TYPES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
General revelation is available to everyone. It is the way God (or universal truths) are revealed in the natural world. Christians call this sort of revelation "natural theology".
William Paley's book on the Design Argument was called Natural Theology. The Design and Cosmological Arguments are both based on general revelation - the idea that you can understand God through his Creation.
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Special revelation comes directly from the divine. It isn't available to ordinary people. Religious experience would be a source of special revelation but so are religious scriptures and sacred texts.
Thomas Aquinas argued based on both general and special revelation; the view of the Catholic Church to this day is that God reveals himself through the natural world but also through the Bible, the saints of the Church and through prayer.
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One solution is the idea of amanuensis, a word that means "copier" or "secretary". This is the belief that God dictates propositional revelation directly into the thoughts of a human being. It's therefore a human prophet who writes down or speaks aloud the revelation, but God is speaking 'through' them.
However, this doesn't really solve the problem of interactionism. Just how can a spirit "take over" the brain of a physical being? Doesn't this make God even more contingent, because he needs the brain (and mouth - or perhaps writing hand and pen and ink) of a human in order to reveal himself? Moreover, if this is possible, how is it different from "possession" or mind-control, which seems to be a violation of human freewill? |
A famous Bible verse that celebrates the idea of scripture as propositional revelation that is "God-breathed" ('divinely inspired')
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Of course, God could use his omnipotent power to ensure that the propositional revelation is passed on accurately and transmitted in an uncorrupted way. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church: the Holy Spirit does not allow the Church to fall into error. (this is called the infallibility of the Church's teaching); Protestant Christians believe the revelation in the Bible is inerrant (without flaws).
However, this brings back the problem of interactionism and freewill in a more forceful way, for now God is not violating human freewill just once by revealing himself, but continuously, by protecting his revelation from being corrupted by human choices again and again down through the centuries. |
'Belief In' rather than 'Belief That'
According to this non-propositional view, faith can be seen as "belief in" - a Christian is someone who believes in God's goodness, believes in Jesus's love and self-sacrifice, believes in love and hope triumphing over death. In order to accept God's revelation, people don't need to accept certain propositions as being factually true - they need to believe in the values those revelations represent.
Many religious believers say that non-propositional faith (belief in God) is more important than propositional faith (belief that God exists). They point out that even the Devil believes that God exists. In the Bible, demons recognise that Jesus is the Son of God, but they don't believe in him by accepting him as their Lord.
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This website explores the contradictions from treating the Bible as propositional revelation
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Understanding revelation non-propositionally removes some of the problems of corruption vs continuity, but creates others.
On the one hand, the original person who had the religious experience has no particular authority: we don't need to accept their interpretation of what it meant. This means revelation can be re-interpreted to fit the present day.
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YES
Religious experiences are noetic - they communicate knowledge of God or the universal truths. These are facts about the divine reality and how we should live. The theophanies of the prophets and saints are moments where God intervenes in human history; the Enlightenment of figures like the Buddha are moments of spiritual discovery for the human race.
Rejecting propositional revelation makes all revelation into a mere opinion and scripture no more than a historical human document. If you believe revelation has any sort of divine authority at all, you are committed to some propositional beliefs about it. If you treat some revelations as non-propositional, you're guilty of picking-and-choosing.
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NO
Never mind the difficulty of explaining how an eternal bodiless spirit can interact with a finite human mind, there's also the problem of freewill. Propositional revelation in the theistic tradition involves God overruling human freedom - and freewill is the only justification for God creating or allowing a world with so much suffering in it.
There's nothing wrong with picking-and-choosing. Taking many revelations as propositional statements would make God out to be a monster or force us to return to the lifestyles of the ancient past, with slavery and oppressed women. It's more important to interpret revelation and make it relevant to the modern world.
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