All theology springs from the fact that man, faced with a revelation that makes certain demands upon him, finds that at the same time he must accept the demands of his own humanity and of his life in the world. The reason is that man cannot accept revealed truth without submitting it to interpretation by his reason, in terms of truths he knows as a rational thinker. A man finds that he cannot be true to revelation unless he is true to himself as a man in the world.

And revelation is a very wide concept. Some revealed truths are not immediately concerned with matters of ordinary human experience. Of such a kind is the revelation of the Trinity. There is no particular rational factor that would automatically make us tend to interpret this truth in one way rather than in another. Other revealed truths however are concerned with matters of ordinary experience, and so experience itself provides a framework for a rational interpretation of the revealed truth, enabling us to accept the revealed truth as running parallel, so to speak, with the truth we have learned for ourselves. Where revelation concerns death, for instance, we have an example of this kind of ‘ready-made’ interpretation being used. Because death in our human experience means that particular event which is the termination of life in the world, we are inclined to think of death, where the word occurs in statements of revealed truth, as that event.