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| IS THAT A FACT? Al Greene Reading the Bible property has never been without its problems. One of the most common problems today, and perhaps one of the least recognized, is that we cannot hope to understand what the Bible is saying if we use the modern meanings of the words it contains. A society develops its own way of seeing the world and expresses that way in the words it uses. Christians are always in danger of not realizing that they have absorbed a worldview and that they read the Bible in its light. One important instance of this is the modern use of the word "fact." As long ago as 1948, when The Presence of the Kingdom was first published, Jacques Ellul stated the problem in the following words: "Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact. The procedure is always the same. People take the fact- the ‘proletariat,’ or the fact - the ‘State,’ or the fact of ‘money’; then they divinize it, and it is suddenly imposed on a whole category of men, without difficulty, because modern people are ready to fall down and worship facts. Everyone takes it for granted that fact and truth are one; and if God is no longer regarded as true in our day it is because He does not seem to be a fact. Now it is this kind of intimate conviction which constitutes the religion of the masses. To have a ‘religion’ there is no need of creeds and dogmas, ceremonies and rites: all that is necessary is that men in the mass should adhere to it with their hearts. Now if we try to see what men as a whole worship in our day, it is easy to perceive that whatever form their worship may take, it is always connected with the ‘fact.’ We only need to look through illustrated magazines to see that this is so." (p. 37 – 38) What’s the problem? The problem Ellul is talking about is that modern people have made facts into a form of religion. They do not think of it as a religion at all. In fact, if charged with using it as a religion, they would vigorously deny the charge. But the charge is true. It depends on the identification of fact with truth. Modern people still believe, for the most part, that there is such a thing as truth. Postmodernism denies this, but it hasn’t found its way down to the general public widely enough to shake people’s belief in truth. Modern people still believe in truth and identify it with facts, which are recognized, moderns think, by the scientific method. Can this be, as Ellul charges, a form of idolatry? Anything in the creation can be put in the place of God and so become an idolatrous religion. Modern people don’t all believe in the personal God of the Bible, but they do believe deeply in scientific fact. Even if they believe that Jesus is the Son of God, they would usually think of him as the truth in spiritual things but in science as showing us the truth in ordinary things. The only truth the Bible recognizes is Jesus (John 14:6). It has no place for truth in ordinary things if it is not Jesus. This is why the modern identification of facts with truth is a form of idolatry. How did this happen? The story is fairly easy to discover, though it is not well recognized today. At the beginning of the Enlightenment, Lord Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) urged his fellow scientists to forget about the meaning or purpose of the things they were discovering and simply gather facts. Facts were thought to have been discovered in full if their causes could be identified. Their meaning or purpose was now regarded as unimportant. They were thought to be strictly neutral. It is difficult for us today, steeped as we are in the modern way of seeing things, to realize how different this was from the way reality was looked at before the Enlightenment. The ancient Greeks thought that behind everything in nature lay eternal ideas, which could be apprehended by the rational human mind. The Hebrews were convinced that Almighty God lay behind all reality. The emphasis of the Psalms on God as creator of all things by His Word is evidence of this. Now, as the scientific revolution gathered momentum, facts became neutral. The result was that the apprehension of facts now presented a person with no risk or obligation. Value was quietly subtracted from facts and buried. The doctrines of a church creed demanded belief or unbelief, but facts were simply truth regardless of one’s response or lack of it. This is why science textbooks today do not say, "We believe", but simply state what is thought to be the truth. What is the real situation? The reality is that all the "facts" discovered by science are created and thus entirely dependent upon the Word of God. Not only did God make the world by his Word in the first place, as Genesis 1 indicates repeatedly, but His Word is the only reason the creation continues to exist. (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1: 17) He holds our world together moment by moment by the power of His Word. Furthermore, the Bible is clear on the reason why God made the world the way He did. His intent was to reveal Himself to humans through the creation. Evidence for this is not difficult to find in Scripture. Romans 1:20 says, "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." (italics added). Psalm 19:1-2 agrees, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." Psalm 8 supports this idea thus: "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth, who hast displayed Thy splendor above the heavens! " And in Isaiah 6:3 the angels who flew around God called to one another in these words, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory." God did not make the world thoughtlessly. He made us with physical hunger to remind us of the heart hunger which He alone can fill. The beauty of the wildflower or the sunset is not ultimately in the flower or the sunset. The beauty is God’s beauty coming out in the creation. Parker Palmer catches a glimpse of this when he says, "Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know ... Knowing is a human way to seek relationship and, in the process, to have encounters and exchanges that will inevitably alter us. At its deepest reaches, knowing is always communal." (Courage to Teach, p. 54) In his book, A Rumor of Angels, Peter Berger writes, "I would suggest that theological thought seek out what might be called signals of transcendence within the empirically given human situation...By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our "natural" reality but that appear to point beyond that reality." (p. 52-53). He then lists and describes the argument from ordering, from play, and from hope, damnation and humor. In each instance he cites a perspective humans hold that is empirically discernible but which clearly depends on a faith that lies in a realm beyond scientific inquiry. So he says regarding the argument from ordering, "Throughout most of human history men have believed that the created order of society, in one way or another, corresponds to an underlying order of the universe, a divine order that supports and justifies all human attempts at ordering." (ibid., p. 53) Then he illustrates by alluding to a child who wakens, frightened, in the night and is comforted by the mother’s saying, "Don’t worry. everything is all right." Any mother, Christian or not, will do that. Is the mother lying to the child? Berger says she isn’t, "Because the reassurance, transcending the immediately present two individuals and their situation, implies a statement about reality as such."(ibid,p.55)" The mother is thus building a world and a world order which child psychologists say is "absolutely essential to the process of becoming a human person" (ibid., p. 55-56). But if the world the child is being told to trust will ultimately take the child’s life as well as the mother’s, if it is the only world there is, it provides no comfort whatever. Here is an undeniable instance of a common human characteristic which is cruel and meaningless if the cosmos is the only reality there is. The other arguments offer similar situations. In the argument from play, Berger suggests that the real goal of play is joy and that when this goal is achieved, we actually move into a new time frame. We shift from time into eternity. Children, who are not yet conscious of death, show this all the time in their playing. When adults are absorbed in a game, they recover something of their childhood unconsciousness of the fear of death. "Joyful play appears to suspend, or bracket, the reality of our ‘living towards death’ (as Heidegger aptly described our ‘serious’ condition)." (ibid., p. 59) Berger develops similar conclusions from the arguments from hope, damnation and humor. All of which is to say that reality is not meaningless. It is meant to point beyond itself. It is one of God’s ways of revealing Himself to us. If these illustrations seem a little abstract, it is not difficult to find examples in the concrete area of everyday life. Take romantic love, for instance. In Bed and Board Robert Capon insists that Dante’s famous poem indicates that it is really about the "the Mystical Body—the City—the mystery of membership in each other ... this astonishing thing of being lifted out of one’s self by the mere sight of the beloved ... was designed to be a communication. Not, mind you, the girl’s communication of something in her, but God’s communication through her of the mystery of the Coinherence. She is an image, a diagram of the glory of the City—of that collection of created pieces made to tend ceaselessly toward the oneness of the Body"... Beatrice is precisely a priestly figure. She is not my destiny, but the agent, the delightful sacrament, of it. If I treat her as an end, delight is about all I can bargain for, and not even that for long. If I take her as a sacrament, I receive, along with the delight, the joy that lies behind her" (p. 65-66). In our sex-soaked day, this is a healthy alternative perspective! Another instance, and one which has meant a great deal to me personally, comes from C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer. He and his friend had been discussing prayer as worship or adoration while on a walk and had stopped to rest beside a small waterfall. Lewis supposed that to pray in that way one must begin with a passage of Scripture or a quotation from the creeds. His friend bent down, washed his face again in the waterfall, and said, "‘Why not begin with this?" In this exchange, Lewis learned that "pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility" (p. 90). He goes on to say that we should "make every pleasure into a channel of adoration." Only God makes pleasures (Psalm 16: 11). The pleasure does not come from but through the food, the drink or the friendship. Bad pleasures are simply "pleasures snatched by unlawful acts." The pleasure is still a beam from the glory, but now it has been sullied by the unlawful act. What does all this mean? It means at least three things. First, it means that the modern church, at least in the western world, has practically lost the creation. It still subscribes to the doctrine that God created the world in the beginning, but it thinks of the creation as the secularists do, i.e. as something controlled by natural laws. This is actually perilously close to deism. It is not surprising, since Adam and Eve’s declaration of independence from God in the Garden of Eden blinded them to God’s self-revelation there. We are their children and we inherit their blindness. However, when we become convicted of our sin and turn to Christ, the capacity to see the world aright is restored to us in Him. This is why Romans 12:2 instructs us not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Being born again brings with it not only a new view of morality; it also brings a new way of thinking about the world. Christians do not seem always to be aware of this. We cannot live in two worlds, one where Christ is king and another where truth is discovered by science. It may be that the failure to recognize this has led to the church’s weak witness in today’s secular society. The second thing grows out of the first. The church’s dualistic perspective puts it into the practice of idolatry. Christ is not the truth in spiritual things while facts are the truth in ordinary things. Facts are not neutral. They do mean something. They reveal God. If we leave God out of them, we put them in His place, and that is idolatry. It is no more acceptable to God now than it was in Old Testament times. It is easy to blame ancient Israel for its involvement in idolatry while we forget to ask whether we are guilty of the same thing. The third thing is that the meaningfulness of facts puts us under obligation. It calls for a response on our part. What could a response be? Not some new theological concepts. Our theology comes from the Bible. But if the creation reveals God, then it is up to us to learn to know Him through it. We can do this at the very least by growing in our awe of Him, which Proverbs 1:7 says is the beginning or the chief part of wisdom. We can be deepened in our love for Him. We can learn to praise Him in new ways. And we can serve Him more as we learn to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. This is an important part of a truly Christian life and a way of being transformed by the renewing of our minds. - Dr. Albert E. Greene Alta Vista Phone: (206)
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