Awaken to Love Part 4 - GETTING THE WORD

About the Bible

What we call “God” – infinite, omnipotent and omni-present Creator Spirit – is not revealed directly to our experience. If that were to happen, our very limited capacity to receive would be completely overwhelmed. It would be like the sun drawing near the earth!

Consequently, God “cloaks” the fullness of the Divine presence in various kinds of “signs” and “manifestations” that are nonetheless very powerful and can be very transformative when we experience them.

These signs communicating the love and wisdom of the Spirit can take a variety of forms.

In pre-historical times, sometimes called the “childhood of the human race”, God’s Creation was understood as the primary sign or “Word” of God. We can still see this in the language and outlook of Native American spirituality and in the surviving, indigenous religious forms of Africa and Asia. In these traditions, everything of the created world – the animals and birds, the sun and moon, the earth itself – expressed some aspect of the Spirit. Creation was a mirror or picture of a divine reality in which everything existed.

However, after hundreds of thousands of years as simple hunter-gatherers, humanity underwent its most profound revolution in about 8,000 BCE: our ancestors learned how to plant seeds and harvest crops! As a result of this “Agricultural Revolution”, human beings now controlled their own food supply for the first time and that meant they could begin to control their environment, too.

Working magic in the Memorial Garden

People learned to stay in one place (mainly the fertile river valleys, in the Middle East and China) and they quickly developed increasingly complex forms of social organization – the beginnings of towns, cities and kingdoms.

Their religious focus began to shift, too, from the direct perception of the divine in nature to the divine as revealed in their community’s myths and rituals.

Spiritual truth began to be expressed symbolically, in temples and statues and processions. A little later, a whole new order of symbols appeared when our ancestors invented writing. Almost immediately, there appeared the phenomenon of “sacred scriptures” as a community’s religious myths began to be recorded and set down for future generations.

It is in this context that the Bible appeared, its earliest stories (Genesis 1-11) dating to around 4,500 BCE.

The Bible is therefore part of the ongoing revelations of God. As human consciousness continued to grow and develop over the centuries, God allowed to us a new revelation of love and wisdom suitable for the level we had reached (much as a parent we give our child differing versions of “where babies come from”, depending on their age and needs).

So Creation, and visible symbols, and sacred writing, have all been (and still are) forms of God’s Word to us, signs of his presence and purpose.

(There are still other forms of the Word, too, and perhaps the most significant of these is the unique pattern revealed in each human life – each person is created as a living gospel of God’s love and truth.)

The Bible as the Word of God is the sacred scripture, the foundational, written document, of the Christian tradition. It is not “better” or “truer” than the other sacred scriptures of other traditions (e.g. the Koran, the Hindu Vedas, the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, etc.). The Bible is very different from these other writings but as sacred writing it shares one fundamental similarity: its divine meaning is expressed metaphorically and symbolically, not just literally!

Stirring the beans at the Elmira Maple Syrup Festival

In other words, God’s presence is “cloaked” as we said before, this time within the literal words on the page.

There are as many levels of meaning and significance to the Bible as there are people ready to read it with open hearts and minds. But this does not mean the Bible can mean anything! For a start, the literal meaning does much to constrain and direct the deeper meaning.

However, disagreements about the “right” meaning and proper emphasis, especially when caught up in worldly considerations of power and control, have caused bitter and often bloody conflicts between Christian groups. Over the centuries, it has sometimes become very important for believers to be loyal to the particular interpretation of their particular church.

This insistence on loyalty and blind faith became even more unbending with the beginning of the modern world in the 18th century. Why then? Because that century ushered in the first great discoveries of modern science (Newtonian physics) and technology (the Industrial Revolution). Now, in the Western consciousness at least, “truth” began for the first time to be equated with scientific or empirically provable “fact”.

This meant, for increasing numbers of people, that the Bible had now to be accepted as literally, factually true, in some way or form.

This led some to keep Jesus simply as another great moral teacher and throw out everything else as mere “primitive superstition” and “ignorance”. This was the basic position of the secular humanists and atheists.

On the other hand, some Christians went to the opposite extreme and insisted that the whole Bible had to be read and believed as literally, factually true, as if it were a work of science. Thus, for them, the world was indeed made in 7 days, Adam and Eve were real historical persons, and so on. This is the traditional view of those known as “fundamentalists” or “Biblical literalists”. Curiously, while they are determined to defy the modern, secular world such people actually share the very same modern worldview that “truth” = “facts”.

However, rather than either give up on the Bible (“it’s mostly just primitive superstition and nonsense”) or turn it into something it isn’t (“it’s an exact, scientific and historical blueprint of what did and will happen”), there is a third possibility: that the Bible IS indeed the Word of God but it must be approached symbolically and metaphorically, with a conscious openness to its deeper spiritual meaning!

Swedenborgians say that everything in the Word “corresponds” to a deeper spiritual meaning. The one is the “sign” of the other, just as everything of this life in and around us similarly ‘corresponds” to the greater spiritual reality from which it comes.

Swedenborg was shown that there is a consistent, continuous, inner meaning embedded within the literal sense of the Bible. Every word and phrase expresses or “corresponds” to a spiritual reality, in either a positive or negative sense. Thus, for example, “fire” or “flame” in the positive sense corresponds to the purity of love but in the negative sense to the burning passion of an evil desire. Killing an enemy really refers to stamping out an evil desire that is hostile to the welfare of our souls. And so on.

The meaning that the Bible communicates is in the form of a story on essentially two levels (although each of these has many sub-levels).

On one level, the Bible provides us with the story of our human journey, from birth (Genesis), maturation (the patriarchs), the quest for meaning, identity and earthly success (the Exodus and conquest of the Promised Land), the building of a life and a family (the kingdoms of David and Solomon), the experience of inner conflict and self-doubt (the prophets), the loss of certainty and the search for deeper meaning (the exile, the wisdom books), the discovery of the Spirit or Kingdom within (the Gospels) and the re-birth into a whole new life in the Spirit, both here and hereafter (Revelation).

Along the way, at each of these stages, the Bible gives us God’s wisdom regarding the particular challenges we will face and the possible ways to overcome these challenges and move on. All of God’s love and wisdom for you, indeed the very presence of God, is revealed as inside and within the literal sense of the Bible.

Summer Fun

Thus the Bible is very much God’s Word for YOU! Think of it as a divine love-letter, written expressly to and for you.

However, there is also a second, even deeper level. For every story reveals the character – the personality – of the story-teller. So it is with the Bible. It reveals the life of the divine-human God, the trajectory of the man Jesus becoming the risen, glorified Lord.

Just as, on the first level, the Bible is essentially about our “regeneration” or re-birth into fully conscious, spiritual beings, on this second level the Bible is about the glorification of Jesus as Lord and Christ.

Note, however, that these levels of deeper meaning are not communicated by all the books in the Bible in quite the same way.

In particular, it was revealed to Swedenborg that in the New Testament only the four Gospels and the concluding Book of Revelation express the divine wisdom about the evolution of our relationship with the Lord.

The numerous letters which make up most of the New Testament are certainly excellent for our discipleship and spiritual growth, but they express the deeper story of our life, and the Lord’s life, less directly.

For that reason, Swedenborgians, while revering all of the Bible, have often made a distinction within it between what they call “the Word” (nearly all the Old Testament, the four Gospels and the Book of Revelation) and the other books.

This does not mean “the other books” are unimportant or not from God, only that, while they are excellent teaching, they do not communicate the underlying spiritual story as directly or powerfully as the books which constitute “the Word”.

Nonetheless, Swedenborgians do not “segregate” one from the other but draw inspiration and comfort from every part of the Bible as a whole.

The Bible gives us, as followers of Jesus, the deep wisdom of God’s love to guide us in becoming the kinds of love we most truly are and thereby be fulfilled in our lives.

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