Especially in theistic religions, that is, religions which construe God as being a person or very much like a person (though He is not, of course, thought to be a human person), the notion of "revelation" is likely to be much more prominent than that of religious experience.
The special features of revelation refer primarily to the nature and action of the object involved and, to a lesser extent, to the type of effect produced. Perhaps we can see some of these features if we think of how a human person's revealing himself to us differs from our merely seeing him. The person who reveals himself must be active—he must do something deliberately for the sake of the revelation. His action, intention, and purpose are essential to his being revealed, but these are irrelevant to a person's merely being experienced. He can be seen, for example, as a rock can be seen, with no initiative on his part.
In general, then, a revelation is an experience that is brought about deliberately by its object and, at least in part, for the sake of the knowledge which the experiencing subject is to gain. It is not, therefore, hard to see why theistic religions, like Christianity and Islam, should find greater use for the revelation terminology. If God is as these religions describe Him, then it seems likely that there is no experience of Him that occurs apart from His initiative and purpose; or simply, that every experience of God is a revelation. But it will still remain true that, since revelation is a species of experience, much of what can be said of experience applies also to revelation.
(George I. Mavrodes, Belief in God: A Study in the Epistemology of Religion [Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1970], 53 [italics in original])
