I’ll be starting an occasional series of entries where I’ll be commenting upon the Bible’s treatment of some important issues, but I’ll be commenting from my own perspective which I’ve been developing in this blog, Acts of Being, and my other blog for less technical writings, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, after first laying the foundations in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand.
I’m starting off this series of Biblical commentaries by presenting my angle on the questions as to what the Bible really is and is it free of errors?
To very quickly summarize my proposed general structure of Creation:
God manifested truths sufficient for a rich and complex Creation. Those manifested truths formed an abstract sort of stuff (the Primordial Universe) which God used to shape multiple universes, worlds when seen in light of God’s purpose which gives what we would perceive as a moral order. Somehow, we can perceive not only a very imperfect but substantial moral order in our concrete beings and our surroundings but also the very abstract truths of such fields of study as transfinite set theory, truths very far from anything we could perceive with eyes and ears. I speak of multiple universes in my worldview because God could shape other universes from the Primordial Universe, even the world of the resurrected where the friends of God can live with Jesus Christ for time without end.
Moreover, my worldview expands upon the views of St. Thomas Aquinas on the formation of the human mind. (See What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? and ensuing entries with the general name What is Mind? for a discussion of the Thomistic views on mind, partially presented as a discussion of the ideas of the neuroscientist, Walter J. Freeman.) In my worldview, building upon Thomistic principles, a human being shapes his mind by responses to his immediate environments. He will likely begin to dimly perceive greater levels of reality by, so to speak, moving out from his immediate environment. If all goes well, he might even begin to shape his mind in response to his insights that something exists we can call a universe. If all goes still better, he might begin to shape his mind in response to a dimly perceived moral order in that universe, coming to shape his mind in response to this world.
This gives us multiple realms of being with only the most concrete, our immediate environments on the surface of the earth and mere hints of what lies beyond the atmosphere, available for raw perceptions, what we might call ‘animal perceptions’. The Bible gives us a set of narratives at the two levels of physical events of the sort we participate in or observe and God’s purpose — the ‘meaning’ of it all. God has made no effort to reveal to us the details of empirical reality nor the general concepts which are the foundations of this reality. It seems to be our job to explore our world and come to understandings of empirical reality.
God began a conversation of sorts with the patriarchs of the Hebraic peoples (as well as possibly other Semitic peoples) at a time when Homer, or at least his predecessors, were first developing the concept of a long and sustained narrative by the very acts of constructing such. The Hebrews had no such concepts for a number of centuries after Moses. The historians of the kings of Israel and Judah gave us their best view of matters from the limited perspective of the courts but it wasn’t until the time of King Josiah, circa 600, that some unknown geniuses realized that the writings useful for Josiah’s efforts to honor the covenant between his ancestors and God could be used to construct a narrative of what is something of a conversation between God and a very extended human family. Amazingly, that conversation which took place inside of an increasingly coherent narrative stream, continued after what could have otherwise been seen as no more than an effort by King Josiah and the priests of his kingdom to increase their power.
But what do I mean by ‘conversation’? Did God somehow cause vibrations in the air so that Moses heard the Holy Name of God? Did God somehow cause the cells of Moses’ brain to respond as if that early prophet had heard God literally speaking?
No. When I say ‘conversation’, I point towards the mental processes of shaping the mind in response to the things and processes of God’s world, so that it responds to those particular manifested thoughts of God. We, children that we are, converse with God by learning to speak along with Him as He creates. We learn to listen to God by learning to prophesy, that is, to speak along with God. Prophesying isn’t predicting the future, but rather speaking of the present in God-centered terms.
The coherence of the narrative provides our confidence in the truth of the narrative. This is true in any field of study which deals with historical or developmental processes. It’s true in cosmological physics, including specialized areas such as the efforts to understand how galaxies came to be. It’s most certainly true in evolutionary biology. It’s also most certainly true in human history.
We can understand much of the universe by our own efforts. We can even understand much of Creation which is not strictly in the form of concrete being. We can somewhat understand God as a Creator by our own efforts in empirical knowledge-gathering and also in speculation. The Bible tells us about God’s love for us and for all of His Creation, but we have to remember that past generations of Christians couldn’t even understand this central revelation as well as we can because they didn’t understand the scope of Creation nor did they know about many strange and wondrous aspects of Creation.
There is a wholeness that mandates a certain amount of recursion so that the Bible is itself part of the narrative for which it provides meaning. If we manage to construct a coherent narrative, we can — in the phrase used by John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas — move with the grain of the universe.