“Is it “closed”?
That revelation is “closed” or
finished is understood to mean that we should expect no new publication
revelation bearing on the Christian gospel and Christian faith. This idea is
contained in the description of what has been entrusted to Timoty and Titus as
a depostium in St. Paul’s Pastoral Letters. The gospel, what Timothy and
Titus are to teach, is something that is to be guarded as a complete, and
integral whole; nothing is to be taken away from it, but also, nothing is to be
added to it, for an addition would amount to adulteration. As St. Paul puts the
matter elsewhere, there is no other, no different gospel than the one he
preaches. (Gal 1:6-9).
A firm purchase on the fact of revelation’s
closure is very important for a theology of the development of dogma. Without
it, it is all too easy to understand the development as the continuation of revelation.
The failure to see how dogma in revelation such as Scripture and Tradition
mediate it to us then poses no problem: God continues the dialogue man begun with
Israel, continued in the Church, and he says new things to us, things not
previously said. Such solutions invite the church as show now exists to think
of herself as contributing to revelation in the way the Church of the New
Testament did. They make of the Church now an instrument not only of the teaching
of what has been revealed, but an instrument of further revelation.
And what would be the problem with
that? Why not a Church as continuing the constitutive role in revelation of the
Jews and the first Christians? The trouble is Christological. We would not be
able to think of the Lord Jesus as completing the work of revelation as Christians
have been wont to do (e.g. Mt 5:17; Jn 1;14; 2 Cor 3:13-4:6). We would not be
able to think of the Lord as being the incarnation of that Word of God in which
all things are said for our salvation, the Word unto which all things in the
prior history of Israel led up, the Word form which all ecclesial words follow,
not as additions, but as explanations, or implications or commentaries or . . .
developments. Having spoken his Word to us in the Incarnation, God has nothing
more to say to us, as John of the Cross put it. Another way of putting the point
is that the “New Covenant” would not be “everlasting” were revelation not
closed (Lk 22:20; 1 Cor 11;25; Heb 10:12-16).
It is noteworthy that the closure of
revelation is taught in the condemnation of Modernism. This is because the
modernist view of revelation as a wordless experience or consciousness of God
does not make of the act of God’s revelation something in principle finished
with the age of the apostles. Modernists like George Tyrrell acknowledged a
normative role of the first, apostolic formulation of the gospel. Still, even
these words are derivative and secondary to the original and wordless revelatory
experience of God. Revelation, Tyrrell insists, “is a vision of showing but not
a statement.”
Closure means that Christ delivered
his message and himself completely and without reserve to the apostolic Church.
The witness to him and his preaching and his deed as recorded in the New Testament
has therefore an unsurpassable character that it normative for all subsequent
ages of the Church. This is what it means to say, in the imagery of St. Paul,
that the household of God, the Church, is “built upon the foundation of the
apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph 2:20).
The implication of the image is clear: if there is something not built on the
apostolic and prophetic foundation, then it is unfounded, and does not belong
to the faith on which the Church is erected. The apostolic age, however, is
over, and we expect no new apostle to appear upon whose witness we can build another
wing of the house of God. Revelation is in this sense closed.
On the other hand, there is perfectly
good sense in which revelation continues to occur, if we advert to the
correlatively necessary role of the hearer of the word in any speaking of a
word. If no one hears anything, nothing has been spoken, just as if nothing was
learned, nothing was taught, and if nothing was seen, nothing was unveiled.
This is the important insight of Joseph Ratzinger in his Habilitation
thesis. For St. Bonaventure, furthermore, inspiration and revelation are not to
be distinguished, and revelation just is the spiritual understanding of
Scripture, itself not to be separated from the scientific exegesis of
Scripture. This is how he sums things up in Milestones:
“[R]evelation” is always a concept
denoting an act. . . . By definition, revelation requires a someone who
apprehends it. . . . [I]f Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes
Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with
it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is
merely written down.
In this light, it makes sense to say
that the event of revelation is consummated every time someone hears the word
of God, not just in the age of Isaiah or of John the Evangelist, but in the age
of Augustine, Bonaventure, Bossuet, or Balthasar. Faithfully reading Scripture,
faithfully hearing the word of God, is therefore also to discover oneself
within the history of which the text speaks. It is to discover Tradition as a
necessary companion to Scripture. (Guy
Mansini, The Development of Dogma: A Systematic Account [Sacra Doctrina
Series; Washington, D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 2023], 52-55)
