What is Revelation ?
Religion and Revelation : being the Paddock Lectures for 1931. By A. L. Lilley, Canon Residontiary, Chancellor and Praelector of Hereford. (S.P.C.K. 9s. 6d.) CANON LILLEY'S study of the problems surrounding revelation follows naturally upon his previous works on the nature of prayer and of sacraments. All three are the explorations of a devout Modernist into the essential facts of man's religious life—explorations which must necessarily precede all fruit- ful attempts at theological restatement. The particular problem involved in the idea of revelation is shortly this : How does man arrive at those spiritual verities which form the living heart of his religion ? Are they discovered by him in the process of development, or are they " given " by a spon- taneous manward movement of the Divine ? Is religion, as Von Hugel was fond of saying, a " golden shower " ? And, if so, how does the golden shower reach the soul ?
Christian orthodoxy of the past, as Canon Lilley points out in his first lecture, never asked this question. For it—and still for its surviving representatives—" Revelation was con- tained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and in certain oral traditions communicated by our Lord to His Apostles " ; and this revelation was " infallible and inerrant in all its parts." The critical study of the Bible, inevitably destroying the ancient belief in its textual inerrancy, has made such a view of " revealed religion " impossible to the vast majority of educated Christians ; and-they have silently abandoned it, almost without a qualm. Yet the concept of revelation is vital to all genuine religion ; and a relapse into pious naturalism must be the price of its abandonment. So the question for contemporary theology—and it is a crucial question—is this : Can we, as in a general sense we must, accept the broad results of Biblical criticism, and yet continue to believe that the Scriptures do constitute or transmit a Divine revelation to man ? Karl Barth, to whose theology Canon Lilley gives sympathetic attention, answers this in the affirmative. The Scriptures, he thinks, though woven of very human stuff, are yet the transmitting media of that which is more than human " the One unchangeable Word," the self- disclosure of God. But the Word is spoken to, and heard by, faith alone : the soul does not truly hear, if it is not " over- powered and empowered by the Majesty of the Word " and attuned to the supernatural wave-length. The spiritual world stoops to us, and murmurs its august secrets by human channels and in human ways. We on our part must grow up towards it, if we would become capable of receiving that which is thus revealed. Only in the full response of faith is Truth recognized and received by us. Thus—as St. Thomas first, and the reformers afterwards, perceived and declared—there are'degrees of Divine revelation, and grades of meaning await- ing -the discerning mind in the Scripture which contains it. One of the most interesting sections of Canon Lilley's book is that in which he analyses the rich and noble teaching of Aquinas ; and shows how profoundly the distinction between the unspeakable realities of faith and the symbols and meta- phors under which alone they can be apprehended by us, had entered the texture of his mind. " Every Divine revelation is a ray of the Divine Light, veiling its insufferable brightness in the mists of human thought." And surely it is along such lines as these, agreeable alike to reason and to faith, that the theology of the future will best solve the problem which is the theme of this stimulating and deeply spiritual book.
EVELYN UNDERIIILI..
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