Communing with God

I have been doing a lot of theologising lately - thinking about God, and how I might begin to express what God means for me. I was listening to John Spong recently and he made the comment that it is impossible to describe God - words and the images we use them to create are so finite, and yet God can be nothing if not infinite. But, he said we can all describe our experience of God.



It is in this context that I have just read a small book by Paula D'Arcy called "Gift of the Red Bird". It is an easy read, in journal form although I think written retrospectively, perhaps relying on actual journal material in many places.

It begins with her experience of the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband and daughter in a road accident just three months before her second child was born. She chronicles her experience of God through those dark times as well as her frenzied experience as a circuit speaker, telling her story over and again, to a point of physical collapse.

She thinks she is recovering when she is struck down with an illness that was completely unresponsive to treatment. For eight months she struggles and eventually recognises that her illness is not a physical thing, but an inner spiritual thing, and when she begins to put these things right, her recovery becomes evident.

She gets back onto the speaking circuit but under much better terms and after a time plans a wilderness retreat - that involves three days of fasting as well as solitude. She spent a great deal of time preparing with others for this experience and the plan was that she should keep a journal of this quest. Towards the end she writes:

"In reading through these pages I have noticed many things: the length of the grief process; the way God must continue to be followed and pursued; and the fact that yesterday's understandings of the Divine are already old. It is only the immediate day and moment right before me that matter."

What struck me as I read her experience is something I think we all find and experience quite naturally: that God is in all things that surround us, and that some of our most profound experiences of God occur in natural settings. There are hints of this experience in our sacred texts - the Psalms and the writings of Paul in their various ways affirm this idea that God is not separated from the creation, but is in a sense incarnated in it.

Paula D'Arcy's experience is not unique, nor is it uniquely Christian. It could be said to be common to the human experience that we gain a sense of acquaintance with the Divine or God or whatever you may choose to call this sense of "the Other" when we place ourselves in our natural environment and pay attention.

The question that then arises for me as I make this observation is: How is it that so many Christians live by a world view in which God is out there, to whom we pray, seeking a visitation from "heaven" into our earthly experience in order to intervene and make things right? I know that there are also hints of this dualism in the sacred texts, but I find that view much harder to fit into a modern world view of a cosmos that is driven by a whole set of laws of nature in which God is already present.

What do you think?

Evolutionary Christianity

Throughout Advent and the Christmas Season a natural scientist and devout Christian, Michael Dowd, conducted 38 telephone interviews on this topic with a wide range of scientists and theologians from diverse Christian traditions, including evangelicals, all discussing various aspects of their views about Christianity & Evolution. There were three Nobel Science Prize winners among the speakers and four Templeton Prize winners for their contribution to religion. Some were academics. Some were pastors. It is an incredibly diverse group and all these conversations can be downloaded as MP3 files.

They seem to me to have three basic themes, but each guest speaker takes their own particular slant on them.

Firstly, they want to claim a middle ground between Ken Ham's young earth Creationism and Richard Dawkins' scientific atheism. For them there is no conflict between science and the Bible and in fact the whole realm of scientific evidence, as a revelation of truth, is in some sense a revelation of God. Therefore, the scientific evidence for a process of evolution does not undermine faith in Biblical Revelation, it simply changes what we understand the text to be saying and how it got to be that way.

Secondly, they want to propose that the idea of evolution, of gradual and incremental change is intrinsic to all aspects of creation. If this is so, and there is a great deal of evidence for it, they want to suggest that our faith must also be seen in evolutionary terms - not just at a personal level, but also for the whole of the church. Most of us can see the sense of our own faith journey as one in which we have had a gradually unfolding, ever deepening relationship with God. I like, but find quite challenging, the idea that the faith of God's people and the church must also be constantly evolving into new things.

Finally, they talk about time as Deep Time and by it simply mean that there is to much evidence (revelation from God) that the world is approximately 18 billion years old for anyone to convincingly argue that God made it all 6,500 years ago.

It seems to me, and others, that there are basically four ways that Christians deal with this Science-faith debate.

1. The two world views are mutually exclusive - you can't have an evolutionary scientific world view and be a Christian.

2. The two world views must be kept in separate compartments of our lives - like oil and water, they don't mix, but they are both there.

3. The two world views can learn from each other, but they are still essentially separate.

4. The two world views can and must be integrated into a single world view.

I can see all versions of this among the people I know in the church, but I have found this series of conversations have helped give me a vocabulary to express that I have intuitively believed - that science and faith can and must live together within a single world view. What do you think?

They Followed a Star

Two things have converged for me to raise an interesting question.



A few days before Christmas, Andrew McGowan, in his blog A New Parson's Handbook discusses the origin of the date 25th December as the date we remember the birth of Jesus. He canvasses various suggested sources ranging from astrology, paganism, the Roman Emperor Cult and even an example of very interesting early Christian logic - based on an assumption that the death of Jesus was coincident with the date of his conception in Mary's womb, and given that his death can be carefully dated in relation to the date of Passover in the relevant year (dates ranging from April 25 - May 6) then his birth mist have occured on a date nine months before those dates (hence the existence of two dates for Christmas).

Regardless of which story may actually be the explanation of the source of the date, two things are clear, the nominated date of December 25th is most certainly only that, a nominated date, and the earliest attribution of that date for the birth of Jesus seems to be about the 3rd Century. In other words, we have no way of actually knowing the date of Christmas.



Then yesterday, in the ABC Broadcast of Songs of Praise produced by the BBC the presenter, in between the various songs about the Wise Men following a star, we were introduced to a range of astronomers, some no less influential than those residing in the Vatican, who have deduced that the year of our Lord's birth must have been 6BCE because in that year there was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Mars (I think) within the constellation of Aries, an event that would have been of some significance to middle eastern astrologers. This convergence was not apparent on 25 December in the year 0 so the explanation must relate to some error in the assignment of the date of the start of the Christian Era, and Jesus was born BCE.

Two things immediately came to my mind that made this amusing. First was the aspect mentioned above by which December 25 is in most likelihood completely arbitrary as the date of Jesus' birth. Second is my basic understanding of the history of our calendar. The Julian Calendar started in 45BCE and was basically a solar calendar of 365 days with a leap year each 4th year adding an extra day. But over time that extra day added too much time because a solar year was 11 minutes short of 365 1/4 days. So, in the 16th Century Pope Gregory XIII modified the Julian calendar into what we observe today, a calendar not universally accepted in Western Europe and when some Eastern European countries eventually relented in the 20th Century they had to wipe out 13 days - not to be celebrated that year. Even though Gregory and his mathematicians did some amazing calculations to work this all out, I live with a niggling doubt that we can actually tie down the year we nominated as 0 to a documented moment in history.

In other words, I found it rather preposterous that here we are in 2010 trying to fit scientific facts to a view of time and history that is so rubbery and slippery that any conclusions we might arrive at would inevitably be flawed.

I am happy to live with a nominated date for Jesus' birth. I am happy to live with birth narratives that are highly figurative and symbolic rather than historical. The fact of Jesus is indisputable. The thrust of his teaching, although subject to some debate, is generally agreed upon. The establishment of a movement that became the Church as a result of his life and story is beyond doubt. It is the details that ground all this in a very particular historical moment that is much harder for us to pin down.

What do you think?