The Course
This 4-unit course explores "God's knowability and self-disclosure: revelation, the incarnation, Scripture, preaching" (Undergraduate Catalog). We will further concentrate on God's self-disclosure in the practices of the community of faith, centering on the Word and sacraments. The course helps fulfill the theological/historical studies emphasis of the religious studies major, and the systematic theology upper-division elective of both the major and the minor. Introduction to Christian Doctrine (rs20) is a prerequisite.
How do we learn the truth of Christian faith? This — a traditional name for it is "the doctrine of revelation" — has long been a 'first question' for theology. Sometimes it serves as a bridge linking the intellectual world of an audience to that of the Church (as it does for Aristotelians reading Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica). Sometimes it is a rule the rest of theology observes to keep it accurate (as the Scripture Principle guards Calvin's doctrine from Catholic errors in the Institutes). Sometimes it establishes the factuality or reasonableness of what follows it (so Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century) or aids its plausibility in public discourse (so Wolfhart Pannenberg in the twentieth).
These contrasts reveal that different theological projects ask different first questions, even when they use the same name for them. That places a great responsibility on the structure of a course like this. Should the doctrine of revelation even be a 'first question'? Is this a place from which we start in order to travel somewhere else?
I am not so concerned with starting points and logical priorities as with explicating the faith of Jesus' community in a clear and responsible way. I will not be treating the doctrine of revelation as topic that is radically prior to any other. If you want this course to establish a foundation for all subsequent courses, then you are good company. If you do not, then you are also in good company. The second group may find me more amenable than the first, but the first will find many helpful resources among our course materials. We will primarily be asking, How do we learn the truth of Christian faith?
Here is a preliminary list of forms of our knowable God's self-disclosure:
Witness: We learn Christian faith when the community of faith shows it to us: by evangelism, catechesis, preaching, prophecy, and other forms of witness.
Practice: We learn Christian faith as we practice Christian faith: through every act in the life of the Church, at the heart of which are the divine/human interfaces of the practiced Word and Sacraments.
History: We learn Christian faith through examining God's decisive interventions in our world that create and maintain communities of faith. These past, present, and future acts center on God's actions through and for Jesus Christ. They may be broad enough to include the phenomena of nature itself and of human lives beyond God's communities of faith (though this is by no means a settled position among Christians).
Encounter: We learn Christian faith when God meets us directly: through dreams, visions, conviction, and other such experiences.
Reflection: We learn Christian faith as we contemplate what we already know and deepen our understanding of our God, our world, and ourselves.
These 'sources' of divine knowledge should reinforce each other. When they do not, something will correct something else sooner or later; there is no hard-and-fast rule about which governs which. I have arranged them in a biographical priority that should be familiar to evangelicals, but many will learn Christian faith differently. Moreover, if we were to write this from a "God's eye view," we would prefer a different order.
What is the point of all this work? We find out what kind of God it is
who meets us in these ways (the summary answer is "Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit"). We discover narrative as a way of disciplining our
talk about God and our lives according to what we find out. We train ourselves
to be ready to expect God to manifest himself in these various ways. We
become familiar with the common meeting places and learn to count on them,
to know them well, to direct others toward them. 
