Hearing the World in a Higher Key

Genuine reality, like a live orchestra, cannot he reduced to mere bits of data.

Our era has erected a giant barricade against faith. Every society ever studied—with the notable exception of the post-Enlightenment West—has held to some kind of belief in an unseen world. But nowadays many people get up, eat, drive their cars, work, make phone calls, tend to their children, and go to bed without giving a single thought to the existence of an unseen world.

I imagine that even most Christians, if pressed, would confess to such doubts; they grow like mold in the dampness of our skeptical age. Ironically, it was while surrounded by earnest believers—at a Bible college, no less—that I found faith in an unseen world most difficult. Here was my problem: Actions regarded as “spiritual” by the believers on campus seemed utterly ordinary to me. If the unseen world really was making contact with the seen world, where were the scorch marks, the sure signs of a supernatural Presence?

Take the matter of prayer: The believers seemed to distort events to make everything look as if it were an answer to prayer. If an uncle sent an extra $50 to help with school bills, they would grin and shout and call a prayer meeting to thank God. They accepted these “answers to prayer” as final proof that God was out there listening to them. But I could always find another explanation. Perhaps the uncle had sent all his nephews $50 that month, and the prayers were merely coincidental. After all, I had an uncle who occasionally sent me gifts, though I never prayed for them. And what of these students’ many requests that went unanswered? Prayer, it seemed to me, involved nothing more than talking to the walls and an occasional, self-fulfilling prophecy.

As an experiment, I began mimicking “spiritual” behavior on campus. I prayed devoutly in prayer meetings, gave phony testimonies about my conversion, and filled my vocabulary with pious jargon. And it worked, confirming my doubts. I, the skeptic, soon passed for a veritable saint—just by following the prescribed formula. Could Christian experience be genuine if most of it could be convincingly reproduced by a skeptic?

I conducted this experiment as a result of my reading in the psychology of religion. Books such as The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, had persuaded me that religion was just a complex psychological reaction to the stresses of life. James examined the claim that the sincere Christian is a new creature formed out of new fabric. But, he concluded, “Converted men as a class are indistinguishable from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their fruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-day inspection of the ‘accidents’ of the two groups of persons before him that their substance differed as much as divine differs from human substance.” I, too, could see no unusual radiance, no distinguishing mark in the believers around me.

The Endurance Of The Natural

Thanks to the grace of God, I did not remain a skeptic. But in honesty, I must admit that even now, after two decades of rich and rewarding faith, I am vulnerable to doubt. Spiritual experience does not bear introspection easily; shine a spotlight on it and it vaporizes. If I probe my times of communion with God, I can usually uncover another, more natural explanation for what has taken place. There is no blinding difference between the natural and supernatural worlds, no gulf fixed with barbed wire separating the two.

I do not stop being a “natural” person when I pray: I get sleepy, lose concentration, and suffer the same frustrations and miscommunications while conversing with God that I do with other people. When I write on “spiritual” topics, I am not suddenly lifted heavenward by the muses; I still must sharpen pencils, cross out words, consult the dictionary, wad up and throw away countless false starts. Instances of “knowing God’s will” in my life have never been as straightforward as the examples I see in the life of a Moses or a Gideon. I have never heard the booming Voice from the whirlwind.

Why, then, do I believe in an unseen world? I have received great help in this struggle from the writings of C. S. Lewis. The theme of two worlds runs like a thread through most of his work—in the early writings, in letters to his friends, and in all his fiction, until it finally develops into a full-blown theory in an essay called “Transposition” (contained in the collection The Weight of Glory). Lewis defined the problem as, being “that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be our supernatural life of all the same old elements which make up our natural life.” Most of what follows will simply expand on his ideas.

Looking Along The Beam

Lewis began his essay “Transposition” by referring to the curious phenomenon of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. How odd, he commented, that an undeniably “spiritual” event, the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, would express itself in the strange human phenomenon of speaking in another language. To the bystanders at Pentecost, it resembled drunkenness; to many “scientific” observers today, glossolalia resembles hysteria or a nervous disorder. How can such natural actions as the movement of vocal cords express the supernatural indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God?

Lewis suggested the analogy of a beam of light in a dark toolshed. When he first entered a shed, he saw a beam, and looked at the luminous band of brightness filled with floating specks of dust. But when he moved over to the beam and looked along it, he gained a very different perspective. Suddenly he saw not the beam, but rather, framed in the window of the shed, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside, and beyond that, 93 million miles away, the sun. Looking at the beam and looking along the beam are quite different.

Our century excels in techniques of looking at the beam, and “reductionism” is the word most commonly used to describe this process. We can “reduce” human behavior to neurotransmitters and enzymes, reduce butterflies to molecules of DNA, and reduce sunsets to particle-waves of light and energy. In its most extreme forms, reductionism sees religion as psychological projection, world history as evolutionary struggle, and thought itself as only the opening and shutting of billions of I/O computer gates in the brain.

This modern world, so skilled in looking at the beam from every angle, is a world hostile to “faith.” The reason all societies took for granted the existence of an unseen, supernatural world was that they had no other way of accounting for such marvels as a sunrise, an eclipse, and a thunderstorm. But now we can explain them, and much more. We can reduce most natural phenomena, and even most spiritual phenomena, to their component parts. As Lewis observed about glossolalia, even the most “supernatural” acts express themselves on this earth in “natural” ways.

From the theory of transposition, I draw these conclusions about living in such a world.

1. First, we must simply acknowledge the powerful force of reductionism. That force offers both a blessing and a curse. It blesses us with the ability to analyze earthquakes and thunderstorms and tornadoes, and thus defend ourselves against them. By looking at the beam, we have learned to fly—all the way to the moon and back—to tour the world while staring at a box in our living rooms, and to bring the sounds of orchestras to our ears as we jog along country lanes. By looking at the beam of human behavior, we can recognize chemical components and thus, through drugs, rescue people from severe depression and schizophrenia.

But reductionism has also brought a curse. Looking at the beam rather than along it, we risk the assumption that life consists of nothing more than its constituent parts. We will never again view the sunrise or moonrise with the same sense of awe and near worship that our “primitive” ancestors—or even the sixteenth-century poets—felt. And if we reduce behavior to merely hormones and chemistry, we lose all human mystery and free will and romance. The ideals of romantic love that have inspired artists and lovers through the centuries suddenly reduce to a matter of hormonal secretions.

Reductionism may exert undue influence over us unless we recognize it for what it is: a way of looking. It is not a true-or-false concept; it is a point of view that informs us about the parts of a thing, but not the whole.

Spiritual acts, for example, can be viewed from both a lower and a higher level. One does not supplant the other; it merely sees the same behavior differently (just as looking at a beam of light differs from looking along it). From the “lower” perspective, prayer is a person talking to himself (and glossolalia the same, only gibberish). The “higher” perspective presumes a spiritual reality is at work, with human prayer serving as a contact point between the seen and unseen worlds.

I can attend a Billy Graham rally as a curious spectator and make a point of selecting one person in the vast audience, theorizing on all the sociological and psychological factors that might entice this one woman to be receptive to Graham’s message. Her marriage is falling apart; she is looking for stability; she remembers the strength of a pious grandmother; the music takes her back to childhood church experiences. But those “natural” factors do not rule out the supernatural; to the contrary, they may be the means God chooses to prompt that person toward him. Perhaps the continuity between natural and supernatural is a continuity of design from the same Creator. That, at least, is the “higher” view of faith. The one point of view does not exclude the other; they are two ways of looking at the same event.

2. Oddly, the lower viewpoint may even seem superior to the higher. C. S. Lewis recalled that as a child he had first learned to appreciate orchestral music by listening to the single, undifferentiated sound produced by a primitive Gramophone. He could hear the melody, but not much else. Later, when he went to live concerts, he was greatly disappointed. A multitude of sounds came from many instruments playing different notes. He longed for “the real thing,” which, to his untrained ear, was the mongrel sound of the Gramophone. To him, the substitute seemed superior to the reality.

Similarly, a person raised on a steady diet of television might find real mountain hiking, complete with mosquitoes, shortness of breath, and annoying weather changes, inferior to the vicarious experience afforded by a National Geographic special.

More to the point, the lower viewpoint may seem superior in moral issues as well. The ideal of romantic love has inspired our greatest sonnets and novels and operas. But reductionists like Hugh Hefner now argue quite articulately that sex is superior when freed from the constraints of love and relationship. (Certainly Playboy has more visceral appeal than the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) And secularists, dismissing religion as a crutch, extol the “braver” challenge of surviving in this world without an appeal to a higher Being.

3. The reality of the higher world is carried by the faculties of the lower world. The word “transposition” belongs to the vocabulary of music. A song can be transposed from one musical key into another. Or, more appropriate to the analogy, and broadening the term beyond its technical use, a symphony score written for 110 orchestral instruments can be transcribed, or “transposed,” into a version for the piano. Naturally, something will get lost in such a “transposition”: ten fingers striking piano keys cannot possibly reproduce all the aural nuances of an orchestra. Yet the transcriber, limited to the range of sounds made by those keys, must somehow convey the essence of the symphony through them.

C. S. Lewis cited a diary entry from Samuel Pepys regarding a rapturous musical concert. Pepys said the sound of the wind instruments was so sweet that it ravished him “and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.…” Try to analyze the physiology of any emotional response, said Lewis. What happens in our bodies when we experience beauty, or pride, or love? To Pepys it was a ravishing feeling, and yet not unlike nausea. He felt a kick in the stomach, a flutter, a muscular contraction—the very same bodily reactions he might sense at a moment of illness.

Looked at from the lower point of view, our physical responses to joy and fear are almost identical. In each case the adrenal gland secretes the same hormone, and neurons in the digestive system fire off the same chemicals; but the brain interprets one message as joy and one as fear. At its lower levels, the human body has a limited vocabulary, just as a transcriber/transposer has a limited number of piano keys to express the sounds of a full orchestra.

And this is where reductionism shows its greatest weakness: If you look only “at the beam,” reducing human emotions to their most basic components (neurons and hormones), you might logically deduce that joy and fear are the same, when they are in fact near opposites. The human body has no nerve cells specially assigned to convey a sensation of pleasure—nature is never so lavish. All our experiences of pleasure come from “borrowed” nerve cells that also carry sensations of pain and touch and heat and cold.

A Way Of Life

The human brain offers a nearly perfect model of transposition. Although the brain represents the “higher” point of view within the body, there is no more isolated or helpless organ. It sits in a box of thick bone, utterly dependent on lower faculties for information about the world. The brain has never seen anything, or tasted anything, or felt anything. All messages sent to it arrive in the same coded form, our many sensory experiences reduced down to an electrical sequence of dots and dashes (— · —— ·· — ··· ——). The brain relies totally on these Morse code messages from the extremities, which it then assembles into meaning.

As I write, I am listening to Beethoven’s magnificent Ninth Symphony. What is that symphony but a series of codes transposed across time and technology? It began as a musical idea that Beethoven “heard” in his mind (an extraordinary mental feat, for the composer, by then totally deaf, had only memory to guide him and could not test his idea on musical instruments). Beethoven then transposed the symphony onto paper, using a series of codes known as musical notation.

More than a century later, an orchestra read those codes, interpreted them, and reassembled them into a glorious sound approximating what Beethoven must have “heard” in his mind. Recording engineers captured that orchestra’s sound as a series of magnetic impulses on a streaming tape, and a studio transposed that code into a more mechanical form, eventuating in the tiny ripples on my record album.

My turntable is now “reading” those ripples and amplifying the variations through loudspeakers. Molecular vibrations caused by those speakers reach my ears, setting into motion another series of mechanical acts: Tiny bones beat against my eardrums, transferring the vibrations through a viscous fluid on into Corti’s organ, where 25,000 sound receptor cells lie in wait. Once stimulated, the appropriate cells fire off their electrical message. Finally, those impulses, mere dots and dashes of code, reach my brain, where the cortical screen assembles them into a sound I recognize as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I experience pleasure, even joy, as I pause and listen to that great work of music—the joy being once again carried to me by “lower” faculties of my body.

Transposition is a way of life. All knowledge comes to us through a process of translating downward into code and then upward into meaning. I have just written three paragraphs on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. These were thoughts originating in my mind that I then transposed into words and typed into a computer, which recorded them in code on a magnetic disk. Eventually, my computer will transpose that magnetic code into a binary code, and a device called a modern will transpose the binary code into digital sounds that it will send over telephone wires to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. If I listen in as my modern transmits the three paragraphs on Beethoven, I will detect nothing but a cloud of static, yet I trust that the static will somehow contain my thoughts and words.

The publisher’s computer, receiving the digital sounds, will translate them back into magnetic codes stored on a disk. Eventually, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will retranslate those codes into words visible on a screen, and then transpose the words into patterned ink marks on paper—the very ink marks you are reading right now. To your trained eye, these blobs of ink on a page form letters and words that are conveyed to your eye cells and transposed into electrical impulses that your brain is assembling into some kind of meaning.

All communication, all knowledge, all sensory experience—all of life on this planet—relies on the process of transposition: Meaning travels “downward” into codes that can later be reassembled. We instinctively trust that process, believing that the lower codes really do carry something of the original meaning. I trust that the words I choose, and even the staticky transmissions of my modern, will carry my original thoughts about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

I look at a photograph, an image of the Rocky Mountains transposed to a small, flat, glossy sheet, and mentally relive a visit there. I scratch a magazine ad to smell a perfume sample, and the image of my wife, who wears that perfume, suddenly comes to mind. The lower carries something of the higher.

Transposition Of The Spirit

Should it surprise us, then, to find the same universal principle operating in the realm of the spirit?

I think back to the questions that occur to me at the moment of doubt: Why doesn’t God intervene and make himself obvious? Why doesn’t he speak aloud so I can hear him? I yearn for miracle, for the supernatural in its pure, unadulterated form.

I chose the word “unadulterated” deliberately, because it betrays a sentiment that lies at the heart of this issue. We moderns strive to separate natural from supernatural. The natural world that we can touch and smell and see and hear seems self-evident; the supernatural world, however, is another matter. There is nothing certain about it—it has no skin on it—and that bothers us. We want proof. We want the supernatural to enter the natural world in a way that retains the glow, that leaves scorch marks, that rattles the ear drums.

The God revealed in the Bible does not seem to share our desire. Whereas we cleave natural from supernatural, and seen from unseen, God seeks to bring the two together. His goal, one might say, is to rescue the “lower” world, to restore the natural realm of fallen creation to its original state, where spirit and matter dwelled together in harmony.

When we become Christians and thus establish contact with the unseen world, we are not mysteriously transported upward; we do not suddenly put on spacesuit bodies that remove us from the natural world (ever since the gnostics and Manichaeans, the church has consistently judged such notions heretical). Rather, our physical bodies reconnect with spiritual reality and we begin to listen to the code by which the unseen world transposes into this one. One might say our task is the very opposite of reductionism. We look for ways to re-enchant or “hallow” the world: to see in nature an engine of praise, to see in bread and wine a sacrament of grace, to see in human love a shadow of ideal Love.

Granted, we have a limited vocabulary for this higher realm. We speak to God as we would speak to another person; could anything be more ordinary, more “natural”? Prayer, proclaiming the gospel, meditation, fasting, offering a cup of cold water, visiting prisoners, the sacraments—these everyday acts, we are told, carry the “higher” meaning. They somehow express the unseen world.

Looked at from the lower, reductionist perspective, all spiritual acts have natural “explanations.” Prayer is mumbling in the void; a sinner repenting is contrived emotionalism; the Day of Pentecost is an outbreak of drunkenness. A skeptic might say that the natural faculties are an impoverished lot—if that’s all we have to express the exalted world beyond.

But faith, looking along the beam, sees such natural acts as hallowed carriers of the supernatural. From that perspective, the natural world is not impoverished, but graced with miracle. And the miracle of a natural world reclaimed reached a point of climax in the Grand Miracle, when the actual presence of God took up residence in a “natural” body exactly like ours: the Word transposed into flesh.

In one body, Christ brought the two worlds together, joining spirit and matter at long last, unifying creation in a way that had not been seen since Eden. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann puts it this way, in a sentence that merits much reflection: “Embodiment is the end of all God’s works.” And this is how the apostle Paul puts it:

“And he is the head of the body, the church.… For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:18–19, NIV).

When that Word-become-flesh ascended, he left behind his actual presence in the form of his body, the church. Our goodness becomes, literally, God’s goodness (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). Our suffering becomes, in Paul’s words, “the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.” Our actions become Christ’s actions (“He who receives you receives me”). What happens to us, happens to him (“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” the voice from heaven asked, after Saul had been persecuting Christians). The two worlds, seen and unseen, merge in Christ, and we, as Paul kept insisting, are quite literally “in Christ.” Embodiment is the end of all God’s work, the goal of all creation.

To complete the analogy of spiritual transposition, I need search no further than the words of Paul, for the image he gives to describe Christ’s role in the world today is the same image I have used to illustrate transposition. Jesus Christ, said Paul, now serves as the head of the body. We know how a human head accomplishes its will: by translating orders downward in a code that the hands and eyes and mouth can understand. A healthy body is one that follows the will of the head. In that same way, the risen Christ accomplishes his will on earth, through us, the members of his body.

From below, we tend to think of miracle as an invasion, a breaking into the natural world with spectacular force, and we long for such signs. But from above, from God’s point of view, the real miracle is one of transposition: that human bodies can become vessels filled with Spirit, that ordinary human acts of charity and goodness can become nothing less than extensions of the incarnation of God on Earth.

Adapted from the book Disappointment with God, to be published by Zondervan Publishing House this fall.

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