Theophany: Encyclopedia - Theophany

Theophany

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A theophany is a visible manifestation of God to humans.

For example, in the Bible in Isaiah 6, the story of Isaiah seeing the Lord sitting upon a throne is called a theophany.

According to the philosopher Philo, God is purely transcendent, so his interactions with the material world are through an expression of himself, his Logos, or Word. It was through this Word that God created the world.

Perhaps the best known example of theophany in Western religion is from the Torah where God appears to Moses and, by many analyses, the entire nation of Israel on, and at the foot of, a mountain variously called Sinai or Horeb, and reveals his name and the text of the Ten Commandments to Moses. Jewish inter-testamental tradition personifies this expression of God as a special angel who has the task of representing God to men. This angel is called the Angel of the Face, or the Angel of the Presence, or Metatron, in Hebrew; anan or mal'ak, said to have the highest place in heaven next to God, and who intercedes for Israel.

Traditional Christianity posits that God is a trinity; it also teaches that God became especially immanent through the Incarnation of Jesus, who is at once fully God and fully human. The Feast of Theophany in the Eastern Orthodox Church on January 6 of the Julian Calendar or Gregorian Calendar celebrates Jesus' baptism in the Jordan, at which time both Jesus' divinity and the Trinity was made manifest by the appearance of Jesus, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, while the audible voice of the Father was heard.

Joseph Smith claimed a personal modern day theophany; a physical appearance of God the Father and his physical son Jesus Christ.

The most well-known and beloved theophany in Eastern religions is contained within the Bhagavad-Gita of Hinduism, itself representing one chapter of the epic, Mahabharata. In the Gita, the famed warrior Arjuna begs for Krishna to reveal his true form after a series of teachings given by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra indicates Krishna to be far more than mortal. Krishna complies and gives Arjuna the spiritual vision which enables him to see Krishna in his true form, a terrifying and awe-inspiring manifestation that forms the main part of Chapter XI. This theophany was paraphrased by Robert Oppenheimer upon witnessing the first atomic bomb test, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds."

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Theophany", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki