Rebuilding the Tower of Babel

By Helmet Thielicke (1908-1986)

July/August 1983

Originally the world “had one language” (Genesis 11:1). What bound people together was once stronger than what separated them. And this is what God intended the world to be when he created it. When we hear those words “one language,” it is as if for a few seconds the harmony of the original creation salutes our sundered world and tries to tell it how it was when men and beasts and clouds and stars still possessed a binding center and were still turned in common praise, in the music of the spheres, to him who called them into being.

But now, suddenly, a new and alien note is struck in God’s creation. Now man proposes to be his own master. Did not God himself summon him to dominion?

”I am not going to go on stumbling over the prohibitions of this allegedly higher being,” says man. “I am free, and therefore I can do what I will, and therefore I can experiment and see how far I can go. I have reason and  intellect and therefore I’m not going to be tied to standards and stipulations which I can’t verify for myself and accept in freedom. With my intellectual equipment, it is utterly impossible to expect me to believe in something that is invisible and commit myself to these alleged commands of God. Am I not autonomous, am I not Homo sapiens?”

God’s judgment today. And immediately we ask, Does not God finally intervene like a thunderbolt and confuse their tongues, disperse and scatter them to the four quarters of the earth? (Genesis 11:9). Where do we see any such spectacular judgments taking place today? This, after all, seems to be our trouble; we are expected to believe contrary to all appearances and contrary to our experience.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to think of God’s judgment upon Babel as something like a miraculous thunderbolt from the Beyond. … The judgments of God are very often quite different in style: He just lets men go on as they are in order that they may see where it brings them. He let experiment of the Third Reich run its course to the bitter end and not one of the seven or eleven attempts on Hitler’s life was able to interrupt the experiment; nobody was permitted to prevent or anticipate His coming judgments. And so it is here.

How then are we to envisage this dispersion, this explosion of rebellious mankind?

Perhaps some of you have already noted a passage that crops up, somewhat hiddenly and enigmatically, at the very beginning of our story: “Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens … lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” Hence, long before the judgment of dispersion fell upon them, men already had a premonition, a dim fear that they might break apart and that even their languages might be confused. They sensed the hidden presence of centrifugal, dispersive forces.

This arises from the fact that they have suffered something that might be called the “loss of a center” and that now that they have banished God from their midst they no longer have anything that binds them to each other. Always the trend is the same: wherever God has been deposed, some substitute point has to be created to bind men together in some fashion or other.

You start a war, perhaps, in order to divert attention from internal political dissensions and thus create a new solidarity by making people feel that they are facing a common threat. Or you build a tower of Babel in order to concentrate people’s attention upon a new center by rallying them to united and enthusiastic effort and this way pull together the dispersive elements. Or you whip together by terror those who will not stay together voluntarily. Or you utilize the powers of suggestion, “propaganda” and “ideology,” in order to generate the feeling of community by means of psychological tricks and thus make people want precisely what you want them to want.

Now, what has gone wrong here? And to answer this, we need to make clear the following. Suppose I have a colleague or a business partner who believes in nothing, for whom there is no authority whatsoever, to say nothing of commandments of God, a man in whom I cannot find anything that looks like an inner sanction. I would be on guard against such a man. I would distrust him. Perhaps I would even be afraid of him.

Why? Simply because he is completely unpredictable and probably capable of doing almost anything. On the other hand, when I know that someone is bound to God and that his conscience has a secure orientation, then I can “predict,” as it were, how he will act in such and such a situation: ‘that he will feel bound, for example, to keep contracts and promises, that he will not perpetrate crooked acts or that at least he will have a bad conscience if he does.

Of someone else, who does not have these ties, I do not know this. In other words, if he is no longer subject to God, then he is under the domination of his instincts, his opportunism, his ambition, his will to power. The day may come when he will stick at nothing if it seems opportune to him. For every one of us has some kind of a lord, we are all driven by something – if not God, then an idol, if not from above, then from below. That’s why I am afraid of a man who has no ties and am on my guard against him.

Mortal enemies. And that’s the way it is. When a man stands in humbleness before God and his conscience is firmly bound to the promises and commandments of the Lord, he radiates confidence, he becomes a neighbor to his brother, and then his brother knows what his intentions toward him are. Then bridges are built from person to person and the security of community comes into being.

But the opposite is equally true. When I know that a person has lost the center of his life I must reckon with the fact that he will be aimlessly and arbitrarily carried away by his instinct and by his own egoism.

For a time I may get along fine with him, that is, as long as common economic interests or political expediencies bind us together. But the moment this specific interest ceases to bind us together he loses his interest in me. Then he doesn’t give a hang for me; it is as if he never knew me. Or it may be even worse: he regards me as his mortal enemy because I am his competitor or because he wants my job.

In a society which has lost its center and consists of not much more than interest groups, employers’ associations and labor unions, tenants’ and home-owners’ associations – we call it a “pluralistic society,” without realizing the fateful Babylonian curse that lies behind this pluralism! – in such a society fear and distrust prevail, precisely the centrifugal forces which exploded with a vengeance at the tower of Babel.

A tiny oasis. When the first words which come to a man are no longer those which he speaks to his God, when there is no more prayer, language itself ultimately breaks down. How, for example, can one have any common understanding of what freedom means without God, without Him who makes us free?

When the center, when God the Lord disappears from our circle, language too sinks into the grave; we begin to talk at cross purposes with one another and the result is a real Babylonian confusion of tongues. Indeed, the result is that perverse state of affairs in which language becomes an instrument of cloaking and veiling, rather than of communication and confession ….

The counterpart of the story of the tower of Babel is the event of Pentecost which is recounted in the New Testament. Here the common language is suddenly present again, and Parthians, Medes, and Elamites understand one another. Here the spell is broken and all the confusion banished. When Jesus Christ becomes the Lord of our life, then there is healing of hearts, of bodies, and even of language.

God’s kingdom begins with tiny seeds and little particles of leaven. When my heart and your heart find their way home to the peace of the Father’s house a little light is kindled in the great world’s night and there is a tiny oasis in the desert.

He who allows this to be bestowed upon him finds that the evil virus has no power over him. And not only the bad, but also the good is infectious! Because this salt is present, the earth cannot go utterly bad. Only ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah stay the judgment. For their sake all the promises remain in force. The question is whether you and I are among these ten. All our destiny lies in this question.

Reprinted by permission from How the World Began (1961) by Helmut Thielicke (1908-1986), with permission from Fortress Press, Philadelphia, PA, and James Clarke & Co. Ltd., Cambridge, England.