Trees for Food

One of the must fundamental teachings of the Bible and of the Christian religion is that man does not have life in himself. Man must get life from outside of himself, in order to maintain his life. The way this is done is through eating and drinking. Apart from life, communicated through food and drink, men die. Hunger communicates to man his lack of independence, his total dependence on something outside himself for life.

Accordingly, the question is: Who or what is man dependent on for life? As we have noted, men need food for life, but where does food come from? An evolutionary, this- worldly perspective says that the human person is like a machine that runs on fuel provided by food. Implicit in this perspective is a denial of life, an assertion that there is finally and ultimately no qualitative difference between a man and a rock. Men are no more alive than a robot made of steel. The robot runs on electrical energy, and man runs on food.

Even where the older mechanistic worldview breaks down and some kind of vitalism takes its place, the notion of being "alive" is still fundamentally pantheistic: Man is a "living" animal that stays "alive" by eating food. From a Christian standpoint, there is not much difference between the mechanistic and the vitalistic standpoints. Both deny that life is an injection of God's grace from outside the universe, and that food is merely a channel of that grace.

The Biblical perspective is far different from either mechanism or vitalism. According to the Bible, man is given life by the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and also from the Son, out of eternity into time at every moment of time, to communicate this life. When the Spirit withdraws, men die.

Christian biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has suggested an analogy that is helpful. Asked about the possibility of creating life in the laboratory, Sheldrake said this:

Imagine that someone who didn't know anything about transistor radios was shown one, and he was amazed at the music that came from it and tried to understand it.

He might think that the music originates entirely within the set as a result of complicated interactions among its parts. If somebody suggested [that the music was] coming from outside through a transmission...into the set from somewhere else, he might deny it on the grounds that he could see nothing coming in. Nor could he measure anything because the set weighed the same switched on and switched off, and although he couldn't understand the set in terms of its parts and their interaction, he might think that as a result of further research, he would be able to do so. So, he might think he understood the set, or could understand the set in principle, even though, in fact, he knows nothing about radio waves, etc. He might even try to prove he understood it. He could take it to pieces. He could find out the things it was made of silicon crystals, copper wires, and so on. He might then think he could prove that he understood the set by making a replica. By getting copper, crystals, and all that, he could make a radio set which would work in the same way as the original. When switched on, music would come out of it. He could say, "Look, I've fully understood this thing. I've synthesized one of these things entirely from known materials."

But still, you see, he wouldn't really understand how it worked. He still wouldn't understand about radio waves in spite of the fact he'd been able to make a radio set. I think that's just the position we're in relation to life. I think the mechanists are like people who try to understand radio sets ignoring radio waves and concentrating only on copper wires, components, and the way they're wired together. Those are important of course, and they're really there and if you destroy a component or take one away the radio won't work properly. But it's only part of the picture. What's wrong with the mechanistic view is that it's a limited view; like most errors, it is based on a half-truth. 1

What Sheldrake is setting forth by analogy is the Christian view. It is the vitalizing energy of the Holy Spirit that causes living things to be alive.

Does life come from food, then? No. How can it, since food is dead? The flesh we eat is that of dead animals; the vegetables are dead vegetables. There is no way that we can eat life directly from any other living thing. The belief that this is possible through wizardry underlies all vampire myths. The vampire supposedly steals life by drinking the living blood of a living animal or person. Practically speaking, such behavior would be fruitless. Symbolically speaking, however, vampirism is very important. The Bible tells us that the life of the flesh is the blood. Accordingly, it is the height of idolatrous presumption for man to attempt to circumvent God's Spirit and get life by drinking blood. God told Noah that man might eat meat only if he renounced the blood (Gen. 9:4). This stipulation was reiterated to Moses (Lev. 17), and again to the New Testament Church (Acts l5:28f).

It is God's Spirit who makes these dead substances work with our bodies to renew our lives. The action of the Spirit in communicating general life through food is parallel in concept to His communicating the life of the New Creation through the dead bread and wine that form the Lord's Supper. Reformed theology has wavered between the position of Calvin and that of Bullinger on this question. The position of John Calvin and Martin Bucer has been termed "symbolic instrumentalism," the idea that Christ (and kingdom life) is communicated to the faithful recipient of the Supper by means of his eating the bread and drinking the wine. The position of Heinrich Bullinger and John Knox has been called "symbolic parallelism," the idea that Christ (and kingdom life) is received by faith while the faithful partakes of bread and wine.

Calvin's position is obviously closer to what we think of concerning an ordinary meal. We don't mentally divorce the act of eating from the expectation of renewed life; rather we expect the Holy Spirit to work through the food, and so we ask God to "bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies, through Christ our Lord." Such traditional prayers express the Christian belief that dead animal and vegetable matter by themselves cannot give life. They are rather the instruments by which the Spirit gives life.

At creation, God set two trees in the center of the Garden sanctuary, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He told Adam that he might eat freely of every tree except the latter. Clearly this was an encouragement to Adam to eat of the Tree of Life. Adam decided that he had life in himself, however, and that he did not need to seek life from God. He seized the forbidden fruit, and lost Eden.

To teach Adam and his heirs that they do not have life in themselves, God caused men to hunger. Adam would have to labor hard to eat, by the sweat of his brow. Repeatedly throughout the Bible, especially in the wilderness wanderings, God made His people hungry so that they would cry to Him as the only source of life. Similarly, Jesus let the crowds that followed Him become hungry, and then He fed them.

Men do not have life in themselves, then, and the only place they can get it is from God. God has appointed food as the means by which He communicates life to man.

James B. Jordan is scholar-in-residence at Theopolis.