Category: Theology

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Science and Religion Spirituality Theology

TG Darkly Podcast #5: Humanity as and In Creation

Here is the text of my most recent podcast.

The second chapter of Genesis offers an enduring image for the creation of humanity: “the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

What does it mean for humanity to be created “from the dust of the ground?”

In many ancient Mesopotamian creation stories, human beings were depicted as deriving from some physical part of the gods. Often this was the result of conflict: humans arose from the blood, flesh or tears of gods slain by other gods. Humans created in this fashion were supposed to serve the gods by performing menial work that the gods had tired of doing themselves. The lot of humanity, then, was one of violence and servitude.

In the Israelite creation stories reflected in Genesis 1 and 2, humans are made from the ordinary material of creation: “dust.” Humans are made of earth-stuff, not god-stuff.

At first glance, it may seem that this lowers the status of the human creature. We might ask the question raised by Eliphaz in the book of Job:

Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?
If God places no trust in his servants,
if he charges his angels with error,
how much more those who live in houses of clay,
whose foundations are in the dust,who are crushed more readily than a moth! (Job 4:17-19)

Indeed, our humble origins ought to remind us of the fragility of our lives. As the Psalmist says,

You turn people back to dust,saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

The elements of which our bodies are made are ordinary and abundant. Science tells us that approximately ninety-three per cent of the mass in a living human body is comprised of elements first formed through nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. Through almost unimaginably vast and ancient cycles of stellar formation and supernova explosions, this “stardust” of elements has been spread throughout the universe. It is as though God scattered the stars across space and time to seed the universe for life, including your life and mine. And we are thereby inseparably connected to each other, to the air we breathe, to the ground we tread, to all the creatures that fill the skies and crawl upon the earth and teem in the seas, to the depths of all the heavens. We are not transcendent of creation. We are creatures.

Yet we are creatures into which God breathed the “breath of life.” We are stardust and more than stardust. We are not reducible to our constituent chemicals. A “man” or a “woman” is not just a gooey sack of water, carbon and trace elements. Hydrogen, oxygen and carbon are not aware of their own existence. These elements cannot reason or pray or make love or write poems. Conjunctions of these elements cannot carry any persistent identity across time. They do not exercise will or intentionality or agency. They are not “selves.”

Most of the cells in a human body are in constant flux: aging, dividing, dying, being replaced. The surface layer of human skin is renewed completely about every two weeks. An adult’s skeleton is entirely remade over approximately ten year periods. It may be that only the neurons of the cerebral cortex and a few other types of cells persist throughout the lifetime of a human body. And eventually, it all does return to “dust.”

Yet we think of ourselves as persisting over time, as comprising an “identity,” a “self.” Perhaps the cerebral cortex provides the stable biological platform for identity and selfhood, but something new emerges from the chemical-electrical soup, new patterns of organization, a different level of causation. We can even make choices that reshape ourselves, both the physically and psychologically. The very wiring of our brains changes when we make conscious choices. Mind is both shaped by matter and supervenes on matter.

Materialists who wish to collapse all of human identity into brain chemistry overstep the bounds of “science.” A fundamental principle of scientific practice is testability: is it possible to demonstrate empirically whether a proposition is true or false? As Saint Augustine observed many centuries ago, the fact that I acknowledge I could be “wrong” about something means that I am a “self” who is capable of making real choices about things that are in fact true or false. “Si fallor, sum” Augustine said – if I can doubt, if I can be wrong, then I must exist. One who is a true materialist “all the way down” cannot test his or her materialism. There is no possibility of “being” right or wrong, indeed no possibility of “being” – there is nothing but chemistry.

Spiritualists who wish to degrade matter in favor of the soul or spirit likewise are not expressing a Christian anthropology. Indeed, one of the first heresies that encountered the early Christian church was Gnosticism. A core belief of Gnosticism was that matter, including the human body, was essentially evil. Salvation for the Gnostics involved the soul’s escape from the prison of embodiment and materiality. The Gnostics treated the body either with disdain – engaging in extreme ascetic practices – or with antinomian abandon – engaging in extreme sexual license. Either way, their practices were rooted in the belief that matter and the body were unimportant. It’s easy to see how this view continually creeps into both our popular culture and our Church cultures.

Christian theology asserts that humans are spiritual creatures, a unity of body and spirit or “soul,” integrated, not reducible downwards to mere matter or upwards to mere spirit. Perhaps there is no better way to bring these themes together than with a Psalm — here is Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of 139 in The Message:

God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say
before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
then up ahead and you’re there, too—
your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful—
I can’t take it all in!

Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit?
to be out of your sight?
If I climb to the sky, you’re there!
If I go underground, you’re there!
If I flew on morning’s wings
to the far western horizon,
You’d find me in a minute—
you’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!
At night I’m immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;
night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I’d even lived one day.

Categories
Barth Theology

Blogging Barth: Church Proclamation: Church Dogmatics, §1.3.1

Barth, from Wikimidia Commons

Last week in Daniel Kirk’s virtual Barth reading group, we read through the first part of Barth’s chapter on “Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics.”  Here Barth begins to outline the source of dogmatics.

That source, for Barth, is “proclamation.”  Proclamation “is human speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as speech in and by which God Himself speaks….”

“Proclamation” is located in the Church and inheres in preaching and the sacrament.  God may speak to us in many ways — for example, in “a flute conerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog,” or in the daily ministry of the local church– and we should listen to this speech.  However, this sort of speech is not “proclamation,” not a proper source of dogmatics, because the essential locus of the encounter between God and humanity is the preaching and sacrament of the Church:  “preaching with the sacrament, with the visible act that confirms human speech as God’s act, is the constitutive element, the perspicuous centre of the Church’s life.”

For many of us from “low church” evangelical / dispensational or very conservative Reformed backgrounds, all this sounds odd.  We are attuned to the Bible as the written, objective locus of dogmatics.  Indeed, both the Westminster confessional tradition and the systematic theologies produced by many conservative evangelical scholars (for example, Wayne Grudem) take the Bible to be the source of a system of doctrine that can be deduced and distilled from its pages.

Barth’s approach might perhaps seems a bit less odd for those coming from a moderate Reformed or Wesleyan tradition.  The moderate Reformed view emphasizes common grace and general revelation, whereas the Wesleyan traditions refer to the “quadrilateral” — scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.  But a significant difference remains, because Barth refuses to locate any source of dogmatics outside the Church’s proclamation.  Barth rejects appeals to “general revelation” or “reason” as norms for theology outside Church proclamation.  Here seems to reside both a higher — or at least different — pneumatology and a higher — or at least different — ecclesiology than in the moderate Reformed or Wesleyan traditions.

In fact, at first glance, it may seem that Barth would be sympathetic to Roman Catholic views on theological authority.  Not so.  Indeed, in this section he roundly criticizes Catholicism for what he views as its generally weak approach to preaching, which for him is an essential element of proclamation.

In may ways, then, Barth’s normative posture can be seen as pre-modern and pre-scholastic. Reformed and conservative evangelical dogmatics after the 19th Century tended towards modernism — either in objectifying the written word as a rationalistic sourcebook or in objectifying reason as the sole norm of truth (in liberalism).  Catholic dogmatics from about the time of Gregory the Great through the 19th Century tended towards scholasticism.

Barth’s view hearkens back to the Church Fathers, who understood scripture, reason, tradition, and experience all as one unified witness to the Christ uniquely proclaimed and celebrated by the Church.  This remains, I think, a vital corrective for those of us in the West, particularly in America, who are the heirs of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — either in traditions influenced by fundamentalism or traditions influenced by liberalism.  But as I’ve hinted at in prior posts, to confront the challenges of Church proclamation in a post-scientific, pluralistic and post-Enlightenment age, we’ll need to think a bit more carefully about those things Barth categorically excludes as normative sources for theology — particularly reason and experience mediated through the scientific study of creation, and reason and experience as lived out in non-Western contexts.

Categories
Barth Theology

Blogging Barth's Dogmatics: § 1.2

This week in Daniel Kirk’s virtual Barth reading group, we are discussion § 1.2 of the Dogmatics.  Here Barth discusses what comprises a proper prolegomena to dogmatics.

Coming from an Evangelical context, it’s common to take analytic philosophy as the prolegomena to theology.  This is particularly true for neo-Evangelical theologians such as Carl Henry and conservative Evangelicals such as Millard Erickson and Norman Geisler.  Their systematic theologies rest on logical rules such as the law of non-contradiction as applied to what they consider to be empirical observations concerning the propositional content of scripture.  This method leads to an emphasis on rational argumentation, which in turn supports a robust apologetic program. The same observation could be made concerning scholastic Roman Catholic theology.  Indeed, Norman Geisler considers himself an “Evangelical Thomist.”

Barth will have none of this.  For him, adopting anything other than “revelation” as the basis for dogmatics is a form of unbelief and idolatry.  Philosophy, for Barth, is a human construction, and therefore the ultimate ground of rationalistic theologies is man, not God.

The immediate response to this claim is that man is made in God’s image, meaning that human reason and the rules of logic are reflections of God’s own self.  Barth rejects any such notion of the analogia entis.  As he will develop later in his discussion of revelation and the Trinity, Barth — drawing strong support from Martin Luther — takes God to be wholly other, hidden, and inaccessible to fallen humans absent a radical act of grace.

Two very helpful themes can be derived from this section.  First is the limitations of apologetics.  For Barth, apologetics are not merely of limited value — “apologetics and polemics,” he says, “have obviously been irresponsible, irrelevant, and therefore ineffective.”

Second is that revelation is the proper foundation of theology and indeed of Christian epistemology.  As Barth notes,

“the place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be neither a prior anthropological possibility nor a subsequent ecclesiastical reality, but only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ Himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts.”

As we will see, and as this quote foreshadows, Barth’s concept of “revelation” certainly is not the same static notion as Henry’s or Geisler’s.

At this point we might begin to wonder, however, about Barth’s anthropology.  Barth will eventually flesh out this brief introduction with a lengthy argument specifically against any sort of anthropological prolegomena to theology, in response to a claim that an earlier version of the Dogmatics relied too heavily on anthropology.  But it is not at all clear that he — or anyone — can escape some sort of a priori anthropological assumptions.  Even Barth, after all, is making a reasoned argument against the use of reason as prolegomena.

For this and other reasons, I will eventually lean towards Thomas Torrance’s softer understanding of the analogia entis and natural theology. It should also be noted here that Roman Catholic theology, after the nouvelle theologie, is no longer predominantly scholastic. Barth and one of the key figures in the nouvelle theologie, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, were famous interlocutors, though this relationship began after Barth wrote Volume I of the Dogmatics.  Balthasar may also be a helpful conversation partner, along with Torrance, as we delve deeper into Barth’s work.

Categories
Science and Religion Spirituality Theology

The Triune God and Creation

Here is the text of my most recent podcast.

The Triune God and Creation

In our previous podcasts, we mentioned that the doctrine of the Trinity is vital to our understanding of creation. In this conversation, we’ll explore what we mean when we say God is Triune, and how this deepens our perspectives on God’s relationship to creation.

That God is Triune is among the most basic of Christian confessions. Christians confess that there is one God – God is “one in essence” – distinguished in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Certainly the idea that “God is one in essence distinguished in three persons” is far easier to state than to understand. As theologian Robert Jensen says, “’[t]he doctrine of the Trinity’ is less a homogeneous body of propositions than it is a task: that of the church’s continuing effort to recognize and adhere to the biblical God’s hypostatic being.”

It is easy to paint incorrect pictures of what it means for God to be Triune: pictures of three persons of the Trinity having different hierarchical ranks (called “subordinationism”); or pictures of the three persons representing merely different manifestations of God (called “modalism”); or pictures of the three persons as individually separate gods (called “tritheism”). Against these incorrect pictures we need to understand that the persons of the Trinity are equal with and inseparable from each other – that they are “coequal,” “coessential,” “coinherent.”

These word pictures matter because they point us toward the sort of being God really is. Theologian Daniel Migliore says it this way:

To speak thus of God as triune is to set all of our prior understandings of what is divine in question. God is not a solitary monad but free, self-communicating love. God is not the supreme will-to-power over others but the supreme will-to-communion in which power and life are shared. To speak of God as the ultimate power whose being is in giving, receiving, and sharing love, who gives life to others and wills to live in communion, is to turn upside down our understandings of both divine and human power.

This relational understanding of God has profound implications for how we understand God’s purposes for creation. This is because God acts as God is. In theological terms, we say that the “economic trinity” – how God is in Himself – is the “immanent trinity” – how God acts in relation to creation. God created not because anything compelled or required Him to do so, but out of the same love that characterizes the coequal, coessential, coinherent Triune persons of his being.

Creation is a gift. Theologian and writer David Bentley Hart summarizes this theme beautifully:

The God whom Genesis depicts as pronouncing a deliberative “Let us…” in creating humanity after his image and as looking on in approbation of his handiwork, which he sees to be good, is the eternal God who is the God he forever is, with or without creation, to whom creation adds absolutely nothing; God does not require creation to ‘fecundate’ his being, nor does he require the pathos of creation to determine his ‘personality’ as though he were some finite subjectivity writ large, whose transcendental Ego were in need of delimitation in an empirical ego; God and creation do not belong to an interdependent history of necessity, because the Trinity is already infinitely sufficient, infinitely ‘diverse,’ infinitely at peace; God is good and sovereign and wholly beautiful, and creation is gift, loveliness, pleasure, dignity, and freedom….”

Hart continues: “precisely because creation is uncompelled, unnecessary, and finally other than that dynamic life of coinherent love whereby God is God, it can reveal how God is the God he is; precisely because creation is needless, an object of delight that shares God’s love without contributing anything that God does not already possess in infinite eminence, creation reflects the divine life, which is one of delight and fellowship and love.”

Gift. Delight. Loveliness. Fellowship. Love. These words characterize creation because they are what the God who created is in His Triune self.

Creation is gift. It is easy to lose track of this truth in the midst of the violence, anger and war that scars our experience of the world. Have you ever thought it would have been better if you had never been born? Have you ever wondered why God created at all when the result is so much suffering? It is impossible to “explain” suffering and evil, though we will talk about some ways to think of suffering and evil in future podcasts. One important theme is that, even with all its groaning, creation is given freely by God, out of His overflowing perichoretic love, as gift. That we are alive, that we breathe the air of this world and feel its soil under our feet, is good.

Creation is delight. How often do you drink in the simple joy of being? Stand by a window for a moment and feel the warm sun on your skin. This is an expression of God’s own life.

Creation is lovely. From the tiniest one-celled organisms to the inconceivably vast fields of galaxies, creation displays symmetry, light, color, movement, form, shape.

Creation is fellowship. The creatures of the earth and we human beings are bound together in a common share of life. And we as human beings, with all our variety of skin and body types, are fundamentally of the same stuff, sharing the same spark of divinity, made for each other and for God.

Creation is love. Every structure, every particle, everything seen and unseen, all that is, is because of God’s love, and is loved by God. To be loved by the God who is perfected in love within His own being is to be named a thing of unimaginable worth. There is nothing ordinary in the universe or in any universe God has made. Everything that is, is extraordinary and priceless.

Today may you receive with gratitude the gift of being;
May you delight in life;
May you bathe in beauty;
May you know you belong;
May you realize the true measure of your worth, and share in the joyful dance of God’s overflowing, creative love.

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Podcasting Science and Religion Spirituality Theology

TG Darkly Podcast: The Triune God and Creation

Here is TG Darkly Podcast #4:  The Triune God and Creation.

Use the player below to listen, or download the file.

Categories
Barth Theology

Blogging Barth's Dogmatics: Section 1.1

Daniel Kirk is hosting a virtual Karl Barth reading group in which I hope to participate.  We’re commenting this week on section 1.1 of the Church Dogmatics. I had started reading the Dogmatics this past summer so I’m looking forward to this group interaction.

Barth defines “dogmatics” as follows:  “[a]s a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God.”

I love this definition because it lays some important groundwork.  First, dogmatics is a sort of “science.”  That is, dogmatics seeks to explain some aspect of reality.  It gets at the essences of the way things really are.

Second, dogmatics is an act of “self examination.”  The theme of ever and always getting back to the sources, of critically reappraising our thinking about God, is important to Barth’s project.  The theological task never ends.

Third, dogmatics is distinctively situated within the Christian Church.  The “science” of dogmatics is not like the supposedly neutral, objective enterprise of the natural or social sciences.  Rather, dogmatics asserts its own grounds and grammar, ultimately based in revelation.   As we’ll see, Barth’s doctrine of revelation is both objective and dynamic, rooted ultimately in God’s Triune person.

For Barth, the science of dogmatics “does not have to justify itself” before other sciences that proceed according to their own methods.  This will prove to be, I think, a great strength and a potential weakness in Barth’s project.  Christian theology cannot submit to any standard as final arbiter of its claims other than God’s revelation in Christ, or else it will lose its integrity.  As we move through the Dogmatics, however, we may want to modify or soften some of Barth’s opposition to some kinds of natural theology.

A good conclusion to this brief introduction is the definition of who is a “theologian,” quoted from Johannes Coccejus:  “A theologian is someone who speaks of God, from God, before God to God’s glory.” May it be so!

Categories
Science and Religion Spirituality Theology

God and Creation: Immanence

In the previous podcast, we discussed God’s transcendence. Today we will cover a complementary topic: God’s immanence.

God’s “immanence” refers to God’s presence in creation. If we were to speak only of the ways in which God is “transcendent” – how He is other than, above, and hidden in creation – we would be left with a god that seems more like an abstract force than a person. The God of the Bible, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, however, is a personal and relational God. This sort of God does not merely wind up creation like a watch and then sit back to watch it run. This sort of God is always intimately involved with His creation.

God’s immanence in creation is bound to God’s character as a relational being characterized by love. In our next podcast, we’ll explore in more depth why the doctrine of the Trinity – the fact that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one substance – is vital to our theology of creation. For now, we’ll focus on the truth that all of creation is a product of who God is: as 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.”

Creation is a product of love. God did not need to create. God in Himself knows no shortage of anything. The fact that God did create, then, reflects an outpouring of God’s generosity and love. Indeed, this is echoed in the poetic refrain of Genesis 1: God declares the creation ”good.” It is profitable to let this truth sink deep into our souls: the world God made is good because all of it is the abundant expression of God’s love. It is sadly true, of course, that the creation is affected by our sin, and we will discuss what this may mean in later podcasts. But it is still God’s creation, and therefore it is still in its essence good.

In fact, creation is continually sustained by God’s love. An important corollary to God’s immanence in creation is the contingency of the creation. If God were an absent watchmaker, the creation could run on its own, without anything from God beyond the initial wind-up. But if the creation is such that God is immanent in and throughout it, then the creation does not exist apart from God. The entire creation depends utterly on God’s sustaining will and power for its ongoing existence. From the perspective of Christian theology, there is simply no such thing as “nature” without God. And despite our sin, God has not abandoned the creation. This too is a thought worth meditating upon: God has never withdrawn His presence from the creation; He has not given up on what He has made; it all remains entirely His and it all continues because of His love.

This is not to say that God’s immanence in creation deprives creation of its own integrity. Creation is characterized by a beauty and order that reflects God’s own character. In His love, God has graced creation itself with causal freedom, within the probabilities of quantum physics and emergent physical laws.

Consider, for example, the Bird of Paradise, which engages in elaborate mating displays involving the construction of bowers out of colorful flowers and other materials. A female might be courted by several males, and ultimately will choose one as a mate based in some way on the quality of his display. We should not imagine that God somehow directly instructs the female about which mate to choose. The causal relationship between the male’s display and the female’s choice of mate has its own integrity, as does the evolutionary history of the birds’ plumage and social rituals. We can understand these causal relationships without invoking immediate Divine intervention. Classical theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas called this “secondary” causation.

But creation cannot run on its own, because there is a deeper, “primary” level of causation, which is God’s creative and sustaining will and power. In classical theological terms, all “secondary” causes, because they are entirely dependent on God’s “primary” causation, are subsumed within God’s “primary” causation. In this way, we can think of creation as possessing inherent created freedom while at the same time existing entirely under God’s sovereignty.

Yet, if creation possesses causal integrity at least at the level of secondary causation, why should we invoke God at all? Does God become an unnecessary appendage, to be elided by Ockham’s Razor? Should we repeat the famous adage of the astronomer Laplace – who, when the Emperor Napoleon asked where God fit into the cosmos, replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis?”

No, because the brute fact of the universe’s existence alone does not adequately explain all – or even most – of what we as human beings believe is important. We might suggest that the universe as brute fact alone cannot explain the fact of itself. Why does this universe exist? Why does this universe seem so finely tuned to produce the sort of carbon-based life that results in human beings who are able to reflect on the meaning of it all? The best response of materialist scientists to date is the “multiverse” theory – a curious idea that we’ll explore in a future podcast – one that, even if it could be considered a true “scientific” idea, merely pushes the “why” question, and indeed the “how” question of the origin of physical laws, further back into the mists.

Perhaps more importantly, the universe as brute fact alone cannot explain what is “good” or “just” or “beautiful” or “true,” unless we strip those terms of any real meaning. The universe as brute fact alone cannot account at all for “love” – again, unless we reduce and redefine the meaning of “love” to a mere interaction of brain chemicals. (We’ll also discuss this sort of reductionism in a future podcast).

Finally, from a Christian perspective, most importantly of all, the universe as brute fact alone cannot explain the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, a truly Christian perspective is one that views the universe through the lens of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and not the other way around. We start where the scriptures start: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). We understand the immanence of God in creation most directly through Christ, the Word, the Logos, by whom all things were created, in whom all things hold together, and who himself took on flesh and became both creator and creature.

And this brings us back to the notion of God’s immanence. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”, we read in John 3:16. Everywhere in creation, we should see the cross of Christ. We should see God present to such a degree that God Himself was willing to suffer and die in the person of the Son, in union with the groaning of all creation. All of creation – all of its beauty, all of its majesty, all of its power, all of its complexity, all of its simplicity, all of its suffering – points to the Logos, the Christ, who shaped it, who suffered with it and for it, and who will redeem it. This means that Christ himself is never far from any of us. He is not absent or far off; he has not abandoned what he has made. With the eyes of faith, wherever we look, we can see him; with the expectation of hope, in every season we can turn and find him right there; with the delight of love, we can enjoy and care for all the good things he has made as though he were enjoying them and caring for them along with us – for he is indeed Emmanuel, God With Us.

Here is the text of my second God and Creation podcast.

Categories
Podcasting Science & Technology Spirituality Theology

TG Darkly Podcast #4: God's Immanence

Here is TG Darkly Podcast #3: God’s Immanence.
This podcast was prepared for my God in Creation class.
You can listen to the podcast using the link below or download the file.

Categories
Science and Religion Theology

God and Creation: Transcendence

Here’s the text of my most recent podcast.

Introduction: God’s Transcendence

If we want to talk about God, creation, and science, where should we start? It’s easy to begin with conflict. We can claim that the rise of modern science is the root of cultural decline. We can dive right into some of the contentious questions about how the Bible and science relate to each other. We can adopt a posture of defensiveness about what Christians believe and the ways in which some people think science threatens our beliefs. There are, in fact, some important questions that we eventually will need to discuss along these lines.

But this is not a good place to start. The place to start is the place where all good Christian theology must start: with God. (Don’t be put off by the word “theology,” by the way – “theology” is just the very human process of thinking about God).

“In the beginning, God….” These are the first words of the Bible. “I believe in God….” These are the first words of the Apostle’s Creed. If we want to develop wisdom and understanding about the theme of our class – “God and Creation” – then we need to start with the source of everything: God.

But how do we know anything about God? And how can we say anything about God? As we go about our daily lives, we can’t converse with God in exactly the same way that we might talk with our families, friends or neighbors. We can’t touch or smell God like a patch of green grass or taste Him like an apple. We can’t see him like an image on our TV screens. In theological terms, there is a sense in which God is “hidden” to our human senses. Many great Christian thinkers, such as Martin Luther, spent a good part of their lives reflecting on the “hiddenness” of God.

It may surprise you to hear God described as “hidden.” Those of us who have been in the Church for a while often are much more familiar with talk of how God has revealed Himself to us. We seem to gravitate towards detailed and systematic explanations of what we think we can know about God. God has, of course, revealed Himself to us – or else there would be very little point in a class like this one. In scripture, in the proclamation of the Church, in the created world, and most importantly, in Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known. So why start with how God is “hidden?”

The very fact that God cannot be directly perceived by our ordinary human senses tells us something important about God and creation. God is “hidden” because He is “other.” God is not a patch of grass, and a patch of grass is not God. God is not an apple, and an apple is not God. God is not a television image or painting or statute, and a television image, painting or statute is not God. God is not a human being, and human beings are not God. God is not matter, the stuff of the created world, and matter is not God.

In theological terms, God is transcendent. “God” and “creation” are not the same things. This is a basic idea that distinguishes Christian understandings of God from many other philosophies and religions. In fact, as we’ll see when we discuss the cultural background of the Bible’s creation narratives a few weeks from now, this emphasis on God’s transcendence is one important difference between the Hebrew and Christian theologies of creation and the prevailing ideas in the world of the Biblical writers — the ancient near east. It also distinguishes Christian thinking about God and creation from some of the important ideas that are common today.

In fact, two of the most common contemporary perspectives really are very old ideas dressed up in new clothes. One is a notion you might hear, for example, on TV talk shows, in self-help books, or in popular music or movies: that “everything is one” or that “God is in everything.”

The first common popular idea is that “God is in everything and everyone.” In popular culture, what we hear often sounds more like “pantheism” — the notion that God and the world around us really are essentially the same thing. In fact, in American popular culture, this usually boils down to God becoming the same thing as our own individual selves. How often have you hear a line like this in a song or TV show or movie: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are.”

The truth of God’s transcendence is that the real basis for a meaningful and good life lies outside of ourselves. We are part of creation, and therefore we are not God.

Before we become too critical here, we need to preview for a moment an important theme I’ll talk about in the next podcast: that God is also immanent. It is true that creation is an interconnected system and that God is always present throughout all of creation. It is also true that in our created humanity we are made for an intimate connection with God. It is right to look into ourselves as we seek God. An honest search of the self should reveal a nature that is not self-sufficient, that is not meant to be alone, that longs for relationship with a beauty and harmony and love that the individual self cannot sustain. The great Christian thinker Augustine called this a “God-shaped void” at the heart of every person.

Yet we also need to be clear that, while the search may begin with our selves, it must not stop there. God is “other,” so we must continue beyond ourselves, in fact beyond everything we think we see, in order to find Him. And the paradox here is that we can only find the true meaning and purpose of our own selves by going beyond ourselves and finding the God who is other than us and who made us.

The second common popular idea is that “matter is all there is.” Unfortunately, for some people this idea has become the standard for supposedly “scientific” thinking about the world. But this is not a “scientific” idea at all – it is a metaphysical statement (“metaphysical” just means “beyond the physical”) with roots going back to the ancient Greek Stoics. For many educated people in Western culture, if something cannot be verified with the human senses, it is not “real,” or at least it is not worthy of consideration as a matter of “fact” or “reason.”

There are many reasons why this way of thinking about what counts as truth or knowledge has become so influential. Our modern intellectual, political and social systems were deeply influenced by the period from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries known as the “Enlightenment.” We will see as we progress through this class that even modern Christianity has been tinged in significant ways by Enlightenment thought.

The Enlightenment, of course, was not all bad. It gave us some great gifts, including the contemporary scientific method and the political frameworks, such as the U.S. Constitution, that support the freedoms we now take for granted.

But like many exciting moments in history, the Enlightenment produced some unbalanced perspectives. The ways in which human beings can know things in addition to observation of the tangible world around us were lost. The sorts of intuitions and experiences that human beings throughout history had taken as perhaps reaching beyond reason were discredited. The thought that a transcendent God might have broken into history to reveal anything about Himself was increasingly set aside.

Christian theology has always asserted that because God is transcendent, human observation and human reason are neither the starting point nor the ending point for true knowledge, wisdom and understanding. If matter is not all there is, then our search for truth cannot be limited to the material world alone. In fact, the beginning of knowledge and wisdom is the realization that God is beyond and other than the created world.

Again, a word of balance is in order. Human observation and reason do matter, precisely because God created us as part of a world that is in important ways orderly and knowable. The great Christian thinker Anselm said that knowledge is the act of “faith seeking understanding.” “Understanding” – the sometimes difficult process of bringing all our resources, including reason, to bear on the search for truth – depends on and follows “faith.”

We’ll discuss this in another podcast. But for now, it’s important to note that God’s transcendence means that the physical world does not represent the limits of what is true and real. Indeed, the physical world is not the beginning or end of what is true and real. The “beginning and end,” the “alpha and omega,” is the God who is beyond all our thoughts and imaginings.

Categories
Biblical Studies Science and Religion Theology

Cunningham: What Genesis Doesn't Say

Conor Cunningham — my doctoral advisor at Nottingham if I end up pursuing that degree —  offers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong, on Christian Century.  I love his discussion of the early Fathers and his approach to Christ as the hinge of all theology of creation:

Adam, the idea of a Fall and so on can be revealed only in Christ if we are to remain faithful to the church fathers. It is folly to interpret the Fall or the existence of Adam in either positivistic or strictly historical terms, since there is no Fall before Christ. That is to say, there was but a glimmer of its occurrence, and this glimmer was only about Christ and not about some historical event of the same genus as the Battle of Trafalgar. Moreover, before Christ there was neither death nor life nor even sin. For all such concepts find their truth only in the passion of the Christ, and for one very simple reason: creation is about Christ and nothing else. Jesus, as the Word of God, is the metaphysical or ontological beginning and end (telos) of all that exists. This is not some wishy-washy religious nonsense but is, on the contrary, perfectly logical.

We should therefore bear in mind that, for theology, protology leads to eschatology. So, for example, according to the church fathers, Adam was Christ and Eve was Mary, while paradise is the church, and the Fall signals humankind’s redemption in Christ. Indeed, without Christ there would be no need of redemption—so the Fall would not make any sense. Thus the Fall is never a stand-alone item and makes no sense on its own.