A Christian View of the World
By Lloyd Brown
May 6, 2011
Before discussing my understanding of the Christian view of the world, it is necessary to provide a brief sketch of some other views of the world as a context for our consideration of the Christian view. This is necessary in order to understand the world in which Christianity exists, to appreciate its contribution to our understanding of the world, and recognize its significance.
Contemporary Culture
All great ideas whether scientific, political, philosophical, social, or religious make claims about the nature of the world and our place in it. For example, Marxism denies the existence of God, and regards religion as the opiate of the people. It also deemphasizes moral freedom, claiming that morals are determined by the society in which we live. Marxism is a materialist vision in which individual change is dependant on a radical change in society, when we are no longer alienated by economic conditions. In other words, to Marxists the individual is of little consequence except in so far as he/she is a part of society and supports the state. This explains the denial of individual freedom by Marxist governments. It also explains the state’s mistrust of the individual and its rejection of individual imaginative expression. In Marxist states art serves the state.
Darwin was also a materialist. His theory of evolution linked humanity and the lower animals. To the Darwinist we all share the same origin. The result is that instead of being, as the Bible asserts, “A little lower than the angels,” we are but a little higher than the snake. In Darwinism we have lost our status as a special creation. Darwin’s well-known modern disciple, Richard Dawkins, holds that because the universe is a chance creation and there is no creator, the universe has no purpose, no meaning, and no good or evil. It also seems to me that true Darwinists, if they attempt to explain morality on the basis of evolution and natural selection, would have to support the principle of the survival of the fittest, the principle that emphasizes “looking out for number one” in order to survive and produce.
Freud also professed that he was a materialist. He described those who were religious as delusional. Religious ideas, he said, were false beliefs, based on a projection of what we wished things to be like. To Freud God is a mere wish fulfillment, growing out of the need for protection that our fathers provided when we were children. His conclusion is that there is no moral order in the universe, no life after death, and no God. The absence of these, and Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious leave us with a self that is unrestrained, one that is free to indulge in whatever it wishes.
I provide this brief introduction to those three important thinkers because of their powerful influence on contemporary society. Even people who have never read them have come under the influence of their ideas; even some who have never heard of them are their heirs. One could consider them as contributing largely to modern materialism which is de rigueur in modern society. Consider the following examples, so familiar, so pervasive:
1. Only the world which we perceive with our senses is real. There is no transcendence; nothing beyond matter exists. Science is, therefore, the only true way to knowledge.
2. The world, including humans, was created by chance by impersonal forces. Thus the world is meaningless and without purpose. Jacques Monod, the well-known French biochemist, claiming that we are here by chance, said that as a result we cannot ascribe meaning or purpose to life. To quote Shakespeare, life seems to be “a tale told by an idiot…signifying nothing.”
3. Since there is no God, the materialists say that there is no absolute moral good and no personal evil. We create our own values, and they are not universal. They vary from individual to individual, and among different societies. For example, to Marx our moral ideas are determined by the society in which we live. In fact, Marx holds that evil only exists in society, in its class structures and institutions, not in the individual human heart.
4. There is no life after death. In fact, if materialism, which claims that matter is the only true reality, is true, there couldn’t be another realm beyond the one we inhabit. And since only the physical body exists, there cannot be a soul.
5. Happiness is achieved through accumulation of wealth and material progress. Capitalism, with its survival of the fittest mentality, is a social mirror-image of Darwin’s biological view.
6. To materialists mystery is a bugaboo. They are concerned with problems, and problems can be solved. However, mystery cannot be solved. When confronted with mystery one does not look for solutions. Instead our response is worship and our expression is awe.
A Christian View
The remainder of this paper will discuss the ideas in the statements above with a view to presenting a Christian response to them. I conduct this discussion under four main headings: 1. Transcendence (2) Morality, (3) Truth, and (4) Mystery. My purpose in writing this brief paper is not just to present some Christian views of the world, but by including the ideas of philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, as well as Christian theologians, to illustrate that the Christian view of the world is to be taken seriously, and that they are not, as some recent atheists claim, the figments of some crazed fundamentalist mind. I should make it clear at this point that not all Christians will agree with the opinions I express here. There are a great variety of Christian views of the world and my view is just one of them. And, it should be pointed out, what I have to say here is too brief to be adequate, and is based on knowledge that is too limited to be complete.
Transcendence
Though I believe that the materialist story is still the dominant one, it is fair to say that developments in science, especially physics, seem to be more open to the notion of an underlying, invisible reality. New findings in physics provide support for this view of reality and are encouraging for anyone who wants to discuss spirituality and the transcendent order. And they allow one to do so without embarrassment, without apology, and without feeling the fool for doing so. These findings seem, in fact, to undermine the premise of materialism. Recent scientists, especially physicists, seem more accepting than even some theologians of an underlying invisible reality. As physicists have probed deeper into nature they have discovered a world that is beyond our direct sensory perception. For example, David Bohm (1987, 148), postulates what he calls an “implicate order” that is hidden and out of which the tangible world emerges. He describes it in language very familiar to the theologian’s. He calls it “the ground of being.” And, astonishingly, he concludes that this ground of being is “permeated with a supreme intelligence which is creative.”
The world portrayed in the new science is a place of mystery. In the mechanistic world of the old science particles were hard indestructible balls. In the new science particles are no longer solid. Davies (1986, 103) says that an atom only materializes when you look at it, and “in the absence of an observation the atom is a ghost.” Fred Alan Wolf (1997, 51) states, calling to mind Bohm’s theory of the implicate order, that “quantum physics proves that spiritual reality underlies the physical world.” He further explains “when we investigate matter at its deepest level, it dissolves into a non substantial reality that religion calls spirit” (45) Owens (1983,86) quotes Heisenberg as saying that atoms are not real. They are instead, “the sheerest mathematical Platonic forms.” The physical world, then, seems, as Liderbach observes, to be “made up fundamentally of non substantial presences.”
Polkinghorne, A theologian turned physicist, (1998, 44) argues that entities such as quarks, gluons, and neutrinos, though unseen, warrant our belief because their existence “provides the basis for understanding what is happening.” He makes the same claim for the unseen presence of God in the world. Both, he says, may be unseen, but they nevertheless “bear some relation to the actuality of the world” and make aspects of experience intelligible. The subatomic world of the new physics, then, like the one portrayed in religion, is a veiled, hidden reality.
The new story, as revealed in the work of the new scientists, takes seriously the spiritual aspects of life, emphasizing wholeness and mystery. Sometimes as Christians we have doubts about the rationality of our beliefs—the presence of the Holy Spirit, immortality, the invisible God as the ground of our being. However, if the claims of the scientists introduced here are rational, we should be able to claim with confidence that our claims about the invisible world are no less so.
The notion that the material world is not all there is an old one. For example, Plato regarded the material world as one of appearance only, one that is dependent on and supported by a deeper, timeless reality. The material world was to Plato but a reflection of the eternal world, known as Plato’s forms, outside time and space.
St. Augustine of the fourth century seemed to reflect something of Plato’s view when he argues that the heavenly city, the City of God, provides a standard by which the secular city can be judged. In other words, the invisible, eternal world is the transcendent standard for the secular world.
Many modern scholars also make the case for a divine, invisible reality beyond the visible one. For example, Jung is definite in his expression: “The world beyond is a reality, an experiential fact. We only don’t understand it.”
(Quoted in Morton Kelsey.(1987, 105). Kelsey, after discussing a variety of scholars, but Jung in particular, draws the following conclusion:
Man is not only in touch with …the material world…he is also in touch with a …spiritual world of images and intuitions, dreams and fantasies, myths and numinous contents which are…of more than individual significance. (1987, p.144)
These ways of knowing, Kelsey suggests, are “contacts with an objective center of meaning which men have called God.” Such contacts can have healing properties, can create wholeness, and meaning, and can restore purpose to one’s life.
Simone Weil, whom Malcolm Muggeridge calls in his introduction of Weil’s Gateway to God an agent in “God’s Celestial Intelligence Service”, makes a similar claim: There is, she says, “a reality outside the world…outside space and time.” This reality, she concludes, “is the unique source of all the good that can exist in the world.”(1985, 38)
Tom Harpur (1996), after an examination of Near Death Experiences and the views of the major religions on life after death, concludes “I am persuaded of the truth of the spiritual planes beneath, through, and beyond this world of space, sense and time.” (334)
All the major religions challenge the view that physical reality is the only one. Their view is that humans are in contact with two realities—the spiritual as well as the physical. The prophets of Hebrew Scriptures tell of their experiences of the world beyond. Moses, looking after a flock of sheep, heard the voice of God address him from a burning bush. Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. Ezekiel in his vision saw “something that looked like fire, and there was splendor all around.” It had the appearance, he says, “of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”
The New Testament also provides examples of those who caught glimpses of a reality beyond. Jesus at his baptism felt the Holy Spirit descend on Him like a dove. John testified “I was in the Isle that is called Patmos”, and “I was in the spirit…and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet.” The book of Revelation was the result. And Saul was struck blind on the Damascus road, a mystical encounter that changed his life. Instead of being a persecutor of the Church he became its great witness, at great cost to himself.
Transcendent experiences are still common. William James (1958), the great American Psychologist, saw the essence of religion as a belief in an unseen order and adjusting ourselves to it. He concludes that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance.”(P. 367) He collected testimonies of people who have had experiences of this unseen order. I include two of them here:
“I had a revelation last Friday evening. I never before so clearly felt the presence of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver…with the presence.”
“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out…into the infinite.” (p. 67)
James describes the people who experience these mystical states as having a sense of knowing a different order of reality. However, it must be admitted, these reported experiences do not necessarily prove that the unseen order exists. Materialists may explain that they are caused by some quirk in the brain, some special evolutionary residue. James (29) calls this explanation medical materialism, which, he says, dismisses St Paul by “calling his vision…a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex. But is this explanation any more plausible than the one which posits an eternal, universal mind which ours can connect with? Is attributing St. Paul’s experience to “ a lesion of the occipital cortex” a more credible explanation than that it was due to divine intervention? Is it any more provable? C.S. Lewis (1965), the well-known literary critic, novelist, and amateur theologian, says that we are made for this transcendent reality. We have a built-in longing for it that we cannot hide, a longing that nothing in our earthly life can satisfy, nor can anything material appease it. He also claims that this longing for “our own far country” suggests that it exists in the same way that our hunger for food indicates that food exists. Because we are such beings that need food for our nourishment, the world would be strange indeed if no food existed to satisfy our hunger. When the materialist looks to the future he sees nothing but the everlasting blackness of death. The Christian view promises the meaningfulness of a moral order and the affirmation of hope.
We may not have had the dramatic experiences described by James or those recorded in the Bible. However, I believe the spirit is constantly calling, that our lives are made up of faith-filled moments directed by an unseen reality. These come as urgings of the spirit. We meet a stranger in distress and are urged to help, or we are surprised by the sun like a flame on the water. Peter Berger (1971) calls these experiences “signals of transcendence” that link us to what James calls the “unseen order.”
However, it is a mistake to think that Christianity emphasizes the spiritual world at the expense of the physical. How can it when Jesus the Christ is regarded as the spirit incarnate, the spirit made flesh? Unlike the Gnostics, who saw physical reality as evil, orthodox Christianity holds that we are both body and spirit, one interpenetrating the other. Always in the Christian experience there are two aspects of reality—the physical and the spiritual. Without the physical, the spiritual is detached and personal only. Without the spiritual, religion degenerates into politics. To illustrate the dual nature of the Christian experience, consider St. Luke’s account of the transfiguration of Jesus, who with three of his disciples “went up into a mountain to pray.” The disciples wanted to remain on the mountain and build places of worship. Instead they came down from the mountain into the world, and, as if replenished by the spirit, Jesus continued his healing work. I try to capture this in the following brief poem:
Transfiguration
“Let us stay here,
On this mountain”, Peter said.
“Let us build a habitation,
And dwell in this
Timeless place,
In its bright peace,
Its dazzling glory.”
“No”, He said.
“We will go down the mountain,
Down to the routine
And daily rhythms of our lives,
Down into unravelling time,
Demanding and persistent, closing around us,
Down to a man’s mad son.
But there we shall feel our spirits stir
And soar
Because we have known
This bright cloud of eternity. (Lloyd Brown, 2010)
Even the doctrine of creation in Genesis portrays humans as beings in the world. They are not only created as living souls but also are created from dust of the earth. Further, the Lord God planted a garden and placed man in it to tend it, thus emphasizing his place in the physical world.
Borg (2004) uses the Celtic term “thin places” to illustrate the intersection of the spiritual and the physical, the visible and the invisible. To emphasize the point he quotes a paragraph from Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk:: “God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and events.” (155) Borg concludes that a thin place “is a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us.” (156) Kelsey (1987) also emphasizes the integration of spirit and the material. Christianity, he says, “emphasizes the spirit, but within the framework of the material world.” He continues, “Its central message is that God became man, that spirituality indwelt the flesh and the two realms became one.”(173) From this point of view the bread and the wine, the common elements of our daily lives, become, at the communion meal, sacred elements, bearers of spiritual powers.
To further stress that Christianity integrates life in time and beyond time, let us consider the two views of eternal life as portrayed in the New Testament. First, it is difficult to escape the otherworldliness of Jesus’ teachings. He constantly reminds us of the world beyond throughout the Gospels where heaven is mentioned, mostly by Jesus, over a hundred times. Further His resurrection is itself a promise of our own resurrection, a promise that death is not the final end.
However, John in his first letter (17:3) to the early Christians says that “I am writing to you that you may know that you have eternal life.” In other words, he is saying that God has already given us eternal life which is exemplified in his Son Jesus, the one in whom the fullness of life dwells. What exactly does eternal life here and now mean? It means loving each other, treating each other not as an object to be used and manipulated but as a “Thou” to be cherished. It means pausing and paying attention to the beauty, the strangeness, and the wonder of things. It means recognizing the uniqueness of each moment with each other. It means remembering that where ever we are is holy ground, and that the Promised Land we seek starts where we are. It means regarding our life as precious, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price. In other words, the supernatural world gives purpose to the world in which we live, gives it meaning, and makes it more precious. Spirituality alone leads to isolation, but doing good without it is a boastful do-goodism.
Morality
We live in a society which regards those who speak with confidence about right and wrong as arrogant. Even school children are taught the process of “values clarification,” but not the values themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter what values they hold as long as they are clarified. We have grown too sensitive to the values of another culture to offer any criticism of its customs, allowing that what is good for one person or society is not necessarily good for another.
How did this situation come about? Certainly the three central figures discussed earlier—Marx, Darwin, and Freud—played a part. Anthropologists have also had an impact. Their showing us a variety of customs that have grown out of a variety of cultures has probably created the impression that values are solely the product of cultures. The result is skepticism, uncertainty, timidity with respect to morality. In fact, it is a sign of our discomfort with the word “morality” that we have substituted “values” for it, thus removing the dogmatism and stuffiness associated with the word morality. Values, after all, are matters of taste, belief, and culture. Even the strongest relativists, however, will at times raise their voices against certain values and for others, thus, paradoxically, undermining their belief in relativism, modernity’s great absolute.
This skepticism and uncertainty are due, in part at least, to the fact that modern secular society lacks any foundation on which to base moral decisions, or on which to base moral arguments. For example, evolutionists face a severe challenge in trying to explain absolute morality as a product of evolution. This is not surprising. On the face of it, it seems like a contradiction. How can a theory that emphasizes the survival of the fittest give rise to altruism? How, that is, can humans who are supposed to put self first in order to survive and reproduce sacrifice themselves for the good of others? What appears to be altruism is really a survival strategy. A mother, for instance, will jump in the sea to save her drowning child because she shares her genes, and the self sacrifice is a way of ensuring that her genes continue into the next generation. It turns out that what looks like altruism is really a selfish act! Furthermore, this argument does not explain why we sacrifice ourselves for strangers who are genetically removed from us, and whose rescue from death is of no genetic value to us. It seems to be a desperation theory that fails miserably to explain such acts of dedicated kindness shown by Mother Teresa in the streets of Calcutta, or the generosity of the Good Samaritan toward a stranger on the Jericho Road.
Some argue that morality should be based on what is good for society. For example, they say that murder is wrong and needs to be punished because
if murder were practiced with impunity, society would be unsafe and chaotic. To hold that murder is wrong and should be outlawed, they say, is necessary to preserve society. But this is begging the question. Who says that society should be preserved? And on what grounds would one argue that it should be preserved? If one person says that it should be and another disagrees, is this then just a clash of opinions? Is there an absolute standard by which we can judge? There clearly is no absolute standard if right and wrong are matters of opinion merely.
This is also the position of the post-modernists. They claim that there is no objective means of distinguishing right from wrong, that there is no foundation from which one can make truth claims. All interpretations of right and wrong are equally valid because there are no foundational or common standards to which we can turn in evaluating or judging ideas, opinions, or the way we live our lives. They leave us with a frenzy of interpretations to choose from. But how can we choose if there is no criterion by which to evaluate our choice? The result is confusion in the face of competing interpretations. We are left without a center. One thinks of the words of John Donne, the English poet: “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”
It should also be pointed out that the post-modernists cannot really sustain their relativism. For if everything is relative, they contradict their own position which they want us to accept as true. In other words, their own position is also relative, thus undermining their authority to speak of it as truth
What about Christianity? Does it have a foundation to which we can refer in our battle with relativism and nihilism? Does it offer a transcendent loyalty to which all other loyalties are subject? I believe it does. Christianity claims that God, regarded in various ways by Christian writers and scripture as the “Universal Mind,” “an Unseen Order,” Love, The Law written on our hearts, is the sure foundation. Simone Weil(1985,38) refers to this God as that reality which is outside space and time, and is “the unique source of all the good that exists in the world; that is to say all beauty, all truth, all justice…all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.”
C.S. Lewis (1978, 16) uses the Chinese term Tao to make the same point. The Tao, he says, refers to the way the universe is, the way we are meant to be. “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” The Tao consists of principles that are to morality what axioms are to geometry. Lewis says that they are “premises,” and as such we may conclude that they are the foundation of all “value judgments.”
For Christians Jesus is the embodiment of the Tao. He is the logos, the word out of which all things emerge. He is “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In Him the fullness of God did dwell and he is, therefore, the criterion by which we judge the fullness of our humanity. He didn’t, however, preach a new moral system. C. S. Lewis, in his search through philosophies and religions, both ancient and modern, found that they all emphasized a common morality. They all emphasized such universals as beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and children, justice, honesty, and mercy.(1978) He found no society, for example, that adopted injustice or lying as a one of its principles. Nor did Jesus develop a new code or a new set of rules. From the point of view of codes and rules Christianity is not really a moralistic religion. Neither is its approach to morality legalistic. Such an approach is not at all in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament. For example, Jesus took issue with the moralists. He condemned the Pharisees because their morality was a sham, they were clean on the outside but contaminated on the inside. He sternly said to them on one occasion, “You are the ones who make yourselves look right in other people’s sight”, but forget that “God knows your hearts.” (Luke 16:15) In other words, he condemned their morality because it was external, a show. They had created their own morality and made of it a display. They were highly esteemed in the world but not in the sight of God. They trusted in their own righteousness, but despised others. Their morality did not spring from a loving heart, and its roots were not in the heart of God.
Jesus himself broke religious precepts. On one Sabbath day when He and his disciples were walking through a field of wheat, his disciples picked the heads of the wheat. The Pharisees complained that this was against the Law. Jesus responded: “The Sabbath was made for the good of man; man was not made for the Sabbath.” (Mark: 2:27) Similarly, He acted against the Law by healing the sick on the Sabbath. On another occasion he revealed that compassion took precedence over the Law: “If any of you had a son or an ox that happened to fall in a well on the Sabbath, would you not pull him out at once on the Sabbath itself?” Compassion, humanity, and love came before strict legalisms.
Jesus portrayed morality not as rules to be followed, nor as an abstract code to be obeyed. His morality is not so much commands as insights, revelations. Consider the Beatitudes, those statements which confer blessings on those who in their behaviour and spirit help usher in the Kingdom of God. Blessed are: the poor in spirit (those who have no illusions of self-righteousness or self-sufficiency); the meek (who, being powerless, place their hope in God); the merciful (who avoid judgment but show forgiveness). These and the others are revelations of the unseen life of God, signs of eternal life, signs that, as I heard a preacher say recently, “will blossom into the eternal life beyond.”
Think, too, of the parables, those gems of poetry and spiritual power. To know them is to know Jesus, who is the grand parable. The parables that he told are but reflections of the life he lived. They are not stories that he learned from the culture, though they do reflect it. They grow out of his very nature, out of his being one with the Father. To know them is to know Him. And to know His parables is to participate in them through imagination. Most of these stories are metaphors that require us to make connections with our own lives, and to think about their implications for living. They dramatize events that engage us, stir our feelings, and challenge our perceptions of things. They create surprise and open up new possibilities of thought. When speaking about the Kingdom of God, Jesus says something wild and startling. He says the kingdom is like a treasure hidden in a field, and is so valuable that a man sold everything he had to get it. It is like a man in search of fine pearls, and having found one he sold all he had to buy it. It is like a minute mustard seed, germinating, growing, spreading until its branches are large enough to provide shelter and nesting places for the birds of the air. This emphasis on smallness reminds us of his references to other small things and events—“the cup of cold water given in my name,” the one talent, the lost coin, the widow’s mite, the one lost sheep, and the act of kindness “done unto the least of these.” The kingdom is also like leaven acting invisibly, quietly in bread, and transforming it.
These stories embody the eternal verities of the Kingdom—generosity, sacrifice, the inestimable value of the individual, kindness, mercy, and love. These stories, then, shape our conscience and reveal to us fundamental truths about the human condition.
While Christianity reminds us of the good, it also confronts the existence of evil. St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians (6:12) feels so strongly about evil that he personalizes it: “Put on all the armor that God gives you, so that you will be able to stand up against the Devil.” He also puts it on a larger scale than mere individual foibles, describing it as “wicked spiritual forces,” and “cosmic powers.” For Paul evil is not something external. He sees it as something inherent in the human condition: “It is the sin that lives in me,” and “even though the desire to do good is in me, I am not able to do it.” (Romans, 7: 20, 18) In other words, St. Paul is speaking the truth about all of us. Our very nature is out of order and we are unable to restore it to order on our own. Paul’s answer is: “Thanks be to God, who does this through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 7: 25)
This notion of individual evil runs counter to the post-modern view of the world in which no evil exists except in human structures and government. The answer to this view of evil is better systems, technology, education, and medicine. These are touted as the answer to the brutality, destruction, and criminality that plague us. This emphasis on social evil at the expense of individual sin banishes personal responsibility for individual acts, banishes individual guilt, and banishes repentance and the need for forgiveness. Even some liberal theologians and clergy down-play the evil inherent in the human personality. The Moderator of the United Church of Canada recently wrote, showing the influence of Marxism, about sin as systemic, and speaks about being born into “sinful arrangements,” as if sin were not individual, a part of our human nature. How else, if it were not, could we have systemic sins? Systems are, after all, made up of individuals. The denial of individual sin undermines the centrality of the cross, the great revelation of both evil and its cure. It is at the cross that one sees the full, ugly face of evil, the murder of innocence. It is also here and at the resurrection that love defeats the power of evil. Jesus absorbed it into himself. One is reminded of Simone Weil’s statement that “To suffer evil is the only way of destroying it.” (1985, p. 51)
Christianity tells us, then, that we are guided by moral laws, laws that are more than human inventions, laws that are universal and written on our hearts. Williamson (1994, 18) sums up the truth of Christian response to evil when she says that “We must not perpetuate the illusion that the right government, the right technology, or the right armies can fix our problems. They cannot.” She concludes, “The only antidote is spiritual. The only medicine is love.”
Truth
To the materialist any proposition not based on empirical observation is meaningless. The ultimate goal of scientific knowledge is through observation and experiment to describe the world in order to gain control and mastery of it, and to make predictions about it. This approach to knowledge has been very successful in its contribution to improved human comfort and health. It has also liberated human thought from superstition, and has done much to encourage human autonomy. But it is a limited epistemology, narrow in its purpose to explore and describe the way the world is. It says nothing about the important issues of our everyday lives such as purpose, meaning, values, joy, love, hatred, and fear. Its language is mathematical, expressing quantity. For example, the colour red is described by the scientist, qua scientist, as light waves of a certain frequency. This is a different language from the poet’s “My love’s like a red, red rose,” or Isaiah’s “Who is this that comes from Edom…in garments stained crimson”? It has none of the warmth, the sense of life and beauty of the former, and none of the strong associations with the Divine and the symbolic power of the latter. The point is that we cannot read the language of the Bible as if it were the language of science. It communicates a different kind of truth. If, then, the truth of Christianity is not the same as the truth of science, what exactly is it?
The first point to make is that the truth of Christianity is not, as was pointed out earlier, a system of rules, laws, or codes. The truth of Christianity is Jesus himself. To Thomas He says: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John, 14:6) And to those Jews who were his followers He proclaims “If you continue in my word…you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John, 8:31-32) This, says Paul Tillich, “is a profound transformation of the ordinary meaning of truth.” He explains that we ordinarily speak of statements as being true or false. We might sometimes say that someone has truth, but we never refer to a person as the truth. However, it is an appropriate expression for Jesus, says Tillich, because in Him “the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present…that God is present “unveiled, undistorted…in His unapproachable mystery.” (1955, 69) We can possess this truth if we live out of the reality which Jesus embodies, if we abide in Him as He abides in us. In other words, this is a participatory truth, an experiential truth, an inner transformational truth. It is a life-enhancement truth that contributes to the kind of person we are meant to be.
We may be grasped by this truth if we participate in the love that Jesus makes manifest, if we, that is, show love and compassion to others. To love a person is to know more of that person than can be grasped by the intellect alone. To love is to open oneself to the other, and to allow the other to reveal him/herself. One thinks of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. In the encounter Jesus expressed no enmity because of ethnicity and gender, and showed no impatience because she didn’t really understand his reference to the “living water.” The encounter was one of openness and acceptance. By the time they parted she knew him as the Messiah and he knew her well enough to tell her, in her words, “everything that I have ever done.” (John, 4: 29) To engage in such an encounter is to refrain from regarding another person as, to use Martin Buber’s term, an “It”, as someone to be used, to be manipulated as an object. To love is to treat the one loved as a “Thou,” as one who is unique, and of inestimable value. (1958) As Buber explains it, “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou.” And the eternal Thou for the Christian is Jesus.
For the Christian, then, love is not a human invention. It is a reflection of a higher reality. John expressed this truth (1 John, 4:19) in these words: “We love because He (God) first loved us.” Our love is but a pale reflection of this greater love. Love is, then, an indwelling, inherent good. It needs no proof. It is the highest good, one on which all other values are based.
We may also be grasped by truth if we encounter nature as a Thou. Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this notion in his poem God’s Grandeur: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” C.S. Lewis (1980, 17) sees the splendours of this world as a reflection of a greater glory, “of which nature is only the first sketch.” McLaren (2004, 198) describes this dramatic encounter with nature one day as he walked “as a creature among creatures in God’s wonderful creation’:
For a period of about 20 minutes, I felt that every tree, every blade of
Grass, and every pool of water became especially eloquent with God’s
Grandeur…The beauty of the creations around me …seemed on this
day to explode, seemed to detonate, seemed to radiate with glory.
The pages of Scripture are also replete with examples. Isaiah (55: 12) even sees nature rejoicing when Israel returns to God and to its land: “And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Psalm 19 proclaims the glory of God in the created order: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The scientific approach to nature results in counting, describing, recording. The Christian view is that the order and beauty of nature is reflective of a larger, underlying reality. We are from this perspective, and to use King Lear’s expression, “God’s spies,” searching for the reality hidden in appearances, in the manifest order of things.
The scientific description of a book, for example, would focus on its size, its shape, its colour, the number of pages, and the print--the black marks on a page. However, in doing so it would miss the meaning conveyed by the black marks, would miss, that is, the invisible reality that the book contains. Similarly, one may look at nature as written in things. That is, one may think of God, the creating, ordering power, speaking things as we do words. The spy tries to determine what the things mean and what they point to. The search is always for the invisible truth. And faith will be our guide, although at present we may only see as if through a glass darkly.
The truth of Christianity is not a literal truth that can be proven as we can prove that the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, or where Toronto is located. It is not propositional truth, stated as we would state a theorem. The truth of Christianity is usually embodied in a story which frequently has no historical foundation. Consider the story of the Prodigal Son. It tells us not what happened but what happens. It unveils what is eternally true about human nature. The story isn’t about farming, or cruelty, or poverty in a far country. It tells instead what the human heart is like when lonely and longing for home. It portrays what love is like when a father meets his returning son. It reveals the joy of the son when he hears the words of welcome and the joyous exclamation “This is my son.” The truth of the story lies in the fact that we all share the Prodigal’s experience, that we all have the Prodigal within us. It is truth that is encountered through participation and identification. This is the Christian way to truth.
The truth of Christianity is also one of revelation. This phenomenon has been studied by William James, which I included in the earlier discussion of the realty of the unseen. His was a scientific study which consisted of a collection of the spiritual experiences of a great number and variety of people. Others such as Alister Hardy (See Maxwell and Tscbudin, 1990) and Tom Harper (1996) have also written similar accounts of transcendent experiences. James says that these experiences “are states of insight in to depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.”(1958) He concludes from his study that these experiences, though subjective and personal, enrich lives, and create “A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life.” (1958, 367)
It is true that such studies, being personal, may have no validity for those who have had no such spiritual experiences. One may not be able to generalize from these experiences as we would from the results of a scientific experiment. However scientific these studies are in methodology, they cannot be repeated in a laboratory, and cannot be verified by any statistical methods. However, such experiences are facts to those who have had them. And, according to James, they enrich their lives: “Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him.” (1958, 384) In other words, those who have these transcendent experiences are put in touch with an unseen order, and that you are “really affected for the better when you throw your life into its hands.” (383)
Although expressing caution in interpreting such experiences, Harpur, 1996, 44) concludes:
Whatever else we may say, these experiences are intensely real to the millions who have them. The possibility…that they witness to an objective reality “out there” has to be taken with full seriousness.
Another tenet of Christianity is that we are by nature sinners. G. K. Chesterton (1959) observed that some new theologians dispute original sin, which, he says, is the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved.” (15) Not all Christians believe in original sin; however, it is a generally accepted truth of Christianity that there is something fundamentally wrong with us, that we are broken. It is not just that we do what is wrong, but that it is a part of our nature to do so. The “United Church Statement of Faith” calls sin “a disposition revealed in selfishness, cowardice, or apathy.” As a result of this disposition we have trouble responding to the true and the good as it is embodied in Jesus. This is the truth about us. It isn’t just a matter of trying to do better. The fact is we are lost and need to find our way home.
The other central truth of Christianity is that in our lostness it offers love and forgiveness. This is the significance of the Cross. In the Cross we learn the truth about our sinful nature. Recognizing sin in ourselves creates within us a compassion for and understanding of the failures and faults of others. It also reveals that only love can conquer evil. Jesus, perfect love, absorbs it. This is not a fanciful theory, It is the absolute truth. It is what Tillich (1957, 80) calls “the really real,” the fundamental bed-rock reality and truth about human existence. And the expression of love on the cross is Jesus’ sacrifice—His body given for us. This is another of the great Christian truths: paradoxically, we are to die to self in order to really live.
This truth is embedded in Jesus as the great Christian archetype. That is, He is the pattern or model of the ideal self, of our true selves, providing the ideal of what we can be. He is the archetype that is both historical, within time, and spiritual, beyond time. He is the concrete historical expression of a fundamental, invisible reality that is both eternal and changeless. He is the eternal absolute in the midst of the chaos of the temporal world. He puts us in touch with the transcendent reality, and to be in touch with this reality is to be in touch with ultimate truth, is to grasp the truth about ourselves and the world.
However, He is not a pattern to be imitated only. He is the archetype in which we can participate because, as St. Paul says, He lives in us. Jesus’ teaching and experiences speak to the universal human experience. His experiences are appreciated and known when they become our own. And they become our own through study, faith, trust, commitment, and through ritual--celebrating, engaging in, and rehearsing the events of His life, his birth, crucifixion, resurrection, and in the breaking of bread together. Through these rituals we participate in the eternal and in the sacred. These, by linking our minds with the mind of God, give our lives coherence and meaning. Perhaps Browning had something like this notion of the truth in mind when he wrote in his poem Paracelsus:
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all
Where truth abides.
Many moderns reject the truth of Christian doctrines because they are regarded as old- fashioned, imaginary, anti modern. One such doctrine is the Trinity. I read some ago about a psychobiologist who explained the Trinity-- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-- as corresponding to different layers of the brain. Such people are reductionists; they explain the higher in terms of the lower, the whole in terms of the parts. To them thought is a mere movement of atoms in the brain, love is a poetic term for lust. I find Dorothy Sayers’ (1979, 37) explanation of the Trinity much more accessible to the ordinary reader, and much more appealing and satisfying. Like St. Augustine, she shows that we recognize ourselves in the image of God, which is the Trinity. She does this by suggesting a human analogy. She says that human works of art have their own Trinity, their own triune nature. They are made up of the following: (1) The Idea-- the conception of the work that is in the mind of the artist, not yet manifested, not yet made concrete, and therefore invisible. (2) The Energy—the material reality of the invisible Idea, the book or painting which embodies the Idea that was first invisible in the mind of the artist. It is a revelation of the Idea and one with it. (3) The Power-- the meaning of the work that is grasped as we experience the work of art by reading, observing, dramatizing it. It is the way that a work influences and inspires us, becomes a part of us. Sayers is arguing here that the three-fold nature of human creativity is a reflection of the Trinitarian doctrine about God the creator. In other words, the notion of the human trinity is familiar to our experience because “we find the three-fold structure in ourselves.” (122-123) In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity God is the Idea, invisible and outside time and space. The Son, Jesus, is the Energy that embodies the Idea and makes it visible. The Spirit is the Power that allows the Son, and therefore God, to be experienced by believers. In her book, then, Sayers, by grounding her discussion of the Trinity on the analogy of the human trinity, presents the timeless truth of the Christian Trinity in such a way as to make it accessible to us. It is no longer an unknowable arcane mystery, but it speaks to us because it is a part of our very nature.
Mystery
We have learned a great deal about human life and the world. Science tells us that the universe is 15-20 billion years old, that it came into existence through a big bang. It also postulates that the earth is approximately four to five billion years old, and that, counting the years from the beginning of hunting and gathering, humans are about 12,000 to 20,000 years old. Yet the details of what came before the big bang, what it was like immediately after, and how human life originated are still mysteries. The more we learn the more the mystery deepens. We seem to be moving toward a receding horizon that we can never reach. Leith, a professor of theology, (1988, 44) concludes that “There does not seem to be escape from the mystery that encompasses us.”
Leith (45) distinguishes between problem and mystery. He says that our response to each is different. Problems are in principle solvable. The response to them “is hard work, study, the application of technique and procedures. The proper response to mystery, however, is silence, awe, wonder, prayer.” (46) Even some scientists speak of the mystery of the cosmos. Einstein (quoted in Dukas and Hoffmann 1981) wrote to his friend, Dr. Otto Juliusburger, that “we never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” (82)
However, there is a difference between the scientific and religious view of mystery. Scientists may express awe at the majesty, size, and beauty of nature even as they are convinced that they can show us the complete truth about nature by describing it. To the Christian mystery is outside the reach of science. Mystery always exceeds the grasp of the individual, though the individual may be grasped by the great Mystery. Leith (1988, 45) regards the Christian Mystery as a presence to be encountered. We can draw near to it if we have ears to hear with and eyes to see with. For example, Moses encountered the Great Mystery when he listened to the voice from the burning bush. In other words we may encounter mystery if we are alert to the numinous dimensions in our daily lives. We live with mysteries everyday. Chatting with someone at the grocery store is always a revelation, but only a hint of the deeper mystery that is hidden. Light trickling down the mountainside, the sun dancing on the ocean like a flame, a breeze whispering among the silken branches of a juniper are all parables of mystery, as if they were just spoken into being, fresh and new, all wordless choirs of praise.
Scripture regards mystery as hidden: “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom.” (1 Corinthians 2: 7) In Isaiah (48: 6) God says to Israel, “I make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known.” However, God revealed aspects of this mystery to the prophets and the apostles in various ways; sometimes in person, at other times through dreams, visions, and angels. Jesus himself is a mystery. Brueggemann (1989) contrasts the birth of Jesus and what it stands for with the culture of the day: “The birth itself is presented by the song of the angels against the rulers of the day.”( 97) The rulers, he observes, planned a census and “all the managing ways that went with it.” (97) The birth of Jesus, however, is a new thing beginning with a song for a new king. Brueggemann continues: “The newly lyrical beginning is received by the only ones who could receive it, the shepherds. There is no hint here of the lyrics being heard by any of the managers of the census. They just keep counting.” (98) Neither the stars, nor the angels, nor the new birth amazes them. They have no time for awe and wonder.
The Christian view of mystery also differs from the scientific view in the language it uses. Poetry is needed to create the mystery of religion. The flattened language of prose is fine for factual reports and scientific experiments. However, to create wonder, amazement, awe, and to reveal glimpses of mystery poetry is called for. Poetry here does not mean
rhyme, regular rhythm, and poetic form. It means the language of metaphor, image, and symbol, language that engages the feelings and imagination, language that reaches for mystery, that points beyond itself and describes the visible in such a way as to give us hints of the invisible.
As an example consider a scene from Chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, of The Wind in the Willows,(1969) that classic animal fantasy by Kenneth Grahame. The incident describes Rat and Mole who one early morning are looking for Portly, the little otter, who was lost. They paddle downstream and moor their boat “at the flowery margin” of an island, a likely place to find him. They push their way “through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn. (133) “This is the place of my song-dream …whispered Rat, as if in a trance. Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find him.” (134)
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water... bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror…but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew. (134)
The language of these brief excerpts creates openness to something new, creates a feeling of mystery, the feeling that we have been admitted into a different realm. It has ushered us into contemplation, awe, and wonder. It introduces us to what lies beyond our daily habits, chatter, and routine. Only poetry can do that.
The language of the OT prophets is also characteristically poetic and lyrical. Isaiah creates a rich supply of metaphors. He announces God’s salvation to Jerusalem using the image of a king returning in triumph from victory:
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings…that saith unto Zion , thy God reigneth.” (52:7) In chapter 55: 12 he even shows nature rejoicing at Israel’s return to its land: “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” In reading this language one feels a strong sense of holiness, a transcendent glory, and a powerful sense of the numinous. It is an example of words being used to suggest the mystery beyond the words.
What, then, does it mean for us to live in mystery? It means been alert to the things and people around us, recognizing that they are manifestations of the hidden unseen reality, incarnations of a greater, foundational order.
Conclusion
1. Christianity claims that behind the appearance of things there is what William James called the “unseen order”, and it is the church’s responsibility to put us in contact with it. As James pus it, “our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” (1958, 58) This unseen order, God, is the foundation from which the visible world draws its chief significance.
2. The heart of Christian morality is embodied in Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, not because He left us with a specific moral system to follow, but because in Him the fullness of God did dwell, because he, the divine archetype, revealed the goodness at the heart of existence.
3. The truth of Christianity differs from the truth of science which is based on empirical observation and experiment. Christian truth is experiential and participatory. The truth of the Prodigal Son is not a geographical truth about a far country. Instead it portrays the truth of the human heart when it is lonely and longing for home. Christian truth is made concrete in the life of Jesus. His life and teachings speak to and of the universal human experience. These are appreciated and known when they become our own.
4. Christianity claims that we are surrounded by mystery. This mystery is outside the reach of science. It exceeds our grasp like a constantly moving horizon. We may draw near to it if we have hears to hear with and eyes to see with. We may encounter it sometimes if we, like Moses before the burning bush, are alert to the numinous dimensions of our lives; that is, if we are alert to the things and people around us, recognizing that they are manifestations of the hidden unseen reality, incarnations of a greater, foundational order.
There are, then, these four: Transcendence, Morality, Truth, and Mystery, discussed here, for the sake of clarification, as if they were discrete. However, they are not. For example, to speak of transcendence is to assume mystery. To discuss mystery is to claim it as a Christian truth. And to discuss truth is to make a claim for Christian morality. They all overlap and interpenetrate each other.
