revelation

revelation. In Christian theology the word is used both of the body of truth about Himself which God discloses and of the process by which His communication of it takes place. Since it is commonly held that some truths about God can be learnt through man's natural endowments (e.g. His existence, which philosophers outside the Christian tradition have claimed they could establish), while others, e.g. the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, are not knowable except by faith, Christian philosophers have distinguished between ‘truths of reason’ and ‘truths of revelation’. Traditionally Protestants have held that all revelation is sufficiently contained in the Bible, Catholics that part is also to be found in the unwritten traditions of the Church, but in recent times RC theologians have drawn a less sharp distinction between tradition and Scripture and stressed their ultimate unity.