The Theology of Light and Sight

An Interfaith Perspective

Kenneth L. Vaux, K. K. Yeo, Vaux, Yeo

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608997732
  9781498257657
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498273961
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

And God said: "Let there be light." And there was light. These words mark the first step in the creation of all life. The very genesis of light is tied to the nature and purpose of God--God as the author of light, as the pouring out of light, as light itself. Believers in the three Abrahamic faiths have always understood God as light. The Hebrew scriptures celebrate this divine illumination: "Yahweh is my light and my salvation . . ." (Psalm 27). Christians, too, proclaim that "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1.5). For Muslims, "Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth" (Sura 24.35). And theologians and mystics of all ages have explored the revelation and meaning of divine light. This volume explores the theme of divine illumination in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Theologians, physicians, and philosophers share their wisdom and understanding of the uncreated light that God is, the created physical light of the world, and the relationship of enlightenment to human reason and ethics. Contributors: Philip Amerson Jamal Badawi Kimberley Curnyn Mark A. Dennis, Jr. Souleymane Bachir Diagne Wendy Doniger Peter Knobel Larry Murphy William Murphy Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Morton Schapiro Jan van Eys Kenneth L. Vaux Sara Anson Vaux Richard Vaux Julie Windsor Mitchell K.K. Yeo

Part 1

Scriptures and Theology

1

Light and Sight in Interfaith Theology and Ethics

Kenneth L. Vaux

Introduction

Our Project Interfaith finds birth today after nearly a year of planning. We begin with a spectroscopic view of the issues explored in our inaugural workshop on Light and Sight in interfaith perspective. We seek to scope out how the One God of all Truth and Life illumines this world and its peoples of faith. If the Semitic/Hellenic faiths of Abraham—along with the cognate faiths of Africa, India, China, and other regions of the world—are theologically valid and their witness is ethically virtuous, then such biblically animated divine illumination will shine as we illumine each other, will forgive us as we forgive one another, feed us as we feed each other, and redeem us as we acknowledge and prompt redemption in one another.

We meet here in Chicago, the inaugural host city of the Council for a Parliament of the World Religions, and in Evanston, host city of the 1954 World Council of Churches whose theme was “Christ: The Light of the World.” We seek to stand in that heritage in which mutual consultation and service brings radiance to this dark world as “we let our light so shine that the world may see our good works and glorify our heavenly Father” (Matt 5:16).

The workshop, like a symphony, flows in three movements. In the first movement, we seek to lay down fundamental structures, purposes, and convictions. Following this introductory essay, we will rehearse the strains of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interfaith theologies. The Christian refrain, presented by Northwestern Medievalist Barbara Newman, gives us a window into the Christian picture of faith and devotion as depicted by Hildegard of Bingen—in her conviction that God is “Living Light.” Hildegard expressed these perceptions of God in texts, songs, and artistic drawings in that age of Camelot insight and interfaith awareness. “Living Light,” Newman contended, drew on biblical understanding, yes, but principally on classical, Neo-Platonic, and Aristotelian metaphysical and theological understandings of God and human life. The membrane between those two Weltanschauungen, of course, is very porous, especially if we define a biblical worldview in inter-Abrahamic terms.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, the Russian historian and Northwestern chair of Jewish Studies, then walked us through an advanced Yeshiva tutorial on the biblical-Talmudic, then midrashic unfolding of the motif of Divine light. His thesis—that a minor theme in J, E, D, and P—the authorial strands of Torah as understated in Heschel’s first three Judaisms—biblical, rabbinic, and Talmudic—then becomes pronounced in Hasidic and Kabbalistic renditions of the faith. In the discussion that followed, Shtern’s star light and his parlance was most illuminating—the reader will note—as he waxed lyrical on the themes of color, green in particular, in the inner sanctum of holiness.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, one of our world’s eminent philosophers of Islam and science, delighted his audience with the florid light-brilliance of Muslim theology as seen by Sufi eyes.

Movement two in this first symphony of Project Interfaith is a collage of artistic renderings ranging from ophthalmologist Kim Curnyn’s moving screen of sight grounded in biblical narrative and clinical care around the world—to the challenging words about the indispensable vitalities of faith in university, seminary, and community by Northwestern President Morton Schapiro and Garrett-Evangelical President Philip Amerson—and respondents from that clergy community. Concluding the day were moving analyses of the light afforded by brush and film from frere Richard Vaux, a New York iconographer, and his sister-in-law, Sara Anson Vaux, whose sketch of valences of light and shadow—both in texture and theme—in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino climaxed a varicolored splendor as twilight descended on day one.

Movement three: On day two, the reach of the palate extended into the African Rain Forest, reflections on the Genesis-Johannine light theology by Northwestern and Garrett scholars Bill Murphy and K.K. Yeo—followed by Wendy Doniger’s masterful culminating discussion of sight (faith and natural knowledge) in Indian philosophy and religion. The Mircea Eliade Professor at the University of Chicago—author of three volumes of Hindu Penguin Classics—summarily suggested that Indian philosophy teaches us to doubt what we see, while Indian theology trains us to believe what we see. Even here in the cradle of human spirituality, we see the reciprocity and complementarity of philosophy and theology as the twin pillars of criticality and credibility. The careful reader will find in this two-day symposium a primer for and a vision into the interfaith horizon of extraordinary color and value—material and mental.

What Is Light?

In this symposium, and in the broader project, the first issue before us is whether Light is material (scientific), metaphoric (metaphysical), moral (ethical) or all of the above. We begin with a discussion of the theological science of light.

One of my first theological teachers was Tom Torrance. Perhaps the best class I had with him was not Systematic Theology the year I spent in Edinburgh, when Barth’s Dogmatics started to come into English from T&T Clark—in part from Tom’s able translating hand. Nor was it the junior-high class at the wee kirk I served as minister in Whitecraig, Midlothian. I invited Torrance to lecture to the young people one evening. He spoke on Athanasius and the Trinity to what appeared to be a raptly attentive audience. It’s amazing what respect the Moderator of the Church of Scotland commands, even among teeny trainspotters. My greatest learning, though, came some years later in the three days we spent together stranded in Kennedy Airport, waiting to return to London—Torrance to Auld Reekie and me to Oxford to continue a sabbatical. The four feet of snow—drifting to more than 40 feet and covering the air terminal buildings—afforded us some wonderful conversations that were tinged by the thrill and terror of apocalyptic atmosphere toward which we both tended in our Augustinian theologies.

Before this 1983 blizzard, reenacted in 2010, Torrance had already produced fine work in theology and science. He wrote an edition of his neighbor James Clerk Maxwell’s The Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field and its theological interpretation, intrigued as he was in the pioneer scientist’s insistence that created light and uncreated Light constituted one continuum. Interfaith monotheistic theology had affirmed this analogical truth for millennia. Torrance had not yet won the Templeton Prize or ventured into the remarkable set of books that included Divine and Contingent Order, The Christian Frame of Mind, and Reality and Scientific Theology. I have reviewed his work in An Abrahamic Theology for Science,1 one volume in the interfaith series I have prepared for my classes over the last 20 years.

Ten years after Maxwell’s incisive formulae were presented, Einstein followed with his earth-shaking summarial work of quantum theory and general relativity. Then, in the spring of 1921, he reluctantly came to the U.S. and was greeted as a rock star. This naïve puritan society so enamored with hope—especially Miltonian exuberance in science and technology and an all-too-readiness for eschatological war—saw only paradise regained in this frock of snowy hair. Both his N...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Prayers for Light
• Part One: Scriptures and Theology
• Part Two: African and Asian Perspectives
• Part Three: Arts, Film, and Medicine
• Part Four: Interfaith Community
• Contributors