The Perils of General Revelation

General revelation--the way God reveals himself in nature--is an idea near to my heart. As an ardent outdoor amateur, I revel in the glory of a mountain sunset, a high alpine ridge, a herd of elk spotted from above, the great force of a descending river. 

The topic of general revelation has been much in my mind, lately, given that the first unit I teach each year to my juniors is on nature writing. The first quote we look at together is a famous one by the naturalist and conservationist, John Muir: "Man needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."

I find this a fitting place to begin because it is both beautiful and misleading. Concerning the beauty, Muir is absolutely right to reject mere utility; we may not need beauty in the same way we need bread--no one has ever died for lack of sunrises--but we do need beauty to live a fully human existence. (More on this in another post.) Muir is doubtless riffing off of Christ's famous line in the desert temptation that "man shall not live by bread alone." There must be more to this life than meeting the demands of the body. 

Muir is also right that we need and healing and enlivening strength. In a great paradox, we are constantly worn down and emasculated by the comforts of this world. Our rest--watching TV and eating crap--is not restful and restorative. We are being killed by our own material wealth. (More on this later, as well.)

Muir is wrong, though, in another important respect. After we talk about utility and its emptiness and establish that Muir is right about the beauty part of his quote, the question I ask my students is who has agency in this quote? Who is doing the doing? The answer of course is nature. It is nature that can heal and give strength to body and soul. 

But nature has no agency. Nature's power, if it can be said to exist, has to be derivative. And this is where Muir goes off course. If this restoration can come through nature it can only come as God wills it through nature. The rest, then, comes from God. Muir clings to the first part of Christ's response to Satan--that man shall not live by bread alone--but forgets or ignores the coordinating conjunction and the world of implications that comes in its train: the physical sustenance of our daily bread is insufficient unless joined with "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." 

This small example illustrates well the problem of trusting to general revelation. Of itself, general revelation is incomplete. It is a partial view of the truth, "like," in the words of a song I still like too much, "looking through a fogged mirror." The mirror is fogged because of our sin and the brokenness of the world we now behold. And while this world still contains and speaks to God's all-encompassing glory, the fullest picture we must behold is not this marred cosmos but the perfection of God himself in the face of Christ. 

Much more on this to come.