The Baby, the Bunker, and the CIA: Thoughts on Revelation

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are their words,
whose voice is not heard. Psalm 19:1-3

The more I seek the more I’m sought… Joe Pug, Hymn #101

Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible

Here’s a dirty secret about the study of theology. For all the footnotes, for all the jargon uttered in its name, and for all the systems erected to scaffold its dignity, theology is ultimately dependent on something it cannot produce itself. And that something is called revelation. Without revelation, theology is impossible. Without God first speaking a word, without God first showing something about Himself, there would be no Theo for the ology to speak about. God must first reveal and then people respond. That’s what theology is at bottom, a response to and an account of revelation.

This is no cause for alarm though. You might think revelation is something that you must go searching for, that God is somewhere out there, out there being wherever it is you currently are not. But it is not so. Every morning you wake to find that you are born anew and that there the world is once again waiting to speak. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” after all, and “day to day pours out speech.” The implication is that this world is waiting to tell you things about God, waiting to impress upon you revelation. Simply to wake up and feel sheets against skin, to sense the warmth of a body next to you, to curl your muscles and crack your back, to sit up and brush away crusts of sleep from the corners of your eyes, is to encounter revelation. You wake to find that there is a God and that his world is speaking.

Born anew you wake to find that you are a helpless creature. Like an infant who hungers for that which he cannot provide for himself, you wake to find that you are once again a babe in the arms of your mother, rutting for milk. The wonder is that as you clutch and crawl and grasp to find something to feed you, as you squint and screw your head in search of a face, you find that there is such a thing as milk, that there is such a thing as a face looking for you too. You come to learn in the first moments of life a truth for all your searching—what you most need can’t be found in yourself. The wonder of Christian theology is that we are all of us infants and that the world and the word are milk to us. The wonder is that there is nourishment everywhere; we just have to start clutching our way toward it.

Take what I have just said and imagine that it is true. It is overwhelming, isn’t it, to think that every moment we rub against the edges of the world is a moment when we might encounter revelation. And our response to that revelation is critical. In the simplest terms, theology is an accounting for revelation. And if that is true, then doing theology is a little bit like being an intelligence officer. A theologian, or any human being for that matter, is like a field agent in the CIA. In developing assets, following leads, trying to sniff out who can be trusted and who cannot, there is always the question of what really matters, what is hard intelligence worth acting on and what is simply chatter, noise in the system. The difficulty is this—if the heavens are declaring the glory of God, if creation itself is a testament to God, a source of revelation, then everything is latent with meaning. Everything is both chatter and intelligence, useless and useful, insignificant and significant.

But in one sense we aren’t intelligence officers at all because there is no such thing as critical distance. We don’t observe and collect data from afar. We are within the data. We are the data. And for some this is why theology can never be taken seriously. This is an embarrassing fact for those who critique theology’s validity from the outside as a genuine mode of inquiry and from those on the inside who drone on in pseudo-scientific language and armor themselves with infinite footnotes to try and make theology something it is not. Wouldn’t theology be so much better, they seem to say, if it didn’t have to account for creation, didn’t have to account for every bloody thing, really, as revelation, or, horror of horrors, contend with Scripture? For those who harbor these objections, these latent fears boil down to one disturbing fact—revelation is not something that can be caused or controlled. It is only something that can be received and responded to.

You are here to receive. You are here to bear witness to this singing, showing world God has made, this world that pours forth speech. God first speaks and then this world he has made speaks back, speaks of the God who made it and that speech goes on and on in what Balthasar calls a “voiceless articulation”(from Epilogue). And what is being said is not nonsense. The world does not say any old thing it pleases. Psalm 19 once again tells us something indispensable about all this revelation—the heavens declare the glory of God. It might all seem like noise, like meaningless din, but the heavens aren’t speaking gibberish. In fact they are saying one thing, over and over again, and that thing is glory.

Begin to receive and meaning will begin to impress upon you and so will glory. Everywhere creation drips with revelation, so you come to find yourself soaking with the stuff. You will come to feel the friction of it because this is a world textured with truth. You will come to breath in its fragrance, both the rank and the perfume. You will come to taste both the sweet and the savory, the salty and the bitter, to be nourished and delighted with the food of God, to be disgusted and sickened with all that isn’t. You will come to hear the singing, to discern harmony and order, point and counterpoint, to feel too the dissonance, to cringe at those notes that are sharp and those that are flat. You will come to behold the splendor and squalor, to see the swallowing darkness, yes, but also to see light bend and fold, to reflect and refract shapes and movement to your open eyes.

Let’s consider once again that what I am saying is true. How do you even begin to live in a such a world? Psalm 19 has something to say about that too. At the end of the Psalm, once David has meditated on both the world God has made and the words God has spoken, he has to come to terms with himself, and so he prayers in response. “Let the words of my mouth and meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer,” he prays, saying in effect, “Make me the kind of person who is capable of rightly receiving the glory of the world you have made and the sweetness of the word that you have spoken.” Within in the span of that single psalm, David moves first outward and then inward. He begins with the heavens declaring the glory of the Lord and ends by asking that his words and meditations would be pleasing to the very Lord whose glory has been declared. Revelation first pulls us out of ourselves only to plunge us back into ourselves as we wonder at the thing revealed.

This rhythm of wonder and awe followed by prayerful response is not unique to Psalm 19 but is seen throughout the Psalms. The psalmists have a lot to teach us about revelation and how we should respond to it because they take for granted that the world says things about God. They experience that revelation and in turn take what it said, filter it through their own lives and imagination, and say it back to God. The world speaks to them, and they start reaching for metaphors. They start connecting one thing to another in a web of figures and reference. There it is in Psalm 1—the righteous man is like a tree. There it is in Psalm 23—the Lord is a shepherd, and I am a sheep. Like intelligence officers the psalmists string yarn between scraps of evidence, make connections, follow the trails. Like lovers the psalmists read the world as if it were a letter from the beloved. They trace themes from sheet to sheet, searching for what is said in words both written and unwritten. They feel the paper for traces of touch, for fragments of presence. “There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard,” David says in Psalm 19. Everything in the world is here for us to hear, but it is only the lover who wants to hear it all. The psalmists, like lovers, are especially attuned to the “voiceless articulations” of the world, so they learn to read the glory of God in creation like a kind of body language. God is not the subject of their inquiry, or the object of their scrutiny. God is their beloved, the one whose name is blessed, who is like honey on their lips, like water to their souls. The psalmists hear the world speaking, and they say back to God in love, “You are a rock, a fortress, a warrior, a rush of mighty waters, an eagle, a Father, a king, a lover. And we are trees, sheep, vines, arrows, children, subjects, lovers.”

I’ve been asking you to imagine that all this is true. Now I’m going to ask the harder question. It is true, so why don’t we live like it is? The skies, the stars, the handiwork of the heavens haven’t just shown David and the other psalmists that there is a beautiful world and that God has made it. These things have spoken to us too, and they have shown them and us that we, all of us, are accountable to that God, a God who is responsible for our consciousness, for our ability to even consider the heavens. For David in Psalm 19, the skies and stars are a gift that pull him first outward and then plunge him inward. Outward to glory and inward to his own smallness. Outward to the immensity of what God has made and inward to his own consciousness that can, by God, even in its own smallness contemplate such things as stars and shepherds and stones and conclude that there is goodness beyond and behind the stars.

We have to come to the point where we are ready to ask ourselves the questions that the psalmists asked themselves. If the skies are speaking and I am here listening, then what kind of world is this? What does it say about me that I am capable of hearing such things? How am I supposed to live in such a world that speaks?

These are not easy questions to answer, and some of the answers must wait for another essay, but one reason is that we make ourselves the primary obstacle to this way of living in and experiencing the world. As Paul tells us in Romans 1, the skies are speaking indeed, everything around is telling us that there is a God and that he is powerful, but our response is to actively ignore that fact. We make ourselves willfully ignorant of that glory because that glory demands a response. Ultimately, glory demands our worship of the God who made the splendor and the glory we behold. Whoever goes in search of revelation cannot say the journey is done until they have worshipped the God revealed. Revelation is a means to worship. The heavens aren’t declaring facts about God. They declare “Glory!” and the proper response to glory is awe, is wonder, is worship.

Theologians, if they are doing what they should, traffic in revelation which means they must also traffic in humility, awe, and wonder. Theologians must traffic in worship. This does not mean that the task of theology is easy. There are distinctions to be made, there are categories to articulate. There are systems to develop. There is hard work to be done, but in the end God reveals himself so that we might worship him. The stars shine so that we might worship God, but Paul says in effect that we have made the world a kind of starless bunker. We have lived as if these were starless, silent skies. Without humility, awe, and wonder theology can, and more than that life can, become a self-perpetuating, self-terminating activity, and soon we will find ourselves in the starless bunker murmuring to ourselves because we have forgotten that the stars are singing.

But we, like Dante, can emerge from the hell of the starless bunker and can begin again to hear the speech being poured forth from the heavens:

“Upon this hidden path my guide and I
entered, to go back to the world of light,
and without any care to rest at ease,
He first and I behind, we climbed so high
that through a small round opening I saw
some of the turning beauties of the sky.
And we came out to see, once more, the stars.” Inferno, Canto 34:133-138