Since faith is the human response to divine revelation, the classical account of theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’ should be expanded.
Theology is ‘faith in the divine self-revelation in Christ seeking understanding’. This makes it clear how revelation is a central question for Christian theologians.
A well considered theology of God’s self-revelation in Christ should prove a force of gravity holding together everything that follows in such particular sections as Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, and ecclesiology.
Without an adequate view of revelation as an organizing principle, specific areas of theology will fly off uncontrollably or else collapse into each other.
Witness, for example, the endemic tendency to identify divine revelation with biblical inspiration and what it produces, the Sacred Scriptures. We return below to the need to distinguish firmly between revelation, on the one hand, and biblical inspiration and the canonical Scriptures, on the other.
Up to the late 1980s, many notable contributions to a Christian theology of revelation had come from such scholars as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Avery Dulles, Romano Guardini, René Latourelle, H. Richard Niebuhr, Wolfhart Pannenberg,
Karl Rahner, Paul Ricoeur, and Paul Tillich. Even early in the twentieth century Ernst Troeltsch could speak of an ‘inflation’ in theories of revelation. Since 1988, the year von Balthasar died, the more interesting reflections on revelation have been largely confined to such collections of essays as those edited by Paul Avis (1997) and by Ingolf Dalferth with Michael Rodgers (2014), and to entries in dictionaries and handbooks, like the Dictionary of Fundamental
Theology (ed. Latourelle and Rino Fisichella, 1994) and the (five-part) entry on revelation in volume 25 of the Theologische Realenzylopädie (1995).
