The God of the Signs - Introduction
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
The eminent scientist Galileo Galilei once observed that God had written two books about himself, the Bible and the Creation. Galileo’s steadfast belief that divine truth had been written into the fabric of the created order compelled him to study the physical world as it was, or at least as it appeared to be to his thoughtful eye and analytic mind, apart from the Aristotelian a prioris which, in his day, masqueraded as scientific wisdom in the halls of the medieval Church. In retrospect, our culture, shaped as it is so profoundly by the tides of Enlightenment thought, hails Galileo as a paragon of scholastic virtue, a hero in the ongoing battle between science and faith; yet, in a manner uncomfortably analogous to that adopted by the Vatican, modern man persists in ignoring the shining wisdom inherent in Galileo’s epistemology. For, in proposing the existence of not one but two divine texts—the first literary, the second living—Galileo had no intention of disparaging either; rather, he wished to exalt both as equally valid, and entirely compatible, sources of divine revelation. In Galileo’s view, God had revealed himself discernibly both in the Word of his Prophets and the Work of his hands. Thus, Galileo was convinced that the empirical labor of the scientist had no quibble with the diligent exegesis of the theologian, for both the scientist and the theologian were ultimately students of the Light imparted to man by the same gracious God.
Living as we are in the midst of a worldview revolution in the Church, I would venture that most thinking Christians, especially those versed in the philosophy of science, would agree with Galileo’s observation. After all, does not Paul teach in his letter to the Romans that God’s eternal qualities and divine nature are clearly revealed in what is made? What is such a statement if not an invitation to develop alongside one’s systematic theology of Scripture a rigorous account of the science and semiotics of Creation? Personally, I applaud such epistemic balance and long, however nostalgically, for a return to the golden days of the early Enlightenment when those who considered themselves “natural philosophers” mined the wisdom of Nature to acquire a more intimate knowledge of God. Nevertheless, I am far less intrigued by the fairly obvious implications of Galileo’s thesis for the study of science than its much less appreciated, and wholly more profound, implications for Christian soteriology (i.e. the theology of the means and process of salvation). Indeed, in my view, the idea that God has simultaneously revealed himself to man through Scripture and Creation must not only directly influence, but in some part must necessarily redefine, the traditional Protestant doctrine of salvation, at least with respect to those countless persons across the span of ages and nations who, as a result of many factors, chief among them geography and cultural insularity, have never been exposed to the written revelation of God.
As any student of history must grant, entire societies have, for millennia, survived and flourished apart from the wisdom of the Word. If this reality seems distant, it is only because the Western world has, by God’s magnanimous grace, so interlaced the revelation of Scripture into the character of its institutions that, despite the recent encroachments of militant secularism, the Word is not only present but also visible in the language and symbols by which we interpret our world (see for starters the Declaration of Independence, the preeminence of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter among our pantheon of holidays, the ever-inquisitive nature of Time magazine articles on the “historical” Jesus, and, perversely, the Christ-centered nature of our curse words). The Eastern and sub-Saharan African worlds, on the other hand, have, until the last few decades, abided in one long spiritual night, at least with respect to the written Word. The same can be said of the Mesoamerican world prior to the arrival of Catholic missionaries in the fifteenth century A.D. What is more, even Scripture mentions nothing about such peoples after the debacle of Babel in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. As a matter of history, therefore, God’s interactions with such people groups for the last four thousand years at least are completely lost to us, just as the true story of Atlantis is lost to us (assuming the mythic city ever existed). When confronted with this fact, Christians tend either (a) to throw up their hands and admit essential ignorance about the eternal fate of those untold billions who have lived and died apart from exposure to the Word or (b) to dispatch them summarily, and supposedly necessarily, to the category of “heathen” and “godless” for whom Hell-fire is reserved. Given the difficulty of the issue, I appreciate the candor of the former position; yet its fundamental insubstantiality renders it analytically uninteresting to me. The latter position, on the other hand, is a view that, for better or worse, one can sink his teeth into. In this essay, I intend to employ Galileo’s insight about the dual texts of God to challenge such an absolutist view head-on. My analysis shall be guided by a single overarching question whose call issues forth from the essential Christian doctrines of divine benevolence and human dignity. It is thus: Did not God, who, without qualm or qualification, desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4), leave in the inscriptions of glory written into Creation a real and compelling (the Calvinists would say “efficient”) witness to His Light?
Although I realize the risk in saying so, I believe the proper answer to this question must be emphatically affirmative, both as a matter of Scriptural exegesis and as a matter of philosophical observation. Although it is clearly true that God, in electing to set apart Israel as his Chosen People, focused the narrative of Scripture upon the triumphs and travails of the Jewish race and, only in ancillary fashion, upon those peoples whose histories intersected with Jewish history, I believe it is equally obvious that God wrote into the fabric of the universe, as an enduring testimony to all nations upon the earth, at least eight primary signs, or impressions, of divine truth, which adumbrate, to the inquisitive mind, the story of fallen mankind and tell of the love, grace and righteous judgment of God in a language that all can understand. Such signs, I wish to argue, are not mere symbolic gestures whose Light is powerless against the raging current of spiritual corruption that has, since the third chapter of Genesis, embroiled the world. They are, in fact, the very reflective markers by which any man or woman, fashioned in the image of God and empowered by his omnipresent Spirit, might, as Paul proposed at the meeting of the Areopagus, “seek [God] and perhaps reach out for him and find him (Acts 17:27),” irrespective of the nation and culture into which such person is born and what perverse local deities his or her ancestors worshipped. On a purely practical level, I will admit that the number of people estranged from the culture of the Word who have, despite the ponderous weight of sin and Satan’s tyrannical machinations, reached out for God and found him by way of the Light of Creation is most likely small compared to the multitudes who have ignored the truth inscribed in Nature, clung to worthless idols, and wasted their lives in riotous rebellion against the Most High. (This, of course, continues to be the case; thus the unqualified necessity of Christian evangelism). Nevertheless, as a matter of principle, the path to faith through the wisdom of the created order must exist, for its reality and efficacy are the very lynchpins by which the wrath of God revealed against all ungodliness and wickedness in every culture and in every age is also perfectly just. As Jesus said to the Pharisees: “If you were blind you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains (John 9:41).”
At this point, the reader may object: “But what about Christ’s claim to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, apart from whom no one may come to the Father? How can Jesus be the only way to God and yet man be saved apart from a knowledge of Him?” Such are valid and pressing questions which require the grace of an honest and Biblical answer. Rest assured, I intend to offer such an answer without compromising the exclusivity and universality of the Christian gospel. Nevertheless, to develop my apologetic now would get the cart before the horse and rob the Book of Creation of an opportunity for self-explanation. The Signs of Creation, you see, exude such a resplendent spiritual Light that once their luminosity is appreciated their theological significance, as I construe it, should appear far less threatening to the traditionalist. This is because the theological narrative delivered by the Signs is both transparently rich and wondrously harmonious with the message of Scripture. What then are the Signs of Creation? As I see it, they are the Sign of Beauty, the Sign of Order, the Sign of Consciousness, the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Death and Rebirth, the Sign of Love, the Sign of Lament, and the Sign of the Heavens.
Next time: The Sign of Beauty
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