Revelation as divine testimony : a philosophical-theological inquiry

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The dissertation examines, on the basis of insights from contemporary analytic philosophy of testimony, the intellectual viability of the traditional Christian conception of revelation as divine testimony. This conception entails that God reveals by speaking, and that people canacquire knowledge of God and divine things by believing what God says. In academic theologyof recent decades, this view is often dismissed – under the label of 'propositional revelation –as authoritarian and intellectually problematic. Recent developments within the analytic philosophy of testimony, however, provide grounds for a re-evaluation.The dissertation has two purposes. One is to clarify the concept of propositional revelationand to examine what the consequences are, for Christian theology, of rejecting this idea. Thesecond purpose is to investigate whether there is a way of explicating the divine testimonymodelof revelation (traditionally the most prominent version of propositional revelation) so as to render it intellectually credible today.Chapter 1 introduces the topic and describes the dissertation's purposes, methods andsources. Chapters 2 and 3 address the first purpose by distinguishing, following NicholasWolterstorff, between manifestational and propositional conceptions of revelation, and byarguing that unless theologians posit some form of propositional revelation (e.g. revelation asdivine testimony), theology will be threatened by incoherence. On the basis of a survey of anumber of manifestational theories of revelation, selected from different categories in AveryDulles's classificatory scheme, the author argues that manifestational theories in general sufferfrom certain systematic limitations and therefore provide an insufficient basis for theology. Thismeans that theologians have strong reason to take a second look at the idea of revelation asdivine testimony.To evaluate this model is the second and main purpose of the dissertation, and it isaddressed by the method of hypothesis construction and testing. In the present context, thismeans to construct a version of the divine testimony-model with the help of the bestphilosophical and theological tools available, and to examine whether internal coherence andcoherence with established knowledge can be achieved. In chapters 4 and 5, the author describesthe philosophical tools that will be used, viz. Nicholas Wolterstorff's analysis of the idea ofdivine speech, and insights from recent analytic philosophy of testimony, especially JohnMcDowell's anti-reductionist theory of testimonial knowledge. In chapters 6-8, the divinetestimony-model is elaborated using these tools and tested for internal coherence, coherence with external knowledge such as contemporary biblical scholarship, and coherence with traditional views of the nature of Christian faith. The model's ability to withstand philosophical objections of various kinds is also scrutinized. The tentative conclusion of the dissertation is that the model is intellectually viable in light of current knowledge, but that further testing inthe context of a wider scholarly debate is needed.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University