Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus I: Demonstratio Christiana

1. The genuine notion. a) Etymologically, the Latin verb 'to reveal' (revelare) means "to remove a veil," which impedes the vision of a thing. The same notion underlies the synonymous Greek words (ἀποκάλυψις, φανέρωσις) and the vernacular words (Offenbarung, révélation, etc.). From physical things the word 'revelation' was transferred to signify an intellectual manifestation of a truth more or less unknown. And indeed, from general usage, the divine manifestation of religious truth is customarily called revelation.

Hence revelation in the broadest sense is defined: a divinely made manifestation of religious truth. There is understood, moreover, both the act by which the truth is manifested (active revelation) and the object, or the truth itself that is manifested (passive revelation). We speak only of the act, or fact, by which God manifests religious truths. God, however, can manifest religious truths by a twofold act, namely natural and supernatural. Whence we distinguish natural and supernatural revelation.

b) Natural revelation is a divinely made manifestation of religious truth through the works of creation. For God indeed left as it were his traces in the created world, so that through the works of creation he manifests his existence, his nature, and the other religious truths that are drawn from them. The work proclaims its maker; the creature proclaims the creator, mover, and governor of the world. It suffices to have employed sound reason, so that from the world we ascend to God and from the world we come to know God by the force of the principle of causality.

Since, however, he renders himself knowable through natural works and the exercise of natural reason, this revelation is rightly called natural.

The psalmist magnifies this natural revelation of God: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth forth the work of his hands"¹. Paul extols it: "God manifested it to them (the gentiles). For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made: his eternal power also, and divinity, so that they are inexcusable"². Theologians, however, when they speak of revelation, for the most part do not understand it as natural, but as supernatural.

c) Supernatural revelation, or revelation strictly taken, is a manifestation of religious truth made through the words of God to man. This revelation, therefore, consists in this, that God himself directly enlightens and instructs the human intellect concerning religious truths. Such an influx of God, moreover, is altogether supernatural, since it takes place apart from every concurrence, faculty, and exigency of nature. Apart from every concurrence of nature, because God no longer manifests himself through the works of creation, but through his own speech. Apart from every faculty of nature, because by inborn power man is able to draw religious truths from the created world alone, and indeed by his own reasoning. Apart, finally, from every exigency of nature, because it does not pertain to the constitution, or essence, of human nature that God himself directly instruct man.

Of this supernatural revelation the Apostle writes: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son"³ 2. Spurious notions. a) Certain rationalists, indeed — not to speak of the monists and deists — bandy about 'revelation.' Nevertheless, as is clear from what has been said, they do not understand it as supernatural. For the idealistic, or older, rationalists (Reimarus, Lessing, Semler, Wegscheider, and others) call 'revelation' every, and only, religious knowledge that we acquire by the help of natural reason. Thus Wegscheider, easily the chief among the earlier rationalists, writes: "Only natural revelation, or the manifestation of God through the works of nature, seems able to be rightly defended"⁴ Lessing adds: "that revelation, exactly like education, gives man nothing except what he already possesses by his own nature and can find by his own reason; and hence that there is to be substituted for supernatural revelation a natural revelation so-called only in an improper sense"⁵

b) The empirical rationalists also, under the leadership of Kant, acknowledge only "religion within the bounds of mere reason"⁶ Indeed they contend that "pure" or "theoretical" reason is not even apt for knowing any religious truths whatsoever. For by his intellect man does not know the supersensible "noumena" (transcendental things), but apprehends only sensible "phenomena" by the aid of external experience. "Practical reason," nevertheless, by the aid of internal or subjective experience, "feels" the utility, necessity, and existence of religious truths.⁷ This subjective experience, however, or religious consciousness (religiöses Erlebnis, religiöse Erfahrung, religiöses Bewußtsein), which is nothing but a dictate of the human will, or rather of human sentiment, they call revelation.

c) In almost the same way all the neo-rationalists, or modern Kantians, define revelation, to whom belong the liberal Protestants and those modernists who have come forth from the Catholics.

Albert Ritschl († 1899), father of the liberal school, teaches that Christian revelation arose from this, that God educated the human conscience.⁸

Aug. Sabatier († 1901), the leader of Protestant liberalism in France, calls revelation a manifestation of God in our conscience.⁹

Alfred Loisy, head of the modernists, understands revelation as the conscience, or experience, acquired by man of his own relation to God.¹⁰

The program of the Italian modernists judges revelation to be "an elaboration of religious consciousness." Religious consciousness experiences, or feels, the supernatural, just as the ear feels music. Revelation is that which is produced by this sensation, or subjective experience, and is convertible with it.¹¹

These systems, therefore, reject every revelation in the true sense of the word. They boast of the word 'revelation,' in order the more cunningly to attack it in reality.