God's Two Books

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Man is a dual being. But he is not so much a body with a soul, as be is a spirit with a body. He is physical because he exists in a physical universe, but this phase of existence is only temporary. Those who are motivated by faith acknowledge that they are strangers and exiles on the earth. "Those who thus speak make it clear that they are seeking a homeland." Man is both worldly and otherworldly. The flesh is nourished by bread, but man shall not live by bread alone. He must, if he would truly be man and not mere animal, feed upon every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

     For the guidance of man, God has written two great volumes. One is the book of nature; the other that of revelation. One is to nurture creation, the other to instruct the new creation. The book of nature reveals what God has done. It demonstrates his wisdom, power, and majesty. The book of revelation contains an account of what God has said and done. It transmits the thoughts of the divine mind in human language. It conveys the thoughts of the infinite One to finite minds.

     The book of nature has its own dialect. The poet expresses it thus

     The inspired psalmist, recognizing the voice and hearing the words whispered by the created universe, wrote

     The harmony of the planets, the singing of the spheres, the murmur of the pines and the hemlocks, the whisper of gentle zephyrs, the roar of thunder, the hum of bees, the songs of the birds--all of these are parts of the ''various language." God speaks to us by the babbling brook as well as in the sacred book! The scientists, explorers, and researchists, are all interpreters, constantly providing for us revised versions of the lore collected from a study of nature. They are not creators. They are discoverers. They publish their findings, but one cannot find something that was not already there. There is no indication that a single atom is now in existence which was not present when God finished His creation and rested on the seventh day. Matter is indestructible by man. He can rearrange it, change its form and alter its appearance, but he can neither create nor destroy in its ultimate sense.

     Nature is adapted to man's needs. He requires water and the earth contains water in almost the same proportion as man's body. He requires food, and seed-time and harvest combine to produce it. But it is not just the belly that must be filled. Man is a rational animal. He must have food for thought as well as for the body. A wise creator has ordained that Nature relinquish her secrets gradually, and then only to those who diligently pry, probe and dig. There is no reason to question that the brain of Adam was equal in size to that of Einstein, but the latter had the accumulated knowledge of the ages to assist him, whereas the first had to learn by direct revelation and personal experience.

     The mind of Abram was as capacious as that of Medaris or von Braun, our missile experts, but when God told him to look into the heavens and count the stars, he knew nothing of the galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Each person learns from

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birth on an ascending scale. The experience of yesterday becomes the foundation of today. What is true of the individual is also true of the race. Each generation uses the collected wisdom of the past as its own stepping-stone to climb to further heights. If God had arranged for nature to yield all her bounties to one generation, there would have been no further development. Progress would have stopped, the incentive to live would have vanished, humanity would have retrogressed and sunken into oblivion. The body cannot live long on the food it has already assimilated. There must be a constant replenishment with new food or death is inevitable. What is true of the tissues is also true of the thoughts.

     In the natural realm there seems always to he a conflict between reactionary and progressive elements. The former are sometimes moved by fear, the latter often motivated by mere love of change. The first want to have nothing to do with the future; the second to be wholly divorced from the past. Both are wrong in attitude. The true scientific mind will retain all truth that has been uncovered in the past, and be ready to accept all additional truth as it is discovered. Such a mind will resent and resist categorization as either reactionary or progressive, in so far as these terms designate parties or groups. One needs to love truth for truth's sake, and be willing to acknowledge it regardless of cost or personal consequences. He needs to react against every attempt to offset truth; he needs to progress in acceptance of every newly discovered truth.

     When Nicholas Copernicus discovered that the sun is the center of our system, be was reluctant to announce it for fear he would meet the hostility of the Roman Church. Previous astronomers all held the Ptolemaic idea that the earth was the center of the universe. It was believed that the Bible taught this, since man was the highest order of creation and the earth was his dwelling place. Copernicus dedicated his published works to the pope, but he only incurred wrath for daring to question the teachings of the past.

     Galileo, a great student of medicine and philosophy at Pisa, discovered the law that all falling bodies, regardless of weight, travel through the air at the same rate of speed. He demonstrated it by dropping balls of different weight from the Leaning Tower. But his success brought him into disrepute with the followers of Aristotle. They would have had to reject their past contentions and acknowledge their errors. Rather than do this, they contented themselves with circulating the story that Galileo had lost his reason, and was a dangerous man.

     When Galileo published a treatise on the sun's spots in which he announced his concurrence with the theory of Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun, he was hailed before the Inquisition. After a long and weary trial in which he was hounded and harassed, being accused of denying God's Word, he was ordered to renounce his theory, and sentenced to an indefinite term in prison. This is the inevitable fate of all independent and original thinkers who dare to challenge the perfection of the past, and to question the traditions of the fathers--any fathers!

     The book of Revelation is like the book of Nature. It is so written that it relinquishes its great truths on an ascending scale. Revelation was thus given and it will be thus unravelled. The studies and probes of the past constitute only a foundation for present studies. If this were not true we would no longer need reasoning power at all. The faculty of retentiveness, or memory, would serve our every need. We could but parrot the lore of yesteryear. But as God has hidden in the book of nature those elements which will challenge the thought of mankind as long as the earth remains; so he has concealed in the book of Revelation the infinite wisdom which will still be an object of research "when time shall be no more," or until faith is lost in sight.

     Men make the serious mistake of thinking that because God perfected the revelation, man's knowledge of it has been perfected. This has been the refuge of shallow reasoners in every generation. They think that by deriding a thing as "new truth" they can scoff it out of existence,

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or that truth can be thwarted by ridicule. No truth is new to God, but it may be newly discovered by man. In the natural creation, God made every atom that now exists. But man is still discovering truths about the atomic theory, and they are new to him. In the new creation, God revealed His divine mind in the book of Revelation, but there are still unexplored depths of it. Those who face backward would slam the door in the faces of those who search for greater things. The spirit that persecuted Copernicus and Galileo is still rampant in the twentieth century, although its cruelty is more refined, and its claws are now sheathed in velvet. It still operates on the basis that faithfulness to God is conditioned only upon loyalty to past traditions!

     The followers of Luther, assuming he had gathered all the gems of God's wisdom, embodied them in a creedal world of their own and sought to palm it off as the spiritual universe, so that from then on all research to be done with their sanction must be done only through their telescope. Thus did also the adherents of King Henry the Eighth, Calvin and Wesley. And thus also would act many of the present day heirs of Campbell, Scott, Stone, Lipscomb and Sommer, and other more recent worthies. Loyalty to God, faithfulness to His word, these are conditioned upon viewing everything through orthodox spectacles. God made the universe, but man invented spectacles, and spectacles are only for those who have defective vision. He is twice blessed who can read either the book of nature or of revelation without them.

     In the domain of nature, our scientists are indebted to discoverers of truth in all generations. No less is this true of those who would do research in the realm of the spirit. We owe much to men like Jerome, Augustine, Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Campbell, and many others. But if we pitch our tents about their shrines we are unworthy recipients of their heritage. It is absurd for us to search the heavens through the perspective of Luther or Lipscomb, Stone or Sommer. Space probers do not scan the sky through the telescope of Galileo. Let us retain every truth these men discovered, and thank God for their enrichment of our existence. But let no skeleton hand reach from the sepulcher to hold us to a partisan concept of truth. It is better to stand upon the shoulders of those who preceded us that we may widen our horizon, than to allow them to stand upon our necks.

     No one nation owns the natural universe. The Russian scientist as well as the American, can search for answers to age-old riddles, and each must learn from the other or both may perish. No sect, denomination, faction, party, or segment, has any copyright on spiritual truth. All may learn from each; each must learn from all. And, as in the international arena, peace will come, if come it does, from those in every nation who love peace and their fellowmen, so it will be in our divided, distressed, and distracted religious world. Let men of good will share their discoveries while rising above all partisan alliance and prejudice. We need not engage in the heated rivalry of a mad arms race in either the natural or spiritual realm. In each of these we have something tremendous which we hold in common. In the first, we are all products of Gods creation, for He made of one blood all nations. In the second we all share in divine grace, for He has made us possible citizens of one nation through blood!

     None of us know it all. All of us have much to learn. We are frail, feeble, and ignorant of much of divine truth. There are depths in its ocean that have never been explored. There are mountain peaks of revelation still unchallenged by human thought. We cannot create mountains, but we can climb them. Let us not be either Liberals, Conservatives, Reactionaries or Progressives. Let us belong to no party whose exclusive tenets we must defend. Let us be merely humble seekers after truth, holding on to any truth already found, grasping for every new truth to be uncovered. A party man is a partial man, even as a sect is only a section, and a fragment is but a portion. It is enough to belong to God and thus be added by Him to the one body of our blessed Lord.