Does Not Have Love
I consider this among my favorite sayings in the Book of Proverbs:
It is the glory of God to conceal things,
but the glory of kings to search things out (Proverbs 25:2).
In just eight Hebrew words the proverb articulates the great contest between human curiosity and divine hiddenness. Of the eight words, two are repeated: “glory,” that which enhances God, and that which enhances kings, and “things” (davar). It is the task of kings to uncover the secrets and systems of creation. Thus “government” is characteristically the chief motivator and financier of scientific investigation and exploration. It is the counterwork of the creator God to protect from human probes into the hidden ways in which creation functions. We are able to see that contestation played out in real time. It is the government that finances space exploration and all sorts of health research. And yet, as science advances in its understanding, it continues to discover more space, more complexity, and more hiddenness. It is the bet of the ancient wisdom teachers that while human knowledge continues to expand and go deeper, the capacity of the creator God to maintain inexplicable, inaccessible mystery is indeed limitless and finally beyond exposure. That contestation, moreover, continues in emerging scientific investigation, so that advancing scientific discovery may lead variously to greater control or greater wonder. The contest concerns the capacity of human intelligence for technological power; the wonder is the recognition that finally before the reality of creation in its hiddenness, one is reduced to poetry and awe before the produce of the creator that seems to live beyond human capacity.
The classic biblical example of “kings who seek out” is King Solomon.
Solomon participated in the Near Eastern practice of organizing knowledge into lists and inventories. Thus he collected proverbs and songs:
He composed three thousand proverbs and his songs numbered a thousand and five. (I Kings 4:32).
This listing suggests something like scientific classification. Gerhard von Rad (“Job XXXVIII and Ancient Egyptian Wisdom,” The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 281-291) has shown how the catalog in Job 38:12ff. participates in the Near Eastern legacy of organized learning. To be sure, the evidence in the Book of Job is not directly linked to Solomon. Nonetheless, we may imagine a continuity of intent in ancient Israel in the regulated organization of knowledge.
The king initiated “quarrying” that produced costly stones for the new temple (II Kings 5:17). We may in this terse note see the beginning of a trajectory that continues in the poetry of Job 28 with reference to mining:
Surely there is a mine for silver,
and a place for gold to be refined.
Iron is taken out of the earth,
and copper is smelted from ore.
Miners put an end to darkness,
and search out to the farthest bound
the ore in gloom and deep darkness.
They open shafts in a valley away from human habitation;
they are forgotten by travelers,
they sway suspended, remote from people.
As for the earth, out of it comes bread;
but underneath it is turned up as by fire.
Its stones are the place of sapphires,
and its dust contains gold (Job 28:1-6).
This extended poem goes on to say that for all such human ingenuity and industry, wisdom is hidden from the eyes of all living (Job 28:21). That is, such probes might lead to minerals, but it does not lead to mastery or understanding.
Solomon is renowned, according to the narrative, for his wisdom. He was, in this reading, a patron of wisdom teaching, no doubt because he found it possible to transpose knowledge into power and wealth, and then to control. Solomon joined in the common royal enterprise of knowledge as power, and succeeded in amassing great knowledge, and thus great power.
We must, however, recognize that Solomon’s great learning ended in failure. According to Israel’s memory Solomon lost reference to the God of covenant and so came to disaster (I Kings 11:1-8). It remained for a belated verdict to be issued concerning Solomon:
Even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these (Matthew 6:29).
This saying of Jesus refers to royal “glory,” the same term we have in the proverb. Solomon had much “glory” reflected from his learning, his wealth, and his power. That royal “glory,” is less than the “glory” of birds and flowers that bespeak the wonder of God’s creation. Thus Solomon participated in the contest of Proverbs 25:2. His “glory” in seeking things out was extensive. In the end, however, it came to nothing.
In the long wake of ancient wisdom (here reflected through the prism of Solomon), there is continuity in the modern world. Like the ancient world, the modern world seeks knowledge:
With the crucial antecedent of Copernicus in 1553, Rene Descartes is commonly regarded as the beginning point of modern knowledge. He made it possible to understand and interpret the world according to mathematical calculation that was unhindered by any religious ideology. According to this view, there is no limit to human knowledge that could be acquired by human reasoning in response to consummate doubt. Descartes did not accept that God could or would hide anything from human reason, but all knowledge was available to proper reasoning. This is an offer of human autonomy, unimpeded by the mystery of God whose governance Descartes took care to acknowledge.
As a consequence of the rationality of Descartes, Isaac Newton was soon to take up mathematical calculation and so could arrive at the “law of gravitation and the laws of motion.” As with Descartes, Newton lived in a world of the reality of God; his quest for knowledge nonetheless was unhindered by any hiddenness on God’s part.
The development of steam power in the 18th century mobilized the modern knowledge of mathematics into radically new technology. The development of steam power served to actualize much of human autonomy upon which Descartes had based his reasoning. Sven Lindqvist (Exterminate All the Brutes p. 47) writes of a subsequent development:
In the middle of the nineteenth century, steamers started carrying cannons deep into the interior of Asia and Africa. With that a new epoch in the history of imperialism was introduced.
The dominance of Isaac Newton’s science lasted until the end of the 19th century. A new wave of scientific energy at the turn of the century, featuring Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Neils Bohr among others, essentially rejected the static categories of Newton, and the static theology that came with the static physics of Newton. Now all was dynamism, movement, and motion. Given the new physics, new theological formulations were required in order to remain credible in such a dynamic universe. The old formulations had to yield and what remained, for the most part, was a sense of mystery that pervades the dynamism of the universe.
We may mention of late the remarkable technological capacity of Elon Musk for whom theological categories play no role at all. Musk has been able to mobilize new learning in a quite practical way. It is also to be noted that Musk’s enormous technological capacity brings with it more recently a distinct fascist propensity. Plus the fact that he is tone-deaf to the complexity of human reality.
When we consider the long run of modern Enlightenment knowledge, it is clear that for the most part the claims for God receive lip service, at best. The most passionate zeal for knowledge was seldom held back by reference to the reality of God, even though the Roman Catholic Church did much to resist the new, venturesome knowledge. For the most part, theological reasoning has been playing catch-up to the advances in science. In our moment of technological domination, theological thinking of necessity has taken on a critical function to explore the risks and threats of technological domination. One such critic, Jacques Ellul, has seen what is at stake in that domination. Ellul insists that we must recognize that technology is not merely a “niche” in our learning, but in fact is a way of life, so that we may speak of a “technological culture” with an accent on a capacity for full control of our lived world. Ellul identifies five factors that permitted the exceptional growth of technique:
a very long technical maturation or incubation without any check on it;
population growth;
a suitable economic climate;
the almost complete plasticity of a society malleable and open to the propaganda of
technique; and
a clear technological intention and objective (The Technological Society 59-60).
Ellul opines that these five factors never coincided before the 18th century. The argument of his defining book is that a full century of technology has created a new society that is unrestrained by any religious claim at all. Thus technology is on the loose without any compelling restraint.
It is fair to say, I judge, that much of the church has colluded in the dominance of technology by default, by its parochial prayers that are no more than lists of local needs, by its preference for inane privatized “praise songs,” and by its preaching that moves between moralism and entertainment.
As sobering as this new technological reality is, I have pursued this reflection because of my reading of The Rumor of Angels by William Egginton (2023).The book is constituted by a wise reflection on three quite different modern voices, the generative pondering of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinean writer, the rumination of the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, and the shrewdness of philosopher, Emmanuel Kant. Thus the subtitle of the book, Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Egginton traces the way in which these three critical thinkers, in their very different frames of reference, reason about ultimate reality. In my reading of the book, I was drawn particularly to two remarkable statements:
Heisenberg concludes:
The ability of human beings to understand is without limit. About the ultimate things we cannot speak. Or to put it inversely, by presuming we know the ultimate nature of reality, we limit our ability to understand (p. 25).
This is a quite remarkable statement because the second sentence is quite unexpected after the first sentence. But the second sentence readily acknowledges that there are domains of reality that lie beyond scientific decoding, that is, that narrate a quality of mystery that evades human control.
Of Kant Egginton can write:
In a word, Kant came to terms with not being God (p. 116).
This judgment is a reflection on Kant’s elusive distinction between the phenomenal and the epiphenomenal. The latter lies beyond human analysis.
Thus Egginton shows the way in which these three writers—a novelist, a scientist, and a philosopher—commonly recognize a limit to the capacity of human knowledge; they acknowledge a domain of hiddenness that of necessity remains a mystery beyond explanation. Such reasoning, of course, illuminates the complex relation of wonder and knowledge, and insists that our best knowledge leads us to domains that yields awe and not control. This wonder insists that our best human knowledge is at most penultimate. It affirms that our lives are lived in a universe that properly evokes awe that may end in amazement and praise. This awareness constitutes no defeat for our long-running enterprise of human knowledge, but it does place that long-running enterprise in proper perspective.
In a world where technology continues to offer itself as the inescapable answer to all human issues (as for example the mass of advertising that presents drugs as the cure-all for human finitude), the performance of wonder is the proper task of the church. Such wonder invites us into the presence of holy mystery that both judges and redeems our lives. The church can foster such wonder, so urgently needed to correct the skewed dominance of technology. The church has available, in its recurring practices, the means for such nurturing and evoking wonder:
Prayers that are expansive and voiced in daring imagery, that put before us an alternative world of generosity, hospitality, and forgiveness, that situates our needs into a sweeping zone of wellbeing that summons the power of life that runs beyond our death or our fear of death.
Singing that evokes an occupied cosmos that places our world of scarcity and fear and violence before the throne of mercy. Such singing concerns not our needy preoccupations, but the voicing of a world of governance that variously besets us in our strength as in our weakness.
Preaching that shows us the ways in which we may participate in this world of wellbeing that is at the brink of overriding our shriveled, failed world.
The voicing of such wonder is not an escape from the reality of our lives, but it is an insistence that our lives are pervaded by transformative mystery, and that our great explanatory skills are penultimate before a holy mystery that defies our decoding or control.
We may consider these four attestations to wonder:
From a Jewish rabbi:
To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments…Man hands over his time to God in the secrecy of single words…To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions (Abraham Heschel, Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism, pp. 5, 13-14, 19).
From two Christian theologians, one Reformed and one Anglican, on Dante’s Divine Comedy:
This sees praise and adoration of God as the essence of every person’s vocation, and constitutive of right relations…Right praise is not as optional extra in life but is the fundamental condition for happiness and for staying in harmony with reality….praise is, among other things, a form of thinking and aims to “think God” as adequately as possible (Daniel W. Hardy and David F. Ford, Praising and Knowing God, 50, 52, 56).
From a Roman Catholic scholar:
Only the presence of God can preserve our truth-seeking mind from analytic pretensions of a disruptive rationality for its own sake…The pursuit of science and wisdom is not detachable from the lyrical mooring of a philosophy that attributes the highest actuality to the wisdom of God (deum ignatum) of St. Paul’s speech at the Aeropagus (David Tracey).
And from the great hymnody of the church:
Holy, Holy, holy! All the saints adore thee,
casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
who wert, and art, and ever more shall be.
(“Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” Glory to God 1, second stanza.)
To all life thou givest, to both great and small.
In all life thou livest, the true life of all.
We blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree,
Then wither and perish; but naught changeth thee.
(“Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” Glory to God 12, third stanza).
O fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds you so much dread are big with mercy
And shall break in blessings on your head
(“O God, in a Mysterious Way,” Glory to God 30, third stanza).
These several witnesses voice wonder in its expansive imagery, its vivid portrayal, and its mystery drawn close to our lived reality. As I have written these words, I have been drawn to the opening words of Paul’s famous “love chapter”:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels,
but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith as to remove mountains,
but do have love, I am nothing.
If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing (I Corinthians 13:1-3).
The threefold “if” of these verses concern all “knowledge masters” from Solomon’s wisdom teachers to Elon Musk. All the knowledge in the world, in sum, yields nothing positive without self-giving love. Thus Paul contradicts all our prized autonomy and insists upon our own engagement in the fabric of self-giving. The triad rings in our ears: “Does not have love.” We have complete and unhindered freedom to take our knowledge as far as we are able. In doing so, we live in the power of the Holy One who always summons us deeper into God’s good gifts of “wonder, love and praise,” (in the beloved words of Charles Wesley, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” Glory to God, 366, fourth stanza.)
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
