DEEP CALLS TO DEEP
ADOLPH SAPHIR AND HERMAN DOOYEWEERD
(4) COSMIC MEANING:
“From Him, through Him, and to Him are all things”
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Adolph Saphir writes:
('Christ and the Scriptures', pp 95-101)
“Hence it is that Scripture is throughout parabolic. It views the visible as corresponding to, and showing forth, the unseen. It explains the silent language of nature; it beholds the principles of the spiritual world shadowed forth in the manners and experiences of men.
“When Jesus speaks in parables it is in accordance with the whole method of Scripture. He is the true Son of David, who read the two books of nature and of the written Word (Psalm 19); the true Son of Solomon, who saw in earthly prudence the mirror of heavenly wisdom, and who uttered proverbs - ie parables, dark sayings - clear in their primary meaning, but suggestive of higher lessons. Jesus spake in parables, not merely because He was the Son of David and Solomon, the Israelite trained in God’s school of revelation, but also because He was the Son of man.
“Man ought to have an eye for the beautiful works of God, for the light and the innumerable hues of wondrous beauty; he ought to have an ear to hear the thousand voices around him of deep solemnity and exquisite tenderness, even as his mouth should show forth the praises of God in response to God’s message of love and power at sundry times and in divers manners. But there is a separation, through sin, between heaven and earth, and it is faith only that can see the things which are not seen in the things which do appear. Jesus was in heaven while He lived on earth (John 3.13); the essence of all things lay before Him. God and his kingdom, Satan and his kingdom, He beheld and traced throughout. He opened his mouth in parables. He spake of nature. He had watched the clouds and the red sky at evening; the sun in his glory; the fowls of the air in their blithe carelessness; the flowers of the field in their gorgeous beauty; the wisdom of serpents, the guilelessness of doves, the eagle’s keen eye and sudden descent; the hen gathering her chickens under her wings; the wind blowing where it listeth; the vine and its branches; the trees good and bad: the fig-tree and its leaves; the mustard-seed and its development; - all this became to Him a picture of heavenly things.
“He spake of man; of the relationships and occupations of human life; of the eye as the light of the body; of the sick, who need a physician; of the father giving good gifts to his child; of the mother rejoicing that a child is born into the world; of the friend showing himself friendly to his neighbour; of the shepherd and the flock; the king and his nation; the master and his stewards; the merchant seeking goodly pearls; the sower going forth to sow; the fishermen casting out the net; even the little children playing in the marketplace; — and in all this He beheld pictures of eternal truth and spiritual relations.
“He noticed also the foolish and the evil way of men: the unrighteous judge, who feared not God, neither regarded man; the rich man trusting in his earthly possessions; the unmerciful servant, who will not forgive, though himself a debtor to mercy; the unjust steward; the man who begins to build without counting the cost; the thief and robber; the hireling; and here also He sees spiritual principles, eternal results.
“He noticed the common objects and events around Him: salt; the light and candlestick; the house and its foundation; the door; bread and water; the ways of the good householder. He spake of the marriage feast and the wedding garment; - in all He beheld the things that are real and are for ever.
“[…] The chief purpose, however, is, according to the spirit of parabolic teaching, to impress on us that we are even now in eternity; that everywhere we are surrounded by the same God; that the invisible kingdom is manifested in the visible; that God, and his truth, and his righteousness, are the true reality and substance.
“[…] And as all things are upheld for Christ’s sake, in Him and unto Him, there must be a great parallelism between history — the events and relationships which arise in providence - and the history of grace in redemption. There is only one Word of God, who expresses Himself in nature and in the spiritual world. Hence we have such striking resemblances. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground, and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." This mysterious law is true also in the spiritual world, finding its most wonderful and perfect fulfilment in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“Thus we are prepared to find in all the realms of God’s kingdom, from the lowest to the highest, symbols of Christ. In the lowest we have Christ represented by the Stone, the Rock the emblem of strength, of firmness, of never changing stability; the foundation which cannot be moved. But He is also like the Plant. His is life, even as He gives life. He is therefore called the Branch (or ZEMACH), simply and most generally representing the idea of organic life. And this in its highest and noblest form, for He is the Vine; and in its loveliest and most beauteous manifestation, for He is the Rose. But He is symboled forth in a higher kingdom than that of the plants. He is strong and royal as a Lion; He is meek and gentle, attractive and patient, ‘made for suffering,’ like a Lamb.
“But yet higher we rise. He is called ‘the Son of Man;’ for whatsoever is truly human (according to the idea of God) - wisdom and love, strength of purpose and gentleness of submission, concentration in God and expansive benevolence to all, work and energy, and meditative rest and festive sabbath, all that is truly man finds in Him its perfect exponent and fulfilment. And above all, He, the true Microcosm, in whom and by whom all things were created and are upheld, and who is the very Spirit of All, in so far as it is, is the Lord of glory, the Son of the Father, God of God, and Light of light. The Father beholdeth all things in Him, who is the beginning of the creation of God; and we, to our unspeakable joy, with adoring hearts and light-filled eyes, learn to see all things in Him and Him in all things.
“Jesus speaks of Himself as the King, the Shepherd, the Friend, and the Bridegroom; while the Spirit is spoken of under the emblems of Wind, or Breath, Fire, Oil, Water, and the Dove.
“The book of Nature is more especially brought constantly before us, that we may read in it, and trace in its pages the same wonderful truths which the Word has spoken more distinctly in the written book of God’s testimony. […] Of all that is in heaven, and on earth, and in the sea, God often speaks, showing us that all was made by the Word, even Christ, and therefore speaks and testifies of Him.
“In this symbolism everything is so simple, so real, that it speaks to the heart. There is nothing forced here. The spiritual meaning does not supplant, nor even place in the background the immediate and primary meaning of God’s works, as showing forth his wisdom, power, and goodness. Nor is this spiritual meaning a moral appended, as some lame fables require an explanation. We love and appreciate the works themselves the more we connect them, as God does, with the inward idea. God interprets Himself in interpreting his works, for there is but one God, Creator, and Redeemer.”
(by Adolph Saphir, 'Christ and the Scriptures', pp 95-101)
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The 15 MEANING-MODALITIES of COSMIC TIME
(aka ASPECTS / LAW-SPHERES / MODES of CONSCIOUSNESS)
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Herman Dooyeweerd writes:
Meaning as the mode of being of all that is created. |
“This universal character of referring and expressing, which is proper to our entire created cosmos, stamps created reality as meaning, in accordance with its dependent non-self-sufficient nature. Meaning is the being of all that has been created and the nature even of our selfhood. It has a religious [ie default, time-transcending, structural] root and a divine origin. Now, philosophy should furnish us with a theoretical insight into the inter-modal coherence of all the aspects [modalities] of the temporal world. Philosophy should make us aware, that this coherence is a coherence of meaning that refers to a totality. We have been fitted into this coherence of meaning with all our modal functions, which include both the so-called ‘natural’ [ie up to and including the ‘sensory’ modality on above chart] and the so-called ‘spiritual’ [or ‘normative’, ie the analytical modality and all above it on chart].”
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol 1, pp 3,4)
Meaning in the fall of man.
“There remains, however, another central problem of extreme importance: As regards his human nature, Christ is the root of reborn creation, and as such the fulness of meaning, the creaturely Ground of the meaning of all temporal reality. But our temporal world in its apostate religious root lies under God's curse, under the curse of sin. Thus there is a radical [radix] antithesis in the subject-side of the root of the earthly cosmos. It may be that this antithesis has been reconciled by the Redemption in Jesus Christ, but in temporal reality the unrelenting struggle between the kingdom of God and that of darkness will go on until the end of the world.
The falling away from God has affected our cosmos in its root and its temporal refraction of meaning. Is not this a final and decisive reason to distinguish meaning from reality? Does not the radical antithesis between the kingdom of God and that of darkness, which our transcendental Idea itself also recognizes as fundamental for philosophic thought, compel us to accept an ultimate dualism between meaning and reality? Is sinful reality still meaning? Is it not meaningless, or rather the adversary of meaning, since meaning can only exist in the religious [root] dependence on its Origin?
The falling away from God has affected our cosmos in its root and its temporal refraction of meaning. Is not this a final and decisive reason to distinguish meaning from reality? Does not the radical antithesis between the kingdom of God and that of darkness, which our transcendental Idea itself also recognizes as fundamental for philosophic thought, compel us to accept an ultimate dualism between meaning and reality? Is sinful reality still meaning? Is it not meaningless, or rather the adversary of meaning, since meaning can only exist in the religious [root] dependence on its Origin?
Here we indeed touch the deepest problem of Christian philosophy. The latter cannot hope to solve it without the illumination of Divine Revelation if it wants to be guaranteed from falling back into the attitude of immanence-philosophy [ie any philosophy which seeks ultimate anchorage within time].
I for one do not venture to try and know anything concerning the problem that has been raised except what God has vouchsafed to reveal to us in His Word. I do not know what the full effect of unrestrained sin on reality would be like. Thanks to God this unhampered influence does not exist in our earthly cosmos. One thing we know, viz. that sin in its full effect does not mean the cutting through of the relation of dependence between Creator and depraved creation, but that the fulness of being of Divine justice will express itself in reprobate creation in a tremendous way, and that in this process depraved reality cannot but reveal its creaturely mode of being as meaning. It will be meaning in the absolute subjective apostasy under the curse of God's wrath, but in this very condition it will not be a meaningless reality.
Sin causes spiritual death through the falling away from the Divine source of life, but sin is not merely privatio [absence, deprivation, omission], not something merely negative, but a positive, guilty apostasy insofar as it reveals its power, derived from creation itself. Sinful reality remains apostate meaning under the law and under the curse of God's wrath. In our temporal cosmos God's Common Grace reveals itself, as KUYPER brought to light so emphatically, in the preservation of the cosmic world-order. Owing to this preserving grace the framework of the temporal refraction of meaning remains intact.”
The Christian as a stranger in this world.
“Although the fallen earthly cosmos is only a sad shadow of God's original creation, and although the Christian can only consider himself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, yet he cannot recognize the true creaturely ground of meaning in the apostate root of this cosmos, but only in the new root, Christ. Any other view would inevitably result in elevating sin to the rank of an independent counter-power opposed to the creative power of God. And this would result in avoidance of the world, an unbiblical flight from the world. We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The war that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness, is a joyful struggle, not only for his own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin.”
The apostate world cannot maintain any meaning as its own property in opposition to Christ. Common Grace.
“Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.
Whoever relinquishes the 'world' taken in the sense of sin, of the 'flesh' in its Scriptural meaning, does not really lose anything of the creaturely meaning, but on the contrary he gets a share in the fulness of meaning of Christ, in Whom God will give us everything. It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose; that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychiatric maladies, to practise logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social interaction, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer.
We can only face the problem of the effect on temporal meaning that the partial working of the falling away from the fulness of meaning has in spite of common grace, when we have gained an insight into the modal structures of the law-spheres within the temporal coherence of meaning. But — and with this we definitively reject any separation of meaning from reality — meaning in apostasy remains real meaning in accordance with its creaturely mode of being. An illogical reasoning can occur only within the logical [analytical] modality of meaning; illegality in its legal sense is only possible within the modality of meaning of the jural sphere; the non-beautiful can only be found within the modal aspect of meaning of the aesthetic law-sphere, just as organic disease remains something within the modal aspect of meaning of the biotic law-sphere, and so on. Sin, as the root of all evil, has no meaning or existence independent of the religious fulness of the Divine Law. In this sense St PAUL'S word is to be understood, to the effect that but for the law sin is dead ("χωρὶς γὰρ νόμου ἁμαρτία νεκρά" Romans 7:8).
All along the line meaning remains the creaturely mode of being under the law which has been fulfilled by Christ. Even apostate meaning is related to Christ, though in a negative sense; it is nothing apart from Him.
As soon as thought tries to speculate on this religious basic truth, accessible to us only through faith in God's Revelation, it gets involved in insoluble antinomies [ie conflicts of modality demarcation]. This is not due to any intrinsic contradiction between thought and faith, but rather to the mutinous attempt on the part of thought to exceed its temporal cosmic limits in its supposed self-sufficiency. But of this in the next section. For thought that submits to Divine Revelation and recognizes its own limits, the antithesis in the root of our cosmos is not one of antinomy; rather it is an opposition on the basis of the radical unity of Divine Law; just as in the temporal law-spheres justice and injustice, love and hatred are not internally antinomous, but only contrasts determined by the norms in the respective modalities of meaning.”
The religious value of the modal criterion of meaning.
“If created reality is to be conceived of as meaning, one cannot observe too strictly the limits of the temporal modal law-spheres in philosophic thought. These limits have been set by the cosmic order of time in the specific 'sovereignty of the modal aspects within their own spheres' [ie ‘mutual irreducibility’. NB ‘irreducible’ even to the logical-analytical aspect. The aspects are not a construct of logic, but are primarily discovered by intuition].
Any attempt to obliterate these limits by a supposedly autonomous thought results in an attack upon the religious [ie supratemporal] fulness of meaning of the temporal creation.
If the attempt is made to reduce the modal meaning of the jural or that of the economic law-sphere to the moral one of the temporal love of one's neighbour, or if the same effort is made to reduce the modal meaning of number or that of language [lingual/ symbolical] to the meaning of logic [analytical], it must be distinctly understood that the abundance of meaning of creation is diminished by this subjective reduction. And perhaps without realizing what this procedure implies, one puts some temporal aspect [ie modality of time] of reality in the place of the religious [time-transcending] fulness of meaning in Christ. The religious [transcendent root] value of the criterion of meaning is that it saves philosophic thought from falling away from this fulness.”
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol 2, p 32-36)
Eternity illumines even the seemingly trivial.
In the Biblical attitude of naïve [(not pejorative!) everyday immersive/ pre-theoretical] experience, the transcendent, religious [supratemporal root] dimension of its horizon is opened. The light of eternity radiates perspectively through all the temporal dimensions of this horizon and even illuminates seemingly trivial things and events in our sinful world.
[...] This should not be misunderstood. It would be an illusion to suppose that a true Christian always displays the Biblical attitude in his pre-theoretical [concrete, everyday] experience. Far from it. Because he is not exempt from the solidarity of the fall into sin, every Christian knows the emptiness of an experience of the temporal world which seems to be shut up in itself. He knows the impersonal attitude of a 'Man' [Heidegger term] in the routine of common life and the dread of nothingness, the meaninglessness, if he tries to find himself again in a so-called existential isolation. He is acquainted with all this from personal experience, though he does not understand the philosophical analysis of this state of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic existentialism.
But the Christian whose heart is opened to the Divine Word-revelation knows that in this apostate experiential attitude he does not experience temporal things and events as they really are, i.e. as meaning pointing beyond and above itself to the true religious centre of meaning and to the true Origin."
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Vol 2, pp 29, 30)
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