Q & R: Revelation, Science, and Religions

Here’s the Q:

I have started viewing some of the videos of your talks and began reading some of your books. It is a good thing that you have started understanding the other traditions to help better appreciate the Christian path. We have always put the filter of our Christian constructs on how we view the other traditions and sciences. I would like to start from the following premises or presuppositions below:

The Four Presuppositions about God’s Revelation
God is revealing in all religious traditions and all scientific disciplines like a tapestry or jigsaw puzzle. Knowing the entire truth involves converging and blending together all the truths from religious traditions and scientific disciplines.
God’s revelation is continuous to the same degree as humanity’s evolution of consciousness. God reveals to the extent of what humanity’s current consciousness can handle.
God is revealing to the collective consciousness in which the individual consciousness can know depending on the individual level of receptivity. Receptive individuals can know God’s revelation simultaneously.
God reveals knowledge and wisdom to transform and evolve the entire creation. Humanity needs to collectively discern the truth of God’s revelation through their impact and contribution to creation’s positive transformation and evolution.
Following these premises, my central question would be “What is God revealing to humanity in each spiritual tradition and sciences? All knowledge and wisdom comes from God. If God has chosen to reveal the knowledge and wisdom in the spiritual traditions and sciences at a specific moment and location in history, what is the purpose and meaning of this revelation of specific knowledge and wisdom in the given context?” I would be interested to read your thoughts on this.

Here’s the R:

Thanks for this really interesting question.

I think I would frame our situation a little differently. Instead of starting with the idea that God is revealing specific things to specific people right now, I would explore the idea that what is knowable is available for us to know, that God has already blessed us, through creation, with an almost infinite library waiting for us to explore, that the Spirit is ubiquitous and is always beckoning us to learn, discover, understand … The issue is less whether God is revealing this or that, but whether we are, as you said, receptive.

To the degree that this or that person in this or that religion or scientific discipline is receptively attentive, open, curious, humble, and diligent … wisdom abounds around us and is waiting to be discovered.

The beautiful passage from Edna St. Vincent Millay comes to mind …

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind —
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.

What did she mean by the “loom” and the “red triumphant child?” Is the child a Christ figure, or a symbol of new, special revelation breaking through? Is the loom a way of life or practice or way of learning that positions us to combine facts into wisdom?

Just thinking about these things can help us, I think, become more receptive. So thanks again for your question!