Exploring the Order of Scriptural Reality as Reality

Greystone Conversations

Is there an order to reality and does Holy Scripture commend that reality to us to believe now or does it only record the way the ancients saw things?

From time to time in Greystone Conversations, we feature selections from full-course modules, micro-courses, and other events that we run in the Greystone context. Today we are pleased to make available to you the opening lecture in one of the most portent of Greystone's full-course module offerings. It's a course called The Order of Reality, featuring examinations of time, space, and vocation within the Biblical world. It's among the most important modules in Greystone because it touches on many of the central and animating concerns that have driven Greystone's vision and mission since our formation. At the heart of that mission is a conviction that the world commended to us in Holy Scripture--as the real world to be inhabited by faith--is, in fact, a properly theological reality which is grounded in the Christian confession of the Triune God and of His good and holy purposes for His creation--purposes which come to realization, of course, by the way of redemption and the consummation of all things in the Lord Jesus Christ. What does the order of reality have to do with that? One way of looking at the question is to note the highly influential lectures on philosophy delivered by Hegel in which he infamously and very influentially insisted that the start of the story of Philosophy is with the Pre-Socratics, and that anyone before the Pre-Socratics were, in the nature of the case, pre-philosophical and to be dismissed as preoccupied with mythologies and the like.

Over against that dominant stream of reading the history of ideas, an increasing number of scholars have demonstrated the properly philosophical nature of the cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean and the other cultures leading up to the time of the Pre-Socratics. Among the many benefits of this surge in interest in Philosophy before the so-called philosophers is the appreciation of the possibility that what we are looking at in Holy Scripture is not pre-scientific or pre-philosophical, and certainly not pre-theological. But theology in a different mode from perhaps what we have come to expect it to look like. Essential in that development is the rediscovery of the central importance of the book of Leviticus, which in this course Dr. Mark A. Garcia suggests should be seen as a catechism for reality—particularly as it commends to us a way of understanding the order of things in terms of time, space, and vocation.

In this opening lecture, we begin to think about what some of those most fundamental structures of reality might be. These are concerns classically connected with theory, and as this is only the first lecture in a series of lectures, it will partake of a provisional character. We encourage you to consider listening to the rest of the series as soon as it becomes available on Greystone Connect.
The chart mentioned in the lecture can be found here.