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.   

Romantic Realism

Every year I try to come up with a theme to govern my classes. Most of the time I forget what this theme is in the hubbub of the year and come back to it in the middle of May with a "hey, did you guys remember this?" moment right before finals. This year one of my goals is to be a bit more attentive to the stated theme and hopefully to carry it throughout the year. Perhaps I'll do another post on the theme for my sophomore Honors class, but the theme for my juniors--who comprise the bulk of my students--is "Romantic Realism." I want to explain what that means, but I want to do it--fittingly, for an English teacher--through a poem. So, enjoy this absolutely brilliant envisioning of Romantic Realism by Mary Oliver.

The Ponds

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them —

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight —
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away —
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Gah! Isn't that perfect, so to speak? At the beginning Oliver wants to romanticize the scene. The "perfect" lilies in their hyperbolic plenitude crowding out the darkness of the abyssal waters and enlightening the world. But she shifts in the middle of that fourth stanza with a rhetorical question: "But what in this world/ is perfect?" The answer of course is nothing, least of all the lilies.

Upon further scrutiny each bears some mark of imperfection from the minor--"lopsided"--to the decidedly more serious, "a slumped purse/ full of its own/ unstoppable decay." You think this flower is pretty? Well, guess what? It's DYING!!! And so will you, loser.

The rhetorical question shifts us into decidedly realist territory. No romanticizing here. And a starkly realist poem would end with the word decay. Sucks to you for thinking this was a beautiful scene. But Oliver doesn't do that. She transitions yet again with the word "still," as if to say, hold on, decay is not to be the last word. And then she has line that knocks me off my feet: "what I want in my life/ is to be willing/ to be dazzled." Oliver doesn't just want to be dazzled; she wants to be willing to be dazzled. In other words, she doesn't expect the dazzling to just happen. She does not resign herself to being merely a passive agent in this process. She wants to be willing. She wants to open herself up to the possibility of being blown away by the beauty and majesty of this world. She wants to be willing to make a choice. 

A choice “to cast aside the weight of facts” (28). A choice to “believe that the imperfections are nothing” (34). A choice to, in a conscious nod to William Wordsworth's famously Romantic "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," “maybe even/ to float a little/ above this difficult world” (29-31). Oliver acknowledges the brokenness of the world, the decay of the flowers, the marred nature of creation. But she returns to the choice of seeing the beauty. In the final three words of the poem, in language reminiscent of the marriage vow, Oliver weds herself to this vision of the world, saying “And I do” (36). She is accepting the flaws with the glory that still remains present in this world. She is clear-eyed to the true condition of a fallen world, but chooses the “lapped light” over the abyss of the “black” waters.

This is what I mean by Romantic Realism. It is a view of the world that does not deny an often harsh reality and its pain and decay and degradation. But it doesn't stop there. It chooses to see the world as, in Hopkins' phrase, charged with the grandeur of God. A world that maintains its beauty and glory and God-infused nature despite its flaws, in the same way we maintain God's image within us despite our sin. This is what I want my students to believe about the world; this is what I want my own children to believe about the world; this is what I want to believe about the world. 

And I want this so badly because I think it is the Christian view of the world. And, in my own Romanticism, I think it's possible to win people over to seeing the world this way.

Mortal Insufficiency

My last Gilead post at least until I reread it in another year or two. This passage is so remarkable that I recommend not even reading what I write further down. 

There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us an only child, and this has to be true. "He will wipe the tears from all faces." It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

The sublime beauty of this book overpowers me. I don't remember this passage landing with as much weight the first time I read the book. I wasn't much of a reader back then and tended to treat reading as conquest more than absorption. 

I think part of the reason, too, that it didn't land is that I did not love this world the way I do now. In other words, I never felt my mortal insufficiency to the world, only it's own towards me. Love of the world is a fraught thing for a Christian. I exchanged emails with a friend this week on the temptation of pantheism. It is real and especially so for people who love the outdoors like I do. 

But the fear of pantheism shouldn't lead us into the opposite error of denying the splendor and beauty (more than we can bear), the God-hauntedness, the very groaning of creation. It, like us, waits for redemption. It, like us, is marred by sin. It, like us, will be made new. Christ came because he so loved the world, as my son memorized when he was not yet three. I have no reason to think that love confined simply to humans.

Creation Transfigured

I will cool it with these Gilead posts at some point. I finished the book a few weeks ago, but just keep circling back around to so many of these ideas.

It has seemed to be sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance--for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

One of the great glories of this book for me is how it teaches us mindfulness of the mundane, to see the beauty in the everyday, the common, even the ugly. I love how the first part of this can strike us as true--yes, this world does seem illuminated at times as if by God's special grace--but then the second part comes home as even more true as it diverges from the first. It's better than that: this world is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins "charged with the grandeur of God." It is we who are unable to see it. Obscured by our sin and grime and muck we have lost the vision that is there, the world pulsing with transfiguration and glory. 

Seven Days that Divide the World, Part One

The question of the origins of our earth and the people, creatures, and plants populating it remains as relevant today as ever. What are we, as Christians, to think about all of this? Can we stomach a 4.5 billion year old earth and 16 billion year old cosmos? Does Biblical fidelity require that we take the Bible literally (or literalistically) in its seven day account and withstand the mockery of modern scientists? Can we stake out some middle ground between the two? A sort of god-in-the-gaps theistic evolution or Old Earth cosmology combined with a special creation of Adam and Eve in the garden?

For years I have been noncommittal on this issue. I went to a church in college where the pastor had majored in the physical sciences as an undergrad and was well-known locally as a defender of the Young Earth movement. His enthusiasm never quite wore off on me, but he conveyed the issue as monumentally important and indeed elemental to our Christian faith. He often used Jesus' words in the Gospel of John--"If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe me, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things" (3.12)--as a sort of prooftext for this idea that the physical claims of the Bible bear great weight concerning the truth of the metaphysical claims. 

So this was my major input for a significant developmental period of my life, one in which I furthermore did everything within my power to escape science altogether. Holla at a business major. But I could never quite escape the feeling that maybe the Bible didn't need to be read that way, and as much as I respected and still do respect my college pastor I could never quite believe that the world's scientists (even a good number of the Christian ones!) were in a secret cabal dedicated to defeating a literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1. So I did what any lazy person does: kicked the can down the road. 

But lately that tactic has been unsatisfying. It might have something to do with having kids now and the prospect of having these questions addressed to me, not in some abstract way, but by an adorable little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who is deeply inquisitive about this world and looks to me as the Explainer. And I don't want to be a liar to my son and daughter. 

I was talking about this recently with a friend who is in a similar position. Neither of us wants to teach our kids comfortable, well-intentioned lies, but neither do we want to be needlessly unfaithful to Scripture. If Young Earth is true, in the face of the overwhelming testimony of the scientific community, I don't want to be too cowardly to teach that to my kids. On the other hand, I don't want to teach them Young Earth Creationism because I am too cowardly to square with scientific truth. He and I both sort of feel as if we will never be fully settled on this issue. And so his question to me was how, practically, do we teach it to our kids. And we settled, unsatisfyingly but probably prudently, on teaching the confusion. Teaching our kids that it is OK to not know everything for sure, and that Scripture was not given to us as a universal compendium of knowledge. 

But I still wanted to know more, and I wanted to know where to turn for answers to this question. I remember an old episode of the Simpsons where there is some debate between Creationists and evolutionists and the evolutionist is a Harvard PhD and the Christian debater has a degree in Truthology from Christian University. It might be a caricature, but that is how this debate feels too often. I don't believe that anyone--secular or religious--comes to science without preconceived notions of what they might find or what they wish to believe, but it often seems as if Christians start with Genesis as if it were a science textbook and proceed accordingly. As admirable as dedication to Scripture is, it can lead down some wrong roads and end in needless reductionistic/antagonistic thinking when it is read incorrectly.

And you can buy a book that will tell you just about anything. I remember being in a lecture once with my Renaissance lit professor and a student spouted out some nonsense, I forget even what it was now. The professor asked him where he had come up with such a ludicrous notion. He said with confidence that he had read it in a book. My professor lifted his thespian's brow and said, "Well, you need to read better books."

Which is to say, I am hopeful that I have found a better book on this subject. I am reading Seven Days that Divide the World by the Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John C. Lennox. It is a popular level book intended for an audience such as myself and hopefully like you: a Christian who is inquisitive about these issues and wonders how it might be possible to reconcile the claims of science with the doctrine of Creation. And I therefore intend to do something that I haven't done in quite some time: read a book slowly and blog my way through it. I hope to learn something by slowing down and hopefully this can be beneficial for you all as well. So join me, if you so desire. We may not lay these questions to rest (what, after all, would be the fun in that?), but I hope our understanding is increased as well as our charity for the "other side," whomever that might be for you in this debate.

On that note, as I close I want to say that while it is easy and common for our broader culture to mock the views of Young Earth Creationists, I find it abhorrent when other believers do so. As I have moved away personally from Young Earth views I have often asked myself what I might be losing out on by heeding the scientific discoveries of the past two centuries (and longer), and it has made me understand the tight-fistedness with which Young Earth believers hold on to their beliefs and sympathize with them (the loss feels real). And I want to profess humility on this issue: I am not a scientist nor will I ever be mistaken for one. I have never even watched The Big Bang Theory. Do I believe that God could have created the world in six literal days, resting on the seventh? 100%, absolutely yes. Do I believe that is what science tells us? Increasingly no. Do I believe that is the mandatory interpretation of the beginning of Genesis? Again, increasingly no. There. Cards. Table. Meet.

More to come.

Protoevangelium

This year I am reading through the Bible in chronological order. I have never done this before and had given up on the habit of reading through the entire scripture in a year a couple of years ago. I miss it and the discipline it helps provoke in my life so I am back at it and excited for the challenge.

The first reading of the year was Genesis 1-3, which covers the creation of the universe to the special endowment of the image of God onto man and woman and the fall of humanity and the expulsion from the garden. In other words, a pretty heady bit of reading for the first 15 minutes of scripture. There is so much beauty in these first few chapters: the image of the Spirit of God “hovering over the face of the waters” (1:2); the plenitude of physical creation; the forming of man from the dust of the ground and the breath of life breathed into his nostrils by the Lord (2:7); the splendor of the garden of Eden; Adam’s enamored response at his first beholding Eve (2:23); the haunting final statement of original purity and innocence, “And the man and his wife were naked and were not ashamed” (2:25). I cannot help but read these first two chapters with an incredible longing, a wistfulness, and yearning for the restoration of creation, the day when God finally makes all things new (Revelation 21:5).

But then we move on to chapter three. Eve is accosted by the serpent in the garden and eats of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam, being with her, likewise partakes. The order is corrupted, humanity falls. Eve chooses her desire for knowledge and will to power over her husband and God and Adam chooses his corrupted love for Eve rather than true love for her and fealty to God. It is all a product of Satanic logic. The Lord finds the shamed couple, their innocence in nakedness forever removed, hiding in the garden. They are confronted in the garden, then, and after the pathetic responses God issues curses on each of the three principal characters, the serpent, Eve, and then Adam. Adam’s curse is to till the ground and earn his keep from the sweat of his brow; Eve’s curse is to endure pains in childbirth and to be ruled over by her husband; the serpent’s curse, though, is something altogether different and it comes first: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel” (3:15).

Though the serpent’s curse certainly contains ambiguity, the text never explicitly claims that Satan is in serpent form though this is certainly implied through his ability to speak and the logic employed, there is a certainty to the curse as well. The serpent will be defeated by the offspring of a woman (notice that the offspring of a man is left out of the equation; the enmity is between the serpent and the woman directly). Scholars have called this verse the protoevangelium, or the first announcement of the gospel. In other words, in this verse is the first intimation, the first prophetic utterance, that the serpent and his ways will be overthrown by a son born unto a woman.

I love that we see God’s plan for the eventual redemption of man, the eventual crushing of Satan’s power, at this early juncture in scripture. Immediately after the fall, God has already ordained the restoration. God, then, is not surprised by the fall, and though man fell of his own free will, God the Father had ordained that through this event his Son, the first-begotten and creating member of the Godhead, would secure man’s salvation and be glorified in the manner worthy of his preeminence.

On a practical level, this encourages me because God is not surprised at my own shortcomings. I cannot hide from him in my shame, such an exercise is worthless. But I can come to him, and know that he has decreed grace to cover my sin. That, as the Christmas hymn tells us, “he comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found.”