Revelation, Rule, and the Human End: Trust, Mediation, and the Ordering of Religious Authority in Prophetic Religion.

Religious obedience is often framed through an unstable opposition: either a person independently reconstructs the reasons for a norm and thereby acts rationally, or accepts authority without sufficient thought. Prophetic religion cannot be adequately captured by this opposition. Human knowledge is deeply testimonial, and rational agents routinely rely on persons whose grounds they cannot fully reproduce. A child may rationally heed a mother's warning not to touch a scorpion before understanding venom, the consequences of a sting, or the biological mechanisms involved. The epistemic point is limited but important: a person can be rationally justified in relying on an instruction without independently possessing or reconstructing all the grounds that support it, provided there is sufficient reason to rely on the authority through which the instruction is received.Prophetic religion adds a further difficulty: a later believer rarely encounters a claimed divine source without mediation. What is taken as revelation becomes historically available through reception and communication, transmission and preservation, canonical recognition where applicable, interpretation, doctrinal formulation, jurisprudential reasoning, ritual and symbolic forms, institutional teaching and administration, and concrete application. These relations need not form a single sequence: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam configure revelation, scripture, oral tradition, communal memory, doctrine, law, ritual, interpretation, and institutional authority differently. Across those differences, later religious agents ordinarily encounter authoritative claims through historically mediated forms rather than through unmediated access to the claimed source itself. The philosophical question is therefore not whether mediation is present, but what relation each mediation bears to the claimed source, what additional work it performs, and what warrants that work.This article develops a differentiated philosophical account of religious authority by asking how its distinct forms are warranted, related, and limited in scope. It distinguishes epistemic, normative, interpretive, and institutional authority; examines the warrants appropriate to different forms and levels of religious mediation; and situates directive, formative, attentional, coordinative, deliberative, ethical, and orientational functions within a larger account of human formation and ultimate ends. A religious form may genuinely belong to, contribute to, or partly constitute an ultimate end without being identical with or sufficient for the complete realization of that end. The article then analyzes how a mediating relation can become substitutive, how some substitutions go further by treating the mediating form as though it were the reality, meaning, or object it mediates, and how stabilized forms can contribute to the recession of the underlying questions that gave them their intelligibility. Because mediated judgments enter conduct and communal life, the analysis also identifies a practical pathway by which failures of differentiation can contribute to closed-mindedness, prejudice, exclusion, and conflict when limited human interpretations, classifications, or institutional decisions acquire an absoluteness their warrants do not support. Aristotle, al-Farabi, Maimonides, Aquinas, Weber, and contemporary work on testimony and epistemic dependence serve as interlocutors. The resulting account preserves a disciplined place for trust, law, ritual, interpretation, and institutional continuity while keeping understanding, judgment, and action answerable to differentiated warrants.