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Nets Stylesheet

Niebuhr's Understanding
of Revelation

Last week we looked at the revealing topic of Niebuhr and Revelation. It involved an exercise connected to our Sunday morning worship study of Luke's Gospel. A couple of Sundays ago, in looking at the passage in Luke 1 where Mary is visited by the angel and told that she will bear a son, Paul encouraged us to look at our own lives, to a time when we had been visited by a revelation, and rewrite this experience through the words of Luke 1. Initially, some of us didn't think that we had been spoken to by God, but in trying out the exercise we discovered revelation in our lives.

Niebuhr defines revelation as a shared event among people that touches us deeply and tells us what it means to be human in relation to God. It's an event that makes all other events in our lives intelligible. Without awareness of this revelation, without this organizing centre, our lives can become episodic. Ultimately all of our experiences are linked to the ultimate revelation of Christ.

Niebuhr's understanding is that revelation is something that is happening all the time rather than something that happened once in history. With this view we can see the Scriptures as living words for us rather than a word given to someone thousands of years ago. If we're reading history, the Bible or our own lives, with our view only on the bare facts, we will miss out on the dynamic meaning available to us. Our hearts have to be awake to the meaningfulness of the revelation.

Before sharing our revelations with each other, we talked about the danger of substituting revelation for God. God will always move beyond the parameters of our human experience, as evidenced in Mary's conception of a child, acting beyond our assumptions and our morality.

Attached are the revelations that everyone in community shared at the end of the class. Hope you enjoy them. If you have an inkling to rewrite Luke 1 to represent your own revelation, I'd love to read it.

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