Psalm 8 | Psalm 19:1-4
Jeremy Richards
I recently finished a book called The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. In the book, Hart essentially challenges what we might call a materialist or a naturalist understanding of the world – the idea that all that exists is what can be seen, and that the world is essentially something like a machine chugging along with no reason, no truth, nothing transcendent within or without it. What ya see is what ya get, essentially. (Interestingly enough, both Horacio and David Wheeler hit on this a little bit last week!)
Hart appeals not only to Christianity but to all great theistic traditions to discount this understanding of reality, and his argument is primarily rooted in who the great theistic traditions actually say that God is. Most people who ascribe to this materialist/naturalist understanding of reality think that the God that Christians and other theistic traditions believe in is essentially still part of the machine, just the most important part – that God is a being among other beings, just the most powerful of those beings.
Hart wholly rejects this understanding of God, as do all mature religions. God is not a being among other beings, but the ground of all being. God is not imbued with life, God is the source of all life. We talked about this last year in our series “I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means.” We said that God is both immanent, meaning God is present in all things, and God is transcendent, meaning God is beyond all things. God isn’t contained by anything in Creation, or even in all of creation collectively. God is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being,” in the words of Acts.
Hart says that the three realities that form the subtitle of his book – being, consciousness, and bliss – point to this God in whom we live and move and have our being, and that a merely materialist or naturalist view cannot account for them. As you can probably tell, the book was a bit heady and philosophical. It took me months to read and was definitely the most challenging book I’ve read in quite a while.
But even though it was challenging, I liked it a lot. But many people may ask, what’s the point? Sure, it’s interesting for a few people (and decidedly not interesting to most people), but in the world in which we live, surely there are more important things to focus on, more practical books to read, more pressing issues with which to concern ourselves.
We are still processing the verdict of the Derek Chauvin trial, caught somewhere between joy that justice has finally be served, and mourning that the brutal murder of George Floyd ever happened in the first place, and the fact that since Floyd’s murder even more unarmed black and brown people have been killed by those sworn to protect them, including the recent shooting of 13 year old Adam Toledo. There’s been an uptick in mass shootings, Covid is still far from over, we can’t drive a mile through our city without seeing tents and cardboard dwellings where our poor, mentally ill, and addicted siblings live in conditions most of us can’t even imagine.
As we focus on creation in today’s Earth Day Sunday service, we’re reminded that all of this, of course, takes place within our environment, within what we Christians frequently refer to as creation – the interconnected world in which we live, consisting of air, earth, water, animals, plants, and insects, as well as outer space – planets, stars, moons, etc. As temperatures and sea levels rise here on earth, many environmentalists are warning that we are nearing the point of no return. If we don’t change the irresponsible way in which we have been engaging with creation, the consequences will be devasting – to us, to the plants, to the animals, to the earth, to the oceans and waterways…to everything.
In light of this laundry list of issues, one might understandably ask if arguments like David Bentley Hart’s about abstract, metaphysical concepts like being, consciousness, and bliss are really where we should focus. This is a fair question, one that’s certainly worth asking, but I would argue that the answer is yes. We should still be concerned with larger, metaphysical concepts. That’s not to say that we all need to read dense books on the subject, but the truth is, what we think about reality shapes how we engage with reality. How we see the world matters. Who we think God is matters. How we see ourselves matters, as we’ll explore in our upcoming sermon series on “Restoring Love of Self.” Faith should engage critical thinking, not leave it at the door.
I finished Hart’s book a week and a half ago, and I was already starting to think about this Sunday’s sermon, and I really wanted to finish the book, but I was also thinking maybe I should be doing research for today’s sermon instead. So I was pleasantly surprised when Hart’s final conclusion, the “so what” of the book, focused, of all places, on creation! He argues that the naturalist/materialist view has a very difficult time explaining why we should care about creation, while a proper understanding of God leads to an unavoidable reverence and awe for the world God created and sustains.
Ultimately, Hart says, if we ascribe to the materialist/naturalist understanding of the world, the idea that all there is is what we can experience through our 5 physical senses, if we believe creation is just a machine, if there is no meaning, no transcendent source of being from whom all being comes forth and toward which all things are directed, then we will inevitably treat it like a machine. There will be nothing holy, nothing sacred, nothing mysterious about it. And there’s no reason to respect and honor a machine with nothing holy, sacred, or mysterious about it.
Hart says:
We ought to remember that the mechanical philosophy arose not just as a new prescription for the sciences…but also in association with a larger Western project of human mastery over the world…The belief that nature is essentially machinery is a license not only to investigate its organic processes but to disassemble, adjust, and use it as we see best. The early modern period was, after all, the great age of conquest: of territory, of “less advanced” peoples or races, even of nature itself; it was the age of nationalism, political absolutism, colonialism, the new imperialism, and incipient capitalism…[1]
The connection Hart is making, is that the acceptance of a Western worldview void of any kind of transcendence, any possibility of the divine, coincided with the rise of mastery, conquest, and colonialism.
Machines are created to serve us. We are constantly upgrading our machinery – our iPhones, our computers, our cars – for the next new thing. That which has become superfluous or defective, we throw into the landfill. If our world is simply another machine, however complex, then we’ll inevitably come to think of it as something that exists for us, something we “master,” to use Hart’s word, something we are free to use and abuse. When we find parts of this great machine that don’t serve our purpose, we will dispose of them. And often it’s even worse for those parts of nature that we find valuable, because when we find those parts of the machine that do serve us, we will exploit them to the point of exhaustion, since the machine exists solely for us and our ends. There is no inherent divinity in nature, if there is no such thing as divinity. There is no mystery if there is no meaning, nothing sacred if there is nothing spiritual, nothing holy if there is nothing other than the physical.
And it’s not just the inanimate parts of creation that get exploited and abused. It’s not just valuable stones, minerals, water ways, and oil reservoirs that are plundered. It’s also living beings – plants, animals, and even people. If everything is an accident, if all that exists is material reality, then, again, nothing is holy, nothing is sacred. As Hart says, it’s no coincidence that the rise of a mechanistic view of the world coincided with the rise of “great age of conquest.”
For the most part, we continue to live in this great age of conquest. While many are sounding the alarm, many others continue to pursue policies and practices that treat creation as nothing more than something to be exploited for their own ends. What is most distressing, and most heartbreaking, is how many of these people claim to be Christians, when this is anything but a Christian understanding of the world.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” the Psalmist asks. When he compares himself to the wonders of creation, it’s not the world that becomes insignificant, but him. He isn’t puffed up with pride but brought low with humility.
More than that, nature points to the One who created it. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” This is essentially the argument of Hart’s book: that our experiences – our very earthy, human, creaturely experiences – point to that which is beyond it all, that which infuses it all and also is not contained by it all, the One who stands outside and inside, the One in whom we live and move and have our being, the Alpha and the Omega. Yahweh. I Am that I Am. God.
Hart asserts again and again that the great theistic traditions have never seen this God as a being among beings, as another part of the machine so to speak, but as the source of all that is. To look for proof of God in the world as if God is contained within the world, Hart says, would be like reading Anna Karenina and looking for a character named Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, of course, never makes an appearance in the great novel, he isn’t one of the characters (though Levin is very much based off Tolstoy), but at the same time, of course, Tolstoy is everywhere in the book. There is no character, no scene, no event that could be understood apart from Tolstoy, because he is the author. When you read Anna Karenina, you fall in love with the characters, you get caught up in the story, and yet you always remain in awe of the one out of whose mind the whole story developed, the one who put pen to paper, the one who birthed the characters and created their world: Tolstoy.
We too are born out of the mind of God, and God is everywhere and also nowhere specific. There is no atom or molecule that exists outside of God, and yet we can never look and say there God is in Their entirety.
The analogy isn’t perfect of course. For example, Tolstoy is dead now and yet we continue to read Anna Karenina. Whereas our world goes on depending every second on God for its existence. But still, I think it’s a pretty good analogy.
I’ve shared with you before that my dad was a high school science teacher, and I think I’ve also shared that every year he took students on a week-long “science field trip.” There were 4 locations – Zion, Arches, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley – so that if a student went every year of high school, there would never be a repeat. Sometimes, before I was in high school, I would go with them. Other times I stayed with my grandma or when I got older I stayed at friends’ houses.
The last time I went before I was in high school myself was in 6th grade, and the trip was to Zion National Park. It was strange because the high schoolers were older than me but not that much older than me. I could relate to them in a way that I understandably didn’t when I was only in, say, 2nd grade. Also, because I was older, I had more independence and spent more time away from my parents. Inevitably I was drawn to the “cool” older boys, who in retrospect were not that cool, at least not in my current mid-30s understanding of cool. They were loud and arrogant and they swore a lot.
They knew they weren’t supposed to swear around me, since I was the son of the teacher who in addition to being a teacher also, along with my mom, led youth group out of his house every week. So they kind of tried to censor themselves, but they didn’t try that hard.
At this point in my life, I liked camping and I liked climbing around on rocks, but I wasn’t really awed by nature. I was much more interested in big cities, which I had hardly ever visited, than I was with the nature. So going with my parents on these week-long science field trips was more about camping, hanging out with older kids, and getting out of school for a week than it was about appreciating nature.
But the first evening that we arrived in Zion, a group of kids, made up primarily of the “cool” older boys I idolized, hiked up a big mound of red rock, and watched the sun set on the Watchman, a large, jagged piece sandstone jutting up 2,600 feet above the campground. As the sun set on it, turning the mountain a fiery red, the older boys, who didn’t know I was behind them, let off a stream of obscenities. It was just one curse word after another.
It was, in a sense, a form of speechlessness for those who haven’t yet learned how to be quite. When all you can do is swear, it means you don’t actually have anything to say. There are no adequate descriptors. No words or sentences to string together to make sense of the experience. These high school boys were enthralled, captivated by the beauty, but more than that, I think they caught a hint of that which lay beyond that which was right in front of them. What they saw was holy. Not a piece in a machine, not an accident of nature, but a doorway into Beauty with a capital “B”. It was a harkening back to the source of all other beauty, of all goodness, of all truth, and also a longing for the culmination, the fulfillment, of those very things. It was a taste of God, who is both the beginning and end of all creation.
“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims her handiwork.”
To see these crude boys, who made dirty jokes and loved to tell stories of getting wasted on the weekends, struck so deeply by the sun setting on a red cliff face had a great impact on me. I still remember it to this day. I never looked at Creation the same way again after that.
As Christians, when we look at Creation, we are not to see nature as some machine to be manipulate or some storehouse to be ransacked, the way so many today continue to see it. It’s a living, thriving expression of God’s love. It lives because God lives, and when it suffers God suffers. We, tiny humans that we are, are given the humbling task of caring for this creation, and in so doing we, shockingly, care for the God who is present in it.
When we hear the Goldfinch sing in the early morning, God serenades us. When we smell the Rhododendron blooming in the spring, we catch the fragrance of God. When we run our hands along the tall meadow grass, we touch God. When we bring the Marionberry to our lips, we taste God. When we watch the sun set on the red cliff face, we glimpse the face of God.
Because we believe in God…
Everything is sacred.
Everything is holy.
Nothing is without meaning.
Amen.
[1] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 310-311.