Spiritual Meaning of

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Gen 11:1-32

The supreme purpose of revelation is to teach spiritual truth. This is done by the employment of symbols. Thus the letter of Divine revelation is structured according to a definite law - the law of correspondence - which law expresses the causal relation between spiritual truth and the natural symbols by which it is clothed and through which it is expressed.

There can be no doubt about the fact of the prevalence of a universal natural language among the people of the Ancient Church during the period of the spiritual integrity of that church; but the unity of natural language was an effect flowing from an internal unity of affection and thought in the members of the Ancient Church. What their natural language was is a matter for philology to decide, if, indeed, it can be decided; but it would prove of no special spiritual use for us to know what it was.

The unity of language is used as a symbol of the unity of a deeper and profounder language - the language of the soul - the utterance of the church. This is our concern in the statement: "The whole earth was of one language and speech." Translated into the spiritual sense and read in the light of heaven the meaning is this: "The whole Ancient Church was possessed of one universal doctrine." For by the earth is meant the church. This was true of the Ancient Church in its best state. Its members, it is true, did not know the Lord in the interior way in which He was known in the Adamic Age; but they did all know Him and see Him in the light of the revelation which was made to them. And they loved Him. He stood out before their thought as one - a glorious being - a Divine person whom they could see and approach through the angel of His presence. They lived their life from Him and loved Him from the faith of their hearts.

This looking up to Him and love of Him opened in them the deep fountain of love for one another, for they were all children of the good Father in heaven and therefore brothers and sisters in the bonds of an abiding deep spiritual affection. They were, in other words, a brotherhood. They loved each other and were in the beautiful life of charity. Love to the Lord and the neighbor was their very life; and the language of the church, in them, was the language of love to God and to each other. This was universal. "The whole earth was of one language and speech." That the term language is employed in the Sacred Scriptures to represent doctrine is evident to all students of the Divine Book. The prophet in treating of the future state of the church in which science will be regarded as serviceable to its intellectual life says: "In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan." And in another place it said of the Lord: "I will turn to the people of a pure language that they may all call upon the name of the Lord to serve Him with one consent." In each of these instances no reference is made to natural language. The meaning becomes clear only as we think of natural language as the symbol of the universal doctrine of love to God and man that prevails in a true church. The Ancient Church, in its beginning, knew and used this language. It was the language of the soul.

But the Noetic Church lost this heavenly language. The reason for its loss is clearly stated in the Divine allegory: "It came to pass when they journeyed from the East." How expressive the symbolism! The church had one universal doctrine as long as it lived near the Lord and cultivated in the minds of its members a knowledge of and love for the internal spiritualities of religion. The Adamic Church fell when it left Eden. The Noetic Church fell when it left the east. The east, where the sun rises, is the symbol of the Lord from whom comes the light of life. Thus to dwell in the east, spiritually understood is to live near the Lord and derive from Him the life of love to Him and to our fellow men. To journey from the east, spiritually interpreted, is to close the mind to the Lord and the internal things of His Kingdom.

This is what the Noetic Church did. This has been the sad history of every church that has declined and passed away. Each of the old and consummated dispensations of religion departed gradually from its original state of love into the mere observance of externals.

We should learn a lesson from this. The New Church is an internal church. Not that it is not also external; but the internal things of heavenly life are the essentials Of the church, and forms of worship are mere matters of clothing. Simple or elaborate, they have no other significance or use. We are safe as long as we dwell in the east. We come into trouble and begin to lose our spiritual life as a church, the very moment we turn our minds out and down to mere external things. This sad state is pictured to us in what is said of the people who journeyed from the east. It is said: "They found a valley in the land of Shinar and dwelt there." A mountain, as an elevation in nature, represents a high state of spiritual life. Here is where the church should dwell; for while the church must be in the world it must not be of the world. Its mission is a high and holy service to human souls; and to properly perform it, the church must dwell on the mountains of love to God and man.

A valley is a depression in nature; and in the symbology of the Holy Word is used to represent an external life. So that when it is said: "They found a valley and dwelt there," the truth expressed is that the Ancient Church in departing from the internal things of doctrine and life came into a low external state, and in that state cultivated a love for mere ritual - for the raiment of religion as things of more importance than the inward and enduring things of the spirit of the church. The church dwelt in a valley.

There is a great warning in this story. Those of us who incline to the ornate and the beautiful in worship, who see that there may be great power in such ultimates of worship, should be careful not to give such externals too great importance; for there does lurk a mighty danger in them - the danger of allowing them to obscure in the mind the deeper and real essential things of the church.

We are told in this allegory that when the people descended into the valley of Shinar they said: "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower." Here we have the story of one more step in the decline of the Ancient Church. In departing from the Lord, the church forsook the high things of ideal and life and became external. What could grow out of this state other than the desire to build up a system of teaching with lofty pretensions of spirituality, but utterly lacking all the elements of love and truth? This is what is meant by the city and towers said to have been built in the valley of Shinar. The Ancient Church, in this, its last stage of decline, invented false doctrines and adopted artificial methods of salvation. Its doctrines fostered the love of self, inflated human intelligence with the thought of its greatness; and above all, they encouraged and developed the worst forms of spiritual dominion over human souls.

In this respect the Babel builders of the Ancient Church have come to life and done their work over again in the Christian Church.

Think! The men who journeyed from the east, when they came into the valley, said: "Go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone; and slime had they for mortar." Stones are Divine creations, and in the Scriptures, in a good sense, represent Divine truths revealed by the Lord to man. As no man can make a stone, so no man can make a truth. Bricks are artificially made stones. God never, in any direct way, made a brick. Therefore, bricks represent falsities - things that look like truths, but which when examined in the light of heaven reveal their true nature.

How easy from this correspondence it is to see the meaning of this part of the Divine allegory: The Ancient Church, in this final stage of its fall, turned entirely away from the Lord and His truth to self love and self intelligence and constructed its city of doctrine and its tower of life from the coinage of its own depraved will and fallen intellect. Brick and slime were the material the church built with.

Then came the final end - the judgment of the church. It is told in allegorical form under the story of the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of the people. The Ancient Church broke up into confused sects, each sect going forth to propagate its doctrines. It ceased to be a church.

These two dispensations, the Adamic and the Noetic, cover the prehistoric religious life on the earth: and the Genesis account of them, when understood in its spiritual sense, connects these prehistoric Churches with the historic Jewish dispensation of religion and thus gives spiritual unity to the Old Testament.

Aside from this interpretation of these early Chapters of the Word, we have no account of the beginnings of heavenly life in man. And now that science has rendered a literal interpretation of them impossible, this opening of their inner meaning by the Lord restores them to the Church and establishes rational faith in them as a part of God's divine revelation in the Word.