The notion of noetic perception may be expanded in relation to the role of the imagination in revelatory experience. Here, the expansion of neo-Platonic perspectives in the understanding of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is significant, as are the notion of the imaginal developed by Henry Corbin and the understanding of the role of the human imaginative faculty in religious visionary experience, as explored by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This kind of analysis has implications for solving certain puzzles inherent in the New Testament accounts of visions of the risen Christ. However, questions arise in relation to this understanding, and these may be tackled in part through recent Christian thinking about the notion of revelation, in which the focus is no longer on ‘information about God’ but on what Yves Congar has called an orientation towards salvation. This suggests an understanding akin to the perennialist separation of exoteric and esoteric aspects of religious traditions in the sense of suggesting a two-component, psychological-referential model of revelatory experience.

Chapter 5 explores Augustine’s understanding of how Christians can come into contact with Christ’s resurrected flesh, especially through the scriptural proclamation and specular preaching of the resurrected Christ within the context of the Church. Augustine appreciates that Jesus makes his resurrected flesh available for believers of every nation and generation to see and touch in faith. Moreover, as one of Christ’s specular preachers, Augustine facilitates present encounters of himself, his hearers, and his readers with their risen Lord by preaching on the historical event of Jesus’s resurrection and surrounding events such as Christ’s crucifixion, death, burial, descent into hell, resurrection appearances, ascension into heaven, and sending of the Spirit. The impacts of our contact with the resurrected Christ include our gradual and integral resurrection in and through his risen flesh.

Dunn identifies two foundational types ofmotivating experiences in earliest Christianity: postmortem appearances of Jesus and the first disciples’ Pentecost experiences. He regards the experiences of the apostle Paul as particularly illustrative of early Christianity, featuring the liberating power of the Spirit and of being “in Christ,” experiencing the Spirit of God as the Spirit of Jesus, and the shared experience of believers as members of the body of Christ.