The Vulnerable Revelation

                                                             Ehyeh asher ehyeh

Introduction

Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age. 

7 January 2026

The Vulnerable Revelation

At the beginning of January, the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, epiphany meaning a “showing forth” or a sudden manifestation of truth, a revelation. But what exactly do we understand by the concept of “revelation”? How do we view today the role attributed to revelation?

As an implicit presupposition, we find the acknowledgment of a transcendent or supernatural reality, a reality that surpasses the natural world around us. Without that starting point, the concept of revelation “from outside” loses all meaning. Revelation then refers to an act, a movement, from this “supernatural” reality toward the observable, knowable reality of human beings. If it were merely a movement “from below,” arising from humanity itself and built up by its own power, we would rather speak of a discovery than a revelation. The traditional view is that this revelation takes the form of a set of truths of faith, recorded, among other places, in the Bible as Holy Scripture.

But this traditional view of the Bible as the literal Word of God raises many questions. Many stories from the Old Testament are not particularly original and can be found in various ancient cultures and mythologies: the first fratricide, the flood, the builders of the tower. One can also raise serious ethical questions about certain passages, such as the apparent acceptance of slavery throughout the Bible. Moreover, the Bible is not a single book but a collection of dozens of books, written over a period of more than a thousand years, during which the images people formed of God underwent an enormous evolution, images so far apart that they are very difficult to reconcile. The Bible is clearly the work of people who wrote their own people’s story as a religious narrative.

It is undoubtedly one of the great achievements of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), more in particular in the document Dei Verbum (“The Word of God”), that this traditional image of revelation was fundamentally broken open. Revelation is no longer equated with a series of unquestionable truths of faith, written down in “the longest dictation in the world.” But what, then, is revelation?

At its core, the vision of Dei Verbum boils down to the following: in revelation, God has communicated Himself. A revelation that takes place within the concrete history of humanity, whereby God turns that history into a history of salvation. Within the Christian tradition, a special and unique place is given to Jesus of Nazareth, who definitively fulfills and completes this revelation. Thus we arrive at the unique essence of Christian revelation: God reveals Himself concretely and historically in the human person Jesus of Nazareth, in whom God became human.

Why unique? Because revelation, as God’s self-communication, is not a set of supernatural truths that descended upon us like a block of granite, but a series of concrete, natural events that can just as well be read purely as historical events. Both readings are equally legitimate. This means that within that concrete history there is nothing that inevitably forces people to believe, nothing that serves as irrefutable proof.

Believing in revelation therefore consists precisely in the willingness to see this concrete, natural history as a history of salvation. Faith is a way of looking at the world, a way of relating emotionally to that world, and from that emotional stance entering into a commitment. Why speak of willingness? Because revelation, as a movement toward humanity, places the human person in a relationship of response. It is a free choice: to see human history as salvation history is to choose to see that God has revealed Himself in the fate of an insignificant desert people that left little cultural or architectural legacy, especially when compared to the great civilizations that surrounded it, such as the Egyptian or Assyrian empires. And, as a culmination, that God came to us in a concrete historical human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

That revelation places the human person in a relationship of response says something fundamental about its nature: it is not a one-way communication, not a message that exists independently of whether the intended recipient receives it or not. Essentially, revelation only takes shape when it is received and answered in faith by the recipient. Faith is certainly not the unconditional acceptance of a set of truths. Faith is responding to the appeal that arises from the relationship of response created by revelation. It is the willingness to enter into the dynamic that this relationship sets in motion. This also makes revelation essentially vulnerable: it is only when it is answered in faith by human beings that revelation can truly exist.

What does it mean, precisely, that God reveals Himself? The key can be found in the story of Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–15). When Moses asks what he should say if the Israelites ask for God’s name, he receives the crucial answer: “I am who I am,” in ancient Hebrew “אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶ” (“Ehyeh asher ehyeh).” Linguistically, אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh) is the first-person form of the future tense of the verb הָיָה (hayah) (“to be”). However, ancient Hebrew does not have tenses in the same way our current languages do. This verb form indicates not a specific time, but an “unfinished” aspect. אֶהְיֶה (Ehyeh) therefore means “I am,” “I was,” and “I will be" simultaneously. The particle אֲשֶׁר (asher) expresses a kind of intensification. The phrase can be understood as “I will certainly be,” or “I am the Being of beings.” Ancient Hebrew does not choose: these meanings resonate together. Any single translation inevitably loses part of this richness.

What does God reveal here about Himself? Only one thing: He speaks. God does not “do” anything here; He simply affirms Himself as one who speaks, who presents Himself as a personal presence. The mystery remains. The only thing God communicates in revelation is Himself. He does not communicate objective truths about God. Yet it is indeed a speech act within history, a speech act that becomes revelation only when someone hears it and accepts it.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus is the unique key to the human mediation of revelation. Revelation comes from God, but Jesus speaks it in the first person. Jesus embodies the principle that revelation becomes present in history through human beings. The Christian faith is therefore deeply historical, because it consists in affirming as a historical fact that “I am who I am” has communicated itself as revelation, and that through and in Jesus, God has made Himself known to us.

 

Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2026). The Vulnerable Revelation. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 7 January 2026, p. 4.