The Nature and Process of Divine Revelation
A cross-cultural and cross-textual approach
Pastor Steve
Instructor in Religion, Geography, and Humanities
Faculty Chair, 2018-2019
Abstract
This essay explores the phenomenon of divine inspiration and revelation in religious, spiritual, and philosophical literature across canons, historic contexts, and cultures. I explore the ideas that there is a common denominator connecting revelatory/inspired works and that these works, once inspired, are shaped by the egos and the cultures of authors and audiences. This project seeks to inform studies of revelatory/inspired material by examining the limits of human understanding, the concept of a bitstream, our encounters with complexity, and the possibility that even conflicting texts may offer insights into the deeper process of divine revelation. Revelation is examined in the light of contemporary theories of chaos and probability waves. The conclusion reached is a theory that revelation involves a crossover singularity, or flash of insight where an author is motivated to rearrange pre-existing information into a newly inspired work. In reaching this conclusion, I hope to assist other scholars in accepting the diversity of revealed texts and in recognising the theological importance of a common human theory of divine inspiration.
Part I. The finitude of knowledge and the infinitude of ignorance
Each of us is the prime shaper of our personal world by virtue of being its prime observer. We observe things as being both larger and smaller than ourselves, from both macro and micro perspectives. On the macro level, we can look outward and upward, at the stars, or the lights of the city that surrounds us. On the micro level, we can look inward, or downward at the smaller details of things. Collectively we observe things as small as atoms and as large as galaxies. We measure and chart their behaviors as best we can. Even so, no matter how hard we work, our comprehension of the whole picture is too complex for us to figure out. Some scientists can try to work it all out, but the equations involved rapidly become too complex. (Hawking 2002) Thus, our functional knowledge ends up being limited to an absurdly small span of the macro and the micro universe which we are able to comprehend. Some of us get a little further along the way, and others not so far. All of us form a world view or universe perspective based on the set of observations we are able to grasp.
Another way of modeling this is to look at how easy it is to comprehend relatively small numbers, and how difficult it is to comprehend very large numbers.
Think about the following list of numbers.
10
20
30
200
3,000.
300,000
300,000,000,000
7.65 1080
(Aleph-naught, or the set of all cardinal numbers)
Soon these numbers simply glide beyond our ability to comprehend them. The Crab Nebula is said to be approximately 6,523 light years away from us. That is a very long distance. One of the largest known “structures” in the universe is the Sloan Great Wall of Galaxies. It is said to be 1.4 billion light years across. How well do we comprehend these distances? The answer is that we do not comprehend large numbers very well at all. On the micro level, the Bohr radius of a hydrogen atom is said to be 6.2 x 10-31 cubic meters. Again, even on the micro scale, notice how hard it is for us to fully comprehend these distances.
Another way to frame these limitations to our comprehension is to observe that, as our field of view grows larger or smaller, outside our realm of familiarity, complexity increases and our ability to fully comprehend the picture before us decreases. Complexity is a way of describing the rapidly increasing number of factors which get in the way of our full comprehension of any given system or set of observations.
What we are left with, and what we must learn to be content with is a personal world that is more or less within our grasp. For most of us, this personal perceptual world consists of our life history, lived experience, our family, our friends, our associates, our profession, a few books we remember reading, and so forth. Outside this minute bubble of well understood information there is an ocean of data that remains beyond our grasp. Even the physicist, whose grasp so far exceeds that of the common person does not know why he or she exists as a conscious entity. These are the limits of human understanding. Our minds are mere bubbles of information floating within an ocean of ignorance. This makes it hard to ask the big questions. We are limited from the start if we ask about the nature of reality. We fear that we will fail at this task because the complexity involved in the basic nature of reality so far exceeds our ability to comprehend it. Even so, we must ask, and we must see how far we can get. It matters not how many have tried before us and fallen short. It matters not that we ourselves will fall short. The fun is in seeing how far we can get.
Part II. My methods and a personal history of encounters with inspiration
This project is about the human experience of inspiration, or divine revelation. Both of these labels will be interchangeable here. We will develop the idea that inspiration and revelation are basically the same thing and that the qualitative distinctions between the two processes stem from the culture and ego of the audience encountering the inspired work.
This is a broad investigation of the nature and process of inspiration, including religious, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and other forms of inspiration. The idea behind this approach is that there is a common denominator that underlies all forms of the human experience of inspiration and that this common denominator connects all the diverse forms of inspiration, including divine revelation. The methodology is based on a combination of religious humanism, literary criticism, systems thinking, chaos theory, and postmodern Protestant Christianity. The following personal account is meant to offer a road map of the scope of inspirations/revelations under consideration. With all doctrinal and faith considerations aside, the basic premise is that all of these forms of inspiration/revelation have something in common.
My narrative of inspiration began as a high school student, with the purchase of the Benjamin Thorpe transcription and word-for word translation of Beowulf. After learning to read the Dano-Saxon dialect in which this ancient poem was composed, inspiration came from seeing the very fabric of life in an ancient time. That text brought Anglo Saxon England to life.
My next encounter with inspiration came as an undergraduate, learning Greek and Latin. This brought an encounter with Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. Then came Augustine, Boethius, Ambrose, and Aquinas. Each of these texts seemed inspired in their own way.
In the summer between my undergraduate studies and seminary, I read The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ by Levi H. Dowling. I was both troubled and intrigued by the way Dowling used cadence and syntax in a way that mimicked the King James Version of the Bible as he constructed a narrative of the childhood of Jesus. I also noted the similarities between Dowling and Joseph Smith in their descriptions of the “translation” of their respective revealed texts.
Later came seminary, and immersion in the New Testament and the Old Testament. These texts led to an interest in the process of call in sacred texts, where the prophet experienced the voice of God and a call to share the message received from on high. These call narratives include Exodus 3, I Samuel 3, Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 1:4 ff, and Revelation 1:9ff. The Bible also led me to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA where I encountered countless smaller personal examples of inspiration shared over the years by parishioners.
Later years brought the collection and study of many other examples of human/divine revelation, including the Middle English Cloud of Unknowing, Gilgamesh, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, and Blake. Then came the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi Gospels, the Zohar, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Upanishads. I have also had the opportunity of encountering mystical revelatory texts such as The Book of Mormon, Swedenborg, the works of Helena Blavatsky, and the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.
Followers and devotees of some of these texts might claim that one text has a more perfect and direct divine connection over against another. It is easy to argue that one group of texts is divinely inspired while all the others are merely humanistic, and thus imperfect in their origins. This would be the approach of an organized religious and doctrinal perspective.
In the winter of 1996 through 1998 I had several experiences of personal inspiration in which I practiced automatic writing while in a trance state. This is where I found my personal experience of text creation. The result was a 300 page book called “The Music of the Spheres” which was published briefly online during the early days of the Internet. While it felt to me that this was an experience of divine inspiration, the feeling of composing The Music of the Spheres was also inherently ambiguous. It felt as if it was coming from outside, but it also felt like the composition of my own mind. The text itself was unorthodox in content, and that lack of orthodoxy led to a decision to withhold publication. Distribution of this text would not have been compatible with a career as a as a Presbyterian minister. The most amazing discovery I made while channelling the Music of the Spheres was just how upset, frightened, and angry some religious colleagues became over these texts. I began to understand what it meant to be unwelcome in one’s own country.
My experience with channeling happened when I was researching the work of James Hampton. Hampton was a visionary artist who created The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly. This sculpture group is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. My area of interest centered around Hampton’s Notebooks which are housed at the Smithsonian but were available at that time on microfilm. Hampton’s Notebooks are written in an unknown language thought to be some form of written glossolalia. I was not the first viewer of Hampton’s work to be inspired by it. In his book Time’s arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen J. Gould relates how he came to the synthesis necessary to complete this work by being inspired while viewing Hampton’s Throne.
This led me into the study of chaos theory, the work of Stephen Wolfram on cellular automata in A New Kind of Science, and the monumental work of Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. In reading various works in chaos theory, the most significant for me was Herb Shaw, Craters Cosmos, and Chronology; a New Theory of Earth. While his work may be obscure, Shaw showed how the principles of deterministic chaos apply universally on all scales. This opened the door for a connection between chaos theory and the humanistic theology of divine revelation.
In the winter of 2017 I had another opportunity to read read the Divine Comedy of Dante and to contrast it with an antithetical but still seemingly inspired text known as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, also known as the Strife of Love in a Dream. These texts are amazingly inspired, but they stand as polar opposites of each other. Dante is based on a well articulated vision of Platonic idealism as a spiritual reality. The Hypnerotomachia is a counter version of Dante where the idealism is expressed in purely material as opposed to spiritual terms. Here we have two inspired texts, both deeply rooted in scholastic philosophy, which are in complete conflict with one another.
Most recently I have come upon a Biblical commentary on Luke by Denis the Carthusian, an early Renaissance Doctor Ecstaticus. Denis was a Carthusian monk and a Catholic theologian. He was a prolific mystical writer who was said to have spent hours at a time in the grip of some form of spiritual possession. His works, dating to the mid 15th century are instructive in that his writing process was clearly revelatory/inspirational, but he did not cross any boundaries of accepted church doctrine. Denis was a prophet who was welcome in his own country. His writing was both accessible and prolific. It aimed at reforming and strengthening the institutions of the church by reforming and strengthening the faith of individuals. His work was quite clearly inspired, yet it was also completely accepted by the cultural milieu of the 15th century church.
My journey into inspired literatures has also led me to be influenced by science fiction authors, including Dan Simmons, Neil Stephenson, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Let us also not forget A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. These inspired fiction writers have composed stories revolving around texts and how sacred texts come to influence the larger society. These novels also introduced the idea of a quantum singularity offering a connection between worlds, and the idea of aggregations within the physical world being seen as standing probability waves. While these ideas may not exactly fit into orthodox physics, they are helpful in finding postmodern language with which to describe the process and experience of revelation.
Part III: Some basic principles:
Revelation = bitstream
Culture and ego will alter and shape that bitstream
Divine intervention can be a way of oversimplifying complexity
The first step in framing the process of human revelation/inspiration is to see it as a bitstream. We are looking at some form of data flow. We do not know if it originates within the human brain or if it arrives from some other place. We know that it is a stream of information and therefore it should behave in much the same way as other streams of information. Being inspired, and composing a text are two sides of the same process. We may receive inspiration from outside, but we process it inside.
The War Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QM, 4Q491-496) is an impressively angry document as are the later chapters of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. From the work of Elisabeth Kubler Ross, we know that anger is one of the stages of grief. The anger evident in these texts is connected to the grief of the apocalyptic destruction and ruin brought about because of trauma experienced over centuries, from the Maccabean Revolt down to the Jewish War and subsequent persecution of early Christians. While these texts are inspired in their own way, they are also completely shaped by the dynamics of culture, ego, and historic context.
All inspired/revealed works must be filtered through the mind of the original authors. The collective dynamics of culture and ego in the audience will in turn dictate which texts get lifted up into some sort of canon and venerated by a given religion, and which texts end up being stuck in a cave and forgotten. Some make it a long way, and others vanish.
Religious considerations and semantics would dictate that revelation comes from God, while inspiration is a more normal, or average human experience. This qualitative distinction is itself a function of ego and culture. The normal claim is; “My text is of God, but yours falls short.” Our canon of inspired texts is THE CANON, and all others belong to some other, lesser field of inquiry. If a given text causes cognitive dissonance in a reader, it must be “of the devil,” while more agreeable texts are accepted. Qualitative assessments of inspiration grow from our ego and culture. We appreciate and venerate certain texts because our culture and our traditions tell us to do this. If we lived in Borneo in 1600, the Hikajat Bandjar would be much higher on our list of important texts. If we set aside the considerations of ego and culture, we will be free to see all inspired texts as possibly originating from the same “place.” “Place” is in quotation marks here because we do not know where it is or what sort of place we are talking about. Do these texts come exclusively from the human mind, or might they come from outside?
Traditional religious thinking dictates that our preferred form of revelation or divine inspiration comes from God. In the modern era, this appears to be a dramatic form of oversimplification. If we cannot grasp the complexity of a given event, we might repeat the meme that God simply spoke a given text into being. This idea of divine intervention goes back a long way. There is a common formula from Homer; “Such was the plan of God.” If we need to explain something we do not understand, we can simply say; “God wills it.” So it is with inspiration. If we do not understand where scripture comes from, we can claim that a given text is the “word of the Lord.” The point here is not to denigrate divine inspiration, or to deny it, but to seek to understand it in the light of contemporary understandings of energy and information flow.
Part IV: Standing waves of macro-probability
We know from quantum mechanics that aggregations of material take form through a process that moves from a random state to a fixed, or ordered state. This is the process variously understood and discussed as quantum wave collapse. Any object, or related set of objects may be seen as a standing quantum energy wave. Beyond the quantum level, in ordinary life, we see processes of macro-probability. These words describe the way things change from not existing, to existing, and on again to not existing. Any object at different times may “not be.” Then, later on, it “might come into being”, or it “might not.” Then, it “is.” At the point where an object exists, the probability of its existing is 100%. Its probability wave may be said to have collapsed.
Any physical object, natural or human made, may be seen as flowing from a random state of different materials through a fixed state, and then on to a deteriorating state. In the end, all objects return to the random material soup from which they came. As objects arise naturally, or as they are manufactured, they arise from the randomness of miscellaneous materials. Once they take form, they maintain form for a period of time. Then they begin to deteriorate until they return once again to the randomness of materials from which they were composed. The duration of time for things to stay in a given form varies according to the material they are composed of and the environment in which they exist.
Revelations and inspirations can be seen in the same way. A revelatory or inspired work begins its life somewhere in the random soup of human thought. For a while, the probability that a given inspired work will take form is zero. There was zero chance that the plays of Shakespeare would take form during the first ice age. As a given work begins to take form, the probability of its doing so increases until the bitstream (text) involved is complete. At that point the probability reaches 100%. Then, within the collective environment of ego and culture, the text will hold its form for a period of time. For example, in the case of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, we are at somewhere around 407 years and going strong. The Biblia Vulgata has been around longer, at around 1600 years. The probability of these texts remaining in their present form tomorrow or next week or next month is 100%. Later though, some centuries or millennia, or ten thousand years from now, they may cease to exist. The probability of their holding form will return to zero once again. When Jesus said; “The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my logoi will not pass away,” (Mt. 24:35) was he speaking of the collected documents of the New Testament? Was he speaking of the Gideon Bible? Or, was he speaking of the meaningful revelatory impulses of God?
There is an important core understanding of text at work here. Fundamental religious believers tend to see their text in its entirety as having arrived in finished form from God. In conversations with Christian fundamentalists one gains the impression not only that the KJV arrived from God, but that all other forms of human inspiration are to be ignored. For postmodern Christians, texts can be both inspired and also subject to critical analysis.
If the human mind receives inspiration from some outside transmitter, why are the transmissions so ambiguous? Why are inspirations so unclear and in potential disagreement with one another? Traditionally, such communications have been regarded as being two way. God speaks and we pray. We have a long standing problem though, because the signal is frequently weak and subject to all sorts of interference. God speaks, we listen, and we speak to God. Unfortunately, our conversations are often not very effective. Something gets lost in the translation. Noise becomes signal and signal becomes noise. Instead of a straightforward, clear, and unambiguous communication system, we have an abundance of different products of inspiration which we can use in a multiplicity of ways according to our own free will. Obviously this gets confusing. Our temptation is to join one order or another so as to claim the superiority of whichever set of communications we prefer. This is fine, except that we constantly risk the temptation to fall into conflict with those people who have chosen another, different line of communication. This discord may be the biggest challenge faced by postmodern religious systems.
Circumstances, the cultural and social environments, must all be right in order for a given inspired or revealed text to take form and to keep form. These bitstreams belong to the nature and character of the times and places where they take form. When those times and places pass on, the bitstreams of inspired texts will soon pass on with them. The process of revelation may begin as a standing probability wave within the minute process of human thought, and this standing probability wave can grow, under the right conditions to a larger standing wave in the form of a recognized text stream which then holds form and influence for a period of time.
Part V: Thesis
The thesis presented here is that revelation originates from two places at once. It originates within the mind of the composer, but it also originates from some energy outside ourselves. An energy source assists us somehow in arranging the bitstream of data we have taken in through the course of our daily lives. In this sense, the process of revelation is not so much a matter of; “The Spirits told me such and such a message.” Instead, what is happening is; “The Spirits helped me to figure out what I already knew.” Enlightenment/revelation/inspiration occurs when we experience a subtle rearrangement of the bitstream of data we already possess.
It is amazing how the coincidences or synchronicities of life add up in such a way as to help us find our way through the maze of understanding a complex world. A few of the major streams of coincidence which impact our revelatory experiences consist of the people we have had the opportunity to speak with, the art we have encountered, and the books we have found to read. These streams of coincidence can feel miraculous. We might be pondering a given question when a person we are speaking with will say something that brings things into amazing focus. The same thing happens when some book seems to fall into our hands. We have a strong subjective sense of an outside guiding power, but we still must do the external work of composition.
In certain moments, when the other noises and demands of the world have fallen silent, this external power provides us with inspiration by arranging the information we already possess.
If we examine the Biblical Book of Revelation in the light of these observations, we can note that there is a connection between the Book of Revelation, the War Scroll, the Book of Daniel, and other sources within Hebrew apocalyptic literature. When John received his visions, he was working with the symbolic and cultural vocabulary he had already acquired from his experiences. Perhaps Solomon said it best when he claimed that “there is nothing new under the sun.” (Eccl. 1:10) When we are inspired, we reprocess the data we have put into our minds through other sources.
While it may not be doctrinally correct, subjective experience encourages us to believe that the process of being inspired allows us to rearrange data that already exists within our minds, but it does not necessarily provide us with previously unseen or unknown data. The only information we possess is that which we have already received by reading, watching, dreaming, listening, or otherwise experiencing the data input of our world. This is an important consideration because it places each inspirational/revelatory process solidly within it’s cultural and historic context. This also explains why prophets may intuit the future, but they seldom predict it accurately. This is not to deny the process of discovery in revelation, but to suggest that discovery happens when we see the data we possess in a different light or a different arrangement.
The Biblical concept of “the firmament” in Genesis 1 is useful for distinguishing a “brane,” or structure which separates the external process of inspiration from the internal process. Both Swedenborg (AC.N.32) and Zohar (I:21a 160) offer great expositions of the boundary, or border between heaven and earth. This is the division between the microcosmos of human understanding and the macrocosmos of divine wisdom.
For purposes of discussion, let us construct such a line between heaven and earth. This line is the brane, or boundary between two data sets. On the earthly side we have the perceptual data we have gathered through our culture and our lived experience. On the heavenly side we have the dataset God wishes to communicate to us through all these filters of free will, culture, and ego.
This model of divine inspiration is in firm agreement with the Zohar, where single words, and even single letters of the Torah play in a metaphysical dance before crystallizing into the text of Genesis. This idea is in firm disagreement with various forms of fundamentalism. The fundamentalist perspective would insist that the whole, inerrant text was delivered in a finished state, and that this text must be accepted without criticism, in its entirety. If we set aside the fundamental outlook, we can see that the model of revelation suggested here has profound implications for postmodern Christianity because it enables us to see different texts as they are, as both divinely inspired and as humanly constructed. We can see a diversity of texts as all being products of human culture and divine intervention. The key is to realize that the singularity, or micro-bolt of inspiration occurs within the quantum micro-energetic phenomena of human thought. The whole thing, inspired, or mundane, occurs within that subtle process of thought. This means that the individual, the thinker, has the privilege of deciding what to do with the inspiration, whether to build upon it, develop, and present it or to ignore it.
We need to be clear that the word “singularity” comes from the genre of science fiction and not from the orthodox discipline of Physics. Within science fiction it is used to describe the micro-junction between worlds. While this may be an imagined construct in the eyes of the physicist, it can also be helpful for relating the broad idea of information in some minute form moving from one realm to the next.
Seen in this way, scripture was not dictated by God to the saintly authors of the canon. Instead, a group of human beings, under the unique stresses and the opportunities of ego and culture received an inspiring micro-stimulus which encouraged them to compose texts constructed from the bitstream of information available through their lived experience, culture, and historic context. Postmodern readers today can choose to encounter these texts with an eye for contemporary relevance, inward inspiration, and outward benefit.
In terms of information flow, the work of Stephen Wolfram on cellular automata offers a possible illustration of this concept of a quantum singularity, or micro scale of inspiration. Cellular automata are the smallest and most simple computer programs we have, yet, as illustrated in Wolfram’s work, they can produce the most amazing and complex images if allowed to run over time.
The idea is that a micro-burst of creative stimulus crossing the brane of separation between worlds is sufficient to cause the mind of the person receiving it to reorder and rearrange the dataset of information they possess into a larger inspired work.
Another question about this process is the problem of the Angel Moroni. Moroni was the angel who mediated the revelations received by Joseph Smith. Throughout the history of inspiration there has been a Muse, an Angel, a vision, a mediator of some sort. These visionary images, voices, and other deliverers of revelation are ubiquitous in inspired literature. This may suggest that such cultural constructs are necessary, even essential to the process of human inspiration. Without them we would fail to believe enough in ourselves to construct the work we are called to do. The filter of ego can diminish our work as well as it can expand it. As Jeremiah said; “Ah, Lord Yahweh,behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a child.” (Jer.1:6) Without the social construct of the Muse, the Voice, or the Vision, ego alone would be insufficient to allow the process of inspiration to unfold.
Part VI: A case study examining inspiration within two opposing texts.
There are two texts that have both been historically venerated as inspired by different faith communities while also being clearly antithetical to each other. These texts are Surah 18, Al-Kahf in the Quran, and Chapter 10 of the Gospel of John. An examination of both texts in the light of the ideas about revelation presented above may be useful.
In Surah 18, the Prophet states at the opening that it is a big mistake for unbelievers to claim that God has a son. Then, the Prophet is offered consolation for his intense grief over the unbeliever’s refusal to accept the revelation of the Holy Quran. This introduces the story of the sleepers in the cave where a group of true believers fleeing from persecution find sanctuary in a cave. They sleep in this cave for 309 years with the sensation that only a short time has passed. They discover the passage of time only when one of them ventures to a market place to buy food where his age is discovered by the ancient coins he attempts to use.
At the start of Al Kahf, in verse 6, the Prophet is in despair. “Will you kill yourself for grief of them if they do not believe in this presentation?” (Ahmed Ali tr.) This comes just after the admonition of the profound error of claiming that God has a son in verse 4. “It (this revelation) may warn those who say: “God has begotten a son.” They have no knowledge of this, as their fathers did not have.” (Ahmed Ali tr.) Then comes the story of the sleepers in the cave. If an interested non-islamic reader approaches this text as inspired, without fear of any doctrinal or denominational conflict, the cave itself is an allegory for the peace and eternally silent tranquility of Islam. Islam is the place of “better reward, where those who do right will abide forever.” (Paraphrase from verses 2-3) How excellent is that resting place. (cf. verse 31) If we see the cave as an allegory in this way, we can equate it with other caves in other revelatory texts, such as the Cave of Hira, the cave of Ezekiel in I Kings 19:9ff., the cave of Lazarus, or the cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos. In Surah 18, the cave holding some number of sleeping true believers could represent the silent and eternal sanctuary of the peace of God, the silent space in which the singularity of revelation occurs. Outside that cave we find the loud, confusing, and rambling marketplace of inevitable social change and conflict. The story is an allegory that tells us not to sweat the disagreeable details, like the precise number of sleepers, or even the fact that this is an early Christian story, or that the Christians and Jews will not accept the revelation, but instead to seek refuge within the peace and quiet of absolute faith in One God.
The opposite text in John 10 calls us to examine the violent conflict within a faith that distinguishes sharply between the mortal (human) and the immortal, between the will of the flesh and the will of God. In John 10:31 and following, Jesus is about to be stoned for making himself like God, and stating; “I am the Son of God.” This passage is positioned in the Gospel right before Lazarus, another sleeper, is called forth from his cave, we find a series of statements made by Jesus. “I and the Father are One.” (John 10:30) “I say you are Gods,” (10:34, quoting Psalm 82:6.) “I AM the Son of God.” (10:36), and “for the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” (10:38) Then the sleeper (Lazarus) arises from the cave of death because the sleeper has discovered the truth of relationship with God through the peace of connection with the person of God. This is what happens when people sacrifice the distractions of their own agenda to the higher calling of the Peace of God.
The difficulty here is to understand that inspired texts can also be antithetical to one another. The real conflict arises from our own hearts, our ego, and our culture, as we struggle to make our revelations heard. The solution is to enter the silence in which the singularity flash of revelation can be detected and acted upon. The outward cultural evolutions of these texts may remain conflicted. One may lead to the sacrifice and obedience of Islam, while the other leads to Western individualism and humanism. The point is not that the texts agree, but that they both lead believers into a place of connection with the Divine. As we examine different revelations, our task should not be to locate the error of the other, but to see the flashes of truth extant within them all.
Part VII: Conclusions
Some may argue that we have attempted to possess our cake and also to eat it. We are not willing to adopt the perspective of absolute humanism, whereby inspiration is simply another thing that human minds do. We have insisted on keeping God in the picture in such a way as to explain how it is that so many different revelations are so different from one another. Isaiah 55:11 provides an excellent example of two ways we could interpret the idea of divine revelation. “Thus the word which comes out of my mouth shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I will, and prosper in that for which I sent it.” We could see this as a fundamental statement that the various promises and prophecies of the Bible will eventually be literally fulfilled. In this case, the power of the word comes to be limited to a faithful group of people waiting like Millerites for something that may never happen.
This essay is meant to demonstrate an alternative for postmodern believers. We could see that this Word, this “Dabar”, “Logos,” or “Verbum” is a primordial signal that sets in motion a chain of inspired actions and reactions. These actions and reactions are part of a process that leads to the construction of a culturally specific set of texts which can continue to inspire a diversity of meaningful faith responses. We have suggested that God sends signals to humanity, but that these signals are more like stimuli than finished texts. We have suggested that God does not provide a single definitive text for all humanity to follow, but rather, God provides an initial Logos of inspiration which we may build upon and shape to fit the demands of the times in which we live. Might it be that God does this because God loves differences? What if God loves the other? What if God loves ambiguity and even creative conflict in our human process? This might in turn lead us, not to magnify some doctrinal or denominational theology of revelation, but a much more human way of seeing the way the light of God constructs, and celebrates the multifaceted products of human achievement. I hope that this essay, inspired or uninspired as time may tell, may shed some light on this confusing process of revelation.
Bibliography
Biblical quotations are translated by the author.
Quotations from the Quran are from the translation of Ahmed Ali as published in Sacred Writings, vol. 3. Pelican, Jaroslav, ed. Quality paperback, New York, 1992.
Alighieri, Dante. Tutte le opere. Newton Compton editori, s.t.l. Rome 1993.
Blavatsky, Helena P. Collected Writings. Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill. 1988
Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Salt Lake City.
Colonna, Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili The Strife of Love in a Dream. Translated by Joscelyn Godwin. Thames and Hudson, New York, 1999.
Dionysii Carthysiani. In Evangelium Lucae. Iobannem Roigny, Paris, 1542.
Dowling, Levi H. The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ The Philosophic and Practical Basis of the Religion of the Aquarian Age of the World and of the Church Universal. L. N. Fowler and Company, London, 1920.
Gleick, James. Chaos, the Making of a New Science. Penguin Books, New York, 1987.
Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. First Vintage Books, New York, 2011.
Gould, Stephen J. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1987.
Hampton, James, Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly and Notebooks. Sculpture group and manuscript housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.
Hawking, Stephen, ed. On the Shoulders of Giants the Great Works of Physics and Astronomy. Running Press, Philadelphia, 2002.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid. Basic Books, New York, 1999.
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