Modes of Revelation

It is a scholastic dictum that “whatever is received is received according to the nature of the receiver.” If I want to address a friend at a great distance, and the friend has only a shortwave receiver, it does me no good to speak into the telephone. God’s initiatives are always incarnated in the operational modes of those for whom he cares. The caring of God is an actual event, and like all events, it has a structure. The caring of God is partly determined by God’s own free decisions about the ways in which God will bestow love. But it is also determined by the historical configurations of those who are to be the recipients of that love.

Bernard J. Lee S.M. Jesus and the Metaphors of God