Revelation Unsealed

 Like many Unitarians, I believe that the religious and spiritual development of the individual is dependent upon an openness to progressive revelation – the Quakers would say “Are you open to new light, from whatever source it may come? Do you approach new ideas with discernment?” So revelation is vitally important to the Unitarian approach to religion and spirituality.

image: seggleston.com

In traditional Christian terms, revelation may be defined as something that is revealed by God to humans. This may be done primarily through the medium of the Church and tradition, if you are Catholic, or through the medium of the Bible, if you are Protestant. Of course, this is not to say that Catholics don't believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God, but they don't lay as much emphasis on it as their Protestant brothers and sisters. Or similarly, that tradition is not important to Protestants.

Historically, Unitarians did base their faith on the Bible, but when the science of Biblical criticism started in the 17th and 18th centuries, and came to full flower in the 19th, they came to accept the findings of Biblical scholars wholeheartedly. They came to believe that the Bible had been written by different human beings over many centuries, and therefore could not be the revealed word of God. Today we believe that it can still be a wonderful source of wisdom, but not of divine origin, and not infallible.

The important thing to realise is that revelation is a progressive thing – as humankind develops intellectually, morally and spiritually, we can understand more and more of our place in the universe. And insights about God / the Divine / our place in the universe can be found not just in sacred texts, such as the Bible, but also in the natural world and in the actions and words of other living beings, or in poetry, or scientific texts, or journal articles.

So while the traditional Christian concept of revelation shows the Bible as being the only revealed word of God, modern Unitarians would give revelation a much wider meaning. Vernon Sproxton's words from the Introduction to Mister God This Is Anna, give a wonderful definition of how the written word can be a source of revelation: “Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader’s consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time.” 

Unitarians are so lucky in that we don’t have set rules and creeds to tie us down and blind us to new revelation, from whatever source it might come. So we are able to try to make sense of our world according to our own life experiences, through what we read and learn in our everyday lives, and our reflections thereon.