I have been listening to a series of podcasts by Paula Fredriksen lecturing on Christianity as seen through the lens of the development of sin entitled "Sin: The History of an Idea". She gives some fantastic connections between some obvious historical facts that I had not thought of before. I am not sure if she is going to go in this direction since I have not finished her second lecture, but this is what I thought going up the hill to work this morning amidst the awesome display of autumn colors in the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania…
The connection that struck me today is how the early Ptolemaic concept of the universe envisioned purity. The structure moves out from earth and humanity which is viewed as the center of the universe. But this is not the humanist sense where humanity is somehow an idealized center of the universe. Rather, the material world that we experience as humans is a model of imperfection and impurity. As we move out in concentric circles from this center, we attain to higher levels of perfection up to the dome in the sky and then to the stars which are literally heavenly beings more perfect that anything in our material realm.
(Click for a larger image)
In the Christian view of things that comes through this conception of the universe Jesus is seen as that bridge between the imperfect material realm and the perfection of God in the heavens. God becomes a being with no extension and no limit. The only suitable metaphor for the being of God is thought itself since thought is not coextensive with any analogy in the material realm that we can perceive.
I was thinking about how these conceptions still exist in Christianity through the medium of this ancient form of the universe and its fundamental relationship to God and how arbitrary that this conception begins to look. It's not that it is fundamentally a wrong picture of God, but it is a conception of God that was conditioned by an understanding of the universe that simply does not hold a lot of water based on what we have learned about the structure of the universe since then. So do we still view God in this Ptolemaic way? Yup.
God is seen as that which exists outside of any analogy to human experience and is a being that is immaterial and immutable and these are still held as the values that are equated with perfection. When we start with God viewed through this lens, look what it does to our understanding of what we perceive in the material world. What it does is still understand our flesh, the stuff of the earth, dirt, the dust of the stars, etc. as less than God and so, imperfect – even fundamentally bad or evil. There is a fear that if we directly associate God with anything of the material universe that we experience it would make God imperfect and somehow "less than" God. Karl Barth was adamant about his disavowal of natural theology and was the chief proponent of the neo-orthodox position that starts with the fundamental otherness of God.
But look what this does to our vision of ourselves. It maintains the association with humanity as something far less than anything perfect and so, something of lesser good than this conception of God. While this might be said to be evident by the bad stuff that humans do to other humans and to the pillaging of the earth's resources for personal utility, it also leads to some seriously bad fruit.
For instance, it leads into the idea that everything material in the universe is bad. This "groaning" and "birth pangs" spoken of the the Christian scriptures. There is something about this universe in which we live that is not good or as good as it could be. It lacks a beauty because it is not anywhere near the source of its beauty in God. Change is at best a lesser good since that which does not change is perfect.
And here is where things can get downright odd and even harmful. The relativizing of the status of the human being and of nature this way leads one to think of humankind's relationship to the material world as something that we should be looking to eclipse in order to be more like God. If we are not part of this material world that we experience, we are closer to what is good – closer to God. So life is lived not in terms of what we can do with our lives right now – at this very moment in time in our mutable selves and in the very dirt of the earth – but in terms of a future of value relative to the redemption that God will bring "some day soon". The rejection of this world and all that is in it becomes a virtue and the escape from this world through contact with God is what one ought to seek.
This is very characteristic of many ideas in evangelical and fundamentalist circles – especially among charismatics. The idea there is that to be like God, one ought not be part of this world. In charismatic worship one literally seeks to kill the body by "falling out" or being "baptized by the spirit" in a state of ecstatic bliss. It is literally entering into a space not of this world (the church) in order to leave one's body to join with God. How do we change the world? By perpetuating the pull of people into the church in order to leave the world and leave their bodies as well.
Theology has had this tendency to be as immutable as God as if changing theology and our understanding of God is also something that lacks integrity and virtue. But what if Christianity developed in a conception of the universe that we now have where it is always changing and the universe is bounded but infinite? There is nothing in the universe that is static except for the existence of matter and energy relative to the speed of light. But that idea is sure to change at some point in the near or distant future as we continue to expand our understanding of these processes.
It seems strange now to think that our understanding of the God of the ancient Jewish diaspora world continues to be one that is mediated through this understanding of the universe that does not hold much wealth in how we understand things these days. Cannot our ideas of God even as revealed in Scripture change as the media of how we understand the universe changes? More importantly, if our ideas of God do not change over time, what does that say about our reliance on the fundamental nature of imperfect human wisdom if not to cast it into the image of the immutable and thus perfect mind of God? It is a weird paradox and even seems hypocritical to revere our ideas about God this way.
So what would God look like if we truly read the scriptures through our scientific understanding of the universe today?
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What a fantastic concluding question! At the very least, God must be seen as 'bigger', given how much larger the universe is than most ancient authors could have imagined.
If one uses the same language, though, then God ends up very far away – as implicit (although I would guess unintentionally so) in the recent worship song "God of wonders", which speaks of God as "beyond our galaxy".
If, on the other hand, one thinks of God as not merely 'higher than the heavens' but also omnipresent, God is still 'bigger'.
But in most discussions, the different ways of thinking about God are still about which of the classic alternatives such as theism, pantheism, deism or panentheism best does justice to what we now know. What is still missing is an attempt at natural theology in the strict sense, to see what notion of God we might come up with if we start exclusively with the scientific information we have available. It might not result in a concept that anyone would want to embrace, but at the very least it might allow Christian theology to be stimulated by some genuinely new theological ideas (unless there really is 'nothing new under the sun'), rather than simply interacting with views that were not unknown even prior to the modern scientific age.
What a fantastic concluding question! At the very least, God must be seen as 'bigger', given how much larger the universe is than most ancient authors could have imagined.
If one uses the same language, though, then God ends up very far away – as implicit (although I would guess unintentionally so) in the recent worship song "God of wonders", which speaks of God as "beyond our galaxy".
If, on the other hand, one thinks of God as not merely 'higher than the heavens' but also omnipresent, God is still 'bigger'.
But in most discussions, the different ways of thinking about God are still about which of the classic alternatives such as theism, pantheism, deism or panentheism best does justice to what we now know. What is still missing is an attempt at natural theology in the strict sense, to see what notion of God we might come up with if we start exclusively with the scientific information we have available. It might not result in a concept that anyone would want to embrace, but at the very least it might allow Christian theology to be stimulated by some genuinely new theological ideas (unless there really is 'nothing new under the sun'), rather than simply interacting with views that were not unknown even prior to the modern scientific age.
I was also thinking of it in quantum terms. For instance what of multiple universes? Is God in one of them?
But it is an interesting idea to play with to communicate the point that context shapes one's understanding of God.
I was also thinking of it in quantum terms. For instance what of multiple universes? Is God in one of them?
But it is an interesting idea to play with to communicate the point that context shapes one's understanding of God.