Risking revelation: a review of Robyn Horner’s The Experience of God

Revelation, Robyn Horner argues in The Experience of God, has no meaning for us today. We have lost the capacity to speak of it—perhaps, in a Wittgensteinian sense, to mean it—and, of course, therefore, to encounter it. Like one of Walker Percy’s overused words, which are either so encrusted in barnacles of accreted meanings or “slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued,” ¹ revelation has ceased to communicate to us what it could. The early chapters of Horner’s book diagnose this loss, while the rest comprises the difficult task of scraping and reengraving necessary for developing an account of revelation that has currency today. Horner’s is an excellent book, not only for paving a lucid and accessible (a rare thing!) avenue into the flourishing conversation between theology and continental philosophy but also for advancing this conversation in genuinely constructive ways. My comments here, after a brief recital of the book’s content, focus on the book’s achievements and one area where, I believe, its possibilities remain to be explored.

“Culturally and philosophically, revelation has become unintelligible, unbelievable and unimaginable—a remnant of a past way of being in the world that was subject to immense, uncontrollable powers—invisible forces of good and evil.” ² The reasons for this loss of revelation are multiple. Horner invokes the secularization thesis—the evaluation that religion and belief are increasingly rarer—only to critique and nuance it. Following instead Charles Taylor and Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Horner traces how belief and religious participation are not less common but transformed: religious belief has become increasingly privatized and individualized, irrelevant to public spaces, and the collective memory that gives tradition and the rituals of tradition meaning has been lost. This, as we shall see, is particularly bad news when our working understanding of revelation tethers its meaning to history and tradition.

In this (admittedly) Western context, Horner identifies two distinct challenges to the meaningfulness of revelation, one philosophical and the other internal to Christian theology and practice. The judgment that revelation (or, more broadly, the transcendent) is incompatible with philosophy is raised and discarded for its own biases; Horner takes more seriously the continental tradition (traced here from Derrida to Caputo and Kearney) that is interested in “the possibility of a type of transcendence in immanence” while remaining deeply suspicious of ontotheological metaphysics of Being and presence. ³ Such approaches, in recognizing the inescapably metaphysical structures of thought, have renewed possibilities for rapprochement between theology and philosophy (and Horner’s book operates in conversation with this discourse), even while they maintain a radical negation of presence abstracts and distances revelation from the particularly intrinsic to its meaning in Christian theology.

Contemporary theologies of revelation respond to this philosophical appraisal either by denying its legitimacy (a response Horner associates with radical orthodoxy) or by seeking to articulate a theology that does not absolutize its thought in an absolute metaphysics. The more fundamental problem in Horner’s analysis, however, arises from an uncertainty concerning revelation itself and the degree to which it has come to be associated the propositional content of the Christian faith. The plausibility and meaningfulness of revelation, in such a scheme, is determined by either the ecclesial authority that defines and guards these propositions (an authority subject to increasing scrutiny) or the strength of one’s belief in them (rendering divine revelation not much more than a matter of subjective conviction). Both determinations evacuate revelation’s pertinence in the world today, indexing its meaning and importance to external authority or solipsistic interiority.

Following these diagnoses, Horner develops a new densely phenomenological account of revelation. From Jean-Luc Marion, the text’s primary interlocutor, the book explores revelation in the terms of the givenness of the event, which always exceeds the subject’s capacity and escapes causal ordering and objectification. Marion’s event, however, Horner judges, fails to accord the proper importance to hermeneutics, and it therefore raises rather than answers questions of its recognition. To emend this absence, Horner deepens this reading of revelation as the event through a series of engagements with Jean-Luc Nancy (the event is before belief), Lieven Boeve (the event interrupts and thereby disrupts revelation as defined and static), Claude Romano (the event is transformational), and Jean-Yves Lacoste (God/revelation is encountered not propositionally but affectively). The penultimate chapter applies this abstract theological and phenomenological account to the particular, finding consonance between the book’s account of revelation and Ignatius of Loyola’s reflections on election in his Spiritual Exercises.

This catalog accurately suggests the book’s remarkable facility with its many elusive, and, admittedly, sometimes abstruse sources. Horner’s engagements with these sources are constructive, but her constructive work is shaped by a perspicuous and responsible fluency with the spectrum of contemporary phenomenological thought. In this context, perhaps the book’s finest contribution is its dedicated attentiveness to the importance and necessity of hermeneutics. Because revelation, in Horner’s reading, is not a stable body of propositions (relation to which is a matter of assent) but an experience, hermeneutics are essential. Here we find an embrace of hermeneutics that recalls its etymology as the intersection of divine revelation and human finitude. As Emmanuel Falque writes and Horner quotes, “We have no other experience of God but human experience.” ⁴

Falque’s remark and, of course, the book’s title speak of the experience of God, but this evocative language is also strange in the context of a book that speaks primarily of revelation rather than the God revealed. Indeed, revelation in the text often names a certain caesura guarding against the metaphysics of presence. God, Horner writes, “is neither part of the world nor an object of consciousness.” ⁵ This emphasis on absence shines forth in the book’s three returns, at the beginning, the end, and at a crucial hinge in the middle, to the Lukan story of the Road to Emmaus; Revelation, for Horner, does not name the presence of God, but God’s passing, “in prepredicative experience.” ⁶

One benefit of this deferral is its entailment of the hermeneutics upon which the book so laudably insists. The “excessive nature” of the event, Horner writes, “prevents Christians from being able to do more than risk that it is God who reveals Godself there.” ⁷ A second, at least ostensible, benefit in the shift from the logic that revelation is of something concerns how thinking revelation in terms of affective experience subtends its pertinence today. And in aiming for a relevant account of revelation, Horner is precisely right. I think of Chrétien’s wonderful questions in his meditation on Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in Hand to Hand: “Why does Jacob matter, if we cannot become him? Why does his angel matter, if he no longer has the force to assault us? What does this combat matter, if it cannot take place this very night?” ⁸ Horner, like Chrétien, correctly perceives that a phenomenological account of revelation must concern our own phenomenal life.

This account of absence perhaps explains why the Incarnation figures so little in this Christian theology of revelation. The Incarnation always, it seems, eludes phenomenological thought. It would be, as Jean-François Courtine writes, the “cardinal experience” of revelation, but how, he asks, can phenomenology, concerned as it is with the structure of appearance, speak of that for which “there is on principle no paradigm”? ⁹ Is incarnate presence therefore relegated to the apodictic propositions of creedal faith? Horner’s book already suggests, in its readings of the Road to Emmaus, that such is not the case. The true presence of God in Christ does not transcend hermeneutics but insists upon them. Could this book not speak as constructively of presence as it does of absence? A phenomenology of revelation read in light of the Incarnation need not metaphysically ground theology outside the world; rather, the Incarnation throws revelation into the world (as Merleau-Ponty recognized). To speak, in the language of classical theism, of the Incarnation is to speak of both presence and absence, of both the historical and the present. No less was risked in Peter’s confession than is risked in continuing to think of Christ’s divine presence, as some Christian traditions do, in the saints (2 Cor. 4:8–12), in the church (1 Cor. 12:12), and in the least of these (Matt 25:40). Does not a connection arrest us between the excess of revelation and the excess we encounter in the presence of others, what Marion describes, in a text Horner cites, as the infinite hermeneutic required by “the face of the other.” ¹⁰ To pose this question is to affirm the book’s timeliness and excellence, its power to diagnose our loss of revelation, its phenomenological rigor, and its real contribution to the importance of hermeneutics—it is to affirm all these and to affirm at the same time that Horner’s work might help us imagine the revelation of divine presence as well.

THOMAS BREEDLOVEBaylor University, Waco, TX, USA