A Matter of Fact: The Relative Merits of Rain and God's Word

Book of Nature, Book of God: How are they alike? How do they differ?

I posted this statement a few weeks ago:

[E]ither God is totally impenetrable or God is totally penetrating. But you can't really find another option, epistemologically anyway. You can say with John that God has a "transcendent" feature, a space-time extension of herself: but you can't really talk about it much. You have no more grounds for saying "God revealed himself in scripture" than you do for saying "God revealed himself in rainfall." And if both are true, you really do have to look inward at the image of God, and that's a pretty terrifying thought that quickly separates the humble from the arrogant.

Jennifer asks, reasonably:

Why can't God equally reveal Himself in scripture and rain?

This is a very intelligent question, and gets to some first principles.

I want to lay out a few ideas that are connected here.

First of all, please note that I'm not saying God has not revealed himself in scripture and rain.  For all I know God dictated, inspired, directed, preserved, and oversaw the delivery of scripture to the modern world.

But the operative word is "know."

Above I used the important phrase, "epistemologically, anyway."

The Bible is a different thing to nature.  It's a product of consciousness.  As a tool of knowledge, then, it inhabits a slightly different world from that of nature.St. Victor, who is not St. Nicholas of Lyra but who has a way cooler icon, which Nicholas, whether or not he's the guy I'm thinking of who said what I said he said in this post, was one hell of an exegete.

Let me explain at excessive length.

Early Christian doctrine after Nicea (articulated best by St. Victor in the 12th century) held that God spoke clearly in the book of nature and in the Bible.  The world was a mystery that contained hidden meanings, allegories of God.  Things were riddles that could unmask their meanings that would point back to God in the mode that the early Christians were most comfortable with: allegory, metaphor, suggestion.  They did love a puzzle, and John 1:1-14 provided a ready-made doctrinal warrant for this: all things were made through the logos, and so all things bore the imprint of an invisible (that is, supernatural) God.

Scripture too hid its meanings.  The ancients (until about the Early Modern Period, but continuing perhaps as late as the early 19th century) read scripture at four "levels" in order to unmask its layers.  By the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas is able to articulate the four senses of scripture this way, following a long train of interpretive theory stretching back at least to Origen: the literal (that is the obvious meaning of the text, including figurative language); the spiritual or allegorical / symbolic sense; the anagogical sense (that is, having to do with your final end); and the moral sense (how you ought to live your life).

I think it was Nicholas of Lyra, a French Franciscan who may have been one of the most interesting medieval exegetes, put it like this: "The letter [literal sense] is the history; allegory what you believe; the moral [sense] what you must do; and the anagogical whither you tend."

What's interesting in both the book of nature and the book of the Bible is that an Author and that Author's intended meaning are meant to "bound" the interpretation of the text, whether that text is nature or the Bible.  There is a right interpretation.  There is a wrong interpretation.

And the medieval philosophers at least were not blind to the importance of this.  They were not fools.  Aquinas for instance insisted one could not "read properly" if he wasn't right with God and the Church and his neighbors.  (Luther, who I don't think had read Aquinas, would say much the same thing, but having disfigured Church authority himself was in less of a position to quantify the demand.)

That is, the medieval Church had figured out what it took post-structuralism a while to sort out: that at least so far as texts go, everything depends on the dialogue between author and audience.  If you aren't conscious of those two poles of interpretation, you're not able to read rightly because you will be determining the fields of meaning that matter to you, but not necessarily to them.  God is the Author of both nature and the Bible for the medieval thinker, and the Church the audience (and nobody else), and it's in that binary relationship that one must read both nature and the Bible.

A couple of things are ironic about that.

One is that it was profoundly derived from Greek and Roman hermeneutical practices, but very much at odds with Jewish ones.

The Jewish rabbi was a sophisticated reader.  He understood what he was doing.  But of necessity, he couldn't count on a "factual record" to anchor his readings.  Consequently, he could spin his interpretation almost out of whole cloth, and generally speaking felt very little obligation to the "original meaning."  He might tip his hat, for instance, to the fact that Isaiah 7 was self-consciously about the Syro-Ephraimite conflict ("behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel").  But as his context was different from that of Isaiah, he felt justified in saying that it referred to a coming messiah, and laying aside the very obvious context with its original dialogues.

But turning back to the West, long after it had forsaken Judaism, the great revolution (if not revelation) of human consciousness came about when it occurred to Francis Bacon and others that nature isn't precisely like that.  Nature could provide a stable, contextless interpretation.Francis Bacon, a distant cousin of Hamlet, on a rough day. Thank him for facting us all up.

It's not that they necessarily disbelieved in its mystical meanings, but they established a context for letting the thing simply be what it was, without any particular tip of the hat to its "meanings."

Rain, whether in Judea or China or the Americas, had a certain mass and fell at a certain speed under certain conditions.  If it was a "gift of God," that was a subjective interpretation enforced on it from outside itself, neither demonstrable by observation (even in Judea) and not falsifiable by observation.

In short, we earned through observation the right to make a distinction between that which we can demonstrate unfailingly and that which we simply can't. 

The distinction between "fact" and "value" this is sometimes imprecisely called.

And it became immediately clear to careful thinkers that God's word posed special problems this way.

Rain was rain, regardless of your moral condition.  You could count on it.  It was always true, and its properties never varied whether you were a pagan or a Muslim or a Christian or an atheist.

"Fact" therefore earned a status as the gold-standard for truth, though it would probably be better if it had earned for itself the status as gold-standard for knowledge.

As it was, Aquinas and many others had already said that reading the Bible "rightly" (whatever that meant) required faith, a subjective engagement in relationships that were not universal.  (This is why it's sometimes a great irony when Christians demand with a straight face that people pay homage to "absolute truth.")

But now the Bible was left struggling to articulate what it meant to be "true" in a world where it simply wasn't "true" (or at least knowledge) by the gold standard of fact.

Many pious people, then as now, insist vigorously that the Bible is "fully true."  I generally want to know what they mean by this: in cases of fundamentalism, they mean it's as firm a chunk of knowledge as any fact, thereby proving that they have bought modernism's claim about knowledge without really understanding it, or perhaps without being honest about it. 

The Bible does not "prove itself" as a claim about the rain does.  It can be (and has be) falsified at the factual level.  It creates problems within itself, internal disharmonies that can only be resolved by a sort of hermeneutical sleight of hand. 

So if it is "God's revelation," as your question suggests, it's well worth asking, "In what sense?"

And for the answer to this, one must turn invariably to the what the thing is.

It's a book.  More precisely, it's a collection of books.

And not "books" in the modern sense, with our modern sense of a definitive author having a definitive utterance.

True Pluralism: Reading In Community.They are Jewish books, and Hellenistic Semitic ones, from a time when assumptions about authorship were far different than ours.

But for now, let's just say, "It's a book.  It's literature.  It's the product of some consciousness or Consciousness."

It might be much more than that, but if we leapfrog the bookishness of the Bible we'll end up invariably in some huge tangle of words without meanings, as the medievals knew and feared.

Any work of consciousness, human or otherwise, that depends on language must depend on an author and an audience. 

And the composition of the Bible was not necessarily a great time for stability that way: no printing press to standardize the text, no ease of communication or even common language to level interpretive difference across time and place... there were huge issues that have to be faced.

What they amount to is this:

If the Bible is God's self-revelation, it must be so at the level of reading, not the level of the words on the page, for these quite frankly mean something radically distant in time and place.

And for that to be meaningfully "Christian," it must be read Christianly.

And for that to take place, it must be the book of a community.

Which means it is not like the book of nature.  It's a lonelier thing.  For any of us may embrace nature for what it is.  It depends not on faith but on its essential being.  It will always be what it is, and though the rain might provoke boredom and irritation and wonder or delight, it will always be, when you look closely, just what it is.  It's you that's changed, and you fall in love when you find somebody who says, "Yes, that's how I see it, exactly" and feel that the book of nature, though solid, is not so very lonely as your interpretations made it out to be.

But the Bible is different.  In it, you must first find those who will read it as you think it should be read.

Then you might begin to approach it.

But it will never just be what it is, like the rain.

It requires your fidelity, your belief, your faith.

It's raining again. Photo copyright 2009, The Otter.