We are informed that God created both heavens and earth. In other words, invisible spiritual realities and visible physical realities. This isn’t precisely the distinction being made in Genesis but it is nonetheless implied. Hence, the opening of the Nicene Creed: I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
What a truly incredible first statement of the Bible! Two (hardly trivial) details are established effortlessly and economically: God exists; and, reality is comprised of the visible and the invisible. No effort is made to explain this. As though it’s obvious. If you’re a writer of faith writing for fellow believers then it may well be. But even then, it’s still worth asking the question: what’s obvious about it?
We’ve already noted a deliberate connection in John’s Gospel with the opening of Genesis. Another aspect of John’s theology is pertinent here. His whole account is built on the idea of signs. As is true in English, the word has a dual meaning. It can refer to a physical mark or token, something outwardly noticeable or eye-catching. It can also refer to something inferred, implied, far less explicit, (eg she took his lack of attention as a sign). John uses the word as a descriptor for the miracles of Jesus. It carries both meanings: who saw what; and, who grasped its significance?
For John, the Crucifixion is the super-sign. Do you see brokenness, defeat and death? Or, do you see death’s defeat, victory and the beginnings of New Life? The first sign at a wedding reception is also instructive. The servants knew it was water in the jars because they’d just poured it in, but then saw wine when Jesus told them to draw some out. There’s no unseeing what you’ve just seen, but what does it mean?
For the modern Christian storywriter, this is the question of questions…
All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality… if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself… He’s looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point visible in the concrete, and another is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.1
As a fiction writer, it strikes me as obvious that material realities are more immediately obvious than those of the spirit. Would there be any such thing as faith if God’s existence was undeniable? Yet, it’s equally obvious to me that obviousness isn’t necessarily the measure of something’s importance or its truth. We have the phrase in English more than meets the eye. This isn’t just a question of perception blindness as much as conception blindness. The writers of Genesis seem to be suggesting that openness to spiritual reality is a precondition for the possibility of experiencing it as real. If you’ve already assumed there’s no such thing as spiritual reality, it’s likely you’re missing the subtle signs of its presence.
The only nuancing to the above statement by the great Flannery O’Connor is that spiritual reality, understood a certain way, is more real than the material, because, as we’ll soon discover in chapter three, our present material reality is tarnished and diminished. In making an authentic connection between a given material reality and associated spiritual mystery, the Christian writer is opening a window to heaven itself. A deeper reality rushes in. Words pulse with transforming power. And the reader feels the tug of eternity.
Header photo: Andrik Langfield, Unsplash
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery & Manners, Faber & Faber, London, 1972, pp 40-1 & 42
A literalist interpretation of scripture loses the multivalent sense of that term “shamayim” (heavens), which is indeed a plural construct for “skies”. But the word is more mysterious than that in its extended sense of “worlds” beyond our ken (whose German root has the sense of “that which we see”). We are stuck on terra firma (“eretz”) and, as such, we tend to fall into those exegetical ruts along the way when trying to imagine what an ancient compositor/author was getting at when using such figurative language. If you believe the books of the Bible are inspired, as I always have, though my ideas of what constitutes “inspiration” is wildly out of step with the standard canonical notions, then I believe it is worth considering that passages we regard as absurd, speaking of many “skies” could have (in the mind of the author putting stylus to papyrus) could have extended to the macrocosm and limits of what we are beginning to see from the James Webb microscope, to the microcosm and those things hiding in the interstices between consecutive Planck lengths.