How do we come into "better and fuller understanding"? Perhaps by God's revelation? How can we be so sure that revelation culminated in the Incarnation? When we say we look to the Holy Spirit for direction, aren't we in a sense asking for further revelation? Are we sometimes not recognizing God's revelation due to our own human defects and limitations, and even at times opposing it out of ignorance or selfishness?
It probably depends on the finer points of the definition of revelation. We could talk about revelation as being something where God directly seems to basically do, say, provide, or tell people something- examples would be (if we take these these at face value as historical occurrences- which is something I myself am not sure about and that we could discuss, but let's just go with it for now for the sake of me explaining what I'm getting at.
) the Old Testament Prophets, Jesus Christ, Pentecost, the 10 Commandments, Jesus appearing in a vision to St. Peter, etc.. If one takes the view that scriptures were truly divine writ with God basically directly writing through people, and not just the moral understandings of a communities as articulated by prayerful writers who were close to God and affirmed by that community, I guess we could say that is direct revelation, too. Certainly, the clouds parting and God the Father saying "This is my beloved son, of whom I am most proud" when Jesus was baptized by St. John, would be direct revelation.
I think that kind of revelation is over.
However, what happens when the Holy Spirit or acts of God move hearts to greater understanding and people, cooperating with grace, affirm that new understanding as part of the deposit of faith? I think that still happens, and if one defines that as revelation, sure, it's on-going. In a sense, even when scientists discover something about how physics work, because God created the heavens and the earth, that in it's own way is a revelation about God. Some might even say God *is* the heavens and the earth in some senses, which would make that even more of a revelation. But it's not the Old Testament kind where tablets with commandments float down from a cloud.
But this second kind of thing that we might call revelation that I believe still occurs, is not necessarily any less important than the first part. Perhaps it is will be a reflection of the maturation of the human race as spiritual individuals when we are truly able to recognize this sort of thing as it occurs at a quicker base and no longer need biblical style revelation. Maybe in a sense, that's what Jesus was doing, handing off the reigns to the Church.
But, of course, the Church must evolve to allow this to happen. And it has evolved. Vatican II was a big evolution. We got off track for a while with some conservative Popes and decisions, but in the long-term scheme of things, that may just be blips on the radar. Benedict and others were found of saying that often the true impact of an ecumenical on the Church isn't clear for 50 or 100 years. Well, we're not even close to 100 years since Vatican II yet. While the conservatives were using it to say that the progressive Spirit of Vatican II folks were wrong and the council really meant much less, maybe in the end we will find that instead the council meant much more. On it's 100th anniversary, maybe we'll be holding Vatican III with married female bishops.
You never know.
And, you're right, sometimes God is trying to tell us things that we refuse to listen to. But if our generation doesn't listen to it, maybe the next generation will, or the generation after that. There's a saying, kind of related to what I was talking about in the last paragraphs, that's something along the lines of "the Church thinks and acts in centuries, not years". God waits. But let's not make her wait too long.
