Thoughts on Divine Inspiration
And the Nature of Biblical Truth
I have, for quite a while, identified as both an atheist and a Zen Buddhist. I do not believe that the biblical prophets, the apostles, and the Early Church Fathers were “making it up” when they claimed to have these mystical experiences in which they saw the “uncreated light,” had apocalyptic visions, and heard the voice of God. These experiences are very real. God, angels, and demons, in some sense, do exist as something that people experience. I do not, however, believe that they exist independently of those experiences. I’m even familiar with the forms of meditation and the mystical practices within Judaism and Christianity that are used to induce such visions — and I mean familiar in the sense that I have actually practiced Christian hesychasm and dabbled in Lurianic Kabbalah enough to have had those types of experiences myself. I believe the Eastern Orthodox Christian mystics and the biblical prophets when they claim to have had visions and revelations because I have engaged in some of the meditative practices that lead to such visions and have had similar mystical experiences myself.
It seems to me, however, that these experiences are conditioned by our own understanding of the world, our cultures, and our belief systems. The sorts of practices that lead to these experiences are pretty uniform across religious traditions, usually entailing fasting, vigils, repetitive recitation of divine names or prayers, mindfulness meditation, a prayer rope or beads, etc. The same type of experience will happen whether you use a komboskini and chant Kyrie Eleison or use a japamala and chant Hare Krishna. Every religious tradition has such a practice, whether you are talking about Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam. The striking thing is that the sort of religious experiences and visions that mystics have seem to always accord with their own expectations. Your mystical experiences will tend to align with your belief system. Never does a Hindu doing their mystic practice end up seeing the Virgin Mary or the Christ nor does a Catholic or a Pentecostal hear the voice of Shiva and see the elephant-headed Ganesh.
And while the experiences are clearly culturally conditioned so that the imagery and verbal content are always drawn directly from the tradition with which the practitioner is most familiar, there does seem to be a universal element that clashes with the likely expectations of all practitioners and yet remains constant throughout experiential mystical traditions. The “absolute” is always beyond comprehension to such an extent that all mystics insist on describing it in apophatic terms (describing what it is not rather than what it is) and almost always describe “God” (or whatever) as “not existing” or being “beyond existence.” In the Buddhist tradition, people encounter the same thing as sunyata (emptiness, the void) and this parallels the ancient Greek mystical understanding of chaos (the primordial substance of pure potentiality or emptiness which becomes something). In secular Buddhism and Chaos Magick, I think you may find a common ground between atheism and theism. But theists and religious folks almost always take literal the parts that are not literal and interpret that which should be seen as almost literal to be mostly metaphorical — and so the atheist usually comes closer to having an accurate understanding than the theist does.
The absolute is sunyata (emptiness/openness). The empty chair is the open chair. And, of course, we are told also that “God is love”(1 John 4:8); for what is love but openness? God is not some independently existing craftsman that created the universe. That description of God as Creator is a metaphor. Apophatic theology, which simply is orthodox Christian theology, asserts that any positive affirmations about God are only meant metaphorically. The narratives about God are allegorical rather than literal. When we say that God is “good” or “the creator” or “love,” we are only speaking metaphorically because God’s nature is altogether different from anything else in the universe, such that the Church Fathers insisted that not even existence could be rightfully predicated of God! Even to say that God exists is nigh heresy! Existing is something that created things do, not something that the Uncreated does! And the affirmation that “God does not exist” is constantly repeated in the works of Christian mystics throughout the ages. I personally don’t believe that this language is meant entirely in a figurative sense.
We can interpret these religious experiences and mystical revelations as being communicated to us by some cosmic consciousness, some universal mind independent of us, or even as some sort of “higher self” (or sub-conscious mind) trying to communicate with us. I prefer the latter explanation because it seems to accord with my own experiences and understanding of reality. And, to be clear, I do not believe that there is any objective way to know whether or not so-called “divine revelations” are really communications from some higher being that exists independently of us — whether it is “all in our heads” or something else is impossible to know. I do believe, however, that these experiences are real and are a common feature of the human experience — that people in altered states of consciousness really do encounter Something that seems to communicate with them.
Nevertheless, it appears to me that whatever this Something is (whether it is part of us or some outside intelligence), it can only communicate with us using symbols and language that we are familiar with. And this is why, I suppose, that Hindus see and hear things that fit in with their tradition while Christians see and hear things that make sense within their own tradition. Following a strong apophatic method, I’d like to suggest that the real “Truth” is the je ne sais quoi that is back of those experiences. The words and symbols, narratives, parables, allegories, stories, etc. are not true per se but are only pointing towards some sort of truth in a very dim way. Whatever is back of divine revelation seems to me to primarily communicate in a non-linguistic, non-symbolic, nigh non-communicable manner and the human brain detects this non-rational communication and attempts to rationalize it through language and symbols with which it is familiar.
Whenever you read a scripture, a religious story, a myth, or a parable, the truth in it is not that it is a literal historical fact but that it reveals something of the character or nature of a reality that cannot be literally described. When you read divinely-inspired texts, you’re usually encountering something more like an artistic version of revisionist history than a literal historical account. And the Bible is a clear example of this. When you read the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), you aren’t reading a literal historical account but rather a revisionist account. The narrative is not historically accurate but it’s also not a lie because it’s not meant to convey a historical truth as much as a mystical one. The authors weren’t really trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. They were taking religious myths that everyone was familiar with and retelling them in a manner that revealed a significant difference between the character of their God and the “gods” of the people around them. Indeed, the author of Genesis borrowed directly from Mesopotamian accounts, like the Epic of Ziusudra, the Atrahasis Epic, and the Epic of Gilgamesh — and the readers in his own time would certainly have been familiar with these accounts. They knew about how the gods created men as slaves but the author of Genesis now retells the narrative where men are more like children of God than slaves. The grammatically plural gods (elohim) is turned into an honorific plural yet numerically singular God (Elohim) — symbolizing that El, the God of Israel who is the father of the gods (elohim, sons of El) in the mythology of the surrounding nations, is really the Supreme Godhead. All the gods (elohim) and all their various powers become subsumed in the One God (Elohim) of Israel and humans go from being a mere slave species of the gods to being the pinnacle of creation, a species created in the image and likeness of the Supreme God. The narrative isn’t meant to tell you about the historical origins of mankind but rather to tell you about the value of mankind.
Again the story of the flood and the ark are retold but with key details changed and those details reveal something about the benevolent nature of the biblical God in contradistinction to the nature of the gods of other nations. The Mosaic Law in the Old Testament is often copied almost word-for-word from the Code of Hammurabi. But, again, there are details changed that reveal a very different picture of the nature of God and man. The Laws of Moses are clearly just copied from those of Hammurabi but details like punishments and standards of evidence are changed. In many cases, the Code of Hammurabi would have a criminal be put to death while the Law of Moses shifts the emphasis from retributive justice to restorative justice, mandating that the criminal pay a monetary recompense to the victim or their family rather than simply be punished.
Much of biblical law is hard to reconcile with any coherent theory of ethics and any God that would have commanded such things is despicable and can only be regarded as pure evil at best. But if we assume that the biblical prophets were not literally “spoken to by God” but rather inspired in the sort of way that an artist or poet is inspired, then perhaps the Bible can be redeemed in some sense. The Bible was a product of its time and so contains the marks of the prejudices and idiocies of the people of those days. There are great truths in Greek mythology even though the stories aren’t historically true — the entire point of the story of King Midas will be lost if you think of it as literal historical truth! And we ought to think of biblical stories in a similar light. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice parallels the account of Lot and his wife, where “looking back” at the hellfire and destruction behind them resulted in someone losing everything that they loved and cherished in this world.
And this artistic revisionist history in the Bible didn’t stop with the Old Testament. It carried through into the New Testament. Jesus himself was a revisionist prophet! In the Sermon on the Mount, he says repeatedly, “You have heard…but I tell you…” (Cf. Matthew 5:21–48) Jesus does to the Law of Moses what the Law of Moses did to the Code of Hammurabi! He revises it and reshapes it into something a little different in order to communicate something more about the nature of his God and his ethical beliefs! And, again, the author of the Book of Acts does the same when he puts the words of Dionysius (Bacchus) into the mouth of Christ in Acts 9: “Why persecutest thou me? It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks!” Did St. Paul literally see the light on the road to Damascus and have a mystical experience that he interpreted as a revelation from God? Probably! Did God literally recite lines from Euripides’ The Bacchae to St. Paul on this occasion? Probably not but the author is putting those words into Christ’s mouth in order to convey to his Greek audience that Christ, in his estimation, is no mere man but very much more like Dionysius than like Moses — a divine being above all humans.
And this artistic act of playing revisionist history as a way of conveying some sense of what the non-verbal and nigh incommunicable divine revelation entails is further carried on by St. Paul in his letters. One of the hallmarks of Christianity has always been the doctrine of “justification by faith [alone].” The Pharisees believed that the Jewish people were a superior race or nation, contrasting the “righteous Jews” to the “gentile sinners.” (Cf. Galatians 2:15) They equated “righteousness” with “Jewishness.” In their view, to be “made righteous” (i.e. to be “justified” or “made just”) is to be made into a Jew. You can only become righteous by converting to Judaism and adopting the customs of the Jews. Jesus and St. Paul rejected the views of the Pharisees. Man is justified on the basis of faith alone, not on the basis of race or ethnicity. The Pauline argument of “justification by faith” was never intended to prove that works are unimportant: it was put forth to show the means by which one could attain citizenship within God’s holy nation. Paul’s point was that you don’t have to be Jewish to be in a covenantal relationship with God. The Church is the spiritual Israel and baptism is the spiritual circumcision. To be justified, in the Pauline sense, is to be united to Christ (deified) by way of incorporation into the Church, the Body of Christ. Christianity is the negation of racism and nationalism. Racism and nationalism of any sort must be rejected. St. Paul takes up the Old Testament texts and re-interprets them in a manner that conveys this new understanding of the nature of the relationship between God and man.
And so, in my estimation, the entire Bible is filled with this sort of artistic storytelling that engages in playful and allegorical revisionist history in order to convey an ever-evolving and deepening understanding of the nature of God, man, and morality. And this is why there are so many contradictions in the Bible — because the understanding of the authors is constantly evolving and usually what they are saying is not literally true. When you see a changing picture of the afterlife throughout the Bible and indeed throughout post-biblical Christianity — the oldest biblical texts rule out the possibility of an afterlife altogether, more recent texts depict man taking a seat on a throne alongside God after a literal bodily resurrection, and believers today tend to envision the spirit moving into a spiritual realm after death …well, perhaps the inconsistencies and contradictions here are there because the story of the afterlife wasn’t really supposed to inform you about what happens after this life at all. Perhaps the afterlife or lack thereof isn’t really part of the revelation that the prophets are trying to communicate to us and so all those contradictions on the details about it don’t really matter because that’s not the point at all — perhaps we can’t see the forest for the trees.
What the prophets really want us to do is simply to “come and see”(John 1:39)— to enter into the inner room of our hearts and close the door, retreat within ourselves and communicate with the Unseen (Matthew 6:6), to be still mentally and emotionally so that we can know God (Psalm 46:10) because the Kingdom of God is within us rather than in heaven above. (Luke 17:21) As John Romanides suggests in Patristic Theology and as Al-Ghazali suggests in The Revival of the Religious Sciences, theology isn’t something that should be believed on the basis of faith — it’s something that ought to be examined scientifically. The mystics and prophets throughout history have done certain things in order to encounter “God” and we simply need to replicate their experiments in order to see for ourselves what they are talking about.
All the scriptures in the world and all the writings of the mystics throughout history can only ever give us an inkling. If you think you understand it on any sort of rational basis, you are completely delusional…because the nature of the experience is incomprehensible — it’s something you can experience but not something that you can understand or even begin to explain to others who have not experienced it firsthand. And perhaps the inability of those who have experienced it to understand it themselves or communicate with others about it is to blame for the wide variety of contradictory religious traditions in the world today. Two people have the same experience and one describes it thus, “it’s emptiness, nothingness, God doesn’t exist” and the other describes the same experience by saying, “it’s a person, it’s everything, God exists!” Having experienced something of it firsthand, I’m inclined to think that describing it in atheistic terms is much better than doing so in theistic terms because any sort of positive affirmations about it are inherently misleading since they must necessarily be totally metaphorical in nature.
