On Revelation to a Covenant Community
Q. How was this revelation handed down to us?
A. This revelation was handed down to us through a community created by a covenant with God.
There is some ambiguity in the last question from the section on God the Father as to whether it relates only to our knowledge of God the Father as creator or whether it relates to all knowledge of God. Given that this remark about a covenant community is meant to tee-up the section on the Old Covenant, and the sections on the Old and New Covenants make reference to Scripture being the location where these Covenants and/or knowledge of God can be found, I will choose to interpret this as a more general description of the place of revelation of knowledge of God. Thus, I take this question as one about how we know what we know specifically about God and how God relates to the world, but in such a way that it deals with God in God’s full nature and activity as creator, sustainer, redeemer, and glorifier, and not only with God as creator.
What we see in this question then is a prioritizing of the covenant community’s experience of God’s revelation over what some would think of as a more Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the place of revelation. Rather than answering the question of “how do we as Christians know what we know about God” with “because the Bible says so,” we offer a somewhat more complex answer. We would more properly say, “Certain communities understood themselves to be formed by being called out by and covenanted with this God and these communities had certain experiences of God acting in history, and reflection on God acting in history gave rise to certain claims about who this God is.” For Christians, these communities are first Israel through the Old Covenant—although it is vitally important that we understand this as meaning first in time but not old in the sense of having been negated—and then the New Covenant that forms the Church as that community in which God’s decisive revelation through Jesus Christ has opened the covenant with Israel to all the nations.
The Bible is of course not incidental to our understanding of how knowledge of God is revealed to us—this is the text that gives us access, and authoritatively so, to the records of those community experiences of God acting in history and some of the reflection on the implications of God acting thusly. Nor does it mean we must or should reject the historical Protestant understanding of sola scriptura, of the idea that there is no other authority than scripture (rightly interpreted) should be the sole source against which the teaching of the Church should be judged and corrected. I’ll speak more of this on the section about The Holy Scriptures, but given that we hold the decisive and complete revelation of God in history occurs through the specific life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it is essential that we have some artifact of the authoritative experience of those events in order to hold up all other experiences and ask whether they align with who be believe God to be. This is the core of what we mean by Canon, not that the Bible is the only place we can learn about God, but rather that it is the measuring rod (the word canon is related to the word “cane,” as in reed, which would have been used as a consistent measure in the ancient world).
However, this view of the Bible emerging as the artifact and record, even the authoritative one, of prior authoritative experiences of God in history does rule out certain views of what the Bible could be. It rules out a later Protestant ramping up of that original sola scriptura that may be called “nuda scriptura” (naked scripture) or the notion that the Bible without any interpretive help from history, tradition, or reason will give us all that we need to know about God. The Bible came out of the experiences of covenant community; it arose from a Church that existed prior to it in time and is properly interpreted in the context of that continued, living covenant community. This is why the Bible itself does not come with a user’s manual or instructions for the isolated individual to pick it up and just clearly understand who God is (although of course the Spirit blows where it will and God can use such experiences as an occasion for enlightening the mind of the reader or hearer with understanding consonant with that of the Church). That the Bible is the Church’s book, emerging from and properly interpreted in that community, is why the inclusion of “summed up in the creeds” in the Catechism when describing where we find revelation is not the addition of something over and above Scripture that would contravene sola scriptura. The creeds are those documents that provide the lens of the Church, discerned by generations of holy men and women, for reading the Bible as the Church does. They are authoritative summaries of the Bible considered as a whole, of the total experience of God in history as experienced by Israel and the Church.
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