The following is an excerpt from a bigger project I am working on. This is probably going to be the introduction, when I eventually finish it. Hope you find something of use in it :)
Soli Deo Gloria
-h.
The first attempt in history to replace propositional revelation with personal experience is recorded in Genesis 3:1-7, where we read:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
The serpent’s attack on the propositional revelation of God is a circumstantial ad hominem fallacy, followed by the lie that one can transgress the Word of God and move beyond its strictures. Note that godhood is the promised reward for Eve if she would but subject God’s Word to her sensorially dependent opinion about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Transgressing the Logos of God, the serpent claims, is the way to move beyond the restrictions God has placed upon all of His creation.
As Paul later explains, since the Fall of our first parents the same lie has held sway over the minds of fallen man.[cf. Rom 1:18-32] This is clearly seen from a perusal of various academic, literary, artistic, and philosophical movements throughout history. Consider the Romantic Era in literature, for instance, and Postmodern contemporary literature. The lapse of time between these movements is irrelevant, for they both express the same disdain for the Word of God that we find the serpent expressing in Genesis 3:1-7. Regarding Romanticism, writing in the late 1700’s, the German poet Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe held God’s Word in contempt for its magnification of the Logos of God. He believed that language is too limited, too restrictive, an artificial means of representational structuration imposed by the human mind on the constantly flowing energy of life. Goethe believed this so strongly that in his book Faust, his eponymous anti-hero decides that the Gospel of John should not begin with an exaltation of the Logos of God but of the deed.
‘In the beginning was the Word.’ why, now
I’m stuck already! I must change that; how?
Is then ‘the word’ [i.e. The Logos] so great and high a thing?
There is some other rendering,
Which with the spirit’s guidance I must find.
[…]
The spirit speaks! I see how it must read,
And boldly write: ‘In the beginning was the deed!”
[Faust, Part One, Trans. David Luke (New York:Oxford, 1987), 39.]
The contempt he holds for the Logos, however, is perhaps even more clearly displayed in his decision to cast Mephistopheles, a devil, as a teacher of Logic. Having disguised himself as Faust the academician, Mephistopheles addresses a hopeful student with the following study advice:
Hear lectures on Logic for a start,
Logic will train your mind all right;
Like inquisitor’s boots it will squeeze you tight,
Your thoughts will learn to creep and crawl
And never lose their way at all,
Nor go criss-crossed as now, or go
Will-o’-the-wisping to and fro!
We’ll teach you that your process of thinking
Instead of being like eating and drinking,
Spontaneous, instantaneous, free,
Must proceed by one and two and three. [i.e. By syllogistic reasoning.]
[Faust, 58.]
Goethe’s disdain for the Logos of God is so strong that he identifies Logic with the devil, whereas the Scriptures actually teach the opposite, as Gordon H. Clark notes.
The well-known prologue to John’s Gospel may be paraphrased, “In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God…. In logic was life and the life was the light of men.”
[…]the strong intellectualism of the word Logos is seen in its several possible translations: to wit, computation, (financial) accounts, esteem, proportion and (mathematical) ratio, explanation, theory or argument, principle or law, reason, formula, debate, narrative, speech, deliberation, discussion, oracle, sentence, and wisdom.
[…]In the beginning, then, was Logic.
[God and Logic, <http://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=16#sthash.ch6144ZR.dpuf>%5D
Ironically, as Clark notes, “Goethe can express his rejection of the divine Logos of John 1:1, and express his acceptance of romantic experience, only by using the logic he despises.”[ ibid.] What is key to note is that Goethe’s hatred of the Logos of God signifies his desire to move beyond the ontological limitations placed upon man by God. As the serpent in the garden told Eve she would become a god by transgressing the Divine Law/Logos, so too the “spirit” informing Goethe’s Faust tells him to privilege experience above the Logos.
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