Sacred Symbology part 3. Symbols and Revelation

Passing by Nenushtan: A Prophetic Think Tank

I am writing the first articles, if you would call them that, for a very unusual theological website. This is part 3 of a group stating here.

This an attempt to set forth the underlying assumptions of the biblical theology of this site. This will be done over the course of about 8 articles, each one disarticulated by the others, but together forming the doctrine. I’m doing things in an asymmetrical way that some would call rambling. I call these, however, mediations on a single, unified theme but written in a manner that seems without continuous, organized thought. The ideas they present are assembled in the correct order by the discretion of the reader for his own application. It’s the truth that comes out, instead of the method, that is crucial, knowing that Truth is capable of independently forming its own methods that are idiosyncratic but always aligned in its immovable view.

Pray for me, if you agree with the message of this website, that it is sent out according to God’s Word and according to His will, and that, as it must be if ordained by God, it does not come back void.

Sacred Symbology: Symbols and Revelation: Predicates

First, it must be held in mind that my treatment here is a reduction into symbolism from everything we know and how we know it because I assume that just about everything is a symbol and symbolism is for the purpose of carrying all knowledge. I admire Tzvetan Todorov’s Symbolism and Interpretation for his clear explanation of all the rhetorical theories of symbolism, and no less great scholarship and lucid writing style, but I do not believe, as he does, that taking on the symbolism of linguistics alone for this task because it is the easiest to handle. The atomistic handling of a universal, which is the scientific way, is not all it is cracked up to be if that universal is assumed to extend far beyond humans.

At least Todorov is honest when he says “I have no new ‘theory of the Symbol’ or ‘theory of interpretation’ to propose (perhaps because I have spent too much time reading those of others).”[1] Neither do I have a new theory. Although we certainly have to read the theories of others, I take out theories generally as symbolic of this bad assumption that we will get something ultimately useful out of beginning an examination of a universal by the parts of universals or using the parts of other peoples theories about them, assuming from the start that one must be more or less correct, and end up with one or two that we choose and then combine that will be representative of the universal whole of the symbolic. We usually end up with nothing genuinely new or universal, because this universal will always be beyond our idle musings.

I present a simple way of thinking about symbols that assumes, as a Christian, that symbolism is not only human but is in fact not originally created by humans, but by God so that a certain kind of communication with him can take place and a certain kind of revelation of knowledge can be exchanged between them. This resets the ground rules of symbolic theory from the widest possible universal, only then proceeding to the task of methodical identification of its various parts, but those which then can never depart company, and never in any way speak autonomously of that universal.

Revelation

In symbolism, the focus is not on two main two parts, a symbol and a signification (or it’s meaning), but three, which includes the idea of revelation between them. A symbol, by definition, is, of course, the sensorial, apparent, visible, comprehensible, more discursive token of what is more abstract, obscure and hidden signification pertaining to knowledge. When I use the word “symbol” I refer to this apparent indication of knowledge. The symbol could not exist without that signified knowledge, nor could it exist without a deeper meaning which is produced between the symbols and signified, which I call “revelation.” Revelation is the real point of symbolism, not confusion, obscurity, arcanity, and technical jargon. It is particularly a revelation of worlds and ideas beyond world-bound sight and thought.

Revelation is something understood to be something experienced actively and passively. In the active sense, to “reveal” is an act, to uncover or expose something that we know that is otherwise hidden naturally or by our own effort. Revelation is also the receiving in some way of a thing naturally hidden or by our own actions or is that thing that we receive.

Revelation, as an ultimate revealing and receiving of knowledge, is an overwhelmingly religious word denoting some conception of transcendence, or knowledge outside the world or strictly human knowledge paradigms. It speaks of an epiphany, a moment of enlightenment, an occasion of seeing some ultimate or basic of reality or truth, or it refers to a religious book, having come from the Divine and giving crucial and otherwise inaccessible information to man.

The working understanding of revelation as a religious phenomenon here de-emphasizes its experiential sense, however,  because personal experience is by definition idiomatic, making it resistant to certain conclusions arrived at by any systematic method since even the method of analysis falls under the category of human idiosyncratic revelation. What could be more plastic than a subjective experience?

Nor is our emphasis on scripture as revelation to the extent that every word, Verse, Chapter and Book at all levels of communication is equally revelatory in this ultimate sense, and certainly not revelation as doctrine or creed. Subjective experience assumes God’s revelation as its specific subject and the others assume God’s revelation as its general authority. The Platonic/Aristotelian war between specifics and generalities is eschewed here.

Our main focus is minimally not on a certain sense revelation that can be changed or even modified by people, where the only crucial part is made by people, nor a general sense which causes a loss of its main and crucial parts. Revelation is somewhere in the negative middle: a revelation from a God that is eternal and above the world is assumed to be, as God, both objective, miraculous and eternal, as well as transparent as to its main revelational parts, to and by which God would expect mans particular obedience and assent to Him by his revelation of knowledge.

Because of this, our emphasis stresses the concept of revelation as an objective thing or a piece of knowledge which has a distinctive, obvious self-revelational quality, shown by such analysis to be something both foreign to but a part of the holistic symbolic conception of world/meaning as human beings naturally understand it. Therefore, the demonstrable transcendent and foreign thing is also designed to be readily absorbed and understood by the mind as having a certain ultimate implication for life. Thus, by “piece of knowledge” I speak of revelation as a kind of knowledge which is not only active and passive but paradigmatically foreign. It is this foreign paradigmatic sense of revelation that we must get right and put the traditional active and passive senses temporarily to the side.

The foreign paradigmatic sense of revelation is counter to the conservative and liberal religious and secular models of mere passive and active, which are but potential placeholders for something real and may just as well have nothing to do with it. Identifying revelation as merely from God is the main industry of the conservative Christian apologist, as thousands of books have been written doing just that in powerful fashion. But, we are not being honest about revelation by holding its identification only to a miraculous, foreign, objective thing of knowledge and not to this paradigm of knowledge of which I speak.

It is not enough to identify positively the Bible (Symbol) as containing a real, generally transcendent revelation of the Divine (a meaning) as the end of that biblical symbol’s revelatory value, having not succeeded in showing how these two parts of biblical symbol and signification produce something informationally specific for the benefit of the world which itself resists idiomatic tinkering and puerility is by definition a default to subjective liberal scholarship. The conservative touting the Bible as such is much like the liberal philosopher’s approach, which, even if good-intentioned, both assume that real revelation must come after a long struggle and after great difficulty in the task intense efforts of faith or dissection of a myriad of different biblical or rational revelatory examples. Therefore, liberals and conservatives take revelation to human beings as mainly incidental events and examples and not necessarily and equally one distinctive way (paradigm) of approaching and apprehending spiritual truth, which way is as important as its source or content.

If revelation is really incidental in this theological conservative and liberal way, as well as equally paradigmatic, but the world’s way is incidental but is not holistically paradigmatic, then religious liberal and conservative conceptions of revelation are equally anti-revelational. If so, what is it about the Biblical symbol which produces revelation that these two worldly paradigms, the religious and secular, have missed? I believe that conservatism and liberalism, as applies to theology, has made revelation something open far too much to human whim, fancy, opinion, theory, and feeling, always touted as divinely transformational but never allowing the Divine to positively appear before the world in the form of revelation and allow it to judge the world at least to the extent that we are free to honestly judge it.

To the evolutionist and to the conservative religionist revelation is taken the same in a profound way. To the evolutionist, the “revelation,” for example, that man evolved from apes is derived from the symbols of nature, once inaccessible to man by lack of technology or the proper procedural methods, now made manifest to mature man as a result of the blessings of time and nature. Time and nature are purely mundane, and this symbol, by which man is to use to define the extent and content of and conception of revelation, is a great revelation of a purely convenient problem riddled ontological conclusion about man as purely mundane and having no use other than the mundane. The “revelation” is that man is only an animal and not a spiritual creature.

In religion, the progress of revelation is derived from the symbols of God (scripture, his acts in history, deduction), once inaccessible to man by lack of faith or spiritual advancement, but now made manifest to a mature man as a result of the blessings of God through Christ. But the revelation is never put this way but as the clarification of a “God” concept itself, who, instead of being the equal in the mind to a particular example of transcendence is the revelation a strange, far-away mystery that is now not so, making the purpose of man an invaluable spiritual ambiguity as much as the evolutionists worthless mundane certainty.

This is not a critique of the conclusions either side, for now, only pointing out their self-limiting character. I maintain that what would make a really good revelation of the ultimate would be a revelation not of nature that has no supreme transcendent symbol (God) within our man’s world for him or a God with no specific and supreme, empirical revelational or symbolic example (scripture) without mans world. There is something in their versions of “revelation” that make it into something like the mere expressions of belief rather than something transformative through its power to manifest its alien character and to radically change lives forever. To popular science and religion, their universal or particular symbols are lacking, they are never completely sufficient, where the result is a revelation that is puerile and must await a better symbol for “science” or “faith” to uncover.

Perhaps we should still take an idea from these dysfunctional kinds of revelation, not derived from our bipolar and sharply un-revelational conception of revelation but one the one that it implies as transcending any one of our present or past definitions. If so, we ask how and why the truly revelational definition of revelation should work in a fundamentally different and in a more transformative fashion than the singularly spiritual and natural ones that dominate the idea of revelation that have served us so badly in both science and religion.

In searching for this seemingly elusive conception, this true definition and object of revelation that satisfies instead of merely confuses a transcendent revelation that is never adequate or complete, I believe we look into the basics of symbolism first, since no thought and no expression, whether of God to man or man to God or to his fellows, are possible without it.

Object and Law

The two basic parts of any symbol are Object and Law. Objects are things apparent and apprehendable without the need for inference, and this object sits inside an intangible container of law that controls its presentation and provides this manifestation.

The part of the symbol which aligns with Law, whether the symbol is a traffic sign, a logo, an artwork, an inanimate object, a word, belief or concept, refers to its abstract information, knowledge, controlling or predicating principles or rules in the broadest sense that underlie that symbol. These principles or rules are fixed but intangible, and imperceptible except through the observation of the objects which they control. Mirriam-Websters gives a very general definition for law:

When we start to think about law in terms of human societies, the idea of enforcement by “controlling authority,” a creator of or administrator of the law, starts to come into view:

A symbolic Object, as distinguished from symbolic law, is simply that “thing” that is controlled and directed by its law. The dictionary definitions for “object” include “something material that may be perceived by the senses,” “something mental toward which thought, feeling or action is directed,” “the goal or end of an activity,” “the subject matter of an investigation.” Objects, or symbols, are things or ideas that have an existential reality presumed adequately apprehended through direct perception or cognition, in distinction from “law” which is invisible and perceived indirectly through the sight, movement or interactions of those objects. The perception of the symbol requires no effort and the other, its law or meaning, requires some thought or reflection, no matter how brief or automatic, through the symbol for its apprehension. One, the symbol, is directly accessed in the empirical with the permission of law and the other, law, is only accessed inferentially through the instrumentality of the symbol. Law is gravity and object is my body, for example. I can see my body, but I can only see law through my movements. Without this law or some law, the object of my body would not have come into existence or live for long.

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