“Jesus for Paul was clearly a living and personal present reality who made himself known to him on the road to Damascus. But in other respects, and here we must be aware of the many senses of the word ‘revelation’, Paul received the gospel by means of human agency rather than directly or immediately. And that is the situation of most, if not all, of the rest of us. Wherever Jesus is now - that is, quite independently of what we happen to believe about the ascended Christ present in the church and the world – we do not have a direct, unmediated relation to him, at least in the sense that the words which communicate his reality are firmly anchored in the past. This means that because the texts are couched in the concepts of a particular historical context. God comes to language in the particularities of a culture. This means that the interpretation of the revelatory particulars is entrusted to particular people, who by handing on what they have received become what we call tradition. As we saw, tradition is, before it is anything else, a form of personal relation, and we need the mediation of a tradition of interpretation if we are to receive revelation for what it is.” (in A Brief Theology of Revelation, 108-109)