Evolutionary Christianity - the Pod-cast Marathon is complete

I have spent the last few weeks listening to 39 pod-casts of telephone conversations between Michael Dowd, a self-described "Evolutionary Evangelist", and people he refers to as thought-leaders who are drawn from many and various Christian traditions as well as academic disciplines and fields of science.

There were some well-known Christian thinkers among them - Bishop John Spong, former Dominican Priest Matthew Fox and Fr Diarmuid O'Murchu - as well as two Nobel Prize-winners, Charles Townes and William Phillips, and two Templeton Prize winners, Ian Barbour and John Polkinghorne. I listened to Anglicans, Catholics, Southern Baptists, pentecostals of various kinds, process theologians and those from what is called the emergent or emerging church. I listened to physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, biologists as well as various professors of Science & Religion, a position prolific among the many Christian Colleges that American young people go to after school.

Along the way, in this marathon, I travelled through some amazing worlds of ideas, and I have to say that the people whose stories and ideas most excited me were mostly Catholic Religious women, particularly Joan Chittister. It seemed as if their contemplative life had given a great deal of time for good theological reflection such that their ideas were well thought out, really coherent for me.

Five Signposts became evident as I travelled along the way, and I thought I would have a got at describing them briefly here.

1. Evidence - since scientists seek truth, scientific evidence becomes an accumulation of truth about life as we know it, therefore evidence can be regarded as a kind of Divine Revelation. The claims by some that faith is theistic and science is atheistic is thus demolished, because all truth is an expression of God, even scientific truth.

2. A Single-story Universe - there are some cosmologies that see God, the Divine, as utterly separate from the reality of the physical world. This idea is largely derived from ancient Greek Philosophy, but it is based on the idea that the physical and the spiritual are like oil and water, and are perpetually separated. It is the basis of the idea that God is out there and has to be called into our present reality by our prayers so that God can intervene in the natural order and do a miracle or something, according to our wishes. There is thus a two-story universe in many people's mind.

Rather than being "out there" it is understood that God is intrinsically connected to every bit of the cosmos, as hinted at in Acts 17 where Paul, when he describes God as the creator of the world and everything in it and that God is so intimately present in this creation that he concludes "In him we live and move and have our being". This idea collapses the two-story world view. God is here, in everything. Instead of a theistic, dualistic world view, we see in Scripture evidence of a pan-entheistic world view - God is in everything. This is not pantheism where there are gods everywhere, but one God in everything.

3. A Deep Time Reality - the work of astronomers and astro-physicists has expanded our understanding of how old the universe is, estimated these days to be about 16.8 billion years. Along with this, we have an understanding about the stability of matter that means that matter is constantly circulating through the system of the universe. Atoms are used over and over again - one speaker described us as being formed from stardust, and this was not meant to be a romantic notion, but one based on scientific evidence.

This deep-time notion gives us a sense of being part of something that is indeed very ancient,even though humans have inhabited this planet for just a few million years, and life-forms for just a few billion years.

4. Death is Natural - One thing that is a natural consequence of this scientific world view is that death is something that is intimately connected to life - from dust we are made and to dust we return. This challenges the biblical notion that death was a consequence of sin; but one only has to think a little about the consequences for the universe if those first human beings had got it right and so all creation lived forever. All the resources of the earth be consumed in constantly creating new life.

Just as our gardens obtain life from the composting of dead plant matter so in a way the life of the next generation is secured by the death of a previous generation. There are many Biblical metaphors that catch a hold of this - a grain of wheat must die before it can produce a harvest - but we have so locked ourselves into this idea that death is a consequence of sin rather than simply part of the natural order that many find this one hard to grasp. But it is necessary to find new ways of understanding the Biblical material. For me, the Genesis accounts simply provide us with the best available explanation of why people so feared death.

5. Human Nature - The final thing that people spoke about, particularly Michael Dowd, was that the human sciences have helped us understand a great deal about human nature - psychology, anthropology, social science etc - and many of the things that were described in our Scriptures as being connected with the spiritual dimension such as evil spirits we would see now as having naturalistic explanations. They would also suggest that even the notion of sin is often related to things that are simply our head/body trying to cope with mismatched instincts. For example, in evolutionary terms our instinct towards violence against others is an instinctive response that derives from our much more primitive life and context millennia ago. In other words, the instinct is no longer appropriate and we have developed all sorts of social mores that help people change their behaviour.

These signposts are just that for me. They have marked the territory, and they have shaped the things that need to be considered as this new Evolutionary paradigm emerges. I resonate positively with a great deal of what I have heard and I am sure I will continue to ponder them for a long time.

How about you?

Revelation and revelation

I was recently reminded of the words that open Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
One day tells it to another
and the night to night communicates knowledge.
There is no speech or language
no are their voices heard;
Yet their sound has gone through all the world
and their words to the end of the earth.

A Prayer Book for Australia

Thinking about this I was prompted to think of the ways in which God's so-called Revelation is mediated to us. How does God speak to us? How do we know what we know about God?

Traditionally we have used a capital letter to distinguish two different ways. Capital "R" Revelation generally refers to the stories of our faith, once transmitted orally but now written, and contained in a compendium we now call the Bible. This definitive Canon of Scripture, of texts written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is for many the definitive Revelation of God. The only Revelation mediated in a higher form is Jesus the Christ, whom the Apostle John described as the Word or Logos of God - "the Word was with God and the Word was God."

The Person Jesus and these written Sacred texts have come to hold a primacy in the Revelation Stakes - Jesus because we see him as the human face of God, and the written texts because we regard them as "inspired" or "God breathed".

What then of the Revelation of God that is proclaimed by the Psalmist in those few lines I began with? Through the history of the Church there has always been an understanding that here, too, is Revelation, and there has even been an argument based on verses like this that since God is glorified and revealed in every element of the Cosmos, then we ought not to think of God as separate from us, as distant from our lived experience and therefore needing to be invoked into the present by our prayers and intercessions. (But that is an issue for another day.)

In respect of the written Revelation why do we find comfort in the proposition the Holy Spirit inspired those authors to write these definitive texts between 1900 and 3200 years ago but since then has refrained from similarly inspiring others to write texts that could be regarded as Capital "R" Revelation. By what authority has the Church declared, through those 4th Century Councils that determined what texts would make up the New Testament, that since that time there has been no further Revelation of this kind or authority?

All this is leading to a question, which I am sure has been asked by others elsewhere:

If a Council of the Church was called today with the express task of determining what texts, written since the 4th Century, could be regarded as expressing something of God that could only be regarded as inspired of the Holy Spirit and worthy of being included as Revelation, what texts would like them to at least consider including?

Would you want to include the writings of early Christian saints Benedict, Francis, Thomas Aquinas, and mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart and others? Would you want include Bunyan's "Pilgrims Progress" or John Milton's classic poem "Paradise Lost" or the poetry of the metaphysicals like George Herbert and Robert Frost?

In our multi-media world, what about some of the musical and visual extravaganzas that have so enriched the experience of our lives and have, in themselves, proclaimed the glory of the Lord?

I feel that we need to be open to this idea, and indeed many of us are given the way we buy sacred books other than the Bible. I am convinced that the Holy Spirit did not cease inspiring men and women to record their visions of God in words, music or visually, 1900 years ago. If this inspirational work has continued to this day where can we see the evidence of it?

I have posed the questions. What do you think?