In the last couple episodes, we discussed how you can come to know things about God, the order of creation, and how we should act in their creation, through human reasoning.
What I would like to discuss today is the value that revelation brings and how it shows us a deeper understanding that cannot be known but through revelation.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
-Jesus Christ
Jesus does this by showing us how to live, making claims about the world that are hard to understand but when followed are true, by making an offering of life to which nothing can be compared.
Because Jesus is God incarnate, which is something that needs to be taken on faith- which has plenty of support that may be for another episode- He is able to reveal essential facts about being how do you act that cannot be known by human reasoning alone. The beatitudes are a perfect example of this.
He flips the common understanding on its head and then doing so opens up a door two brand new ways of approaching how we treat our neighbor which lead to huge prosperity and many of the miracles that he tells us we will do.
In fact, this is encouraging is such a powerful event that you can see how he completes in his ministry the work of many who tried to build an ethic before him. This is why Chesterton places figures like Buddha and Confucius with the magi at his birth.
As Jesus progresses in his ministry, He makes claims to divinity to his actions then words. Multiple times throughout the gospels he is threatened with stoning for violating blasphemy laws.
His claim to divinity is important, because this would make an equal in nature with the creator, and would allow him to reveal truth about the way the world is ordered, which he does.
Through His teachings, we reconcile philosophy and religion. It is when God becomes man, walks among us, teaches us, that we truly can understand how to behave and take part most fully in creation.
It is this event that deepens our understanding of Truth that leads to scientific advancements that continue to amaze us, an ethic that has dramatically decreased violence and increased prosperity and charity, and opens the door to the fullness of life- one that we have to wait to the other side of the veil to fully experience but one we can begin to understand in our life today.
