Sentences with phrase «revelation as an historical event»

This modern assumption that the world view of modern science is absolute is, we think, the reason for Bultmann's repeated retreat from revelation as an historical event into an abstract philosophy of life.

Not exact matches

As Johann Baptist Metz and John Cobb have seen in correspondence, it is the memoria of the Christ - event that plays a crucial role in the theological notion of revelation.10 In this view a certain historical tradition of narration and reflection recalls the experience of a unique revealing event by memory.

The somehow negative - theological solution desired in this twofold thesis reads as follows: God's revelation can not be grasped either non-historically by metaphysical categories alone or a non-eschatologically by historical events already passed.

But I do see the divine priority, God's prevenient guidance, in the event as a whole — the history of Old Testament Israel, the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the coming into being of his church — and in its effect, which we variously describe as the supreme revelation of God's love, the redemption of the world, the coming into being of the church.15 Indeed it is precisely God's prevenient guidance that makes of this entire historical sequence, including its climax in Jesus, one single event, producing one single effect.

This is true not only because, as we have seen, the memory of Jesus himself is embedded in the life of the church and is carried in its heart — a memory which no historical criticism can possibly discredit — but also because the real medium of the revelation is the event as a whole, and not any particular part of the event, however important.

In the same way, if we continue to speak of revelation as historical, it is not only in the sense that the trace of God may be read in the founding events of the past or in a coming conclusion to history, but in the sense that it orients the history of our practical actions and engenders the dynamics of our institutions.

This does not mean, of course, that nothing nonhistorical is real; the whole purpose of the event, according to Christian faith, was to provide an historical medium for the revelation of God, who is the ultimate reality above and beyond history as well as within it.

It is important to add that in the tradition of biblical faith, historical revelation, which is the self - disclosure of God in history, is never deemed to inhere simply in the event as event, but also in the interpretation of the event.