The Book That Understands Me

Émile Cailliet was born in France early last century and became an eminent scholar, a National Fellow of the French Academy of Sciences. As a young man he sought a book that would understand him. He could not find one so he decided to compile one for himself. Over time he managed to collect quotes from the books he was reading into a leather bound pocket book. A day came when he thought that the book was complete. He sat down under a tree and read it. But as he wrote later: “It carried no strength of persuasion.”²⁶ He was dejected. Around that time his wife—she was Scotch Irish—brought home a Bible in French. Cailliet read a Bible for the first time. At last he had found the book that understood him. Or in Eric Fromm’s terms, Cailliet had found a frame of reference. Soon he also found the object of devotion.²⁷

So what exactly did Cailliet find in that book that understood him? He found a book, to use philosopher Roger Scruton’s words, which was “a hidden door in the scheme of things that opens into another world.”²⁸ In that book, he found a story. But why this story in particular? After all there are many stories out there. The secularist has a story, the Muslim has a story, even Trekkies have a story. Cailliet, however, became convinced that this book tells the true story about God, about us and about the world such that he could find his place in it. Of course to mention the word “truth” may cause a smile in some. After all, in these postmodern times it has been said that “truth is what your friends let you get away with,” as the late postmodern thinker, Richard Rorty, suggested.²⁹ Truth is a human construct. To claim more is to risk an imperialistic intolerance towards others. (Incidentally this imperialistic tendency is what concerns many postmodern thinkers about the attempt to articulate an encyclopedic worldview.) The funny thing is that when the postmodernist gets the wrong change at the hot dog stand she all of sudden becomes a realist and insists on getting the right change.

So what then is the story that understands me, found in the book that understands me? Novelist Frederick Buechner has said, “The Good book is a good book.”³⁰ He maintains that despite the diversity of biblical testimonies the essential plot is quite simple: God creates the world, the world gets lost, and God restores the world to its glory. So the big story has sub-stories: stories of creation, stories of lostness, stories of rescue and stories of recovery. Let’s look at each in turn.

Creation

Here’s a curious thing: a convinced secularist, Paul Bloom, a Yale professor of psychology and linguistics, thinks that as a species we have all evolved into creationists. Believing in the supernatural is part of human nature. He writes: “Creationism—and belief in God—is bred in the bone.”³¹ So what’s the explanation? Blind evolution is his answer. Blind evolution makes mistakes and our belief in a creator is one of them. Somehow the enduring human belief that there is more to reality than the senses can detect and more to existence than life in this world needs explaining. These beliefs just won’t go away. So instead of denying the cogency of such beliefs, Bloom explains them away as an evolutionary faux pas. Bloom is committed to philosophical naturalism. That is to say, for him, nature is all there is and therefore a closed system of cause and effect. Furthermore, human inquiry must operate on that belief.

A little desperate, methinks. There is another possible explanation as to why these beliefs persist and that even renowned scientists such as Francis S. Collins, the pioneering head of the Human Genome Project, hold them.³² Maybe these beliefs will not go away because there is truth in them and argument to back them up, despite what Richard Dawkins in his recent book, The God Delusion, might think.³³

The seminal story of creation is found in Genesis 1–2. Whether we read these chapters as literal reportage (and some do), right down to a real tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a talking serpent, etc., or whether we read these chapters as laden with symbolism (and some do)—about real persons, real events, symbolically presented—the point of the story is clear. There is a God who both speaks (reveals) and acts (creates). The creation is not fashioned from pre-existing material by some kind of divine artisan with limited power and skill (a demiurge, to use the ancient Greek expression), nor does it flow out of God’s own essence, making all of reality in some sense divine (an emanation). And as for ourselves, in this account we are creatures of a special kind: we have been made in the image of God. We also learn something of the character of this God who creates and reveals. He is interested in creating the good. True, when it comes to human beings, to his special creature made in his image, he sets a limit. In the story there is a certain tree and its fruit is off limits: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There is a prohibition. A boundary is set. Yet the first word is not about prohibition but permission. Every other variety of tree is theirs (Adam and Eve’s), including that other mysterious tree, the tree of life. Moreover the permitted trees are not only aesthetically pleasing, their fruit is delicious. This God is good and generous. This God is not an enemy of human joy, and this God is not hostile to human sexuality but its inventor.

Now it is true that we as a species are amenable to chemical analysis. Mostly H2O, I am afraid. We are of the dust: star dust, the astrophysicists tell us. We are material beings. We like material pizzas, not just the idea of a pizza, to satisfy a very real material hunger. (Make mine pepperoni.) And it is true that we are amenable to biological analysis. We are life and animals, no less. But we are hardly “machines created by our genes,” as Richard Dawkins suggests.³⁴ Is there a machine that knows that it is machine? We bear the divine image, the Genesis story tells us. That’s the difference. We are Godlike in some way. Is it our rationality? Is it our conscience? Is it our need to relate? Is that image not so much in our structure or our relationality but in our role as the highest form of life that is functioning on the Earth? (Indeed, how we function can decide the fate of the planet.) Theologians debate these questions. What is clear is that we are not reducible to mere matter or mere animality or repositories for the selfish gene that needs to replicate itself. We may share an enormous amount genetically with a chimpanzee, but will the chimp ever know it? We do. The creation story is part of the frame of reference, the part that helps us understand our deeply rooted sense of human dignity.

The implications of such an idea of ourselves are legion. That human life is precious is the chief one. Taking human life is a serious moral matter whether in the womb or in law enforcement or in the prison or on the battlefield. Nor can human life be reduced in value to the same level as that of other sentient creatures. Philosopher Peter Singer thinks otherwise. On his materialist and naturalistic premises, he argues,

There will surely be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standard, are more valuable than the lives of some humans. A chimpanzee, a dog, or pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in state of advanced senility.³⁵

But the Christian frame of reference rejects Singer’s moral calculus while at the same time respecting the consistency with which Singer follows the logic of his own argument. Another implication is that we are created to work, whether paid or unpaid. In the opening chapter of the Bible, God presents himself as the great worker under the figure of six days on and one day off. (Incidentally how we are to understand the days of Genesis has been a matter of debate from earliest days. When one of the most famous Christian thinkers of all time, Thomas Aquinas, turned his attention to it in Middle Ages, he simply listed three then-current interpretative possibilities and concluded that however God created the week, it was done in a fitting way.)³⁶ So too the creature in God’s image is a worker. Adam and Eve come before us in the story as workers like God. They are to exercise dominion but not in any kind of mindlessly exploitative way. For the second chapter of the Bible shows us a Neolithic farmer who not only controls the garden but cares for it as well. The health of the environment mattered from the beginning.

The alternative scenario is grim. Writing in the 1960s, Elton Trueblood argued that it was becoming “impossible to sustain certain elements of human dignity, once these had been severed from their cultural roots.”³⁷ He likened his cultural context to that of cut flowers. Flowers once cut from their roots bloom still, at least for a while. But death is coming. In his view, without the acceptance of certain Judeo-Christian ideas about human dignity—such as human beings having been made in the image of God—civilization is in grave danger. On his view, given this cultural trend it is going to become harder and harder to argue convincingly for human value. Peter Singer’s views on human dignity quoted earlier provide a case in point.

Neil Postman wittily argues, “The accidental life is not worth living.”³⁸ Human life is not a cosmic joke. There is a design to life that comes from a good and generous God whose word can be trusted. That design calls upon our faith, our rationality, our conscience, and our hunger for lasting relationships. When I was in high school I took a woodwork class. I had no real aptitude for it, but it was compulsory. One lesson stuck with me. If you plane against the grain you will splinter the timber. Go with the grain was the message. If Genesis is right, there is a moral grain to the universe. But do we see the design? So much seems purposeless, even random. If there is a moral grain to the universe why aren’t more of us on the same moral page? Historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin insightfully writes of the “crooked timber of humanity.”³⁹ Maybe that timber is not so much crooked as splintered.

That notion brings us to the next part of the story that understands me.