Revelation as Testimony
by mats wahlberg
eerdmans, 256 pages, $20
T
wentieth-century theologians across a great spectrum—Catholic and Protestant, conservative and progressive—were critical of theories of divine revelation based exclusively on propositional truth. They were united not in their beliefs, but in their allergy to scholasticism. Instead of saying “in the New Testament God reveals the divinity of Christ” or “Christians must believe by faith that God is a Holy Trinity,” there was a move toward the notion of encounter: Revelation occurs when Christ manifests himself personally to us as Lord, or when we realize that God is personally addressing us as the Holy Trinity. This was the more traditional version, which emphasized the interpersonal and existential dimensions of faith.
On the other end of the spectrum, revisionists like Paul Tillich and Hans Küng claimed that dogmas and propositions are expressions of religious experiences or spiritual intuitions, alerting us to an encounter with God that goes beyond all formulas or man-made intellectual systems. These trends were united by a common feature: a notion of revelation that is less cognitive and truth-based, more intuitive and emotional.
Mats Wahlberg, a young Swedish theologian and recent convert to Catholicism, has written a devastating critique of these modern theologies, one conducted with elegant argumentation and which seeks to vindicate more traditional approaches.
