When we suspect or fear that a miracle of any sort has occurred, we fool ourselves and fail to see that the miracle is nothing but an event tied closely to the always Present Whom we fail to see or to acknowledge in a proper way.
“Is nothing but…” is a funny phrase to use when talking about the Presence of God. Or is it? I’d suggest that we think strangely if we think the Creator needs to perform some sort of magic to shape the stuff of His Creation or form the relationships between entities in His Creation or to direct the events of His Creation.
I’ve started reading a collection of writings by the Jewish (Hasidic) Bible scholar and theologian Martin Buber: On the Bible, edited by Nahum N. Glazer and including an introduction by Harold Bloom. These writings include chapters drawn from the many works of Buber — articles, studies, or lectures. The first chapter, “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible”, asks about “the meaning [we might] find in the words that God came down in fire, to the sound of thunder and horn, to the mountain that smoked like a furnace, and spoke to His people?”
Buber proposes three possible explanations for such exotic events which are described in the Jewish Bible, also known as the Old Testament to Christians. Of course, there might be differences in the books which are included, but that’s not important for this discussion.
Buber says that the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai experienced a strange even — I’d even call it a theophany — which might be explained as:
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Just words.
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An invasion of mortal realms by God.
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A natural event experienced as a revelation.
I’ve advocated the last view in my writings and Buber seems also to prefer it. Let me elaborate on the three possibilities a little and then I’ll speak a little more about my reasons for preferring that view.
It’s just words.
As Buber says, that seeming theophany could be a mere description, “figurative language used to express a ‘spiritual’ process[.]” In the same vein, we can speak of metaphors and allegories. I don’t think the sorts of men who wrote and rewrote and redacted the Jewish Bible were likely to be so inspired by an opportunity for creative literary efforts. Nor were they likely to confuse fiction and the experience-based, if possibly distorted, stories of a people being formed by God. After all, those writers were part of that people and could see the results of often brutal historical forces.
God might be invading our realm to show Who’s the best magician of all.
It could be “the report of a ‘supernatural’ event, one that severs the intelligible sequence of happenings we term natural by interposing something unintelligible.”
Modern Christians seem predisposed to this view of God as a pagan deity who exercises dominion over a realm that lies at His feet. My fellow Catholics seem especially inclined to run around the world visiting theme-parks of a sort where the Mother of God, though not God Himself, has appeared to reaffirm our basic righteousness. We need to tune up our sinful selves, but the greatest share of the fault belongs to Satan, a view that I see as being strongly opposed to the teachings of the Biblical prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. Could a clearheaded Christian really believe that Satan, not God, is driving history forward? I think not. I think that God is telling a story and we’re trying to obstruct that great work. We feel in our hearts that we’re doing as we should be doing, protecting ourselves and our understanding of God’s Creation. We feel that Satan must be attacking our noble and God-centered selves.
It might be the realization that natural events are revelation.
It could be the “verbal trace of a natural event, i.e., of an event that took place in the world of the senses common to all men, and fitted into connections that the senses can perceive. But the assemblage that experienced the event experienced it as a revelation vouchsafed to them by God, and preserved it as such in the memory of generations, an enthusiastic, spontaneously formative memory. Experience undergone in this way is not self-delusion on the part of of the assemblage; it is what they see, what they recognize and perceive with their reason, for natural events are the carriers of revelation, and revelation occurs when he who witnesses the event and sustains it experiences the revelation it contains.”
This third possibility is in line with my belief that a true revelation is an event or a moment or even a vaguely defined period of time when a prophet becomes such because his thoughts come into rhythm or synchronization with God’s own thoughts. In the case of Israel gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai, we speak of an entire people coming into rhythm or synchronization with God’s own thoughts or — perhaps still more accurately — coming into synchronization with God’s story, recognizing the role they were called to play and accepting that role. At least they accepted for a short while though later they rebelled, apparently thinking they deserved better from their Maker. [The story may well be more complex and less edifying than this simple rendering. In addition, the editors and redactors who lived half a millennium after the events were themselves part of the ‘prophetic moment’.]
We’re blind to God’s presence in His own Creation that lies in front of us. We go looking for brilliant flashes, which might well be real apparitions, but it’s not to our credit that we need such. We’re deaf to God’s whispers and wish to hear the mother of His Son speak human words to admonish and encourage us. We can’t think along with the thoughts God manifested in Creation and we think of too many of those thoughts as being demonic disruptions of a world intended to be some sort of Disney-managed Eden.
Blind, deaf, and stupid, we couldn’t be happy in any Heaven consistent with Christian beliefs. Mark Twain once noted this to be true of Americans, but I think it generally true of modern peoples, even most of those who seem to be orthodox Trinitarian Christians. We prepare ourselves for a resurrection into a Heaven more like Disney World than the life the Apostles enjoyed with the Son of God incarnate. We’ll be what we make ourselves to be and we’ll need that Disney-managed Eden to be happy. Or else, we’ll need to spend a lot of time in some remedial education classroom in the entry-regions of Heaven. Heaven, as vaguely hinted in the New Testament and in the writings of great Christian thinkers, is a place of communion with God, not a place where we’ll continue our preferred roles as passive spectators sitting in front of epic shows or sitting in vehicles passing through thrill-rides.
Given an understanding of the evolution of life in general and of human nature in particular, we can see what’s wrong. We’re creatures keyed to survival and reproduction in a world that can quickly strip us of the bare essentials of life. We’re creatures who are keyed to plodding efforts occasionally interrupted by dangerous situations which must be met with bursts of energy and we seek to save energy when possible, to be relatively passive and let good things come to us if possible.
And we human beings have also a strong tendency to justify ourselves. We think we deserve the best, needs and security and luxuries, and we often don’t get the best, especially those of us living at times when it would seem we’ve turned ourselves into flimsy obstructions to God’s story. It actually takes multiple generations to reach this point but some have the bad luck to live at the time when the forces of God’s story start clearing out all that obstructs the story.
We need to get ourselves in rhythm, in synchronization with that story God is telling. When we do so, we’ll perceive the story and He who is telling the story. We’ll know we’re in the presence of God and we’ll be able to start moving with God, taking on our proper roles in that story and willingly living those roles.
In principle.
In fact? The moments when we have a strong sense of God’s presence, as individuals or as a gathering of God-centered people, are likely to be few and far between, and maybe so dim to creaturely vision that we can’t be certain.
We aren’t justified in falling back to a skeptical position which denies God’s presence, either denying His existence or banishing the Almighty to some conveniently far location. Creation and its Creator should be inspirations for our creative literary efforts but they can’t be contained in our tiny imaginations. If we are to think independently enough to be true images of God, we sometimes need to turn from God while we grow up. If we are to be true adults, we need to turn back to God. During our mortal lives, that means turning to the presence of God the Creator in His own Creation, in the things which are our fellow creatures — living and not — and in the relationships of those creatures and in the entirety of this world and of this world we can directly perceive, if only in part.
We are most certainly not justified in falling back to a childish wish for explicit acts of magic from God, perhaps a dancing sun or perhaps the magical healing of the scars and wounds of evolution and development in this world being born. God may cause such events, but we should be careful about needing such evidence and careful about rendering our faith dependent upon miracles. And we should be careful not to bet our faith on what might not be truly a sign of God’s special presence.
Though there are some with a well-founded but simple faith, a properly skeptical attitude can be good. Though the Christian Church, however defined, needs sophisticated believers who can move with faith intact across the best of modern knowledge in a variety of fields, a child-like anticipation of God’s acts of revealing His presence can also be good. That skeptical attitude and that child-like anticipation both need to be set into the context of a spiritually and intellectually and morally mature search for the truth, a search conducted with faith and hope and love. That search must be for the story God is telling, a story which emerges to our vision in only a very obscure manner. It must not be a search for truths to be used in a schematic way to prove or disprove God’s existence nor must it be a search for a God who is oddly enough coming to rescue us from the story He Himself is telling.
Moreover, that search is a communal search, however important might be the role of occasional prophets forced to work as lone-wolves.
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
When the Israelites stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai, they — as a community — experienced the story God is telling in a particularly clear way. God was present to them in a way that we can rarely accept, a way we often refuse to even acknowledge. Our blindness is not entirely to the bad since we are intended to live our mundane lives and we’d not be able to do so if we were constantly living in the burning Presence of God. In addition, we have to remember:
It’s not necessarily the case that all present at one of these moments of an intense awareness of the ever-presence of God will feel that intense awareness.
There might be some who play the role of seers, not having some sort of mystical vision, but seeing exactly what is there and has always been there — the presence of God and not miraculous events. Sometimes, a community might come into synchronization with God’s story in a second-hand way — by coming into synchronization with the words of a prophet or seer in their midst or — more likely — a prophet long-dead. More typically, those who are blind to God’s presence will also be deaf to the words of any prophets in their midst.