Revelation Takes Time

DID God complete revelation in the Bible, or does divine revelation continue today and throughout time? The night before he died Jesus said to his disciples: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” John 16:12-13.
Jesus is saying, “You are not ready to hear everything 1 have to teach you – things you cannot grasp right now. So 1 will send the Holy Spirit to guide you and teach you, over time, those things which you need to understand.”
The changes we’ve seen in our understanding of scripture over the nineteen centuries since it was written have happened through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. God hasn’t changed: it shows that our ability to apprehend and comprehend the mind of God is limited and sometimes faulty.
Things that seemed simply the way of the world – like slavery, polygamy, and the lower status of women – in retrospect seem like examples of humankind’s flawed, limited, and mistaken understanding of God’s will. Our ability to discern God’s will has improved with time, prayer, and reflection.
This is good news. God’s revelation didn’t stop with the completion of the canon of scripture. God is still actively engaged in ongoing revelation over time, even in our own day. God didn’t just inspire the scriptures to be written and then walk away, wishing us well in our attempts to understand those words. God’s Holy Spirit continues to lead us into all the truth, as Jesus promised on the night before he was betrayed. This is how we understand the authority of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and the Magisterium of the Church.
Scripture is the inspired accounts of encounters with the divine, written by people who knew the Yahweh of the Hebrew scriptures and the Christ of the Christian scriptures, and set down, in the best words they could, what they learned about God in these encounters.
Tradition transmits the Word of God as entrusted to the apostles and their successors (bishops) by Christ and the Holy Spirit; so that
enlightened by the Spirit of truth the bishops may preserve, expound and spread the Word by their preaching. The Magisterium is the ultimate authority for any changes in the Church’s teaching.
Reason is the authority that presents itself in our own lives. We experience life in our own day and time, we experience God in the midst of our lives, through the power of the Holy Spirit, who continues to lead us into truth.
Sometimes the Holy Spirit prompts us to change an understanding we may have held for centuries. The good news in all this is that we worship a God who isn’t confined to scripture, but a God who is active in our midst, continuing to lead us forward in our understanding of God’s unchanging truth.
To learn about God, we always begin with scripture, which, after the full and perfect revelation of the Word, Jesus the Christ, is our primary source. We look at how the church has understood those words of scripture over time. Then we use our own experience and reason to ask what all this might mean for us today. Since we are always prone to shaping everything, including God’s will, to our own ends, we must be careful as we apply reason in this triad of authorities.
No one person can decide that our former understandings are faulty; changes that veer from long-held understandings must always be made in community. Many minds and hearts, working prayerfully together, must be employed in this delicate discernment of God’s will. This is a task we must not neglect, for to do so is to reject the leading of the Holy Spirit that has been promised to us. But all ideas ultimately require the authority of the Magisterium if they are to be accepted.
Outside the Catholic Church, the current debate in the Anglican Communion over sexuality is a contemporary example of the Holy Spirit leading us toward a fuller grasp of God’s truth. Where this will lead, only time can tell.
The process of discerning God’s will never ends. It takes all of us – those who seek a change and those who resist it. And it takes courage even to ask if we might have got it wrong in the past. But this is what we’re asked to do by God, who promised to send the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth, who promised to teach us the things we couldn’t bear at an earlier time.
Peter Knott SJ