Did Revelation Cease?

Abstract In the second work of his tetralogy devoted to philosophical issues raised by Christian doctrine, Richard Swinburne has written persuasively on the theme of revelation.1 The middle section of this book considers what evidence we might use to justify belief in such a revelation, while its two outer sections concentrate on rules governing its interpretation. Thus part I is devoted to general issues of meaning, and in particular draws our attention to the way in which truth conditions are affected not only by how the language is employed (literal, metaphorical, analogical, and so on), but also by its wider context, the genre to which it belongs, the presuppositions of the audience or society, and so forth. This implies, he argues, that poetic licence should not be seen as undermining truth (different standards apply), nor should false cultural assumptions. The latter sounds more controversial, but in support Swinburne invites us to consider the case of a man drinking sherry, of whom we declare ‘That man drinking a Martini seems very cheerful’. Russell would have declared the sentence false, Strawson neither true nor false, whereas Swinburne argues plausibly (following Donnellan) that the sentence should be taken as true, provided the context makes it clear to whom we wished to refer.2 The relevance of this to the Bible, which seeks to convey truth through long-discarded scientific presuppositions, should be obvious.