We Fools Assume to Exist

The problem that attends extreme forms of Calvinism--God sends his Church to preach salvation to a world whose inhabitants are predestined in their fates independently of the Church's actions--is a problem that exists only because the elements of God's thought processes are here being subject to human presumption.  This "problem" is really of a piece with "Can God make a stone so heavy that he could not lift it?"

We have choices when faced with the "heavy stone" problem: We can dismiss it out of hand as impiety; we can call it a "mystery"; or we can distill it to a simple statement of the underlying question.  The underlying question can actually split into as many parts as there are discrete elements to the question.

That is, for one, "What is a stone but an object created and maintained continually in its existence by God?" or, to put it another way, "How can a stone exist, other than in a state of being continually lifted by God?"  We might as well dispense with the formalities and maintain that there is no "reason" (or ascertainable cause) for anything to exist.

Similarly, we can dispense with the idea of an infinitely large stone such that an omnipotent God could not lift it.  The surmise itself rests on the unrecognized presumption that the God in question has obligingly created an infinite space (itself an "impossibility") in which to accommodate the stone.  And on and on it goes....

And so also it goes with the dimension of time.  Time as a concept is presented to us in the Genesis account.  With the waters roaring, God says "Let there be light."  God selects an instant to say that--how?  If time can be measured in smaller and smaller and infinitely smaller increments, would God not be--to apply the "heavy stone" logic--still going about seizing on the correct instant?

The problem in all such questions is really just a matter of presumption.  For us to ask how God does this or that rests invariably on our conceptualization of elements of Creation.  Those conceptualizations are necessarily estimates.  If we are to attempt responsibly to address questions about God--including the above-mentioned Calvinism quandary--then we must reckon with the "screen" of estimates.  This screen can work both ways, and it is a fundamental twisting of Scripture to assume otherwise.

For example, God travels to Sodom to see who is worthy to be saved (after listening to Abraham's estimate of the number.)  Abraham, no less than Calvin, knows that all people were made by a good God and that all are--if tested against God--sinful and worthy of destruction.  Abraham does not need to go to the city to examine the matter, but apparently God does.  This is us being treated to a display of God's condescension, not his limitation.

In our world, if we are both reverent and courageous enough to accept it, God is greater than us not only because he can know more, but also because he can know less, and still be God--as represented most valuably in Jesus.  We do God no honors by attributing to him an infinite share of the knowledge we fools assume to exist.

Of Great Presumption

aaahfOf Great Presumption

I need to pull together some strands from earlier posts.  I have written about the essential miraculous quality of all conceptions, and about the sometimes anomalous quality of biblical conceptions--specifically about paternity.  It is, of course, important to avoid veering off into essentially unwarranted directions simply because the human imagination can go there.  We don't need any conjectures about Eve having sex with the snake.

It is, however, something more than mere conjecture to recall that some biblical phenomena that would seem most fittingly to be unique--such as the Luke/Acts account of Jesus, triumphant over death, ascending without dying--are actually not completely unique events.  Enoch and Elijah, it would appear, were also taken away without the mechanism of death.

It would be worthwhile to ask, however, what the unusual departures of Enoch and Elijah had to do with the purposes of God.  Their ministries did not hinge on, or be necessarily validated by, their exits.

So it is, as I have said, with the miracle of conception.  Conception, no matter how objectively unlikely, was going to happen within Sarah, whether she laughed about it or not.  Similarly, Elizabeth was going to become pregnant with the Baptist, however unlikely was the pregnancy, and whatever was Zechariah's response to the angel.  Zechariah, however, was punished for asking a rather natural question: "Whereby shall I know this?" (Luke 1:18, KJV).

This all leads toward Mary, who--in the same text with Zechariah--asks a similar question.  Wags have pointed out gleefully that Mary's response to the angel, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" (1:34) is illogical, since nothing yet said by the angel could not apply to a child she might have naturally with Joseph her intended.  Mary's response is viewed by the critics as a narrative artifice, setting up the angel's description of the virgin conception.

But why is it to be assumed that Mary's response is qualitatively different from that of Zechariah, or that the repercussions are not similar?  Why is the virgin conception seen to be essential to the identity of Jesus, and why is it to be seen as a blessing to Mary?  Both Zechariah and Mary question.  Zechariah is unable to speak about his experience in the temple, and is laid open to accusations of great impiety.  Mary is unable to produce believable evidence in her defense, and is laid open to accusations of great evil.

And for us to decide that the savior need be born to a virgin (or that the savior alone could be born so) rightly lays us open to accusations of great presumption.

When Are We Going to Change This

There is a certain tendency I find disturbing in "Progressive Christianity" (and, I must admit, I have only begun to get my mind around what might be called "Progressive Protestantism"--the notion of a truly "progressive" Catholicism seems hopeless, bound such as it is not only to a seemingly unalterable canon, but also to an entrenched conception of tradition.  What can only be "built upon" can scarcely be "progressive.")

What I find disturbing in much of "Progressive Christianity" is the apparently unalterable determination to wrestle with established Christianity on the usual ground of its own choosing--the Protestant 66-book "canon".  Established or traditional Christianity--when it is not effectively defining itself by belief in that "official" canon and thereby leaving itself open to the charge that it worships not Christ but councils--must ultimately define itself by declaring the nature of the savior it worships.  The proper conception of the savior, I would argue, must be discernable within the gospels--the teaching that he was leaving the first believers with before Paul and the rest.

It is the link between the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament that must be challenged by Progressive Christianity, or else Progressive Christianity has given the game away--having ceded the very notion of a supposedly suitably "ancient" build-up of doctrine that culminated in the traditional canon.  When the "early church" means not "the early church"--the people who stood before the resurrected Jesus--and instead becomes "the early church" post-Pentecost, then the business of determining the core essentials of Christianity--difficult enough when attempting to understand the history of the (indispensable) gospels--becomes the business of determining the essential nature of four or more centuries of the "Church" massaging its (already "ancient") writings as it saw fit.

The church of the councils was already an ancient and fossilized entity.  Hoping to extract anything "progressive" out of the council-defined church, while well-intentioned and understandable, is a fool's errand.

When Are We Going to Do This

I read recently an evangelical Christian's definition of "Christianity".  It was rather unsurprising, speaking about the New Testament and the Church Fathers and the Reformers.  But how can that be a working premise of the sources of Christianity, if the salvific essentials (the Good News of Evangelicalism) of the faith are in mind?  That is to say, are not the teachings of Jesus, by practical definition, sufficient for salvation?

By "practical definition," I am reserving the notion that the non-Gospel portions of the New Testament, by the very premises of the New Testament, are superfluous to salvation.  Only the Gospel of Luke expresses a necessary connection to the rest of the New Testament, and it includes (24:45) the disciples having their minds opened to the scriptures.  The Gospel of John indicates (20:22) the bequeathing of the Holy Spirit.  What then is lacking?

Luke/Acts, of course, carries on with the idea of the signal importance of Pentecost, but only after reflecting on Jesus having spent forty days post-Resurrection teaching the disciples (with no one, apparently, attempting to write any of it down.)  It is conceivable that some number of the about one hundred twenty (Acts 1:15) would have died, been arrested, or have otherwise been absented from Pentecost, and never had contact with another believer again.  To suggest that such a gospel-only-taught believer was denied the full substance of Christianity would be utterly without warrant.

To claim that the non-Gospel New Testament is essential to Christianity is also without warrant, and this conclusion can be arrived at independently of any criticism of the non-Gospel writings.  When are we going to act on this realization?

Everything Remains to Be Done

One of the most sobering things about being born again is the realization that nothing is left undone, and yet everything remains to be done.

This incredible lack of necessity coupled with an incredible insufficiency is keenly represented in Matthew 16, where Peter says, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (16:16, KJV)--which is here taken as such a signal moment by Jesus (not so much so in the parallel passage in Mark 8: "And he charged them that they should tell no man of him".)  What is most curious is that Jesus' satisfaction of the messianic identity is held by the disciples from the start: "We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write...." (John 1:45).

Here, Peter comes to know what he knows all along.  Of  course, much has been made, by both Catholic and Protestant, of  Peter's "confession," yet scarcely a beat passes in the text before Jesus is saying to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan" (Matthew 16:23).

Roused Into Creation

One of the things that is most overdone in the study of the Bible is the notion that it tells stories, or that, thematically, it is the "story" of this or that.  Is the first chapter of Genesis really a "story" of creation?  The start is not really a start, since "in the beginning God" as an idea describes not a start (a creation out of nothing of heaven and earth) but rather prefaces that very creation (as is shown in the separated upper vault of water being dubbed "heaven".)  In reality, that wild conglomeration that becomes heaven and earth pre-exists the "story" (which would more properly be called an "account" or a "presentation".)

There is no beginning to our experience of Creation.  We are roused into it.

What Else Can a Person Think

There is a certain quaint similarity among three particular biblical passages, a similarity that is not at first obvious.  One passage is from Genesis, one is from Luke, and one is from Acts.  (Okay, it might also be said that the last two passages together are from "Luke/Acts".)  The similarity is not even one of theme, but rather one of what might be called take-away.  I hope to illustrate what might be extracted of positive quality from biblical passages by even the severest of critics doing the take-away.

In Genesis 21:25-32:

And Abraham reproved Abimelech because of a well of water, which Abimelech's servants had violently taken away.  And Abimelech said, I wot not who hath done this thing: neither didst thou tell me, neither yet heard I of it, but today.  And Abraham took sheep and oxen, and gave them unto Abimelech; and both of them made a covenant.  And Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock by themselves.  And Abimelech said unto Abraham, What mean these seven ewe lambs which thou hast set by themselves?  And he said, For these seven ewe lambs shalt thou take of my hand, that they may be a witness unto me, that I have digged this well.  Wherefore he called that place Beer-sheba; because there they sware both of them.  Thus they made a covenant at Beer-sheba.... (KJV)

"That they may be a witness unto me"?  Surely antiquity had a radically different definition of "facts" than that which we embrace today.  If two men of influence agreed that something was so, then apparently it was so.  So the stipulated "fact" in the agreement between the two men was that Abraham (or, perhaps more accurately, his servants) had "digged this well."

(I suppose the "severest of critics" to which I referred above might also note that not even the Genesis text itself establishes or even stipulates that the well that "Abimelech's servants had violently taken away" was in fact dug by Abraham.  It seems that the concept of "rightful owner" subsumes unto itself the fact-ish concept of "digger of the well."  One might be reminded of the tendency of arguments about the legitimacy of modern political Israel's land claims to hover serenely above a clouded ancient past having something to do with Canaanites.  Apparently "rightful owner" subsumes unto itself the fact-ish concept of "original inhabitant"--a doubly unsurprising element of this instance, in which nearly all sides of the conflict attribute such an aura to Abraham.)

To modern minds--and, most crucially, to the minds of any person at any time who could grasp the concept of "fact"--there definitely seems to be something missing from the Abraham-Abimelech exchange.  Similarly, any reasonable and interested reader would note something missing from both of the exchanges in Luke/Acts:

In the Emmaus Road episode, Jesus meets two of the disciples,

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:27)

and, if that was not enough, the two return to Jerusalem to the eleven. . .

And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them . . . . And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.  Then he opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.... (Luke 24:36-46)

And, in the awkward non-Galilee-traveling Luke/Acts narrative, the disciples commence to wait around in Jerusalem until Pentecost.  A dozen or more competent, experienced men, well-versed in the scriptures and supported by some ten-dozen ladies and gentlemen (some not without means) had time to appoint a successor to Judas Iscariot.  And yet none of them seems even to have attempted to bequeath to posterity the obvious potential fruit of Emmaus and its aftermath: a comprehensive and authoritative list of Old Testament prophecies about Jesus.  If canonical scriptural authority be of great import (and few are the denominations that would deny this) then apparently the Old Testament's ostensible foreknowledge of Jesus is of so little import as to make the fever-dreams of a radio preacher potentially as authoritative a voice on the matter as the surmises of the church fathers.

And if that were not enough, in Acts Philip encounters "a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority"

And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esa'ias, and said, understandest thou what thou readest?....Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. (8:30-35)

So apparently the Old Testament prophecies ostensibly about Jesus were an important conversion tool for the first Christians.  Unfortunately it was not to be for the New Testament canon to provide us a list denoting (and delimiting) those prophecies.  That can be added to the unfortunate absence of a canonical list of the canonical books--do the various collections of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books foretell Jesus?--and we are left to ourselves to decide what foretells Jesus, and what does not.  It is small wonder that the history of common-era thought is spattered with innumerable conjectures about whether ancient Buddhism or pre-Columbian religion presaged Jesus--or really anything else that can be imagined.

So what can be taken away from the episodes I mentioned?  Persons of good will can agree on constructions of reality that consider existence to be under a benign ultimate influence, and persons of good will can decide to behave with good will toward each other.  This, of course, is a notion of a take-away from those passages described above that would drive conventional Christians to distraction, and yet what else can a person think, who hopes to embody and express good will?  Those passages will not bear any greater weight of specific interpretation.

Love and Trust and Courage

In John 13:34 Jesus tells his disciples,

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. (KJV)

Jesus' discourse continues for a few more chapters, but takes a turn when he says, "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.  If ye were of the world, the world would love his own...." (15:18-19).  This follows immediately after Jesus says,

These things I command you, that ye love one another. (15:17)

Between "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another" and "These things I command you, that ye love one another" fall some of the most crucial statements of Jesus, and they deal in pivotal fashion with love, trust, and courage.

Simon Peter asks, "Lord, whither goest thou?"--he wants to know the goal, or--as Thomas says more completely--the way: "Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?"

Simon Peter asks, "Lord, why cannot I follow thee now?"--he wants to know the truth, as does Judas (not Iscariot): "Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself to us, and not unto the world?"

Simon Peter declares, "I will lay down my life for thy sake"--he wants to know for what he might exchange his mortal life, as is implicit in Philip imploring, "Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us."

The disciples are asking about the way, the truth, and the life, and Jesus is answering with love, trust, and courage.

The disciples are asking about the way, and Jesus responds about love:

I go to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.  And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. (14:2-4)

As for the "way,"

If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. (14:23)

There is no "way", as we might understand it, and no destination other than as a metaphor.  The way is love--to search for the way in love.

The disciples are asking about truth, and Jesus responds about trust:

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God; believe also in me. (14:1)

and

If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. (15:7)

and most pointedly

And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.  If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.  If ye love me, keep my commandments.  And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. (14:13-17)

There is no "truth", as we might understand it, and no way that this world can accept a truth that does not conform to the world's expectations.  Anything is possible for God, and any truth that comports with God's nature can be made by God to be a truth in the world by simply--if necessary--altering every molecular vibration since the beginning of time.  Mountains can be made to leap into the sea, and if God so chooses such a phenomenon can play out in a world that God alters to naturally embrace leaping mountains.  Trust in God requires us to understand that objective truth is a plaything to a God who can alter the entire framework upon which objectivity rests.

The truth is trust--to search for the truth in trust.

The disciples are asking about life, and Jesus responds about courage:

As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue you ye in my love.  If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.  These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.  This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. (15:9-14)

There is no "life", as we might understand it.  The only way to live for the one who died for us is to die for the one who died for us.  We are to die for each other as friends and to die to ourselves to remain in that friendship.  There is no valid way to embrace our life on earth and--as Jesus at the last revealed in his agony--no way to embrace the meaning of the sacrifice of this life for the next.

The life of humanity is courage--to search for the courage to live, and to die.

So the disciples have asked about the way, the truth, and the life.  Jesus' response has two main aspects.

First, Jesus shows that the way, the truth, and the life are more properly subordinate to love, trust, and courage.  This is all very important, but it is subordinate itself to the great, abiding message of the discourse.  This second and more crucial teaching is that all of the elements of our experience are dependent on the person of Jesus, the Jesus who--as a full expression, embodiment, and participant in the divine--is the lord of all those elements.

Jesus is not the "Way" in terms of the idea of a correct "way" among many false ones.  Jesus is the lord of the very phenomenon of people moving through their lives.  He tells us over and over again that the proper direction is love, and that a person who embraces love is on the invisible and unfindable way.

Jesus is not the "Truth" in terms of the idea of a correct "truth" among many falsehoods.  Jesus is the lord of the very phenomenon of people considering and understanding what they can.  Jesus tells us over and over again that the only truth resides in a God who can be trusted.

Jesus is not the "Life" in terms of the idea of a correct "life" that stands out from false lives.  Jesus is the great warning against the very falsehood of individual lives.  Jesus tells us over and over again that life is found in contributing to the lives of others and participating in the eternal life of death always embraced--death to the self on this earth, and death as a participant in the sacrificial death of Jesus throughout every aspect of the universe that was created through him.

Most crucially, the perennial mistake of the denominations--to assert that Jesus as the "way, truth, and life" is a statement of his religious exclusivity--reduces Jesus (and therefore God) to an element of preeminence within a universe of analyzable criteria.  Jesus as the counterpoint to false ways, truths, and lives seems at first to be a figure of great reverence.  This is a horror.  Jesus is not some great figure or great deity standing tall next to lesser beings.  Jesus is being itself.  God is being itself.

"Way," "Truth," and "Life" are parts of us as we understand existence.  We conceptualize them, and we Capitalize Them.  When Jesus says that he is the way, the truth, and life, he is telling us to look at him, and we ought not to be surprised if "way, truth, and life" pale and shrivel.

No Laughing Matter

The biblical treatment of the miracle of conception proceeds out of Eden in what must strike the logical mind as a jumble of stumbling.  We will never, for example, really be able to figure out what is meant by the pre-Flood episode of "the sons of God" appropriating "the daughters of men," to say nothing of the "giants in the earth in those days" (Genesis 6:4-5, KJV).

And we would not be the only people to find such things illogical.  Overhearing the angel of the Lord tell Abraham "Sarah thy wife shall have a son,"

Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.  Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? (18:11-12)

 Whereupon the angel asks Abraham,

Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old? (18:13),

which is surely a polite way to characterize Sarah's amusement, which might well have borne at least some expectation that the geriatric act could have been a drooping, dribbling disappointment.  Sarah is understandably upset:

Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid.  And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.  And the men rose up from thence.... (18:15-16),

leaving Sarah, no doubt, in a state of terror (and probably ill-disposed to experience "pleasure") in the ensuing long months before Isaac was born--a span that saw her aged self be whored out to king Abimelech of Gerar by her righteous husband Abraham.

To doubt what is possible for God is no laughing matter.

A Mystery of Unstoppable Things

When God declares in the Bible that a conception is going to occur, he is describing something that is pre-ordained and unstoppable.  This provides interesting--and perhaps very telling---considerations about his participation in human reproduction, a biological process that would seem--one would fervently hope--to result simply from the uncoerced acts of the involved persons.  People have sex (or at least expose their gametes to their one-celled counterparts in the proper environments) and then sometimes conceptions occur.

In the Bible the matter is not so simple.  The first description of a distinct line of human procreation is directed by God to the snake: "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed...." (Genesis 3:15, KJV).  And then "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (3:16).

One might naturally assume that the "desire" would precede the "conception," and that it would be the "seed" of both the man and the woman who would strive with the snake.  Any number of rationalizations can be produced, it is true, to explain the logic (or is it poetry?) of God's choice of words, but no mode of analysis can dispel completely the mystery surrounding human conception.  This is displayed at the earliest possible juncture.  After expulsion from the garden, "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord" (4:1)--("from" is usually translated as "with the help of" or the like.)

Adam does not get a mention from Eve, nor is he described much afterward, though we are greeted later with the puzzling assertion, at the start of the list of Noah's ancestors, that "Adam . . . begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth" (5:3).  It is small wonder that centuries of people have postulated that Cain was some sort of sub-human or non-human creature, the progenitor of innumerable hobgoblins.

It is truly surprising, however, that the "Adam knew Eve his wife" preface is missing from the subsequent announcement of Abel's birth.  All we are given is "she again bare his brother Abel," with no mention of an act of Adam's.  Were Cain and Abel twins?  Or might they have been twins, or at least brothers, who were alike in many ways and yet profoundly different in the things that really matter?  Abel's sacrifice is held to be acceptable by God, a rather problematic assertion in Christian theology, which holds generally to the notion that no sacrifice short of Jesus' is acceptable.  If Abel were a foreshadowing, or type, or "pre-incarnate" manifestation of Jesus, would it be less than fitting that Abel (the only "son" of Adam not biologically attributed to him) might have been the offspring of only the human Eve?

It would seem blasphemous, in many circles, to postulate that virgin or at least non-sexual conception happened more than once.  Of course, it seems blasphemous in some circles to assert--on biblically solid grounds--that Matthew's contention ("a virgin shall be with child") is a twisting of Isaiah 7.  Or would it be best to consider it blasphemous to ever consider any conception--indeed, any manifestation of creation--as anything other than miraculous?

Pregnancy is a common occurrence, and sex an even more common occurrence.  Every conception, however, is predicated--if the exact molecular makeup of the resulting organism is in mind--on ultimately miraculous or miracle-prone processes.  It is entirely possible that chromosomal permutations might happen to male-derived DNA strands once inside the egg and while not yet having been expressed--making the offspring to that infinitesimal degree no longer "in the image" of the father.  Anything is possible.

Or rather, to use "Bible-talk," nothing is impossible to God.

A Mystery of Shadowed Things

The subject of the miraculous nature of conception must go all the way back to Eden, and this miracle--really just a particularly-focused element of the pervasive miracle of existence--is a miracle reiterated with every biological regeneration.  It is special to humans in that humans can see it as a miracle, but still it is the case that God participates in all renewals of life.

Humans, however, can be aware of God's participation in the intimacies of procreation--the closeness and momentary vulnerability of the couple, and the formation of the fragile conceptus in the inmost parts.  To be aware of the implication-laced fact of God's participation is necessarily bound up with the "knowing good and evil" aspect of the forbidden tree.  Moreover, it explains the otherwise unintelligible business of Adam and Eve being suddenly afraid of their own nakedness.

Adam and Eve were the only people present, and the animals could not have cared about nakedness.  Surely God can see through anything--what was the purpose of the first couple's concern about nakedness?  Only one answer presents itself: For the first couple to have settled in their nakedness would have been for them to have uncovered the nakedness of God--their co-participant in procreation.

Perhaps the greatest testimony to this is found in the gospel account of Jesus' own conception.  The idea of Jesus' birth to a virgin, one of the most loudly-proclaimed ideas in the world--an event that could have been heralded from on high or announced by pageantry like the exotic magi--is described in conceptual imagery only as "the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee" (Luke 1:35, KJV).

The miracle of conception is a mystery of shadowed things.

Babbling in the Face of Miracles

There is a miracle that strikes closer to home for us than plants and seeds--though it contains some of the same connotations.  This is the miracle of conception.

Of course conception involves a different set of notions than seed-germination, since the vegetal analog of human conception is plant fertilization, not sowing and/or growing of seeds.  Yet it scarcely need be said that the Bible speaks of offspring as the embodiment of a man's "seed"--a rather strained concept, in that half of that offspring's "seed" quality comes from the mother.  Add to this the sordid fact that the Bible holds sometimes to the notion that a man's "seed" is properly his to the extent that the woman is more or less suitable--think Ishmael and Isaac, or more tragically, think of the myriad children of Biblical males cast off because the mothers were pagan.

We cannot even begin to think of the arising of new human beings without, one, entertaining the notion of the miraculous and, two, lurching in the same moment into insupportable ideas about what would constitute a miracle, and what would not.  We can say that it is a miracle that new life begins with the joining of the sperm and the egg, but even in that instant we will slip into thinking that "new life" means "a new life"--a single organism, which indeed is what we must call a single fertilized ovum.  Give us a moment more and we might talk of a moment of instantaneous ensoulment--if we are theologically so inclined--yet that leaves us unprepared to answer about the instantaneous ensoulment that would be involved in one or the other halves of a conceptus splitting to become twins.

Of course it might always be said that God knows such a splitting will occur, and provides the two (or three or more) souls necessary within the ovum.  Of course, then, it might also be said that God provides souls in mystical habitation of as-yet-unjoined gametes (for surely that would not be beyond God) but then we can scarcely defend ourselves against the charge that we are doing little more than babbling.

On the other hand, babbling in the face of miracles does not really seem all that strange, now does it?

If We Call Anything a Miracle

A seed falls to the ground.  Usually it stays there for a time, and then perhaps it "starts" to "grow."  Of course, it might have been growing since its fertilization, and there might not be, chemically speaking, any specific time at which it "starts" to "grow."  Then again, it might just lie there in the ground until it rots.  Or it could start to rot, and then--out of seeming stubbornness, proceed to grow.

Or we could say, as Jesus did, that the seed falls to the ground and dies, and out of the dead seed grows the plant.  Jesus' take on the matter would seem to be biologically inaccurate--although his biologic inaccuracy would differ from the inaccuracy of the colloquial "starts to grow" version only in terms of degree.

We think of seeds and plants and virtually all other things as though we understood them, but our "understanding" is invariably a function of our manner of interaction with them.  We interact with seeds as seeds and plants as plants, and so to us such things exist in themselves.  We might be made to look silly in that we hold to concepts such as seeds "dying" into life (to say nothing of any ideas we might have of a "miracle" of the plant being born), but ultimately seeds and plants and all that comprise them consist of the existing universe, which--to us--has no reason to exist.

No explanation--not a self-existent singularity, nor a pulsing, always-existing universe, nor the sovereign will of God--can supply the immediate reason why existence exists.  We can call it a miracle, and we can call any of its manifestations miracles, and the best we can hope for is internal coherence in our take on the existence in which we are trapped.

If we call anything a miracle, then we must call everything a miracle.