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Niebuhr asserts that "Hebraic prophetism" is "the beginning of revelation in the history of religion" (NDM, 2:25). But, for all he ever shows to the contrary, the most he's entitled to assert is considerably less than this. He's justified in claiming only that "Hebraic prophetism" is "the beginning of revelation" in one particular branch of the history of religion -- namely, the theistic/montheisticmonotheistic/radical monotheistic branch that has been so significant in Western, as distinct from Eastern, culture.

With Hebraic prophetism, we do indeed experience the emergence of axial religion in a theistic/monotheistic/radical monotheistic context. But, as is now generally recognized, roughly the same historical period -- what Jaspers calls "the axial period" -- witnessed the emergence of yet other formally similar, if materially different, axial religions in yet other nontheistic branches of the history of religions. And each of them, also, may fairly claim to be "the beginning of revelation" in substantially the same sense, in its own religio-cultural context.

This becomes clear beyond possible doubt from Niebuhr's own interpretation of the meaning of his assertion. Prophetic is "the beginning of revelation," he explains, "because here, for the first time, in the history of culture the eternal and divine is not regarded as the extension and fulfillment of the highest human possibilities, whether conceived in particularistic or universalistic terms. God's word is spoken against both his favored nation and all nations. This means that prophetism has the first understanding of the fact that the real problem of history is not the finiteness of all human endeavors, which must wait for their completion by divine power. The real problem of history is the proud pretension of all human endeavors, which seek to obscure their finite and partial [sc. fragmentary!] character[,] and therefore involves history in evil and sin" (25).

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