The Tower of Babel and the three angels' messages

Meanings behind the Tower of Babel and how they relate to contemporary diversity challenges and the spread of the gospel.

Elijah Mvundura is a freelance writer from Indiana.

The problem of ethnic pluralism and coexistence is now universal. In some ways, this has always I been the case. Humans have forever feared diversity and striven for uniformity. That is why, throughout history, ethnic, racial, and religious minorities have been victims of exclusion or oppression. Alongside these conflicts there also exists an irrepressible longing for a homogeneous society. Indeed it is this longing that often gives birth to the conflict!

The longing for a homogeneous community can be traced back to the Tower of Babel. Against God's explicit order to disperse over the earth, many humans stayed put. The builders of Babel built a city and a tower whose summit would reach into the heavens. Thus they planned to make a name for them selves. But the well-known biblical account says that God came down, confused their language, and scattered them over the face of the earth (Gen. 11:1-9).

It is significant to note that insofar as linguistic and ethnic diversity was inscribed in God's command to disperse, diversity is a positive, divine intention an intention, however, often opposed by humans.

Bernhard W. Anderson is certainly correct when he says that, taken by itself the story of Babel portrays a clash of human and divine wills. Humans tried "to maintain a primeval unity, based on one language, a central living space, and a single aim. It is God who counteracts this movement toward a center with a centrifugal force that disperses them into linguistic, spatial, and ethnic diversity."1

Admittedly, Anderson's exegesis is not universally accepted. A majority of modern theologians follow their medieval predecessors in seeing diversity not as a divine intention but as a necessary evil, a result of human sinfulness. But Anderson supports his exegesis by situating the story of Babel in the larger biblical perspective. He contends that ethnic diversity corresponds with the rich diversity in the nonhuman creation: different trees, plants, birds, fish, animals, and heavenly bodies. And God not only affirmed this diversity at Babel but also at Pentecost. There the Holy Spirit worked not by making different nations understand the language of the Twelve, but rather by making each nation hear the gospel in its own language.

Anderson goes on to say that the eschatological portrayals of the consummation of God's historical purpose do not envision a homogenized humanity but rather a human unity which truly embraces diversity (Isa. 2:1- 4; Rev. 7:9-12).2 This may be illustrated by God's positive intention as He composed the nation of Israel in the form of twelve different tribes rather than as one monolithic unit.

Diversity despite rebellion against it

Anderson's interpretation gains additional force when viewed in the context of the great controversy between good and evil. For there was more than mere human hubris in the builders' aim to construct a tower "'whose top will reach into heaven.'" There was also the desire to immortalize their names and deter mine their own destiny (Gen. 11:4, NAS).

The aim and nature of the project strongly echoes the original ambitions of the devil. "'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God ... I will make myself like the Most High'" (Isa. 14:13, 14, NIV). If Lucifer was thrust to the earth because of his rebellion (verse 15), so were the builders of the tower cast down and scattered abroad over the face of the earth (Gen. 11:9).

Yet, despite the display of divine supremacy, the rebellion continued. "And when the dragon saw that he was thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman" (Rev. 12:13, NAS). Satan employs human instruments in his war against the saints (Dan. 7:21). That is why, in Daniel and Revelation, kingdoms are depicted not just as political powers but also as symbols of evil. "In apocalyptic perspective, history is the scene of a cosmic struggle between God and Satan, the ruler of the present evil age, who seeks to establish a rival kingdom and seduce human beings into his service."3

Taken as a paradigm of Lucifer's attempt to displace God as the Sovereign of the universe, the Babel story has been literally replicated repeatedly in the political history of the world. The idea of a universal empire, of bringing the whole world under one rule, as Pierre Manent noted, has had a powerful hold on people's minds.4

Marcel Gauchet observes that the logic of the empire is at its heart opposed to ethical monotheism, because a universal God demands universal dominion.5 Not without significance, all imperialistic projects, from the ancient Assyrian Empire to Nazi Germany typically tried to wipe out linguistic and ethnic distinctions. They tried to undo what God decreed. But they were all undone by God's word. "'So the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay'" (Dan. 2:43, NIV).

Apparently, the principle of diversity is a divine barrier that has frustrated the human-willed and devil-inspired drive toward universality and constitutional homogeneity. But this is not to say that God revels in, or is a source of human disunity. Far from it.

Uniformity does not necessarily mean amity and friendship among the nations, for if people do not divide along racial and ethnic lines they will do so along class, gender, or ideological lines. This is because human sinfulness is the real source of disunity and discord; unless it is uprooted, there will never be harmony.

This brings us to Abraham. Through him, God set in motion a plan for universal harmony. Abraham was promised the very things that the builders of the tower had willed for themselves: a great name, a universal dominion, and immortality (Gen. 12:2-3).

Authentic unity according to the Cross

To be sure, it is through Abraham's seed Christ (Gal. 3:16) that "the sovereignty, the dominion, and the greatness of all the kingdoms under the whole heaven will be given to the . . . saints" (Dan. 7:27, NAS). But between the promise and its fulfillment stands the Cross. There Jesus died so as to "gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad" (John 11:52, NAS).

There "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (2 Cor. 5:19, NAS). If at the tower God came down and scattered, at the Cross He came down and gathered. Before His death, Jesus Himself said, "'And I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they shall hear My voice; and they shall become one flock with one shepherd'" (John 10:16, NAS).

This quality of unity, affirmed at Pentecost, did not mean sameness or the obliteration of linguistic and ethnic diversity. The gospel was to speak the languages of the world and not vice versa.

Accordingly, or at least by illustration, the New Testament, following the Septuagint, was written in Greek. Later it was translated into Syriac and Latin. Unfortunately, in the Middle Ages the clerical elite blocked the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. It is significant to note that much of the clerics' resistance to vernacular translations and their attempts to monopolize literacy stemmed from their Babel-like bid to build a universal Christian empire.

The Protestant Reformation and the printing revolution of the sixteenth century shattered this dream.6 As the Bible was translated into vernacular languages, the gap between Protestants and Catholics widened to produce divergent theological and cultural traditions. The mass translation of the Bible was a consequential "starting point for the development of national languages and literatures,"7 and also a stimulus, opening the way for modern nationalism.8

In fact, all the national, religious, cultural, and ideological divisions of the modern West can be traced to the floodgates opened by the mass translation of the Bible and the Protestant Reformation.

Putting aside the consequences of this fragmentation, of interest here is the fact that the breakup of Christendom may well be seen as a rerun of the Babel story, a conflict of centripetal and centrifugal forces, in which the centrifugal won out.

Babel and the eternal gospel

To put this dialectic into perspective, we must shade our view of diversity as a concession to minorities a missionary strategy or a response to globalization. This calls for recognizing diversity as of divine origin as we place it near the very heart of the gospel, the eternal gospel of Revelation 14:6. It is significant that the universal call to worship the Creator-God (verses 6, 7) is followed by a universal declaration of the fall of Babylon, a symbol of rebellion against God (verse 8).

In this juxtaposition of the two powers who might be worshiped the created or the Creator, the principles of "the two great powers contending for the supremacy of the world"9 come out in sharp relief. Whereas the national, ethnic, and linguistic identities of those who worship God is recognized and affirmed by God's love and service to the individual, those who worship the beast and his image are unspecified and denied, signifying Satan's indifference and hatred for human welfare.

In God's love, which includes His call for human beings to love even their enemies (Matt. 5:43-48), we come to the deciding factor in the judgment announced by the first angel (Rev. 14:7). God's wrath is directed at Babylon's self-love, self-worship, and self-centeredness, reflected in its violent denial of human love, service, and diversity.

In a significant way, the confusion and restlessness of Babylon (verses 10, 11) can be fixed in the contradiction between its drive for Babel-like uniformity and the reality of human diversity which it ignores. This contradiction also explains why all human projects of homogenization and totalization whether at the level of politics (imperialism), economics (globalization), religion (ecumenism), or ideology (Hegelism and Marxism) have failed and are destined to fail.

Only in Christ do "all things hold together" (Col. 1:17, 18, NAS). And with Christ at the center, holding all things together, diversity does not degenerate into discord and relativism or nihilism. Instead, this whole becomes a cosmic symphony of divine wisdom and love (Rev. 7:9-12).

This symphony is the "mystery of Christ" mentioned in Ephesians 3:4. Here Paul echoes the "mystery of God" in Revelation 10:7. Significantly, in both contexts the phrase is linked with the consummation of the divine purpose in history, as revealed to the prophets.

As "the manifold wisdom of God," the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ is to be "made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places" (Eph. 3:10, NAS). That revelation of the mystery of God's love is what will inaugurate a new world order and bring history, as we know it, to an end.

1 Bernhard W. Anderson, From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 166.

2 Ibid., 167.

3 Ibid., 36, 37.

4 Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, tr. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.

5 Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, tr. Oscar Burge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 116.

6 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 148-186.

7 Ibid., 163.

8 See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

9 Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1940), 324.


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Elijah Mvundura is a freelance writer from Indiana.

April 2002

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