This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every new experience is a new opportunity of knowing God. Every new experience is like a jewel set into the texture of our life, on which God shines and makes interpretation and revelation of Himself.
Experience | God | Knowing | Life | Life | Opportunity | Revelation | God |
Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
Reason and revelation cannot be in conflict because they are on different sides of the gap; revelation is part of that to which we react while reason is part of our reaction.
Reason | Revelation |
Georges Florovsky, fully Georges Vasilievich Florovsky
Tradition is the witness of the Spirit; the Spirit’s unceasing revelation and preaching of good tidings… It is, primarily, the principle of growth and regeneration.
We have become so preoccupied with power and control over nature that we have lost an important dimension of our being, the disposition of thankfulness, of commemoration, of perceiving and enjoying something for its own sake. Instead of viewing these immediate objects of our environment in terms of their own being, we have come to regard them solely in terms of what they are for us. And to such an exploitative mentality, nature’s own voice becomes mute. Approached as material merely, to be worked up and pressed into the service of a self-styled lord of creation, she contains no revelation and no blessing.
Control | Important | Lord | Nature | Power | Regard | Revelation | Self | Service | Thankfulness |
By divine revelation is meant the entrance of truth into the depth of living. As long as truth does not hold sway over the whole life, cognition and life are two separate entities, God and man are living apart from each other.
What education is to the individual, revelation is to the whole human race.
Education | Human race | Individual | Race | Revelation |
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman
Religion is proposed not as a transcendent revelation of the nature of man and the world, but as a means of weathering the storms of life, or of deepening one’s spiritual existence, or of preserving the social order, or of warding off anxiety.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nature | Order | Religion | Revelation | World |
Before reaching us, divine revelation has passed through social contests whose coloring it tended to assume; and to catch its spirit it is often necessary to relive the past and breathe its atmosphere.
Past | Revelation | Spirit |
Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends.
Argument | Body | Cult | Ends | Impulse | Man | Revelation | Sense | Worship | Leadership |
Roger L. Shinn, fully Roger Lincoln Shinn
The stumbling block of revelation is the belief in God in time, God in history.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
It is the historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as stepping stones to the progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight, and the gift of ever more grace to act on this insight.
Grace | Insight | Revelation |
Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer
The ideal of man is to be a revelation himself, clearly to recognize himself as a manifestation of God.
God | Man | Revelation |
Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
When we go beyond the ego and experience the sudden revelation that absolutely nothing is lacking, then immediately the faith is there to jump. The leap itself is the revelation, the revelation is the leap.
Ego | Experience | Faith | Nothing | Revelation |
He who does not believe that revelation is continuous does not believe in revelation at all.
With the approach of death I care less and less about religion and truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation and darkness.
Nature is a revelation of God; Art is a revelation of man.
Nature is a revelation of God. Art is a revelation of man.