He [Elijah] got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He answered,
‘I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, throw down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.’
He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.
I Kings 19:8–13 (NRSV)
When Elijah in extremis and in flight from the wrath of Jezebel sought a message from God and stood expectantly on the ‘mount of God’, Horeb, what brought him to the mouth of his sheltering cave was not the great wind, the earthquake or the fire but, we are told, ‘a sound of sheer silence’.1 From its depths Elijah is addressed by God. The story encapsulates the immediacy of such experiences and at the same time exemplifies their baffling character. For it is not only the archetypal figures and events in the biblical tradition which have this character, but also the widespread religious experiences of humanity, both those inside and those outside religious traditions. Their very existence raises questions of the kind we have been considering about the general nature of God’s interaction with the world and with humanity, especially when viewed in the contemporary perspectives of the natural and human sciences.
Our exploration towards God has inevitably led us to the question of how God can communicate with a humanity depicted by the sciences as a part of a monistic natural world and evolved in and from it. The world is now seen in an entirely differently light from the way it was seen in the cultural milieu of the legends concerning Elijah, and indeed the way it was seen even two hundred years ago. The dominance of the essentially Greek, and unbiblical, notion in the Christian world that human beings consist of two distinct kinds of entity (or ‘substance’) – a mortal, physical body and an immortal ‘spirit’ (or ‘soul’) – provided a deceptively obvious basis for envisaging how God and humanity might communicate. The divine ‘Spirit’ was thought to be in some way closely related to, and capable of communication with, the human ‘spirit’. The two were capable of being, as it were, on the same wavelength for communication. This ontology of ‘spirit’ was not physicalist insofar as it was understood that spirit was not part of the causal nexus of the physical and biological world which the natural sciences continued to explicate.
The basis for such an ontology has, we have seen, been fundamentally undermined by the pressure of the relevant sciences towards an emergentist monistic view of the world and a non-dualist view of humanity. This raises the general question of how we are to conceive of God communicating with humanity in the light of the account we have been developing of how God interacts with the world-System as it is depicted by the sciences.
It is clear that all mutual interactions between human beings and the world (the pairs of arrows in figure 1) are mediated by the constituents of the physical world of which human beings are part and in which human actions occur. Furthermore all interactions between human beings (the pairs of solid single-headed arrows in figure 1) are also mediated (pp.62ff.) by the constituents of the physical world, including the cultural heritage coded on to material substrates. Such interactions include communication between human beings, that is, between their states of consciousness, which are also, under another description, patterns of activity within human brains. This raises the question of how, within such a framework of understanding, one can conceive of God’s communication with humanity, the self-communication of God to humanity. This in turn raises the traditional question of how God might reveal Godself to humanity – in what way can we think of God communicating with humanity in the light of the perspectives we have been led to adopt in our exploration towards God from the sciences?
In communication between human beings some of our actions, gestures and responses are more characteristic and revelatory of our distinctive selves, of our intentions, purposes and meanings, than are others. ‘It’s not what you say but the way you’re saying it.’ This prompts us to seek in the world those events and entities, or patterns of them, that unveil God’s meaning(s) most overtly, effectively and distinctively – constituting what is usually called ‘revelation’, for in revelation God is presupposed to be active.
The ways in which such a revealing activity of God have been thought to occur in the different ranges and contexts of human experience can be graded according to the increasing extent to which God is said to be taking the initiative.
If the world is created by God then it cannot but reflect God’s creative intentions and thus, however ambiguously, God’s character and purposes; and it must go on doing so if God continuously interacts with the world in the way we have proposed. The classical text is St Paul’s letter to the Romans:
For what can be known about God, is plain to them [all who by their wickedness suppress the truth] because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things that are made.2
Paul urges that there can be a knowledge of God, however diffuse, which is available to all humanity through reflection on the character of the created world.
Belonging to a religious tradition provides one with the language and symbols to articulate one’s awareness of God at any instant and as a continuing experience. The tradition provides the resources that help the individual both to enrich and to have the means of identifying his or her own experience of God. Thus there is a general experience of the ordinary members of a continuing religious community which may properly be regarded as a mode of revelation that enhances, and is more explicit than, the general revelation to humanity.
This kind of religious general revelation arises when there is a merging of, on the one hand, the streams of general human experience and general revelation and, on the other hand, those of the recollected and relived particular and special revelations of God which a tradition keeps alive by its intellectual, aesthetic, liturgical, symbolic and devotional resources. These all nurture the unconscious experience of adherents to that tradition and so shape their conscious awareness of God.
This is revelation regarded as authoritative, and so as ‘special’ in a particular tradition. Some experiences of God by individuals, or groups of individuals, are so intense and subsequently so influential that they constitute initiating, dubbing experiences. These serve to anchor in the community later references to God and God’s relation to humanity, even through changes in the metaphorical language used to depict that ultimately ineffable Reality. The community then regards them as special, even if not basically different from those referred to in the previous section. So it is not improper to seek in history those events and entities, or patterns of them, that claim to have revealed God’s meaning(s) most overtly, effectively and distinctively.
That there might be such a knowledge is entirely consistent with the understanding of God’s interaction with the world as represented in figure 1. The double arrows denote an input into the world from God which is both influential in a whole–part manner and thereby conceivable as an input of ‘information’ in the sense of altering patterns of events in the world. The states of human brains can properly be considered to be among such patterns, so, in the model we are deploying, there can be a general revelation to humanity of God’s character and purposes in and through human knowledge and experience of the world.
The Jewish and Christian traditions have, more than most others, placed a particular emphasis on God’s revelation in the experienced events of history. Such special revelation, initiated (it is assumed) by God, has been regarded by Christians as recorded particularly in the Bible. How we are to receive this record today in the light of critical and historical study is a major issue in contemporary Christianity, since it involves a subtle dialogue of each generation with its own past.
This attempt to discriminate between modes of revelation according to the degree to which God is experienced as taking the initiative in making Godself explicitly known is helpful only up to a point. One must avoid the not uncommon tendency to press the distinctions too sharply and to ignore the smooth gradations between the different categories of revelation already distinguished. It is notable from a wide range of investigations3 how widespread religious experience is, even in the secularised West, and that it is continuous in its distribution over those who are members of a religious community and those who are not. The evidence is that the boundary between general revelation and revelation to members of a religious tradition is very blurred. But so also is that between the latter and special revelation. For there are well-documented non-scriptural accounts over the centuries of devotional and mystical experiences, regarded as revelations of God, among those who do belong to a religious tradition.
It is also widely recognised that the classical distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘revealed’ theology has proved difficult to maintain in modern times. For it can be held that the only significant difference between supposedly ‘natural’ and supposedly ‘revealed’ insights is that the former are derived from considering a broader (though still selected) range of situations than the latter. The same could also be said of the subsequently more widely favoured distinction between ‘general’ and ‘special’ revelation, for the range of and overlap between the means whereby insights are gained into the divine reality have had to be recognised.
There is therefore a gradation, but there are also differences, in intensity and the degree of explicitness with which these religious experiences are received as revelations of God as their initiator – rather as a variegated terrain may be accentuated to give rise to distinctive hills and even sharp peaks without loss of continuity. The questions that now follow are: ‘How does our understanding of God’s interaction with the world including humanity relate to human revelatory experiences of God?’ ‘How can the notion of religious experiences be accommodated by, be rendered intelligible in, be coherent with, the understanding of God’s interaction with the world that we have been developing?’ This leads to the question posed below.
If God interacts with the world in the way already proposed, through a whole–part influence on the whole world-system, how could God communicate with humanity in the various kinds of religious experience? It has been noted that the interpersonal relationships we know about are mediated by the constituents of the world. This suggests that religious experience that is mediated through sensory experience is intelligible in the same terms as is the interpersonal experience of human beings. That is, God communicates with human persons through the constituents of the world, through all that lies inside the dashed circle representing the world in figure 1. God communicates through such mediated religious experiences by imparting meaning and significance to constituents of the world or, rather, to patterns of events among them. (This may properly be thought of as a ‘flow of information’ from God to humanity, so long as the reductive associations of such terms are not deemed to exclude, as they need and should not, interpersonal communication.) Thereby insights into God’s character and purposes for individuals and communities can be generated in a range of contexts from the most general to the special. The concepts, language and means of investigating and appraising these experienced signals from God would operate at their own level and not be reducible to those of the natural and human sciences. The interpretation of mediated religious experience would have its own autonomy in human inquiry – mystical theology cannot be reduced without remainder to sociology or psychology, or a fortiori to the biological and physical sciences.
What about those forms of religious experience that are unmediated through sense experience? They may be divided into: the mystical, ‘where the primary import of the experience is a feeling of intimacy with the divine’, and the numinous, ‘those experiences where awe of the divine is the central feature’.4 Or into: ‘the case where the subject has a religious experience in having certain sensations ... not of a kind describable by normal vocabulary’ and, on the other hand, religious experiences in which ‘the subject ... is aware of God or of a timeless reality ... it just so seems to him, but not through his having sensations’.5 The experience of Elijah at the mouth of the cave on Mount Horeb was of God communicating to him through ‘a sound of sheer silence’, an image of absolute non-mediation.
In such instances, is it necessary to postulate some action of God whereby there is a direct communication from God to the human consciousness which is not mediated by any known natural means, that is, by any known constituents of the world? Is there, as it were, a distinctive layer or level within the totality of human personhood which has a unique way of coming into direct contact with God? This was, as we saw in the Introduction (and also p.112), certainly the assumption when the human person was divided into ontologically distinct parts, one of which (often called the ‘spirit’ or the ‘soul’) had this particular capacity.
Now we cannot but allow the possibility that God, being the Creator of the world, might be free to set aside any limitations by which God has allowed his interaction with that created order to be restricted. However, we also have to recognise that those very self-limitations that God is regarded as having self-imposed are postulated precisely because they render coherent the whole notion of God as Creator with purposes that are being implemented in the natural and human world and unveiled by the sciences. Such considerations also make one very reluctant to postulate God as communicating to humanity through what would have to be seen as arbitrary means totally different in kind from any other communications to human consciousness. These latter include the most intensely personal communications yet even these, as we have already seen, are comprehensible as mediated subtly and entirely through the biological senses and the constituents of the world.
So, to be consistent, even this capacity for unmediated experience of God cannot but be regarded as a mode of functioning of the total integrated unity of whole persons – persons who communicate with other persons in the world through the world’s own constituents. For human beings this communicating nexus of natural events within the world includes not only human sense data (as ‘qualia’) and human knowledge stored in artefacts, but also all the states of the human brain that are concomitant with the contents of consciousness and the unconscious. The process of storing and accumulating both conscious and unconscious resources is mediated by all the varied ways in which communication to humanity can occur – and all these have been seen to be effected through the natural constituents of the world and the patterns of events that occur in them.
When human beings have an experience of God apparently unmediated by something obviously sensory – as when they are simply ‘waiting upon God’ in silence – they can do so through God communicating via their recollected memories, the workings of their unconscious and everything that has gone into their formation, everything that has made them the persons they are. All of which can be mediated through patterns in the constituents of the world, including brain patterns. Experiences of God often seem to be ineffable, incapable of description in terms of any other known experiences or by means of any accessible metaphors or analogies. This characteristic they share with aesthetic and interpersonal experiences, which are unquestionably mediated through patterns in the events of this world. Experiences of God could take the variety of forms that we have already described and could all be mediated by the constituents of the world and through patterns of natural events, yet could nonetheless be definitive and normative as revelations to those experiencing them. If God can influence patterns of events in the world to be other than they would have been but for the divine initiative – and still consistent with scientific descriptions at the appropriate level – then it must be possible for God to influence those patterns of events in human brains which constitute human thoughts, including thoughts of God and a sense of personal interaction with God.
The involvement of the constituents of the world in the so-called unmediated experiences of God is less overt and obvious because in them God is communicating through subtle and less obvious patterns in the constituents of the world and the events in which they participate. These latter include the patterns of memory storage and activity of the human brain, especially those operative in communication at all levels between human persons (including sounds, symbols and images), and the artefacts that facilitate this communication.
On the present model of special, providential action as the effect of divine whole–part influence, it is intelligible how God could also affect patterns of neuronal events in a particular brain, so that the subject could be aware of the God’s presence with or without the mediation of memory in the way just suggested. Such address from God, whether or not via stored (remembered) patterns of neuronal events, could come unexpectedly and uncontrived by the use of any apparently external means. Thus, either way, it would seem to the one having the experience as if it were unmediated. The revelation to Elijah at the mouth of the cave had both this immediacy and a basis in a long prior experience of God.
On examination, therefore, it transpires that the distinction between mediated and unmediated religious experiences refers not so much to the means of communication by God as to the nature of the content of the experience – just as the sense of harmony and communion with a person far transcends any description that can be given of it in terms of sense data, even though they are indeed the media of communication. We simply know we are at one with the other person; similarly in contemplation the mystic can simply be ‘aware of God ... it just seems so to him’; and both experiences can be entirely mediated through the constituents of the world. So it is not surprising that those experiencing such communications from God experience them as intensely personal, for this is the closest kind of experience to them in ordinary life. What the treatment here has therefore been pointing to is that it is intelligible how God can communicate personally to human beings in a way consistent with the descriptions of that world given at other levels by the natural and human sciences.
Certainly, for the Elijah of the legend, ‘the sound of sheer silence’ left no doubt about the personal nature of the command and of his response to it.