Come, let us build ourselves a city
and a tower with its top in the sky,
(Genesis 11:4)
No, this wasn’t what originally inspired the tall buildings of New York or other modern cities, even though their tall constructions are often called “skyscrapers”.
Remember, the story of the Tower of Babel has a worldview that the earth is flat and that the highest heaven (sky) is the realm of God.
The aspiration to be able to build high enough to reach the realm of God was the heighth of presumption—and, in the story, linguistic confusion, misunderstanding, and being dispersed over all the earth was the price to be paid for this presumption.
Beware! Often the attempts to deepen our knowledge of matters of faith run the risk of a similar sort of presumption. We tend to think that our construction of sophisticated ideas that narrow slightly the parameters of the mystery we are trying to better understand actually may explain the unknown.
It’s like the tale of the blind men and an elephant. They never had encountered an elephant before, but by touching it they attempted to describe it. But each touched only one part of the elephant. None of them could describe the whole creature.
Theological concepts and constructions like matter, form, person, foreknowledge, substance, accident, body, soul may help us to understand and explain a part of what we believe—but which in its totality is beyond our abilities.
All this doesn’t mean that theology is inappropriate or a waste of time. But be careful not to deceive yourself that by learning a little you’re building so high that you’ll will actually be able to attain the fullness of the knowledge of God.
Scientific knowledge is very different from faith. Science is concerned with the tangible, the observable, the measurable, the provable aspects of the created world and universe and all that is in it.
Faith doesn’t disparage science, but is more concerned with revelation, confidence, and trust.
God speaks through all the beauty and wonder of his creation, but he also communicates through the revealed word, tempered by the understanding and limits of understanding of those who were inspired to speak and write it.
Most of us, if we take a flight from one place to another have hardly any knowledge or training in flying a plane—but we trust in the training and skill of the pilots, even though the technical details escape us.
There are multitudinous details to our religious lives that we can thoroughly understand since they are human customs, traditions, rules, and regulations.
But the principal things we believe are beyond our complete understanding. In this, we’re like one of the blind men encountering the elephant. We understand something, some component or aspect—but understanding and explaining everything is beyond us.
For example, the nature of God, the Trinity, the identity of Jesus, the resurrection, the functioning of the sacraments, creation and evolution, infallibility, the inspiration of the Bible, providence, destiny, death, life after death, to name just a few.
Of course it’s legitimate to build bigger, better, and taller towers—but they’ll never reach the realm of God.
22 May 2022