Revelation: Chapter 4, Verses 1 to 6A
What do pets have to do with the initial vision of God on a thundering throne surrounded by elders and facing a sea of glass?
The seven letters to the church are done and sent.1 Now the voice like a trumpet gestures to an open door to heaven for John to approach it and enter. John sees God sitting upon a throne, 24 elders in white robes and gold crowns, with seven lampstands lit in front of the throne, and a sea of glass. Thunder, lightning, and rumblings echo off the rainbow looking like an emerald and the carnelian-like seated figure and the glass sea.
I imagine a rather noisy and intimidating scene yet magnificent to the eye.
N.T. Wright begins each study chapter with an “Open.”
Note: I’m following N.T. Wright’s Revelation: 22 Studies for Individuals and Groups and his newest book 20th Anniversary Edition with Study Guide, Revelation for Everyone. See my post Prepare for Revelation for suggested materials.
I have so far not addressed the Open topic questions as they’re like a conversation starter, a way for a group of people to relax and get into the rhythm of exchanging ideas. Since it’s just me here and I receive few — heck, rarely! — comments, I’ve skipped them, for I’m already in the zone!
But Chapter 4’s Open puzzles me.
“In your experience with your own pets or with other animals, how do they compare with human beings? What are the main similarities and differences?”
What do animals have to do with the first sight of heaven John encounters? I scratched my head over that one, but no heaven-sent answer arrived.
Wright begins Chapter 4 of his study guide by asking what can humans do that computers cannot and answering with the novel Thinks’ conclusion: humans can weep and forgive.
I think it’s just a matter of time before someone programs a computer to weep. But forgiveness is a complex cognitive-emotional-psychological thought-word-action, that I don’t think a computer will be able to mimic (other than superficially with words), never mind know, for a good long while.
Wright then asks a similar question: what can humans do that animals can’t? He dismisses the “naked ape” rationale and states:
“the main difference, as twenty-four elders in Revelation 4 demonstrate, is that humans can say the word because. In particular, they can say it about God himself.”
Maybe the connection between pets and God’s throne space will become apparent later in this chapter. But I question Wright’s supposition that animals cannot say “because.” I mean, literally they cannot in any human language. But since we can barely interpret animal languages — even having to teach primates how to sign so that we can understand them! — which says a lot about their language intelligence versus ours — how do we know that animals can’t say “because”?
Saying Because
Decades ago, a family friend asserted that animals have no souls and don’t go to heaven.
My mother disagreed vehemently, and I’m on her side on that.
Pets have become more and more like family since then. “Furbabies.” Pets in strollers. “Cuddle bunnies” referring to literal bunnies. So probably more people believe animals have souls today than they did decades ago, but I’m going to hazard a guess, based on Wright’s statement, that conventional Christians still disagree.
Because connotes causality.
Merriam-Webster defines “because” as “for the reason that” or “the fact that.”
Let’s take the first part of Wright’s statement. I doubt I’m the only one who’s had intelligent dogs and cats who demonstrated understanding causality.
Pet Demonstrates Knowledge of Causality
When I was a teen, hanging out in the basement, watching the “goggle box,” my black Labrador mix wanted to play with me. I was being a typical teen, lying like an inert lump on the couch, eyes glued to the 4:3 television picture. My dog was not having it. She looked at me, looked at the TV, looked at me, decided that she was going to have her way, and understood “because.”
Her expression made that plain.
Because the TV was hypnotizing me, she wasn’t going to have play time with me. Because I was refusing to turn it off, she had to disconnect it. Because I could easily turn it back on if she pushed the power button, she needed to disconnect it so that it’d be more of a bother for me to get the picture back than to play with her.
She disappeared behind the large CRT TV, and in a few seconds, the picture vanished. She’d disconnected the antenna. I went and played with her.
How have your pets demonstrated knowledge of causality?
I read awhile ago about whales who lived up to 200 years. These whales remembered the whaling days and had changed their behaviour to avoid being harpooned. When whaling stopped, it took them awhile to recognize the danger had lessened. I can’t recall if they became more trusting, but they had learned causality: ships kill whales, so avoid the ships.
You can’t tell me that pets and animals don’t understand “because.”
What About Saying Because About God?
One of the letters to the churches promised those who conquered that Jesus would give them a new name. We humans name each other. If we want to dehumanize someone, we remove their name. God knows us by name, is an axiom and a promise. Up until this past week, humans assumed only we named each other and so only we receive names from God.
On June 10th, The Guardian reported on a recent research study that suggests “elephants are the first non-human animals known to use names that do not involve imitation.”
Isn’t that interesting?! And if you believe animals have souls, not really surprising, eh? After all, we operate on the assumption that souls have names. And that’s what I reflected in my first novel of my trilogy: the soul of a key character, a dog, has a name not given by a human.
“The research ‘not only shows that elephants use specific vocalisations for each individual, but that they recognise and react to a call addressed to them while ignoring those addressed to others’, the lead study author, Michael Pardo, said….when names were called out, it was often over a long distance, and when adults were addressing young elephants.”
Sound familiar? How often do human parents bellow names up and down stairs, or along the block, for their kids to come?
“Adults were also more likely to use names than calves, suggesting it could take years to learn this particular talent.”
I have a couple of observations.
The first names we use are usually Mummy and Daddy (or Mama and Pop). Since a plethora of calves would probably be using similar designations for their parents, the AI the researchers used probably wouldn’t be able to parse those out as individual names.
It takes awhile before human children can use names properly. They have to first learn them then remember them and learn how to pronounce them. Some kids are quicker to learn than others. It doesn’t seem to me all that different from the researchers’ observations.
“‘The evidence provided here that elephants use non-imitative sounds to label others indicates they have the ability for abstract thought,’ the senior study author George Wittemyer said.”
In my book Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief (the ebook to be released November 16th), I refer to a video showing elephants pausing on their walk to honour the bones of one of their dead. Watching their silent homage, you see intelligence, emotion, grief. You see abstract thought, too! After all, death is an abstraction. Not even we understand death fully — though in their hubris, too many think we do — but we have developed rituals to help us process and live with our grief, psychologically and neurophysiologically (if you want to know more on both, buy my book!).
The elephants showed similar abilities.
Whether they understand life after life after death we couldn’t hope to know during our mortal lives. My trilogy explores death, life after death, and life after life after death. I’m hoping to release the first novel at the end of 2024. Fingers crossed!
Putting all this together — we can’t understand their language and researchers need AI to get a glimpse of it, yet animals understand us; at least one other (social) species uses names and our pets understand the ones we give them; animals grieve and elephants honour their dead; pets evince knowledge of causality — I don’t think we know nearly enough to say definitively that animals cannot say “because” about God themself.
On a side note: when a species calls each other by name in the same way we do, what does it say about those who kill them for sport, rationalizing that they’re old or are troubling the local populace when really it’s about the ability to show superiority and to kill as evidenced by heads on walls? In that case, what’s the difference between a human head on a wall and an animal head?
On a side, side note: my social studies junior high school class visited an eccentric explorer’s Toronto home, which had, uh, well, shrunken heads on the walls. Fascinatingly repugnant.
Question 6
“Behind the ambiguous struggles and difficulties of ordinary Christians — there stands the heavenly throne room in which the world’s Creator and Lord remains sovereign. Spend a few moments contemplating John’s vision of this reality. How does it help you to understand better our own present circumstances?”
I’m skipping the first five questions because they’re about whether the study group or individual understands the first six verses of Revelation, chapter 4. I’m too exhausted to basically summarize. This newsletter is about thinking on these matters, for myself and for my Resurrection trilogy.
For me, I’ve long known we are God’s Creation. Like an author writes characters and stories, so God designed our story but we also direct our paths. Walking hand-in-hand, we have the power to disagree and take off in a different direction. Yet this vision of God on a rumbling throne, surrounded by wise humans (elders) and lit by lampstands, connotes that God will not sit still if we thwart their overall plan for their Creation. Maybe that makes you think about a punishing being, whipping us into obedience. That, after all, is the predominant message as told by the endless fixation on the cross and barely a mention of why Christianity was birthed in the first place: the Resurrection. No wonder a large percentage of Christians don’t believe Jesus was resurrected. Jesus’s resurrection being the entire reason Christianity was birthed, 100 percent of Christians of any age or denomination should believe in it.
I disagree with the idea of a punishing God.
When I write a story, I know how it will end, but midway through, characters usually get antsy and take detours, demand a different plot point, grow in unexpected ways. Always, though, they end up where I’d planned. This is how I perceive God working in our lives. Do I think where God has taken me is only for my good? Uh, hell no! I mean, a car crash? Good for me on Earth? I don’t think so! But maybe it will be in the Resurrection.
Yet I also remember vividly a moment while reading my abnormal psychology (current perspectives in 1980s) textbook: I read a page on brain injury — only 2 paragraphs of which were on concussion — and hunted around for more information. Only a page? One page?! I wanted to know more, but apparently, researchers and the authors were content to know little and make it sound like a lot.
Worse, though a simplistic and partly mistaken understanding, what they wrote in 1980 on concussion is promulgated as truth to this day!
My journey from brain injury to precise diagnosis to effective treatments began with my diagnosing doctor telling me I should write a book on this hidden epidemic (I did) and ending with blogging on Psychology Today and developing a website that answered my hunt. Well, it’s a start anyway. The brain is the final frontier, and we have so much more to learn about injuries to it. Without my own brain injury, that question would have continued to haunt me my whole life. But what a path God lead me on to scratch that itch! Psalm 23 anyone?!
Maybe what I’ve learned and shared will benefit sufferers and health care professionals alike if they believed me enough to act on it — and has done so through the clinics I attended, which applied what they learned through their experiences with me for their clients’ life-changing benefits.
I have no idea where I’ll end up, but I know the Resurrection teaches us that what we do with our experiences can contribute to the overall saving of God’s Creation or can harm it.
I’d planned on summarizing the key takeaways from the letters, but this pets versus humans topic Wright posed brought up all sorts of thoughts that I had to write on it. Next time I’ll summarize what Jesus says will happen if they persist off course and if they conquer.