Offenbarung als Selbstmitteilung Gottes

The author specifies the meaning of revelation as God's "self-communication" by distinguishing that concept from the understanding of revelation as divine afflatus on the one hand and as supernatural information on the other hand. He then traces back that concept to the Philosophy of German Idealism, mainly Hegel, and shows how that approach became adopted by theologians in the 19 th century, for example by Philipp Konrad Marheineke. In the next part of the article (self-) revelation is spelled out in reference to the term "disclosure" ("Erschließung") which was used by Heidegger. In the final reflection the author suggests to understand the content of self-revelation - from a Christian point of view - as kenosis : God reveals himself as a deity who makes himself present in a human being, gets affected by the suffering of that being and overcomes the abyss of death that separates that being from God.