God's Wider Presence

Reconsidering General Revelation

Robert K. Johnston

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780801049453
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441246288
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What are we to make of those occasional yet illuminating experiences of God's presence that occur outside both church and Scripture? We may encounter God's revelatory presence as we experience a beautiful sunset, the birth of a child, or a work of art, music, or literature. While theologians have tended to describe such experiences abstractly as mere traces or echoes, those involved often recognize such moments of transcendence as transformative.

Here senior theologian Robert Johnston explores how Christians should think theologically about God's wider revelatory presence that is mediated outside the church through creation, conscience, and culture. The book offers a robust, constructive biblical theology of general revelation, rooting its insights in the broader Trinitarian work of the Spirit. Drawing in part from the author's theological engagement with film and the arts, the book helps Christians understand personal moments of experiencing God's transcendence and accounts for revelatory experiences of those outside the believing community. It also shows how God's revelatory presence can impact our interaction with nonbelievers and those of other faiths.

1
God’s Wider Revelation

George Steiner, in his wonderful book Real Presences, writes of the “triumph of the secondary” in our Western culture. What he bemoans is not, “as Ecclesiastes would have it, that ‘of making many books there is no end.’ It is that ‘of making books on books on those books there is no end.’” Rather than concentrate on direct encounters with God’s “real Presence” through art, music, and literature, we seek out talk about such talk—talk that is a diversion, “both in the sense of deflection and of entertainment.” He writes, “We seek the immunities of indirection. In the agency of the critic, reviewer or mandarin commentator, we welcome those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation.”1 Steiner’s comments remind me of the story Søren Kierkegaard once told. He said that in the vestibule of an auditorium there were two doors. Above the one door was a sign labeled “heaven.” Above the other door was a sign labeled “lecture about heaven.” And people flocked through the door labeled “lecture.”

For many, Steiner’s and Kierkegaard’s critiques of Western civilization’s Enlightenment project seem particularly apropos of theology. Book after book is written as a dialogue with other books on the same subject. Little attention is given to the Original source of their reflection. Everything seems second order. While there is much to be gained from the wisdom of others, there is also much to be said for beginning from the beginning, with first-order experience, particularly when the subject matter is God’s revelation to us. Rather than understanding theology as “knowing God,” what some today label “spirituality,” we instead have defined theology over the last several centuries as “knowledge about God.” Rather than reflecting on our personal experience with T/transcendence, we have too often settled for intellectual conviction based on detached philosophical argument.2 It is such sterility that has led to a dead end in regard to the topic of general revelation that this book seeks to address. The time for an experientially rooted, biblically based theology of God’s wider revelational Presence is surely at hand.

Some Initial Stories

As modernity comes to its end and we move ever more strongly into the postmodern era, the use of first-order testimony is increasingly important. The overreliance on detached argument has become suspect. Most of us now recognize that we think perspectivally. For this reason, we long for story, whether others’ or our own. And theology is no different. Consider these two examples.

While many commentators on Paul Tillich’s theology have referenced his method of correlation as key to understanding his thought, others have rightly noted an experience he had as a young adult that proved foundational to his thinking. Living through the horror of World War I as an army chaplain on the front lines, Tillich was granted a furlough. Traveling back to Berlin, he went to an art museum for respite. There he saw a painting by Botticelli titled Madonna and Child with Singing Angels. Tillich likened the event to a baptism. He said the experience was transformative of his spirit (he called it “almost a revelation”), opening him to an element of depth in human experience that provided him a “potent analogue” for talking about religious experience more generally. What happened to him, he said, was a “breakthrough.”3 Tillich labeled this early experience with Botticelli’s painting “revelatory ecstasy.” He wrote, “A level of reality opened to me which had been covered up to this moment, although I had some feeling before of its existence.” Tillich had, he said, “an encounter with the power of being itself.”4 We will return to this experience in chapter 3. It is enough, here, to note that in Tillich’s theological formulations, his primal experience of God’s Presence, mediated through and within a painting, proved foundational for all his later theological reflection. Without rooting his thought in this revelatory event, readers of Tillich’s theology risk reducing his thought to a system, in the process failing to grasp adequately its origin in mystery and wonder.5

In a similar way, one cannot understand the theology of C. S. Lewis without reading his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. In that book, Lewis describes a series of sporadic experiences that occurred during his youth—playing with the toy garden his brother made for him in the lid of a biscuit tin, listening to Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin read by his mother, smelling a currant bush, listening to Wagner, reading Norse mythology, and, while at university, encountering Euripides’s Hippolytus. Most significant, he said, was his reading of George MacDonald’s Phantastes. These experiences surprised him with “Joy.” He reflected: “It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my body, or behind me. If it had eluded me by its distance, it now eluded me by its proximity—something too near to see, too close to be understood, on this side of knowledge.”6 Again, we will return to a fuller dialogue with Lewis later in the book. But what is to be noted here is that crucial to his understanding of theology were these foundational encounters with the Divine that occurred outside the church and without any explicit reference to Jesus Christ.

Tillich later labeled his experience of God’s wider Presence a “feeling of ultimate concern.” Lewis spoke of a “Bright Shadow,” or simply “Joy.” We will in the pages that follow consider Friedrich Schleiermacher, who wrote of “a feeling of absolute dependence,” and Rudolf Otto, who described such experiences as a “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (a mystery that is awe-filled and yet inviting). It is not just theologians, however, whether liberal or conservative, who reference such experiences as foundational or transformative to their life and thought. Such encounters are the repeated subject of artists, as well. For example, in her novel All New People (1989), Anne Lamott has Nanny Goodman, her quasi-autobiographical young heroine, say about her parents, “Now my father didn’t believe in God, but he believed in the existence of the sacred, of the holy; it was pretty hard not to believe in anything in the face of Bach, or our mountain. . . . My mother believed that God lit the stars and spoke directly through family and friends, musicians and writers, madmen and children, and nature—and not, as she had been raised to believe, through a booming voice from the heavens.”7 Writing in a similar vein, John Updike has one of his characters, David Kern, speak of an experience he has had as “supernatural mail on foreign soil.” His transcendent experience took place while on his way home from the hospital where his wife was giving birth to their daughter, as he helped a dying cat that had been hit by a car. The juxtaposition of death and life, life and death, came together for him as a moment in time, yet out of time. David concluded, “The incident had the signature, decisive but illegible.”8

Two Reasons for the Importance of Our Investigation

One of the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982) speaks in similar terms of the arts as providing “supernatural shudders.” This is seemingly also what happened to Albert Einstein when he went to a concert early in the career of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. After the concert, Einstein said to the musician, “Thank you, Mr. Menuhin; you have again proved to me that there is a God in heaven.”9 In narrating the story, Richard Viladesau concludes, “Aesthetic experience seems to play a major role—at least for some people—in the exercise of the practical judgment for belief in God—perhaps a great deal more than the traditional ‘proofs’ of God’s existence set forth in apologetic theology.”10 Confirming such a judgment, George Barna in a poll taken in 2000 found that 20 percent of Americans turned to “media, arts and culture” as their primary means of spiritual experience and expression, and the percentage was growing.11

If the reality of “media, arts and culture” as a primary locus of spiritual meaning for many in Western society is one stimulus for reconsidering our theology of God’s revelatory Presence outside the church and without direct reference to Jesus Christ, our increasingly frequent encounters with adherents of other religions is a second. What are we to make of the faith-filled insights and numinous experiences of those we meet who are not Christians? The witness to God’s wider revelatory Presence in life is the testimony of many, perhaps most, people.12 David Hay and Kate Hunt report, for example, that in a national sample in England taken in 2000, while less than 10 percent of those polled went to church, 76 percent reported having a spiritual experience of some kind, and these 76 percent clearly went beyond those with a Christian background.13 Hay and Hunt also observe that their findings are consistent with the evidence from comparative religion, where there are few, if any, limitations on where or when such moment(s) of religious awareness can take place: “There are records of such moments during childbirth, at the point of death, during sexual intercourse, at a meal, during fasting, in a cathedral, on a rubbish dump, on a mountaintop, in Islam, in association with a particular plant, stone, fish, mammals, bird and so on ad infinitum . . . though it is worth repeating that there seems to be no way of ‘switching them on.’”14 With this testimony and warning, Hay and Hunt echo what believers have recognized for centuries. As Irenaeus said in his Against Heresies: “For man does not see God by his own powers; but when He pleases He is seen by men, by whom He wills, and when He wills, and as He wills.”15

The theologian Paul Metzger says he was converted to Christ in a Buddhist temple. For my student David Johnson, a significant encounter with God came while watching the movie Grand Canyon (d. Kasdan, 1991). For another student, Chris Min, it was while watching Magnolia (d. Anderson, 1999); for me, it was while watching Becket (d. Glenville, 1964); for Patrick Oden, it was while reading Milton. According to the vision statement of Sanctus 1, an emerging church in Manchester, England: “We believe that God is already active in our world.” “We recognise God’s indefinable presence in music, film, art and other key areas of contemporary culture.” This church states that it wishes to affirm and enjoy all in our culture that gives voice to one of the many voices of God, while challenging those areas that deafen the call of God.16

In my teaching in theology and the arts, it is a common experience for me to hear students relate stories of their own transcendent experiences that they have had while reading a book or viewing a movie. March of the Penguins, Magnolia, Lars and the Real Girl, The Year of Living Dangerously, Field of Dreams, American Beauty, The Last Temptation of Christ, Departures, The Tree of Life—the list of movies referenced by them includes secular and religious themes, documentaries and feature films, movies that are “G” rated and “R” rated, gritty and romantic, studio and art house. We will return to look at these testimonials more carefully in chapter 3. Others speak of such revelatory moments as occurring at the birth of their child, as with David Kern, or when on a mountaintop, or when listening to music, or when joining others in a march for justice. One cannot predict or produce on demand these revelatory moments that occur outside of the church; they come as moments of grace. But however infrequent and serendipitous, they are nonetheless the experience of most of us. The experiences do not come from the arts alone, nor are they only a response to encountering nature, or participating in the furtherance of goodness. Unable to be coerced, they come randomly, but persistently, through creation, conscience, and culture. We will need to consider these three loci of God’s wider revelational Presence in some detail as the book unfolds. But here it is enough to note the phenomena.

The question I wish to deal with in this book is this: What are we to make theologically of these repeated descriptions of wider experiences in life that are understood by the participants as “revelatory” of God? How, that is, are we as Christians to understand such divine moments that seem not to be primarily directed toward our salvation and/or judgment (except, of course, in the larger sense that all God’s activity is ultimately interconnected), but rather focus simply on grace and encounter. (Think Job, not John; Abimelech, not Joshua.) How are we to understand those theological experiences of God that find their trinitarian roots pneumatologically, not christologically? Such revelatory experiences seem not to be deducible by human reason as we observe God’s footprints in creation, though some such deduction/imprint/vestige/trace (what Luther called “natural knowledge”) might have its own very limited validity. Nor are they producible solely by human effort, though they can be invited and certain aspects of creation, conscience, and culture seem more conducive to their reception than others (e.g., a sunset rather than a concrete parking lot; music of Mozart rather than the sound of nails on a chalkboard). No, the experiences that many judge revelatory are more than the reception of an echo of God’s past activity or human projection of that which is transcendent to ourselves. Rather, these encounters with God’s wider revelatory Presence are always serendipitous, something that lies beyond all human wisdom or agenda, but that nevertheless has inherent and at times transformative value for those experiencing them. It is on such revelatory experiences that we will focus in this book.

Revelation outside the Walls of the Church: A Largely Neglected Topic

Revelation, said Karl Barth, “is what human beings cannot tell themselves.”17 It is, in Tim Gorringe’s words, “the bridge between heaven and earth, human experience and the transcendent.”18 Yet Christians have largely ignored that bridge when it has occurred outside the Christian community and without direct reference to Jesus Christ. They have too often been leery and skeptical to talk about God’s wider revelatory Presence. Perhaps this is because we are unsure how to sort out human projections from such revelation—“the making-known of what we truly cannot tell ourselves in and through the events we experience and in our language,” to again quote Gorringe.19 It appears to many, particularly among those Christians of a more conservative theological persuasion, that, to paraphrase Barth, those testifying of such transcendent experiences are simply speaking of God by shouting “man/woman.”

But though some of us are quick to posit such judgments, we also live uneasily with our own sporadic experiences of the “More”—with those moments of Grace that seem to put all other moments into perspective. We are unsure what to say about those liminal occurrences that cross the threshold beyond human projection. As C. S. Lewis came to realize, the joy he experienced through art and nature was not of his making, but was his response to a “Joy” that he encountered from beyond. But how can we be sure? Again, the question intrudes: How are we to understand theologically such “sacred” encounters?

There have been in the last fifty years relatively few monographs written on “general revelation”—the term usually given to that communion with the divine that takes place outside the church and its Scripture, and without direct reference to Jesus Christ. (In the pages that follow, I will argue that the term is a m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. God's Wider Revelation
• 2. Experiencing God Today
• 3. Reflecting on Experience
• 4. Broadening Our Biblical Focus, Part 1
• 5. Broadening Our Biblical Focus, Part 2
• 6. Engaging the Tradition
• 7. Moved by the Spirit
• 8. God's Wider Revelation Reconsidered
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Notes
• Back Cover