¹ Derrida, Jacques, Positions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 41Google Scholar.

² Ward, Keith, Religion and Revelation: A Theology of Revelation in the World's Religions(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 58Google Scholar.

³ Dulles, Avery, Models of Revelation(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1983), p. ixGoogle Scholar. In his monumental monograph, Theology of Revelation, René Latourelle chronicles the rise of revelation in Christianity as follows. With some foundation in fourteenth-century Scholasticism, the concept of revelation began to achieve prominence only in the sixteenth century, when orthodox theology, both Protestant and Catholic, appealed to it as justification for its confessional positions. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the doctrine of revelation was further developed in opposition to the Deists, who held that human reason by itself could establish all the essential truths of religion. The apologetic notion of revelation which had been formulated at the time of the Enlightenment was attacked and defended in the nineteenth century, when evolutionists held that all religious truth was the outgrowth of human enquiry and when positivists denied that the human mind could have knowledge of the divine. [Latourelle, René, Theology of Revelation(Staten Island: Alba House, 1966)Google Scholar]

⁴ Some critical theologians, however, make faith prior to revelation, and even demote revelation to the status of second-order language (spoken from God's side) as opposed to the language of faith (spoken from man's side) as a first-order language. James Mackey, for instance, calls revelation ‘a metaphorical or mythical description of the literal truth of faith,’ which adds no new content to the latter but invests it with a claim to divine authority. [Mackey, James P., Problems in Religious Faith(Dublin: Helicon, 1972), p. 191Google Scholar]

⁵ Brunner, Emil, Revelation and Reason(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1946), p. 3Google Scholar. An even more radical stance is taken by Karl Barth where he claims that religion ‘is unbelief’ since man's ‘attempts to know God from his own standpoint are wholly and entirely futile … in religion, man bolts and bars himself against revelation by providing a substitute.’[Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I, Part 2: 17.2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), p. 299]Google Scholar

⁶ See, for example, Hick's, John Philosophy of Religion, Third Edition (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1983)Google Scholar, Chapter Five.

⁷ Ibid., p. 115.

⁸ Ibid., p. 120.

⁹ Abraham, William, Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 21Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Mavrodes, George, Revelation in Religious Belief(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

¹¹ The encyclical's remark that the ‘word of God is addressed to all people, in every age and in every part of the world’(§ 64) may be interpreted as an expression of the diachronic intersubjectivity constraint on revelation.

¹² I have adopted the terms individual and corporate aspects of revelation from John Baillie. However, their characterisation and employment in my account of revelation are somewhat different from Baillie’s. [Baillie, John, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought(New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), p. 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar]

¹³ Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method(New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 255Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Runzo, Joseph, ‘Kant on Reason and Justified Belief in God’, in Rossi, Philip and Wreen, Michael, eds., Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 31Google Scholar.

¹⁵ In the section on the necessity and functions of fundamental theology, the encyclical appears to be concerned with the same type of issues when it delegates the duties of distinguishing revelation ‘from other phenomena’ and ‘the recognition of its credibility’ to that division of theology. (§ 67)

¹⁶ The theme of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is a fictional version of this epistemological concern.

¹⁷ James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience(London: Fontana Library, 1971)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ It is interesting to note that at least in one case of prophetic revelation there are some historical accounts that the revelatory recipient in question was intensely exercised by this epistemic scruple. Mohammed is said to have been assailed by such scepticism and ‘cries of doubt and despair’ in the initial and early period of his revelatory experience. [Rodinson, Maxime, Mohammed, Carter, Anne (trans.)(London: Penguin Press, 1971), p. 77Google Scholar and Chapters 4 and 6 passim] To allay his fears lest he had trespassed into the territory of insanity, he resorted to confiding in others for assurance of sanity and confirmation.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 489.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 410.

²¹ Kant, Immanuel, The Conflict of the Faculties, Gregor, Mary (trans.)(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 115Google Scholar.

²² Savage, Denis, ‘Kant's Rejection of Divine Revelation and His Theory of Radical Evil’, in Rossi, Philip and Wreen, Michael, eds., Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 62Google Scholar.

²³ Wood, Allen, ‘Kant's Deism’, in Rossi, Philip and Wreen, Michael, eds., Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 11Google Scholar.

²⁴ I should hasten to add that the statement is not intended to prejudge the issue of externalism versus internalism about content.

²⁵ Steven Katz, for example, offers a survey of the ways in which religious experience is subject to interpretation by the language of the community and its corresponding concepts. [Katz, Steven, ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’, in Katz, Steven, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis(London: Sheldon Press, 1978), pp. 22–74Google Scholar]

²⁶ Norwood Hanson was apparently the first person to articulate this aspect of experience in terms of the theory-ladenness of scientific observations and to coin the phrase for it. [Norwood Hanson, Patterns of Discovery(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958)] It should, nonetheless, be pointed out that the degree and extent of theory-ladenness is a moot point. [For a critical view see, for example, Fodor's, Jerry ‘Observation Reconsidered’, in his A Theory of Content and Other Essays(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990)Google Scholar.] Nevertheless, even within a Fodorian framework, the above argument could stand its ground.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 38. For the sake of presentation, without distorting their substance, I have slightly modified the clauses.

²⁸ Swinburne, Richard, Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 88Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 16–17.

³⁰ Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order(New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 64–87Google Scholar.

³¹ Gilkey, Langdon, Naming the Whirlwind(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 460–65Google Scholar.

³² John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, Chapter 7.

³³ Ibid., p. 7.

³⁴ Quoted by Pojman, Louis, Religious Belief and the Will(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 211Google Scholar.

³⁵ Compare Swinburne’s, amongst others’, appeal to miracles in the context of revelation in his, for example, Is There A God?(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, Chapter 7.