Hence revelation disturbs. It is “an interruption which addresses us.” As it accosts us, revelation establishes a distance — between ourselves and our past, present, and future; between ourselves and our traditions; between ourselves and all aspects of our settled identities. Revelation cleaves us apart; as God’s eschatological word and work, as the presence of the divine glory, it loosens and sometimes severs the conventions which constitute our individual and corporate selves. To be addressed by revelation means that we may not rely unthinkingly on those conventions, believing them to be simply what is the case. However much they form the basic and necessary structures of our historical existence, there is no achieved symmetry between them and the eschatological order of God. “Revelation means that God comes to the world,” and “God’s coming-to-the-world means an elemental interruption of our being-in-the-world” — including our Christian being-in-the-world. Revelation is, in short, the crisis of Christian life and thought.