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The Nature of Revelation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

John Lamont
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Extract

I wish to argue against the widespread view that divine revelation does not consist in a set of propositions. I think that I can show conclusively that a non-propositional view of revelation cannot be reconciled with Christianity.

What are propositions? I cannot do better than quote from Natham Salmon and Scott Soames:

... If you utter the words ‘Snow is white’ and a French speaker utters the words ‘La neige est blanche’, there is some sense in which both of you say the same thing despite your having used different words. This thing that both of you said is a proposition: the proposition that snow is white. When uttering or writing a declarative sentence (in a given context) one asserts (or records) a piece of information, which is the semantic information content of the sentence (in the context). Since they are the contents of declarative sentences—and what one asserts in uttering declarative sentences—propositions are the sorts of things that are true or false. But making true or false assertions is not the only thing we do with propositions. We also bear congitive attitudes towards them. Propositions are what we believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgement about. When you fear that you will fail or hope that you will succeed, when you venture a guess or feel certain about something, the object of your attitude is a proposition. That is what propositions are.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 72 , Issue 851 , July 1991 , pp. 335 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Salmon, Nathan and Soames, Scott (eds.), Propositions and Attitudes, (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1988), p. 1Google Scholar.

2 Dulles, A., ‘The Symbolic Structure of Revelation’, Theological Studies Vol. 41 (1980), p. 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Dulles, A., ‘The Theology of Revelation’, Theological Studies, Vol. 25 (1964), p. 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 I think it is always possible for the prepositional content of symbolic and metaphorical statements to be put in literal terms, for reasons given by William Alston in his paper ‘Irreducible Metaphors in Theology’, collected in his Divine Nature and Human Language: Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1989)Google Scholar.

5 I do not mean ‘deductive logic’ to be understood here in the Aristotelian sense of reasoning that runs from the universal to the particular. Rather, I mean the logic that deals with arguments whose premises, if true, make their conclusions certainly true; as opposed to inductive logic, which deals with arguments whose premises, if true, only make their conclusions probably true.

6 Fr. Burtchaell, James T., Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810: A Review and a Critique (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1969), p. 13.Google Scholar

7 Lumen Gentium§25.

8 Hume, David, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1975), pp. 109–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.