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Progressive revelation is the belief that Scripture steadily uncovers more about God’s character, nature, and purposes through the passage of time. For many theologians and ministers, it’s the linchpin for how they make sense of the Bible‘s inner-continuity. This framework is used to explain an awful lot of disharmonious ideas like the slow evolution from polytheistic language early in the Old Testament to the New Testament‘s resounding monotheism. I like thinking of it as The Obi-Wan Kenobi Principle: “So what I told you is true… from a certain point of view.”
What’s great about progressive revelation is that it’ll get you accosted by conservatives no matter where you stand on it. A certain painfully ignorant segment of the population hears the word “progressive,” assumes the ideology, and condemns it as an attack upon the Bible. Meanwhile, the entirety of evangelical inerrancy ranging from Dispensationalist to Reformed depends upon this doctrine to maintain their view of the Bible’s truthfulness and trustworthiness, so they’ll curse your ancestors if you dare question it. Naturally, I’ve had the pleasure of both experiences.
Allow me to present an alternative view: incarnational revelation. This view is less informed by Platonism and more by cultural anthropology and sociology. To my mind, divine revelation always occurs in and through particular (and always flawed) human cultures. This includes languages, climates, geographies, tools, customs, rituals, foods, weapons, clothing, literature, music, architecture, economics, cosmologies, law codes, government structures, genetics, and the like. God infuses all of it. The incarnate Word being the supreme example. Hat tip, Pete Enns.
It’s not that I reject progressive revelation. I affirm its value to an extent, but see it as a limited heuristic lens as it presumes a mostly linear upward trajectory of revelation across any number of cultural-historical contexts. That’s just plain not the story I see in Scripture, let alone the rest of human history. Instead what I see is the Spirit working to reveal God as much as possible within the constraints of a given culture, time, and place–and sometimes that process that ain’t pretty. That’s why my view minors on progressive revelation and majors on incarnational revelation.
The original beatniks didn’t share much regarding their beliefs about supernatural forms of revelation. To my knowledge, it never comes up anywhere in their writings. Yet one gets the sense they were consciously longing for fresh ways to reach out and touch the finger of God in their time. The thorough curmudgeons of the Beat Generation like William S. Burroughs probably wouldn’t have given a shit about an idea like incarnational revelation, but I suspect guys like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg could’ve had a certain spiritual curiosity about it.
