2 Verifiable Facts & Knowing
In historic Christianity a personal God creates man in his own image, and in such a case there is nothing that would make it nonsense to consider that he would communicate to man in verbalized form. Why should he not communicate in verbalized form when he has made man a verbalizing being, in his thoughts as well as in communication with other men? Having created man in his own image, why should he fail to communicate to that verbalizing being in such terms? The communication would then be three ways: God to man, and vice versa; man to man; and man to himself. Someone may raise queries as to whether in fact such communication has taken place, but in this field of reference, it is neither a contradictory nor a nonsense statement. Such a concept would be nonsense if one had the presupposition of a totally closed field of cause and effect. But if you are a person who holds that cause and effect has been and is totally closed, then you need to ask if such a view as yours really stands up to all we know, and specifically whether your worldview explains why people verbalize to each other.
Why should God not communicate propositionally to the man, the verbalizing being, whom he made in such a way that we communicate propositionally to each other? Therefore, in the biblical position there is the possibility of verifiable facts involved: a personal God communicating in verbalized form propositionally to man—not only concerning those things man would call in our generation “religious truths,” but also down into the areas of history and science.
God has set the revelation of the Bible in history; he did not give it (as he could have done) in the form of a theological textbook. Having set the revelation in history, what sense then would it make for God to give us a revelation in which the history was wrong? God has also set man in the universe, which the Scriptures themselves say speaks of this God. What sense then would it make for God to give his revelation in a book that was wrong concerning the universe? The answer to both questions must be, “No sense at all!”
It is plain, therefore, that from the viewpoint of the Scriptures themselves there is a unity over the whole field of knowledge. God has spoken, in a linguistic propositional form, truth concerning himself and truth concerning man, history and the universe.
Here is an adequate basis for the unity of knowledge. The unity encompasses both the upstairs and the downstairs. This is the answer to the discussion of the unity between nature and grace and modern man’s question of knowledge above and below the line of anthropology. The unity is there because God has spoken truth into all areas of our knowledge.
At the same time one must avoid the opposite mistake of saying that because God has communicated truly concerning science, all scientific study is wasted. This is a false deduction. To say that God communicates truly does not mean that God communicates exhaustively. Even in our human relationships we never have exhaustive communication, though what we do have may be true. Thus, as far as our position in the universe is concerned, though the infinite God has said true things concerning the whole of what he has made, our knowledge is not thereby meant to be static. Created in his image, we are rational and, as such, we are able to, and intended to, explore and discover further truth concerning creation.
God says, in effect, “Learn of the truth that I have made in the external world.” Finite man in the external universe, being finite, has no sufficient reference point if he begins absolutely and autonomously from himself; thus he needs certain knowledge. God gives us this in the Scriptures. With this in mind the scientist can understand, in their ultimate relationships, the truths that he is looking at. Thus scientific study in itself can be to the glory of God, for here man is functioning properly in the universe in which God has placed him. He is telling us what is truly there, and he is adding to the store of knowledge of his fellowmen.
The new theology cannot give an adequate framework for ascertaining facts and knowledge. It cannot because it removes the possibility of communication at the only two points that can be discussed and verified, namely, history and the universe. Religious truths cannot be discussed once they are divorced from the other two. Bezzant, in the book Objections to Christian Belief, well illustrates how crucial this matter of truth is. Though Bezzant is an older type of liberal, and though the book is destructive in many ways, nevertheless he has seen this point very clearly. Having attacked the historic Christian position, he then suddenly swings around and trains all his guns on neo-orthodoxy: “When I am told that it is precisely its immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation from the charge of being mythological, I reply that immunity from proof can ‘secure’ nothing whatever except immunity from proof and call nonsense by its name.” This is a tremendous sentence. At this point he has truly understood the fatal flaw of modern theology. It may dress up its position with all kinds of clothes, but it remains irrational and what it is talking about can never really be discussed, because it is no longer open to verification.
I remember hearing a speaker in England say at a conference at which we were both speaking, “Bultmann is infallible for twenty minutes each Sunday.” That is, all the new theology can do is preach and ask the people to believe or not to believe, without the exercise of reason. In this way, man becomes less than the fallen man of the biblical Christian position.
The historic Christian answer concerning verifiable facts and knowing depends on who God is, on who is there. The God who is there according to the Scriptures is the personal-infinite God. There is no other god like this God. It is ridiculous to say that all religions teach the same things when they disagree at the fundamental point as to what God is like. The gods of the East are infinite by definition—the definition being “god is all that is.” This is the pan-everythingism god. The gods of the West have tended to be personal but limited; such were the gods of the Greeks, Romans and Germans. But the God of the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, is the infinite-personal God.
It is this God who has created various orders of creation, like this:
How then is God’s creation related to himself and to itself? On the side of God’s infinity there is a break between God and the whole of his creation. I am as separated from God in the area of his being the Creator and infinite, I being the creature and finite, as is the atom or energy particle. I am no closer to God on this side than the machine.
However, on the side of God’s personality, the break comes between man and the rest of creation. In terms of modern thought this is a dynamic concept, of which modern man and modern theology know nothing. So Albert Schweitzer identified himself with the hippopotamus, for he did not understand that man’s relationship is upward; and therefore he looked downward to a creature which does many of the same things as himself. But on the side of personality, if our relationship is upward, then everything concerning man’s “mannishness” is in place.
The biblical Christian says that, on the side of personality, man can know God truly, though he cannot know God exhaustively. Unlike the new theology, he is not trapped by the two alternatives of knowing God completely or not knowing him at all. We are not shut up to a total comprehension of the infinite.
Modern man and the new theology have only this:
Modern man has driven a wedge between the personal and the infinite and says that personality equals finiteness. He has equated personality with limitedness. But the Christian says that the only limitation which personality intrinsically must have is that it cannot be impersonal at the same time. To say that personality must always be limited in other ways is to try to make an absolute which one cannot make. Indeed, human personalities are limited in other ways, but this is because they are created and finite, not because they are personal.
PERSONALITY AS SUCH CANNOT NECESSARILY IMPLY LIMITEDNESS
A man from Israel who was an atheist wrote and asked me, “What sense does it make for a man to give his son to the ants, to be killed by ants, in order to save the ants?” I replied that it makes no sense at all for a man to give his son to the ants, to be killed by the ants, in order to save the ants, because man as a personality is totally separated from the ants. Man’s only relation to the ants is in the areas of Being and creaturehood. However, in the area of personality man’s relationship is upward to God, and therefore the incarnation and death of the Son of God for the sake of man’s salvation are sensible.
The reasonableness of the incarnation and the reasonableness of communication between God and man turn on this point—that man, as man, is created in the image of God.
DIVINE AND HUMAN COMMUNICATION
The communication which God has made to man is true, but that does not mean it is exhaustive. This is an important distinction which we must always bear in mind. To know anything exhaustively we would need to be infinite, as God is. Even in heaven we shall not be this.
God has communicated to man, not only about the cosmos and history but also about himself. And God’s attributes so communicated are meaningful to God, the author of the communication, as well as to man, the recipient of the communication. What God has revealed concerning his attributes is not only meaningful below the line of anthropology. The line of anthropology is not a brazen heaven over our heads which cannot be penetrated. The God who has spoken is not the unknowable infinite above the line. The God who has created man in his own image communicates true truth about himself. Therefore this need not be thought of as only an existential experience or contentless “religious ideas.” We have true knowledge, for as the Scriptures say so simply and overwhelmingly, when God wrote the Ten Commandments on stone, or when Jesus spoke to Paul on the Damascus road in the Hebrew language, a real language was used—subject to grammars and lexicons—a language to be understood.
When we talk to each other there are three theoretical possibilities in our exchange of words. The first is that we fail to communicate at all, probably because our backgrounds are too far apart. The second possibility is the very opposite of this: that when we use terms we all give to them exactly the same meaning, so that we understand each other exhaustively. Neither of these concepts stands careful analysis.
The weakness of saying that one is not able to communicate at all was shown up in a conversation I once had with an undergraduate at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Other students had said they found him difficult to talk to, that what he said did not seem to make sense, and they were at a loss to know where to start. I had half an hour to spend with him. After only two minutes of talking in his room, he said, “Sir, I don’t think we are communicating.” I started again. About two minutes later he repeated himself, “Sir, I don’t think we are communicating.” I began to think that the half-hour would be spent in a nonsense session! I looked down and noticed that he had very thoughtfully prepared a lovely tea. There it all was, pot of tea, cups and so on. So I said rather gruffly to him, “Give me some tea!” He was taken aback, but he passed me a cup, full of tea. Then I said, “Sir, I think we are communicating.” From then on we had a very effective conversation.
The simple fact is that no one who takes the trouble to study linguistics really believes that just because we bring our own background to the words, idioms and phrases we use, we cannot communicate at all. On the other hand we need to be warned: just because we know what we mean by a term does not mean that the person to whom we speak understands precisely the same thing. That would be very naive. In human conversation we have true communication, but it is never exhaustive. This is the third and only realistic possibility in our speaking to one another.
If we transfer the possibility of communication from the realm of human intercourse to that of the Divine-human, then the same principle applies. The biblical presentation indicates that because man is made in God’s image, the problem of God communicating to him is not of an absolutely different order from that of man speaking to man. We are finite, God is infinite, but we can understand truly.
LOVE IS MORE THAN A WORD
This conception of the way in which God communicates gives a world which is different from the one in which modern man is struggling. It means quite simply that man no longer needs to destroy, nor to sink into apathy; there is a reason to live, build and love. Man is no longer adrift. We may demonstrate how different the two worlds are by considering the meaning of love. Modern man quite properly considers the conception of love to be overwhelmingly important as he looks at personality. Nevertheless, he faces a very real problem as to the meaning of love. Though modern man tries to hang everything on the word love, love can easily degenerate into something very much less because he really does not understand it. He has no adequate universal for love.
On the other hand, the Christian does have the adequate universal he needs in order to be able to discuss the meaning of love. Among the things we know about the Trinity is that the Trinity was before the creation of everything else and that love existed between the persons of the Trinity before the foundation of the world. This being so, the existence of love as we know it in our makeup does not have an origin in chance, but from that which has always been.
Above the line of anthropology, God the Father loved God the Son before the creation of the world—this is on a horizontal plane. On the vertical plane God also loves me, who am below the line of anthropology. The word and act of love has crossed the line of anthropology downward. Then, also on the vertical plane, I am to love God. The word and act of love has crossed the line of anthropology upward. Finally, I am commanded by God to love my wife, children, neighbors, below the line of anthropology. Here is the word and act of love horizontally below the line of anthropology.
The relationships of love can be shown like this:
Two things follow from this. First, I can know something truly of what it means when I am told that God the Father loves the Son. When I see a boy and a girl walking together arm in arm, obviously showing love towards each other, I do not know all that they feel towards one another; yet because I too love my woman, my looking at them is not as a dog would look at them. It is not exhaustive, but it is true understanding—there is true correlation. And when I talk about love existing in the Trinity before creation, I am not talking gibberish. Though I am very far from plumbing its depths when applied to God himself, yet the word love and the reality of love when Christ spoke of the Father loving him before the foundation of the world has true meaning for me.
Second, when I love my woman, its meaningfulness is not exhausted by the context of this one individual relationship alone, nor even the love of all men for all women, nor all finite love. The validity and meaning of love rest upon the reality that love exists between the Father and Son in the Trinity. When I say I love, instead of this being a nonsense word, it has meaning. It is rooted in what has always been in the personal relationship existing in the Trinity before the universe was created. Man’s love is not a product of chance that has no fulfillment in what has always been. Love is a thing not only of meaning but of beauty and wonder to be nourished in joy.
This then is the second great difference between Christianity and the new theology. The latter gives no basis for verifiable facts and knowing, including knowing the content of words used about God above the line of anthropology. Thus, such a word as love has no meaning or value beyond the realm of limited man. It should be obvious by this time that Christianity and the new theology have no relationship except the use of a common terminology with different meanings.