Noumenal and Phenomenal

People are often disturbed by the fact that God is not visible. Some few respond by simply rejecting the notion that there is a God; the most common response to the invisibility of God, however, has always been to make a visible god — an idol.

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”

So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.”

And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

The attentive observer will notice that Aaron called the name of the god they represented with the golden calf “Yahweh” (i.e. the LORD). In Aaron’s mind, the calf seemed to be a kind of visual aid to help the people connect better with the invisible God who was so distant and, apparently, so dangerous.

Throughout the history of Israel, to say nothing of the history of humanity, people have made visual representations of God. Unfortunately there is a fundamental problem that can best be expressed by exploring the notion of the noumenal and phenomenal.

Popularized by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the word noumenal means reality — what actually is — while phenomenal means what we can perceive with our senses.

For example, when we switch on a light, we perceive “light.” We are told that the light is caused by tiny particles called “electrons” rushing through some medium (a filament, a gas, a semiconductor junction etc.) and exciting other tiny particles called “atoms” to give off still other tiny particles called “photons.” This cascade of interacting particles — the noumenon — is beyond the ability of our senses to perceive. Instead we perceive the phenomenon of light.

Now if you think about God, the question arises as to what phenomenon could adequately represent the noumenon of God? For example, God is everywhere. How can that be represented to our senses — at least, in such a way that it does not totally disrupt our experience of the rest of reality? The Bible speaks of God as “dwell[ing] in unapproachable light.” If even God’s dwelling place (whatever that means) is unapproachable in its brilliance, what must God himself, infinite in energy, be like?

The brightness of that sun could not be seen
Because no eye could endure it;
Could not be reported
Because no brain could survive it.

The Bible says many times that God either cannot be seen or has not been seen. Nevertheless, God has actually provided a physical representation of himself. This is the striking, amazing thing about Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us. The way God made to let us know him is to “incarnate” himself as a human being.

Hebrews speaks like this:

He is the brightness of the glory of God
And the exact reproduction of his being.

Colossians speaks in similar terms:

He is the image [Greek: eikon] of the invisible God….

Finally, John quotes Jesus:

Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

In other words, Jesus represents the Father so accurately that to encounter him is to encounter the Father; to know him is to know the Father. In fact, John begins his gospel in that vein:

No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

In some way, then, there is a seeing beyond seeing that allows us somehow to perceive the noumenon of God. For we believe that in Jesus we really know what God is and what he is like.

And what is this seeing that goes beyond the senses? It is faith. Hebrews also tells us:

Now faith is … the conviction of things not seen.

Some people who have read to this point might say, “You started off so philosophical and rational but you wind up just dumping everything into ‘faith’.” (Others might not be willing to say the first part….)

That is, for many any mention of the word “faith” is a way of cheating, giving up, copping-out. But if you think about what I have said so far, you will note that I have already said that sight – the senses — will do us no good. Yet many — including me — are strongly convinced that God exists and is knowable. How can this be?

I am simply claiming that faith is the organ of spiritual sight — the sixth sense that puts us in touch with the realm of God. Faith is the means of apprehending spiritual phenomena — the unseen things that give life meaning.

It is by faith, for example, that we believe in love; trust is a component of faith. Faith gives us eyes to see the invisible bonds that hold people together. It gives us a perspective on events that let us see the invisible hand of God.

I will give one example of this.

I am one of those simple-minded people who pray for parking spaces. One time my wife and I went to see a symphony performance at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. It turned out that there were a number of events going on in the area. We could not even get into a parking garage and the attempt to do so caught us up in a traffic jam that took up almost all the extra time I had planned as a margin of error.

After we got out of that traffic jam we drove in a direction away from the event but nothing was there. Finally I turned around and started back heading toward the event and prayed for a parking space. About two blocks from the event, a car pulled out of a parking space. I pulled in. And we did not have to pay for the space! We got to the event with time to spare.

Now someone might say, “Wow, did you get lucky!” Notice that to such a person, God remains invisible. Without faith one cannot see God because there is no adequate way to represent God so that he would be accessible to our senses.

But I do not believe it was luck. As I say, I pray for parking spaces all the time. And I get them. This is just probably the most remarkable example I’ve ever experienced, but it is not unique. In other words, I trust God to accompany me and help me even in the smallest aspects of life; in my experience this trust has not been misplaced. And so by faith I see the hand of God in these kinds of experiences.

Over time many experiences and encounters, along with the similar experiences of others that one hears, add up to a kind of God-shaped outline. Or to put it more simply, one comes to “know God.”

So — for those who are interested in exploring new areas of reality, areas that our senses are too limited to experience, I recommend faith as the spiritual organ of knowledge that will lead you.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.