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Thank you oh so very much for your excellent post!

"Information" in the sense defined above -- as soul/spirit manifesting as "successful communication" is precisely the sense I meant in saying that a part of God's revelation is in the Creation.

Very wise and very well said, my sister in Christ!

The Word of God is prior to Creation and as such is the absolutely authoritative relevation. IOW, the Holy Scriptures are of higher rank than the revelation of Nature, which cannot give us Christ or the Great Commandments so needful to our spiritual welfare and salvation. I hope I didn't leave anyone with the impression that I believe otherwise.

I never had that impression from anything that you have said. My comment was to the assertion of the unnamed preacher in post 105 who preached:

"I used to know a preacher who would challenge people to close their Bibles and open their eyes to what God was doing, right now, all around them. That if there were no Bible, it would be possible to recreate it from simply observing, and participating, in what God is doing, now, in the streets, and in history. Because God is still God, and he is still forging the world."

I'm not the unnamed preacher, but I'll reply for my use of his remarks. I did not mean it in the way you may have taken it, but I accept your remarks as putting a necessary limit on how far to take what he said (and I implied).

I think you have already put your finger on it, although if I'm not careful I'll make a mess of it, and you two will have to bail me out. The Word was there from the beginning. Scripture wasn't there from the beginning, but the Word was.

Over time the Word revealed himself, and people wrote it down. That is what is unique about the Hebrews, not simply that God worked with them, as I think God has worked with people in general. The Hebrews are unique in that they understood themselves in that way, they understood their history as an encounter between man and God. And most importantly they wrote it down.

God, the Holy Spirit, did not go to sleep after the final books of the Bible were mailed off to the publisher. God still is very much in the fray, and people are still writing these things down. The difference is that what we write is not canonical, meaning that we don't all agree to what degree the things we experience and write are driven by the Holy Spirit. We all agree on a certain collection of documents, we don't agree on anything past that.

But that does not close the door on God, I believe, he still moves among us. The Holy Spirit is still at work. And the unnamed preacher's challenge was to look up and out and see what God is doing. It was as much a challenge to look at his fingerprints in creation, as to understand that he lives, he moves, he is. We need to be out in the fray as well. I think he was trying to tell people not to be so other-worldly as to miss what is going on right now, and miss your work that is right in front of you, right now.

God is no less in motion now than he was during the days that the scriptures were being written. Scripture gives us a framework to understand what we see and experience. But we should be prepared to recognize that what we see and do now is part of the story that will be written at the end.

And finally, I know what you are referring to, when you note the way in which the Holy Spirit can speak in the immediate through scriptures as you read them... that is a whole different subject, but it is true. Don't think I was disparaging such a thing, I wouldn't do it. If what I wrote seems to imply that, I need to rein in my metaphors. They get me in trouble all the time.

With all respect to the Unknown Preacher: It seems the human mind, completely unaided, would be able to conceive of a general idea of God. But how could it ever imagine what God is doing at any particular time? The mind and action of God are completely incommensurable with human mind and action. We would have to know something about the nature of God before we could imagine "what God is doing, now, in the streets, and in history." And I think that is precisely what we cannot discover for and by ourselves. When man has tried to do that in the past, the result has been concepts of violent nature gods, or lascivious Olympians, etc. For us to really know anything about the nature of God, He would have had to tell us that Himself -- which is exactly what He has done, in the Holy Scriptures.