Revealed religion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A revealed religion is one which perceives a symbolic center in a set of revelations allegedly given by a deity^[1], and often transcribed into a sacred text. Prominent examples are Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Bahá'í faith and Zoroastrianism. The Bahá'í faith has a subtantial authoritative body of scripture. Zoroastrianism is revealed in the Avesta, Christianity in the New Testament, Islam in the Qur'an, and Judaism in the Tanakh. Several religions also have some standard of acceptence of the revealed scripture of other religions. Christianity also respects their own interpretation of the Jewish scripture, called the Old Testament among Christians. Islam similarly grants some status to Judaic and Christian scriptures. The Bahá'í faith stipulates, allowing for scholarly criticism as to whether the original text is available and on matters of translation, the divine origin and basis of the religious scriptures of the majority of well known religions and allows for possibilities among religious traditions among Native Americans and others.^[2] While often denying a deity, Buddhism has Buddhist texts many of which were revealed by the Buddha and Hinduism also has Hindu scripture some of which are accepted as words of a god.

Not all religions that use religious texts are considered revealed religions, however. Taoism, for example, does not consider the Tao Te Ching to have been revealed by any deity, but instead regards it as the written wisdom and philosophy of their founder, Laozi.

Generally speaking, accepting a revealed scripture is counterpoint to Syncretism which essentially ignores the independent authority of revealed scripture, focusing instead only on attempting to reconcile disparate or contradictory beliefs.