Abstract:
For the postfoundationalist Wentzel van Huyssteen, the James I McCord Professor of Theology
and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA, the problem of rationality has been the
dominant and persuasive theme of his scholarship for more than three decades. ‘To understand
understanding’ can be the shorthand description of his scholarly quest. In his published Gifford
Lectures, Alone in the World? (2006), he explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the concept
of human uniqueness and the imago Dei – an exercise in transversal reasoning as he calls it. It is an
exercise that according to Van Huyssteen, stems from the conviction that evolutionary epistemology
creates a natural space for postfoundationalism, and that transversal reasoning represents the
performative praxis of postfoundationalism. The question immediately arises from this exciting and
promising interdisciplinary exercise, if and how the concept of revelation which represents (in most
religions) a constitutive element of religious experience can be understood from a postfoundational
perspective as an exercise in transversal reasoning. Against the background of a limited overview
of contemporary infl uential models of revelation, as well as brief notes on natural theology, I will
make use of Ricoeur’s a-religious understanding of revelation as theological interlocutor for this
critical dialogue with Van Huyssteen. Finally I will formulate a tentative framework within which
the concept of ‘revelation’ can be re-imagined from an interdisciplinary perspective so that it can
be part of the post-modern theology-science conversation in such a manner to maintain its identity
without retreating to an esoteric world of private, insular knowledge claims.
