The Bible opens with a dramatic portrayal of direct communication between God and humanity. God is described as essentially speaking face-to-face with the first humans. In language they understand He says, "Be fruitful and increase in number... subdue [the earth]. Rule over . . . every living creature (Gen. 1:28, NIV). There is no question in their minds as to who they are, what they are to do and what their relationship is to God. God Himself has told them directly and audibly and this direct communication becomes a prototypical pattern of communication between God and His people through out human history.
However, perhaps the most far reaching effect of "the Fall" was the banishing of our primordial parents from the Garden and the chasm that was fixed between God and His children. While God still spoke with people, the operative mode of communication became one in which designated patriarchs and prophets took on the role of being mediums between God and the people. In this pattern, the less direct mode of visions and dreams was often involved. Common to the language of the prophets are words such as "This is the word of the LORD ..." or "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says.. . ." Following such authoritative introductions the thoughts and/or words of God are expressed by the prophet, even in the form of quotation.
The crucial shift in divine-human communication that came with Jesus is summarized this way: "In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.... The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being (Heb. 1:1-3, NIV). "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14, NIV). In Christ there is a reversal of the negative, post-Fall fortunes. Jesus speaks directly to us and lives visibly among us, even though His divinity is shrouded in real human flesh.
But Jesus is crucified and ascends to his Father. In His physical departure he inaugurates an all important, elemental Reality. To His followers, anxious at the prospect of his absence, He says, "Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you.... I will send Him to you (John 16:7, NIV). Thus the Holy Spirit comes to communicate with the world (verse 8) and with believers, specifically to "guide [them] into all truth ... he will speak only what he hears... by taking from what is mine and making it known to you" (verses 13-15, NIV).
And so the fire falls and the Christian Church is born of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2). Although there is still prophecy and now apostleship and the Holy Spirit speaks with direct clarity to the early Christian leaders, as a critical part of His guiding, the Spirit also inspires into existence what we call the New Testament, which with the Old makes up the primary king-pin component in God's communication with humanity. The Bible becomes a tangible, understandable, objective manifestation of the voice and presence of God in the believing community.
Throughout the history of God's interaction with people many have had difficulty believing that He communicates at all with human beings, if they have even believed there is a God. They have largely preferred to rely on the evidence of the five physical senses. During the last century and a half particularly, this merely physical, five sense approach to processing surrounding reality has been refined into disciplines that have now come to dominate the way human beings understand and interpret their world and their experience. The resulting worldviews, that may justly be called purely or merely materialistic, have come into being largely through making use of rational or scientific processes alone. This outlook has spawned an impressive array of insights, discoveries and inventions that have been seen to, or have in fact, spectacularly enriched everyday human life.
The impressive accomplishments of the rational and scientific approach seem to have overawed much of con temporary culture. Thus many today have come to believe that because the scientific approach has so effectively handled the riddles posed by "A" it is also automatically a fine resource for handling "B." In other words, contemporary humankind has largely concluded that the rational process alone should be able to crack the secrets that lie at the heart of the most transcendent realities of the universe. It therefore should also, they believe, ably decipher the mysteries of consciousness and meaning that dwell hidden at the core of the human soul and in the being of God (see Job 38:1).
Today, the essential modes of the rational, scientific approach have been applied to the study and understanding of the Bible. This application produces one of the most enigmatic applications of what is at its heart a basically rational approach. The nature of human consciousness by all means demands that the rational be applied to our study of Scripture. It is not true that forces destructive to a genuinely Christian faith and worldview arrive simply when reason is applied to the Bible. The destructive forces do arrive, however, when to all intents and pur poses reason is virtually the only faculty utilized in our study of the Bible.
Chaos brews when we forget or reduce the reality that God lives, loves and still by all means speaks to humanity preternaturally and supernaturally as he has from the beginning.
Today it is the primarily rational and scientific voice of some theology that has become ascendant in our minds. Forgetting or rejecting the testimony of divine-human communication history and hardly hearing the specific elements in the promise of Jesus to his disquieted disciples, that the Spirit and not merely the Bible would lead into all truth we come to lose the hugely significant capacity to hear the voice of God.
It is interesting that the role, and especially the authority, of the "theologian" as such has come of age only recently. This role could be powerfully energized in all of us if what is so valuable in rational and theological discipline could be properly coupled in us to authentically and unequivocally embrace what is borne in on the prevailing wind of the Holy Spirit.
Cliff Goldstein's lead article in this issue is one that challenges us to review these issues. In effect his article lays before each of us the immensely important challenge to render unto reason the things that are reason's and unto faith the things that are faith's.
