Excerpt from
By What Authority?
A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful
Richard R. Gaillardetz
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the written permission of The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION
A THEOLOGY OF REVELATION

PART ONE
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION
ONE
What Does It Mean to Say the Bible is Inspired?
TWO
What Is the Canon of the Bible?
THREE
What Is the Relationship Between Scripture and Tradition?

PART TWO
THE AUTHORITY OF CHURCH TEACHING AND THE CHURCH'S TEACHING OFFICE
FOUR
How Do We Understand the Magisterium Today?
FIVE
How Do the Pope and Bishops Exercise Their Teaching Authority?
SIX
What Is Dogma and Doctrine?

PART THREE
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BELIEVER AND THE BELIEVING COMMUNITY
SEVEN
What Is the Sense of the Faithful?
EIGHT
Is There a Place for Disagreement in the Catholic Church?
NINE
What Is the Proper Relationship Between the Magisterium and Theologians?

EPILOGUE

NOTES

INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS
CD    The Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Pastoral Office of the Bishop [Christus Dominus]

DV    The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation [Dei Verbum]

GS    The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et spes]

LG    The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [Lumen gentium]

NA    The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions [Nostra Aetate]

UR    The Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism [Unitatis redintegratio]

UUS  Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical on Ecumenism [Ut Unum Sint]

PREFACE
“By what authority do you do these things?” It was a question posed to Jesus by his critics on several occasions. He never gave them a direct answer. The question itself speaks to the very meaning of authority. In effect, what was being asked was, “who is the true author of your actions?” Jesus’ entire life and ministry offered the only real answer to the question. God was the true Author of Jesus’ life. His authority was grounded in his relationship to the one he dared address as “Abba.”

The Church lives to proclaim the message of Jesus Christ, the Word of God. It too depends as well for its authority on God, the Author of life. The Church does not possess authority any more than Jesus possessed it. Indeed, authority is not really a possession at all. Authority names a quality of relationship. This explains one of the perennial dangers of any claim to authority in the Church. The danger lies in the mistaken notion that authority resides in persons (e.g., popes and bishops) or objects (e.g. the Bible). But this way of speaking of authority is misleading, for in the final analysis authority pertains to a relationship more than a person or object.

A person is only an authority to the extent that his or her authority is acknowledged by others. For example, as a professor, I can only function as an authority in the classroom to the extent that my students acknowledge that authority in me. If they choose to view me as a benighted idiot, I lose my authority in their eyes; I cease to be an authority for them. The authority is maintained in the character of our relationship. The same is true for religious authority. Where one might speak of the Bible, the creed or a pope as possessing authority, this authority in fact resides in the relationship between the community of faith and the Bible, the creed or the pope. True authority is always maintained in a relationship between two realities, the one acknowledging the authority and the one manifesting that authority.

This book is about authority in the Church. In particular, the focus will be on the exercise of authority as it is oriented toward Christian belief, that is the authoritative relationships concerned with: the Bible, tradition, popes and bishops, creeds and doctrine, theologians and all the faithful. In an introductory book of this size it will be impossible to consider those many questions regarding the exercise of authority in church governance or in regard to the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church.

Many of the sad divisions in Christianity have occurred because of disagreements about both the appropriate sources of Christian authority and its proper exercise. Often the authority of Scripture has been played off against the authority of tradition, or the authority of church office (e.g. pope and bishops) against the authority of theologians or ordinary believers. A healthy Catholic view of authority will try to avoid these oppositions and instead demonstrate how these various kinds of authorities inter-relate and support one another.

Each of the topics considered in this volume will be considered within the context of the teaching of Vatican II. Held between 1962 and 1965, the Second Vatican Council effected a seismic shift in Catholic consciousness, unlike anything encountered since the sixteenth century. The impact of the council lay not only in the sixteen documents that the bishops promulgated, but in the new frame of reference the council offered for considering Catholic faith today. This new framework benefited from a series of new relationships being forged where antagonisms had predominated. Once the rise of modern science and critical historical scholarship had been met with suspicion, now the council called for a new respect for modern science and an unprecedented openness to the fruit of historical scholarship. Where clergy and laity were seen as two “ranks” in which the sole responsibility of the laity was to obey the clergy, the council called for their cooperation and affirmed the shared identity of all believers as the Christifideles, the Christian faithful. Where the work of theologians had been limited to explaining church teaching to the laity, now bishops and theologians were placed in common service to the Word of God. Where the world was seen as dangerous, now the council saw the workings of God’s grace in the world and the possibility for respectful and fruitful dialogue between Church and world.

This new framework for understanding Catholicism did not repudiate the past in favor of novelty or relevance. It was the product of two principal forces at work in the council: the first was the determination to bring the Church up-to-date in areas where its faith and practice were no longer intelligible to the modern world. The second was the desire to return to the sources of Christianity in order to re-discover biblical and early church insights into the Christian life that had been neglected in modern Catholicism.

This book has been written in the spirit of Vatican II. This does not mean that the answer to every question we will consider can be found in the council documents; the council members themselves recognized that many questions and issues required further reflection and development. It does mean that the teaching of Vatican II will provide the immediate frame of reference for considering key questions regarding church authority.

The book is divided into three different sections. Part One looks at questions related to the authority of Scripture and tradition within Roman Catholicism. Catholics give Scripture a central place in the life of the Church, but many are confused about the authority of Scripture. All Christians believe the Bible is, in some sense, inspired, but they mean different things by this. We will look in more detail at different theories of biblical inspiration and will consider the difficult question of whether there can be errors in the Bible. A brief perusal of the Bible contents reveals that there are books included in the Catholic version that are not found in other versions of the Bible. Why? How exactly did this biblical canon, this definitive list of sacred texts, come into existence in the first place? Questions such as these will be explored in the early chapters. Finally we will explore some contemporary Catholic perspectives on the relationship between revelation, Scripture and tradition.

Part Two turns to the authority of those who teach in an official capacity within the Catholic Church, the pope and bishops. Catholics refer to the special teaching authority of the pope and bishops as the magisterium. This second section will explore the theological foundations of the magisterium and its diverse modes of exercise. Since not all church teachings bear the same authoritative weight, it will also be necessary to attend to the necessary gradations in the authority of church doctrine.

Finally, Part Three attends to a neglected topic, namely, the particular authority that ordinary believers and the entire believing community possess by virtue of their baptism. The Second Vatican Council addressed this in its consideration of the sensus fidei, the “sense of the faithful.” We will explore how the whole Christian community discerns the meaning and significance of the Word of God for today.

Traditionally, the authority of theologians has been related to the magisterium. Before Vatican II it was commonly held that the principal task of the theologian was to explain official church teaching. More and more today the work of the theologian has been related as well to the faith insight of the whole people of God. In this final section we will consider the changing role of the theologian as well as the sensitive issue concerning what happens when a person finds that they disagree with church teaching.

The sub-title of this volume refers to it as a primer, that is, an elementary or introductory textbook. My hope is that it will prove useful as a text in undergraduate theology courses and in lay ministry, diaconate and seminary formation programs. It is my modest hope that it will also find a place in adult education programs. For students desiring a more in-depth treatment of the various topics, much of what is presented in Parts Two and Three of this volume is discussed in much more detail and with considerably more documentation, in my earlier work, Teaching with Authority: A Theology of the Magisterium in the Church. Each chapter also offers a sample of English language works for further reading. Some are fairly basic while others would doubtless challenge those without an advanced theological education. An introductory text such as this will always depend on the theological scholarship of others. As will be evident in the pages that follow, I have made considerable use of the work of fellow theologians. My goal in this volume was not to provide an original and constructive theology of authority as much as to synthesize and present in an accessible manner the important foundational work on revelation and church teaching authority that has been accomplished in the decades since Vatican II.

The main body of each chapter offers a straightforward theological perspective well within the parameters of Catholic belief. At the end of each chapter I include a section dedicated to “disputed questions.” The tradition of attending to quaestiones disputatae is an ancient one in Catholic theology. It emerged in the medieval university with the recognition that the careful reading (lectio) of an authoritative text often gave rise to lively disagreement regarding a text’s adequate interpretation. Thus the lectio gave way to the disputatio so that a diversity of interpretations could be given a fair hearing in the studium. The great historian and expert on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, M.-D. Chenu, describes well the distinctive character of the disputation in medieval education:

From this starting point, the pro and con are brought into play, not with the intention of finding an immediate answer, but in order that under the action of dubitatio [doubt], research be pushed to its limit. A satisfactory explanation will be given only on the condition that one continue the search to the discovery of what caused the doubt.

This kind of lively discussion is essential for the vitality of the theological enterprise. Although they cannot be treated in any depth in a book such as this, readers should have some sense of the debates that are being engaged in academic and ecclesiastical circles. Some of the positions summarized in this section concern legitimate disagreements over issues viewed as open questions within mainstream Catholicism. Other views represent more marginal perspectives. It is my hope that a précis of contemporary questions and disputes might acquaint the reader with some of the challenges being addressed in theology and ministry today. Readers wishing to explore some of the disputed questions will make a good start of it by consulting each chapter’s reading list.

I wish to thank those who gave generously of their time to read and remark upon preliminary drafts of all or part of this volume: James Bacik, Dennis Doyle, Mary Hines, Thomas O’Meara, Barbara Reid, Ormond Rush, and John Strynkowski. I must also single out the remarkable support and investment of time and energy that Peter Dwyer, director of the Liturgical Press, has put into this project. Finally I want to offer my most profound gratitude to the five people who help sustain me daily in my vocation: my wife Diana, and our four sons, Gregory, Brian, Andrew and David.

Introduction
Vatican II’s Theology of Revelation
I teach in a state university. A colleague of mine in the philosophy department recently complained that some of the students in her classes were uncritically quoting the Bible in papers they were submitting to her. After trying to voice her irritation tactfully, she finally blurted out in exasperation: “The problem with you Christians is that it always comes down to faith, and then critical thinking goes out the window!” I reassured her that the Christian tradition in general, and my own Roman Catholic tradition in particular, could not be reduced to blind faith and that there was considerable reflection within Christianity on the necessary role of human reason. Nevertheless, her comment does raise an important question for Christianity because there is a sense, of course, in which she is right. Christianity is ultimately premised on the gift of faith. But faith does not come out of nowhere. For Christians, faith is a graced response to something that comes prior to faith. Faith is a response to God’s initiative. Christians believe that faith is possible only because God has first come to us in love and has “revealed” God’s self to us. We are not left searching the world for an absent God; God comes to us in the wonder of creation, in the sublime beauty of art, in the initial stirrings of the human soul for the “beyond in our midst.” The Judeo-Christian tradition claims to have been addressed by God in the history of Israel. Finally, Christians believe, God has spoken an unsurpassable “word” of love in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This revelation of divine love carries its own authority, the authority of God who is the “Author” of life. This book will attend to the various ways in which the authority of the revealing God is made present and effective in the life of the Church.

Let us begin with two snapshots. The first is of early Christianity around 100 C.E. Christianity was less than seventy years old and was in the process of shifting from a religious movement to a more structured community of believers. Christians believed that, in the person of Jesus Christ, they had encountered the very revelation of God. They did not, however, think of revelation as a distinct body of supernatural knowledge separate from “natural knowledge.” Revelation was understood in terms of the person of Jesus of Nazareth as the bearer of God’s saving offer. The Good News of Jesus Christ was fearlessly proclaimed by believers. A fluid collection of written texts composed by such important figures as Paul of Tarsus, or originating in churches renowned for their apostolic origins, would soon take on a privileged status in Christianity. Many of these texts, along with texts from the Hebrew Scriptures, would be read before the community when Christians gathered for weekly worship. In some churches, individual leaders were beginning to emerge who were acknowledged to have a special responsibility for the authentic proclamation of the Christian message. However, by the year 100 there was as yet no Bible as we know it today, no developed creeds, no catechisms, no universally recognized episcopal structures.

The second snapshot comes 1850 years later. The year 1950 offered a very different view of how Christians encountered God’s revelation. Christianity had long since come to accept the uniquely authoritative role of the Bible. How it was to be interpreted and who had ultimate responsibility for that interpretation had, more than four centuries earlier, become a matter of dispute. Within Catholicism the authority of the Bible was now accompanied by the authority of church traditions, though the relationship between the two was also in dispute. A stable church office with special responsibility for teaching the faith, the episcopate, was now commonly accepted by Catholics and, in varying degrees, by other Christian traditions as well. Divine revelation was still believed to be rooted in Christ, but there was a much greater emphasis on the way in which this revelation could be expressed in objective statements known as dogma and doctrine. Revelation was commonly thought to be a body of supernatural knowledge quite distinct from “natural” knowledge.

At the practical level, a sense of the then dominant notion of revelation was reflected in the process by which an adult was invited into the Catholic Church. In 1950 it was common for someone desiring admission into the Roman Catholic Church to receive “instructions” from the parish priest. In these instructions divine revelation was often presented as a collection of discrete truths or doctrines. The assumption was that assent to these truths was equivalent to assent to the Catholic faith. If the inquirer could assent to these teachings he or she could be admitted into the Church. Revelation equaled doctrine. Many scholars refer to this as a propositional view of divine revelation. Revelation was seen according to the analogy of verbal communication in which God literally “spoke” to the biblical prophets and apostles. The Bible was a record of this verbal communication. In like manner church teaching was often viewed according to the model of human speech. Dogmatic propositions were treated like “divine utterances.” Revelation, often referred to as the “deposit of the faith,” was conceived as a kind of “filing cabinet” filled with individual files (church doctrines). To learn “the faith” meant mastering all of the files.

The strength of this approach was its confidence that God was not some abstract super-Being; the God of the Christian faith could be known and the Bible and church teaching provided a concrete way to encounter that God. It affirmed that revelation was not just a vague feeling or experience, but an objective reality that could be apprehended by the human intellect. The danger was that such a stress on revelation as a collection of objective truths, if taken to extremes, could lead to various forms of fundamentalism, biblical or ecclesiastical.

Vatican II’s Theology of Revelation:
A Trinitarian Framework
Vatican II’s treatment of divine revelation is a good example of the council’s determination to “return to the sources.” The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, offered a biblically informed presentation of divine revelation as nothing less than God’s self-gift to humankind in love. It is in this sense that we might properly speak, not of divine words about God, but of a divine “Word”—the perfect self-expression of God. God’s Word, God’s personal self-disclosure, comes to humankind in history in the form of an address. As such, it is an “eventing” of God.

The origins of this dynamic theology of revelation can be found in the Old Testament’s use of the Hebrew notion of dābar, (“word”). We find testimony to the dynamism and effectiveness of God’s “word” in the Book of Isaiah:

For just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down
and do not return there
till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
Giving seed to him who sows
and bread to him who eats,
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth:
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will
achieving the end for which I sent it
(Isa 55: 10-11).

For the biblical author, to speak of God’s word was to speak of God’s effective action in history. According to the New Testament, “in the fullness of time” God’s self-communication becomes not just a word from God, but the definitive Word of God, Jesus the Christ. At the beginning of the Gospel of John we find this poetic prologue:

In the beginning was the Word,
the Word was with God and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race...
And the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory as of the Father’s only Son,
full of grace and truth (John 1: 1-4, 14).

This passage expresses the conviction that the same word of God, active in creation and present in the Law and prophets, has entered definitively and completely into the world as one of us. Henceforward, in the New Testament, the expression “Word of God” will mean God’s creative and saving Word incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

In Jesus of Nazareth divine revelation takes the form not of information, facts or even doctrines—revelation comes to the world as a person. The communication of God’s Word to humankind in Jesus is God’s definitive gift of self to the world. According to Christian belief, in Jesus, the Word incarnate, we are given a share in the very life of God. This is reflected in the opening of the First Letter of John:

What was from the beginning,
what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have looked upon
and touched with our hands
concerns the Word of life—
for the life was made visible;
we have seen it and testify to it
and proclaim to you the eternal life
that was with the Father and was made
visible to us —
what we have seen and heard
we proclaim now to you,
so that you too may have fellowship with us:
for our fellowship is with the Father
and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
We are writing this so that our joy may be complete
(1 John 1: 1-4).

This passage conveys to us the remarkable truth that in Christ, God’s Word Incarnate, we are able to have fellowship with God; the Word introduces us into relationship with God. This theology of revelation informed the teaching of the bishops at Vatican II.

The Second Vatican Council affirmed the confidence that Christians ought to possess in the possibility of knowing God, in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It insisted on the primacy of Scripture and the necessity of church doctrine in the life of the Church. At the same time the council recognized that for many, revelation had been reduced to a body of information about God rather than a living encounter with God. Consequently, in Dei Verbum, the council affirmed that revelation was not just a set of statements to be comprehended, memorized and spouted back to others. “By this revelation, then, the invisible God from the fullness of his love, addresses men and women as his friends and lives among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company (DV # 2).” Divine revelation is presented as a divine invitation into relationship. This is why, the council says, revelation is summed up in the person of Jesus Christ.

The eternal Word which God shares with us is, in turn, received within our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. The council wrote that it is the Holy Spirit “who moves the heart and converts it to God, and opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth (DV # 5).” The Spirit leads us into an ever deeper understanding of that revelation. This trinitarian view of revelation—God speaking an eternal Word of Love into our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit—brings into sharp relief the limits of the propositional view the council was rejecting. Revelation is far more than a set of statements; it is an encounter with the triune God.

In article 3 the council also affirmed that God’s plan of salvation, was made manifest “by deeds and words having an inner unity.” No longer would it suffice to equate revelation only with words, whether the words of Scripture or of doctrine; revelation also includes God’s concrete saving action in history, culminating in the death and resurrection of Christ. Although many Christians popularly refer to the Bible as the Word of God, it is more accurate to speak of Scripture as the inspired, testimony to the living Word of God. The Bible is not to be equated with revelation; it is a privileged witness to what God has revealed to us. The same Word of God revealed in the Scriptures would continue to abide in the life of the Church, its liturgy, its theological reflection, its doctrinal pronouncements and the daily insight of ordinary believers. The Bible, the liturgy, creeds, doctrinal pronouncements and personal testimony—each in their unique fashion represents diverse expressions or mediations of the one revelation of God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Finally, the council taught that God’s Word was addressed to the whole people of God. Firmly rejected is the view that God communicates divine revelation primarily to the hierarchy who then transmit that revelation to the rest of the Church. Rather, the Word of God emerges within the whole Church through a complex set of ecclesial relationships in which all the baptized, professional theologians and the college of bishops, play vital and necessary roles. This was proposed in a number of ways. First, in its treatment of tradition the council affirmed the role not only of the bishops but all the baptized in the processes by which tradition grows and develops. Second, the council acknowledged that the magisterium, as with the entire believing community, is not superior to but rather the servant of the Word of God DV # 10).

Revelation Comes to Us Through the Mediation of Symbols:
A New Philosophical and Theological Framework
The council’s theology of revelation anticipates a number of contemporary approaches to revelation. These approaches draw on a philosophy of symbol and suggest that we should view revelation as symbolically mediated. Theologically, the council acknowledged that revelation, in its primary mode, is not the transmission of information, as with the propositional model, but the sharing of divine life. In revelation, God “addresses us as friends” and invites us into relationship.

This revelation is not just a subjective experience; revelation does possess some genuine objective content, as the propositional approach rightly affirms. But here lies the difficulty. God is infinite, incomprehensible mystery, and we are finite creatures. Consequently, God’s communication of God’s self to us cannot be like my communicating a bus schedule to a friend. Surely as limited creatures we cannot receive God as God is. God cannot be known and mastered the way a beginning chemistry student might strive to master the periodic tables. If God really wishes to communicate with us, God must communicate God’s self to us in a manner appropriate to our status as finite, embodied creatures. This is reflected in a medieval dictum, “that which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver” (quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis). God comes to us in a manner appropriate to our natures as finite, embodied creatures. And as embodied creatures, the primary way in which we come to know our world is through symbols. We learn through language, concepts, images and metaphors.

Symbols are more than mere signs. Signs point to other realities or bits of discrete information (a red light indicates that we should stop), whereas symbols communicate what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “surplus of meaning.” We look at an American flag or a cross—both symbols—and realize that these symbols communicate many different meanings. Indeed, to some extent their meaning changes depending on the context in which the symbol is encountered. An American flag respectfully displayed by a color guard at the beginning of a civic ceremony offers a somewhat different constellation of meanings than an American flag being burned by anti-war protesters. A cross burning on an African-American’s front lawn, unfortunately, suggests something quite different from a cross leading a liturgical procession into a church at the beginning of a liturgy.

Revelatory symbols also communicate a surplus of meaning. Sometimes these revelatory symbols are linguistic, as with historical narratives, parables, hymns and doctrinal statements. Sometimes they take the form of distinctive Christian practices, as with the liturgical life of the Church. One might also regard art and architecture as revelatory symbols. The Christian community returns time and again to these symbols because it realizes that these symbols continue to have the power to draw us into relationship with God even as they offer us new insight, new meanings about God.

Another way of understanding this approach to revelation is to recall the idea of a sacrament. Revelation might be considered sacramental in the sense that, in revelation, as in the sacraments, one encounters God through the medium of some concrete symbol. So the Christian enters into sacramental communion with Christ through the eucharistic symbols of bread and wine. The symbols do not just point to Christ; they make Christ present in the sacrament. Yet we acknowledge that this sacramental presence is not the same as a physical presence; we do not encounter Christ in the Eucharist in the same way in which his disciples encountered him along the shores of Galilee before his death and resurrection. In the Eucharist, Christ is encountered in a manner that we speak of as “real” and sacramental but not physical. Nor is the encounter with God made possible in the sacrament an encounter with an object that can be captured and controlled; rather, God meets us in the sacrament as divine Subject who invites us into loving relationship. To take another example, in the sacrament of marriage, I believe that I truly encounter the love of God in my spouse. And yet I recognize that my wife’s love for me, while an authentic sacramental mediation of God’s love, does not exhaust God’s love. God’s love is always more and greater than any created mediation of it.

Catholics acknowledge sacramental presence as a unique mode of encountering God. The idea of sacrament affirms that God communicates to us through the mediation of symbols without being reduced to those symbolic expressions as if there were not always “more” of God to be encountered. Now admittedly, we generally speak of sacraments as mediating God’s grace, not God’s revelation. The distinction between grace and revelation is subtle, for both issue from God’s desire to share the divine life with us. Perhaps we could say that whereas grace names God offering God’s self to us in the realm of human action, revelation names God’s self-communication addressing itself specifically to our consciousness.

Understanding revelation as symbolically mediated also has the advantage of highlighting, more than the propositional approach, the role of human experience in the revelatory process. The term “experience” is an ambiguous one. In our culture today “experience” is often used in a purely subjective way, as when we want to emphasize the uniqueness of “my experience.” This subjective aspect of human experience is indeed important as it brings to the fore the role of our own personality in shaping how we encounter our world. But experience includes more than this subjective dimension; experience also refers to my engagement with reality. I am always experiencing something, and this “something” names the objective aspect of human experience. Experience does not mean being lost in one’s own interiority, it means encountering reality in some determinate way.

Another important element in an analysis of human experience is the recognition that human experience is always interpreted. There is really no such thing as a “raw” experience. When we encounter reality, there is a basic dynamism within us that seeks to make sense out of what we have encountered. We try to find meaning in our experience. This is never as solitary as we might think. The meanings that we give to our experiences come, at least in part, from the received wisdom of the larger world in which we live—our family, church and culture. At the same time we are free to revise these received meanings, to find new insight in what we experience. Finally, we should note that human experience is always partial. As finite creatures, we never encounter reality in its totality. We encounter our world under some aspect or from some particular perspective. Consequently, human experience is never complete; we change and grow in our grasp of reality.

This very cursory consideration of human experience offers much to our understanding of divine revelation. Revelation is God’s self-communication, not in some abstract sense, as if revelation were uttered blindly into the cosmos. God communicates to us. As humans we receive that revelation through the prism of human experience in history. Our encounter with the self-revelation of God always has an element of us in the encounter. As we receive that revelation we are bound to interpret it, not privately but from within a number of overlapping interpretive frameworks. Moreover, while from God’s side there is nothing lacking in what God communicates to us, from our side, our experience of revelation will always be from a particular perspective and therefore, in some sense, partial or incomplete. This incompleteness must be understood properly. I do not mean that we are missing some vital part of revelation. I am reminded of the Mel Brooks comedy The History of the World: Part One. In it there is this wonderful scene in which Brooks plays Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai announcing to the Israelites that he has God’s law inscribed on these three tablets. Then he stumbles and drops one of them. As it shatters into fragments he pauses, looks up and says, “. . . make that two tablets!” To say that revelation is incomplete is not like that. I do not mean that we are missing a tablet, but merely that as finite creatures we encounter the revelation of God from our limited human perspective; there is always “more” to be encountered in God’s definitive self-revelation in Christ.

The treatment of revelation throughout this book will presuppose: (1) the council’s trinitarian and personalist theology of revelation, (2) the application of the theory of symbolic mediation to our understanding of revelation, and (3) the importance of attending to the ways in which revelation is received and passed on authoritatively through the matrix of human experience. As we address a number of important topics, our theological context will remain committed to this view of revelation as God’s eternal offer of self, rendered definitive in Jesus and made present to the believing community through the power of the Spirit. We might speak of this as the trinitarian grammar of divine revelation. At the same time, we will be mindful of the way in which revelation must be understood as encountered through the medium of the symbolic and within the context of human experience. This theological and philosophical framework will be vital for an adequate understanding of the topics to be considered in the chapters that follow.

Disputed Questions
1) With regard to Vatican II’s theology of revelation, one of the most contentious issues concerns the nature and scope of divine revelation. According to the Second Vatican Council, “Christ is the mediator and sum total of revelation.” Some conciliar texts affirm that God can be encountered outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. This raises several important questions. The first concerns how revelation is encountered by non-Christians. The council certainly affirms the positive value of such religious traditions. It asserts that they are included in God’s “plan of salvation” and that they contain “goodness and truth” (LG # 16, see also UR # 2). But the council does not directly address itself to the question of whether revelation, properly speaking, is mediated through these traditions. This has been the subject of much debate in the decades since the council.

One school of theologians would read the council texts restrictively, holding that revelation, properly speaking, can be encountered only within the Judeo-Christian tradition. To affirm otherwise, they believe, undercuts the Christian commitment to the uniqueness of Christ. God’s offer of salvation to non-Christians manifests itself in ways that can be known only to God. Other theologians contend that the council’s recognition of the possibility of salvation for non-Christians presupposes a broader view of revelation. If the non-Christian can be saved, as the council affirmed, doesn’t that presuppose that the non-Christian possesses at least some implicit faith? And if they possess an implicit faith, must not that faith be a response to some prior revelation? These theologians wonder, for example, why the Qur’an might not be viewed as a limited mediation of divine revelation. Still other scholars go further and criticize a residual Christian triumphalism in the contention that all revelation finds its term in Christ.