Why We Need Revelation

Personal experience is important but it is not enough. We need the collective encounter of that particularly enlightened group of people who stand behind scripture. They give us an overall picture that must guide our lives. Personal experience can get you to the point where you can have faith, but it is a faith that is missing something. For our experience of good is deep and wide, and with it comes a call. But the same is true of our experience of evil. Experience by itself will lead one into the mistakes of Gnosticism and hard spiritual dualism. The human encounter with the world, the first person perspective reflected upon, is the experience of good and evil cosmicized, we touch the face of light and the face of darkness. It is the Bible, the collected experience of many who had some special historical perspective and spiritual insight, that gives us a faith that we can really rest in: a faith that the good is greater than the evil, and the evil has been and will be defeated.