The unique value of revelation isn’t primarily what it tells us about God. After all, as Paul says and the human study of multiple cultures affirms (Romans 1:20), "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” We can know and speak of God without revelation. Pragmatically this means we Christians don’t have much to offer to the philosophy department when it comes to God. Natural theology or philosophical theology can achieve their goals without us.
Nor is revelation primarily about human beings. The human stories in the Bible are wonderful and dramatic, but they are all ultimately variations of human stories found in many cultures and many books. The Bible frequently attains the status of classic human literature, the more so when it isn’t being mined for moral points. But there are other classics and if the humanities are poorer for ignoring the Bible they are by no means bankrupt.
Finally we need to consider the common liberal protestant view of revelation: regarding it as an expression of human faith in something or someone unseen except in this particular manifestation. In this interpretation the Bible is neither about God, nor about humans, but is a record of human faith in God from which we can learn about both because “faith” in the tradition from Schleiermacher onward is an expression of a self-consciousness with the unity of the universe. Faith is a manifestation both of being human and of the primal unity of being human and the universe as a whole.
However, as I mentioned in the previous post, this has been largely rejected in the academy as simply sneaking theology into religious studies via psychology with the false assumption that the imagined object of faith must be real. Besides, a very large number of Christians find this understanding of revelation incoherent with their own and their community’s experience. When they read the Bible they understand themselves to be encountering the Word of God, not just the faith of the apostles as it more fully expresses or elicits their own faith.
So what is revelation? And as importantly why should revelation and faith be taken seriously as contributors to the goal of the academy?
I want to suggest that where revelation and faith intersect the concerns of academics, whether in the physical sciences, social sciences, or humanities is in its description of what it means to live as a human in light of transcendence. Of course the Bible is much more specific. It deals with living as a human in light of God’s will expressed in a series of distinct covenants and interventions. Yet to initiate a conversation I think we need to start at a broader more conceptual level.
That begins with the assertion that the transcendent isn’t merely a figment of the human imagination, but like other aspects of reality directly impinges upon our perception of the world. In other words revelation really is revelation, not just an account of a human experience within the immanent frame. Revelation is the imposing of transcendence on us in the same way as gravity, or light, or sound, or anything else perceptual. Only this understanding of revelation can rescue it from the accusation of being merely a particular state of mind.
The best evidence for revelation in this sense seems to be contemporary cosmological theories. All these theories in one way or another find that to explain the results of both experiment and developing mathematical models the researcher comes up against infinite possibilities. These in turn interrogate the investigator to not merely provide a better model, but to explain the relationship of being human with the very possibility of describing reality. In other words what cosmologists call the “anthropic principle.”
Robert Jastrow pointed this out in an article about the Big Bang. Jastrow, writing in 1978 wrote:
“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Since the time of Jastrow numerous efforts have been made by cosmologists to get around this impasse; to find a way to describe reality that does not leave a mystery at the beginning of time. Adam Frank gives an excellent summary of those attempts in his book About Time, Cosmology and Culture in the Twilight of the Big Bang. He says: "The Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it.”
His concrete proposal for dealing with this is in part:
“Seeing the interdependence of universes and human beings, we should not devalue our position in the cosmos even as we begin to comprehend the awe-inspiring vastness of that cosmos. Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe. It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole. It is the dialogue that lets the brilliance of the diamond’s infinite facets shine clearly. It is the dialogue that instills within us a power and capacity that is, and always has been, saturated with meaning.”
What is striking here is his recognition that humans are in dialogue with a universe that has an “ever-greater whole,” possessing “infinite facets,” and this is a “sacred act,” “saturated with meaning.” Frank’s whole point is that humans have not been and can never be abstract observers of of an objective reality. It always engages them as humans even as they engage it. We cannot, as disinterested observers, interrogate the natural world demanding answers. It interrogates us demanding that we account for ourselves.
Even Carl Sagan, anxious to preserve science from either mysticism or psychological longing (see his Science a Light in a Demon Haunted World) said, “The sky calls to us, if we do not destroy ourselves, someday we will venture to the stars.” It seems hard even to those most dedicated to objectifying the universe they study to avoid a sense that it is a subject in a dialogue.
This sense that the object of study becomes an interrogating subject is what happened with the politicization of science in the 20th century. Researchers began to realize that they are not disengaged intellects measuring, analyzing, and developing theories. They are at least moral beings with a responsibility for the results of their actions. What is been called the anthropic principle is in some ways a further expansion from this recognition of moral responsibility to the recognition that humans have been drawn into a quest for the meaning of their research because they are confronted with the inexplicable existence of infinite possibilities, with what theologians call transcendence.
So while Frank is hardly a theist his description of culture in the twilight of the Big Bang certainly sounds theological.
As importantly Frank recognizes this this relationship, this dialogue between the universe and human researchers isn't a merely human intuition or feeling but arises out of the rational process of analyzing the evidence emerging from scientific experiment and theory. The liberal theological distinction between physics and metaphysics, between science and religion breaks down. It turns out that, contra what I was taught 40 years ago in theology school, science and religion have a common question: what does it mean to be human in the cosmos?
However, those of us with a commitment to revelation and faith as ways of knowing should not naively believe that the infinities confronted by cosmological theories translate into what theologians call the transcendent. A colleague at SMU (Stephen Sekula in the book Reality in the Shadows) has said that mathematics is the language of nature. As he and his co-authors mean that term the useful concept of infinity is found entirely in the immanent frame in which scientific reasoning is located. So transcendence isn’t merely a function of the existence of mathematical infinities. Rather, it is the particular way that an infinity of possible cosmos arises from cosmological theory to interrogate the human reasoner. That is the starting point in a discussion of transcendence and revelation.
Secondly we must recognize that what Charles Taylor describes as “heroic atheism,” or a refusal to quit searching for the entirely of what is true within the immanent frame, should be respected as a defense of the integrity of human reason. Such a defense is absolutely necessary if theological reasoning is to be preserved from a descent into subservient listening instead of active dialogue. God, as the Bible makes clear, wants to engage us in a wrestling match, not follow blindly those who claim to represent the Divine will. A robust theism depends on atheism, even as it regards atheism as an intellectual manifestation of the demand by transcendence to explain what it means to be human in the cosmos.
Of course there is much work to be done if theologians are to engage in meaningful discourse with others in the academy. Yet perhaps since a half-century of scrambling by physicists to get beyond the ledge that Jastrow first identified hasn’t moved cosmology beyond the question posed by the universe in the Big Bang, those on the ledge who have heard the same question might begin talking to one another.
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