Revelation – A Category of Interpretation Instead of a Reason to Belief?

Abstract

In the current debate on revelation, Saskia Wendel has offered an alternative thesis that caused a stir: that revelation may be an interpretive category of belief but not a ground of faith. This article reconstructs and analyzes Wendel’s thesis. In doing so, a transcendental-historical version of the thinking of reason can thereby ground the thankfulness of human consciousness in its historically variable form and interpretation and reveal a resonance between the decision to content and the ground of release in consciousness. Thus, creatio continua becomes intrinsically comprehensible as a historical event of revelation in resonance events. Theologically, it is shown in the discours with Wendel that the revelation of God as self-communication is both an interpretive category and a ground of faith. Philosophically, the historical variability and the dispositional character of the use of reason are pointed out, and the distinction between the rational form of execution and the proven substantive evidence is questioned.