Reason or Revelation?

Summary:

As a college Bible professor, I am constantly confronted by fundamentalist students who are convinced that only the Bible—the inerrant, revealed Word of God—can be relied upon to offer us truth about the operation of the cosmos. Any source of knowledge that contradicts that truth is only a test of our faith. But the exact opposite is true. God’s creation itself is the only inerrant, revealed Word of God, and our divinely endowed mind is a gift of the divine bestowed on us as a source of communion—a vehicle that unites us with the divine by allowing us to encounter the divine through the ongoing revelation of God’s creation.                                                                                                          

The full text:

Being a college Bible professor offers a unique andexciting challenge. No other college subject—except perhaps biology or paleontology—brings a teacher into such direct confrontation with fundamentalist religious doctrine. Virtually every semester there is at least one student who simply refuses to “think outside the box,” to learn something new, to consider another perspective. Often I encounter students who are simply incapable of doing so. They are brainwashed.

Perhaps the most remarkable, disturbing and disappointing comment I hear is the one that confronts the challenge offered to fundamentalists by the findings of science. Whether the challenge comes from the natural sciences (creation vs. evolution), history/archeology (Did King David actually control a vast empire?), literary criticism (Is the Pentateuch a single composition or a composite work?) or otherwise, the challenge is most often alleviated by understanding it as “a test of faith.”

Essentially this involves a theology that portrays a deity who plants false evidence to test whether or not we will accept the belief that God is a best-selling author. This portrait of God begins with a doctrine that the Bible is the inerrant, revealed word of God, and anything that exists in the world to dispute this doctrine has been planted there to test our faith. Every truth offered by the rational mind that contradicts the doctrine of the inerrant, revealed Word of God is “a test of faith.”

I’m not even going to begin to dispute this utterly demented theology that turns the creator and sustainer of the cosmos into a kind of Promethean trickster. What I’d rather do in this piece is to turn this view of revelation on its head.

The primary and ultimate divine revelation—the alpha and the omega, the first and the last—is the creator’s creation. The world as such, the cosmos as it is, is the inerrant Word of God.

Not only that, but my soul, my consciousness, my mind, my intellect is a piece of the divine within me. It is a free gift of God’s grace, a vehicle for union between me and the divine implanted in me to allow me to discover the presence of God through the intersection of my rational, divinely inspired mind and God’s inerrant revelation in the form of the created cosmos.

That is the primary source of revelation. Other forms of revelation come to bear. Great seers, scientists, thinkers, prophets, bards and sages, whose ability to perceive the order, structure, meaning and significance of the cosmos far exceeds my own, continually provide me with new insights and perspectives. The great scriptures of the world—the Bible, Quran, Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita—written at a time of great spiritual and intellectual fervor, are profound sources of insight and knowledge.

Ultimately, however, God’s creation is the only inerrant source of revelation. The attempt to convince me otherwise—that God’s revelation through the world as such is false and that only this book contains God’s Word—is a true test of my faith. It is a faith that I can use my divinely implanted mind to discover the truth of God’s presence as it is revealed in the world as such and the cosmos as it is.

Ma gadlu ma’asekha adonai

Me’od ‘ameku mahshevotekha

‘Ish ba’ar lo yeda’

Ukhesil lo yavin et zeh

How tremendous are your deeds, O God

Your thoughts are deeply profound

The fool cannot know

The dullard cannot understand this.

(Psalm 92)