This superbly written book has fourteen chapters. The first chapter treats revelation’s ‘elusiveness’. Avis highlights the fact that the Bible makes clear that it intends to be communicating God’s revelation – a revelation that unveils divine mysteries. This revelation, however, still leaves much unclear. Nor is revelation easily perceived or affirmed, given (for instance) the radical evil in the world and the problematic character of various biblical passages. The eyes of faith are necessary to perceive revelation.
The second chapter explores revelation’s ‘actuality’. Revelation has urgent ethical import for the present. Jesus’ ethical character is the heart of revelation. Jesus embodies a ‘unique spiritual impulse’ (p. 22). When we encounter Jesus, this encounter demands the category of the revelation of God. The existence of the church is a testament to the reality of revelation, despite the abuses of power and instances of false teaching that mar the church. Avis maintains that in the Bible, Jesus, the church and the world, there is an abundance of pointers to the self-revealing God, even if we cannot prove that God exists or has revealed himself.
A biblical term for revelation is the ‘word of God’, and this is the focus of the third chapter. The ‘word of God’ is proclaimed orally by the prophets and apostles, written in Scripture and enfleshed in Jesus Christ. Hypostatised ‘Wisdom’ is another way of referring to this word. Christ is the incarnate Word or Wisdom, and his teachings are wise.
The fourth chapter discusses God’s acting and speaking. Since God’s action has universal scope, revelation in a certain sense is universal. Revelation takes place in space and time, but it is hidden to strictly empirical historical inquiry. God acts to achieve his purposes even through wicked persons and natural calamities, although particular horrors are generally beyond our understanding. Christ and the Spirit act through believers when we truly live ‘in Christ’. Avis cautions that biblical narratives about miracles should be read poetically rather than literally, and he indicates also that our discernment of the Spirit can be faulty. Even Scripture contains false teachings since human instruments are fallible. Revelation inspires a journey, a way of life, not propositional certitude.
The fifth chapter sharply critiques ‘propositionalism’. Avis advocates for a personalist conception of revelation so strongly that it is unclear at points whether propositions remain important at all. Doctrines are second-order realities that can never possess absolute certitude; what is fundamental is our personal encounter with the self-revealing God through the diverse modes of his revelation. Even so, Avis grants that revelation contains cognitive content. God primarily reveals his ethical character, his status as Creator and his being as Father, Son and Spirit. Through ‘word and sacrament’, believers share in the fellowship of the church and receive the good news of Christ’s ‘incarnation, ministry and teaching, passion, death and resurrection/ascension’ (p. 79). The truth about human ‘being’ is revealed in Christ’s life and experienced in his community, the church.
Chapter 6 further unpacks the personal, dialogical dimension of revelation, which dialectically includes both veiling and unveiling. God invites our ongoing translation of revelation in different eras and cultures. Jesus is the climax of revelation, but revelation – as mediated to us in the church through word and sacraments – is constantly being appropriated anew and understood in new ways, constituting a praxis.
The final eight chapters expand upon many of the above themes, with discussions of the roles of experience, reason and imagination; the functions of theology; the threefold form of the word of God; revelation and the church; revelation and authority (in light of feminist and other critiques); foundational and ongoing revelation; revelation and the liturgy and Jesus as supreme revelation. There is a good bit of repetition in these chapters, but there are also interesting engagements, especially with Avis’s favoured theologians Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Rahner.
Throughout the book, while insisting on divine revelation as grounded in Scripture and the church, Avis warns sharply against paths that claim (in his view) to know too much. He is dogmatic in his anti-dogmatic insistence that the Catholic Church and Evangelicals have misunderstood revelation. For Avis, the Catholic John Henry Newman exemplifies this misunderstanding, both with respect to Newman’s claims about infallible dogma and with respect to his understanding of doctrinal development and the role of an infallible Magisterium. Regularly, Avis denounces ‘rigid conservatives, especially Fundamentalists, habituated to extracting information and moral directives from Scripture’ and bemoans ‘some churches (and there is no need to name names, which we can all do for ourselves)’ – hint: Catholic – that domesticate revelation ‘by enunciating what they proclaim to be infallible or irreformable dogmas’ (pp. 166-7). In response, I note that such dogmas include the incarnation and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which Avis himself seems to take as enduringly true. Given his emphasis on Jesus as an ethical model, it would also seem reasonable for him to affirm the existence of enduringly true teachings with respect to certain matters of ethics. To my mind, Avis’ exaggerated critique of the truth-claims of his ecclesial opponents is reflective of weaknesses in his generally mild-mannered and middle-ground-seeking approach.
