The Logic of Revelation

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Today is Epiphany, the culmination of the Twelve Days of Christmas. It celebrates the Magi (or “Wise Men”), bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh to the child Jesus. I’ve written before on the meaning of the gifts, but today I want to focus on another dimension. Traditionally, Epiphany actually celebrated three distinct events from the life of Christ: the visit of the Magi, the Baptism in the Jordan, and Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. What do these three seemingly-unrelated events have in common? St. Peter Chrysologus (c. 380-450) explained,

In the mystery of our Lord’s incarnation there were clear indications of his eternal Godhead. Yet the great events we celebrate today disclose and reveal in different ways the fact that God himself took a human body. Mortal man, enshrouded always in darkness, must not be left in ignorance, and so be deprived of what he can understand and retain only by grace.

In choosing to be born for us, God chose to be known by us. He therefore reveals himself in this way, in order that this great sacrament of his love may not be an occasion for us of great misunderstanding.

With the gifts of the Magi, we get a clear signal that the Child is God, King, and Sacrifice. In the Baptism in the Jordan, we hear the Father’s voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). And at the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus reveals His miraculous powers publicly for the first time. As St. John says, “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11). So what each of these three events have in common is that they are the first three great moments of revelation, which is exactly what the name Epiphany means. It’s a good day. then, to focus on the topic of “revelation,” and what it means for Christianity.

The Logic of Revelation

Christ is, from His infancy, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel” (Luke 2:32). And St. Paul can speak of “how the mystery was made known to me by revelation” (Eph. 3:3), highlighting a fascinating paradox within the faith: that is simultaneously a religion of Mystery and of Revelation.

It’s easy to take the idea of revelation for granted, but we shouldn’t. For starters, revelation is the proper answer to relativism. Most relativistic claims are premised off of the same basic idea: nobody has a monopoly on the truth, we’re all just making our best guess, so we should humbly recognize that none of us have the full truth and we’re all equally right (or wrong). This is correlated to the idea that everyone is equally qualified to opine on religious questions, which is how you get articles like One More Way All Religions Could Be True How Spiritual Reality Really Works — My Best Guess, Anyway. You virtually never see these kinds of silly articles in the context of science, because they’re more obviously absurd (and their authors are more obviously unqualified to write them). But because we tend to treat religion as “everyone’s best guess,” they’re treated with less disdain in religious realms. This is also how you get biologists like Richard Dawkins writing entire books against religion without ever studying the subject (imagine the reverse, in which a prominent theologian wrote a biology textbook without bothering to consult the best literature out there).

But all of this assumes that religion is man’s upward reach towards God, or his attempt to explain the universe. And if that’s all religion is, we’re right to be suspicious: we’re notoriously fallible creatures. After all, “no man has ever seen God” (1 John 4:12), so who’s to say which religion is true and which is false? Well, there’s a single exception to that: Jesus Christ. His whole claim is that He has seen God, because He comes from God. He says so in John 6:46, “Not that any one has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father.” In other words, if God chose to reveal Himself, it logically follows that this religion would be trustworthy in a way that merely man-made religion isn’t. (Obviously, I’m not saying that Jesus claiming to be the Son of God proves that He actually is; only that, if His claim turns out to be credible, that’s reason to listen to Him over any other religious figure).

The simple fact of revelation also tells us something about the nature of God, and our relationship to Him. Every human being has a religious impulse consisting of (1) a longing for ultimate truth, and (2) a hunger for infinite goodness and ultimate meaning (and an inability to be wholly satisfied with anything less). Our intellects and our wills are insatiable with anything here on earth. (Andrew Sullivan has pointed out that this religious sense is found even in the writings of famous nonbelievers like John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, and that it’s only through constant distraction that we can fail to recognize this religious sense in ourselves). This is ultimately a longing for God, who alone can lay title to infinite Truth and Goodness. C.S. Lewis argues that:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

With revelation, we can go a step further. God’s choice to freely reveal Himself through us is confirmation that He also wants relationship with us.

It also means that He wants us to know something about Him. That is, God reveals things for us to know them. St. Paul says of the plight of the Israelites in the Exodus, “Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction” (1 Cor. 10:11). A great insight is accredited to legendary UCLA basketball coach (and former English teacher) John Wooden: that “the most crucial task of teaching was to distinguish ‘I taught it’ from ‘they learned it.'” To be sure, a lesson sometimes takes a while to fully sink in. Take something as simple as “God is trustworthy.” You can understand this on a particular level as a child, but your grasp of the profundity of this truth will (if you let it) grow and deepen over the entire course of your lifetime. It’s also the case that even the best teachers might have a handful of students who (due to their own apathy) are unwilling to learn. But if you teach a lesson that no one in your class understands, you have failed as a teacher. So revelation is a two-way process: the teacher (in this case, God) must both share a thing, and it must be understood by the audience. Christ describes all of this at the Last Supper, promising to the send the Holy Spirit to abide with us forever, to keep us in all truth (John 14:16-17, 25-26):

And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. […] These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

Christ Himself is the fullness of the revelation of God, “the image of the invisible God,” (Col. 1:15). As Hebrews 1:1-2 says, “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”

A few things follow from this logically. First, it means that there’s no such thing as a Great Apostasy (as Mormons and many Protestants imagine) when orthodox Christianity disappeared from the earth. For instance, a 16th-century Anabaptist work (reprinted in Christianity Today) claims that the entire Church turned anti-Christian at the time of Constantine:

The church of God and of Christ has been obedient to the Teacher’s word and has never had the power of government within it; nor has it called upon this power to place the hangman beside them, but always suffered persecution until the reign of Constantine. He was baptized by Pope Sylvester, the antichrist, the son of perdition, whose coming took place through the work of the terrible devil.

Therefore he received the name Christian falsely. For the Christian church was thereby transformed into the antichristian church. This apostasy was foretold by Paul. Then the devil, who had hitherto been bound by the Christian church, was released from his prison and proceeded to lead the heathen astray in the four corners of the earth. 

Or, as John MacArthur puts it, “what was born with Constantine was Christendom rather than Christianity.” Worse even than the gross historical errors (Pope Sylvester didn’t baptize Constantine) are the gross theological ones: this presupposes that it’s even possible for the entire Church to be overcome by the forces of Hell (in direct contradiction of Matthew 16:18). But in such a case, if the entire Church became apostaste and unchristian, then there was a period (apparently as long as the 1200 years between Constantine and the Reformation) in which none of the intended recipients of Christ’s revelation understood what He was trying to teach. something similar can be said for any theology that says “nobody knew until 1517… or 1845… or 2018… the real message of Christianity.” But notice that this runs counter to the entire logic of revelation. If Christ revealed Himself to the world, and nobody understood it for a millennium or so, He would be like the proverbial tree that fell in the forest without anyone hearing it. You don’t need to be an expert in Church history to see the problem with that: you just need to understand that God chose to reveal Himself and that He meant it when He said (Isaiah 55:10-11):

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

Today, on the feast of the Epiphany, let us celebrate the truth of Revelation: God has revealed Himself fully by His Son (Heb. 1:2), and done so in a way that the Church has rightly understood for two thousand years, because He wants relationship with us even more than we want relationship with Him.