How might love shape scholarship?

The Global Faculty Initiative is a wonderful enterprise to stimulate the interaction of university scholarship with theology. They employ the following methodology.

"Theology Brief: a longer essay by a leading theologian on a key theme in Christian theology

Disciplinary Briefs & Disciplinary Notes: short essays by research scholars that explore connections between their scholarly specialty and a Theology Brief"

The most recent Theology Brief is by Oliver O'Donovan, The Sovereignty of Love.

Here is my response, a Disciplinary Brief, 

The Radicalness of Love—for the Natural Sciences and the Research University.

The link above gives a PDF of my full article.  It is also available on the GFI website.

Here is the beginning.

Love should be primary for a Christian scholar

I was both surprised and challenged by O’Donovan’s argument that love should be primary for a Christian scholar. My prior perspective was that universities are primarily about thinking. Integrity, both intellectual and moral, should be the main characteristic of Christian scholars. This includes integrating disciplinary knowledge with theology. However, I now see that love should subsume integrity, just a Jesus challenged us.

O’Donovan states: “Those for whom specialised knowledge constitutes their sphere of work thus face a challenging question: how may they love that one aspect of the world which they know very well, while focussing their love finally upon God and their neighbours?” This challenge of a dual focus must be related to the question: how does one resist the temptation to worship the creation not the Creator (Romans 1:18-25)? As I discuss below, modern physics is truly amazing and beautiful. This has led some theoretical physicists (for example, authors of popular books such as Sean Carroll, Paul Davies, and Frank Wilczek) to follow the example of Albert Einstein and be in awe of nature and our ability to understand it. Unfortunately, they either deny the existence of God or at least his personal nature.

Love for others is particularly challenging as it includes love for enemies. A scholar may encounter many enemies (both real and perceived): colleagues who oppose their ideas, anonymous reviewers who make unjustified criticisms, bureaucrats who frustrate, impede, and burden with dubious administrative requirements, and increasingly members of the public or politicians who make ill-informed criticisms of their work, its value, or its applications.  

The concern for love enlivened a liturgy (from Every Moment Holy) that I often pray before commencing work. Here are a few lines 

“May I learn to love learning, O Lord,

for the world is yours,

and all things in it speak

-each in their way – of you:

of your mind,

your designs,

your artistry,

your power,

your unfolding purpose.

All knowledge is your knowledge.

All wisdom your wisdom….

Let me be in this school, even is small ways,

a bearer of love and light and reconciliation;

which is to say, let me in humility be your child…” 

Counter-cultural dimensions to love in the academy

The love commands of Jesus were counter-cultural in the first century. His followers were largely from the lower echelons of society and faced opposition from both Roman imperial and Jewish religious leaders. Obedience could come at a high cost. The commands are also radically counter-cultural in universities today, as they are dominated by four values: money, marketing, management, and metrics. The social and institutional pressure to conform is immense. In his Disciplinary Brief, responding to O’Donovan, Ian Hutchinson suggests “humility seems the most difficult value in the academy.” Peter Harrison recently discussed how, following the characterisations of Max Weber, secularisation has led to disenchantment, diminishment of virtue, and being trapped in the “iron cage” of bureaucracy. 

Tom McLeish argued that Christian natural scientists need to adopt a contemplative stance in their work.  He argued that the book of Job

“urges us not to look on the natural world for signs of God, nor through it as a window onto some dim divine image, but to learn to look on nature with God’s eyes, aligning our servant gaze with, not at, the divine. The same searching look of creative power and insight, of love, with which God participates in his created nature is to be the direction, if only in image, of our participation also.”

This resonates with O’Donovan’s definition of love as “affective and directive attention to a good.”

What is a university for?

Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime—a lifetime which has included 9 years as a student and 32 years as an academic, across 6 universities in Australia and the USA. Australian universities are receiving increasing media attention due to failures in management and governance, including a recent ABC Four Corners documentary.  Numerous books by academics lament the state of Australian universities.  They appear to be all about four M's: money, marketing, management, and metrics. Learning, understanding, and discovery for its own sake seems alien and marginalised. Questions that need more attention include What is a university for? and What values should a university embody? In the New College Lectures for 2025 Peter Harrison went much deeper than the public debates and considered the role of secularisation, values, and virtues. 

This is the beginning of an article I wrote What is a university for? A Christian Vision for the Modern Secular University 

CASE subscribers can read a nicely formatted, illustrated, and hyperlinked article here.

Comparing and contrasting Christian belief to others

For the last two meetings of the theology reading group we discussed I believe. Help my unbelief!: Christian beliefs for a religiously pluralistic and secular world by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

It is a 400+ page summary of the author's five-volume systematic theology series called Constructive Christian Theology for the Church in the Pluralistic World.

The book is an ambitious and admirable project. The author not only discusses all the main topics in systematic theology but also attempts to bring each topic into dialogue with science (representing the secular world) and the major religions: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

I am in two minds as to how much the project has succeeded. I am glad Karkkainen tried. I learnt a lot about other religions. The compare and contrast approach was done in a respectful and honest way. I think there are two problematic extremes I have noticed in comparisons of religions. One is to force similarities that actually aren't there and to ignore or minimise real differences. The opposite extreme is to deny any similarities and demonise the religion of the "other". The author avoids both extremes.

I don't know enough about other religions to know if the author's descriptions were reasonable and accurate. I did learn a lot and found them helpful. It is interesting how in Judaism there is little emphasis on heaven and eternal life. How should that affect how Christians read the Old Testament? The discussion highlighted for me how certain Christian beliefs are distinctive, such as salvation by grace and the affirmation of the goodness of God's creation. I found it ironic that Buddhism and Hinduism are dominant in communal cultures but are highly individualistic in terms of their views of "salvation" and religious life.

I found Karkkainen's engagement with science somewhat disappointing. References on scientific topics were often popular websites such as space.com. Sometimes details were garbled, such as his description of quantum entanglement (page 90). He only mentioned a few authors on this topic, and some of the references were quite old. More recent authors such as Alister McGrath, Tom McLeish, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, Peter Harrison, Alvin Plantinga, and Rodney Holder were not mentioned.

On theology, Karkkainen models "generous orthodoxy" in the sense of affirming central orthodox Christian beliefs while graciously acknowledging differences in how those beliefs are to be interpreted and lived out. He references authors from a range of traditions, convictions, and perspectives. Although he is Lutheran, he is comfortable criticising Martin Luther!

I looked through the index and counted page references to different theologians: Jurgen Moltmann (25), Augustine (23), Aquinas (15), Barth (14), Luther (14), and Pannenberg (7). I found this interesting, but I'm not sure what to conclude from it.

Science begins and ends with theology

In Ancient Greece, science was intimately connected with philosophy. Aristotle wrote about physics and metaphysics. They informed one another. Until the nineteenth century, science was known as natural philosophy. Peter Harrison has argued that theological ideas were central to the emergence of modern science. In that sense, science began with theology. However, due to the influence of Modernity, including naturalism, theology came to be considered irrelevant to science. But, scientific knowledge raises philosophical questions. Why does science work? What is the relationship between theory and reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the relationship between mind and brain? Do we have free will? Can science provide meaning, purpose, and values? Hence, science begins and ends with philosophy.

Sean Carroll claims that science leads to naturalism, which has the ultimate lesson:  “Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves” (p. 9, The Big Picture). This creates a need for “existential therapy” and leads to “the hardest problem of all”, which is “how to construct meaning and values in a cosmos without transcendent purpose” (p. 5). Hence, he ends up back at theology, in the sense of finding ways to avoid it.

Another atheist physicist who could not escape theological questions was Fred Hoyle. He resisted the idea of the Big Bang theory because he could not accept the idea of “creation” and of “causes unknown to science.” Yet, in the end he had to accept where science led: there was a beginning to the universe. Furthermore, his own work on the synthesis of carbon in stars led to the concept of fine-tuning. The questions it raises struggle to avoid being theological in nature.

I claim these ultimate philosophical questions are also theological, as Christian theology can address them. It does not provide definitive answers, but neither does philosophy.  

The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel caused a controversy in 2012 with his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Nagel published a helpful short summary of the book in The New York Times. He noted how the scientific revolution “depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.” Consequently, physics is not a “theory of everything” as it cannot describe the mental dimension to reality. Nagel argued that there is a need to move beyond the current materialist presuppositions of science.

“This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.

There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.

All four of these positions have their adherents.  I believe the wide popularity among philosophers and scientists of (a), the outlook of psychophysical reductionism, is due not only to the great prestige of the physical sciences but to the feeling that this is the best defense against the dreaded (d), the theistic interventionist outlook. But someone who finds (a) and (b) self-evidently false and (c) completely implausible need not accept (d), because a scientific understanding of nature need not be limited to a physical theory of the objective spatio-temporal order. It makes sense to seek an expanded form of understanding that includes the mental but that is still scientific — i.e. still a theory of the immanent order of nature.

That seems to me the most likely solution. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy. I would add that even some theists might find this acceptable; since they could maintain that God is ultimately responsible for such an expanded natural order, as they believe he is for the laws of physics.”

My goal in raising the views of Nagel here is modest. It is not to claim that of his four options (d) is the correct option, i.e., that the only possible explanation for the existence of mind is divine intervention. That is a God of the Gaps perspective. Rather, my point is that science leads to theological questions and that theological answers to the philosophical questions should be seriously considered. Again, there are competing traditions at play and ultimately, which we choose to give authority to is a matter of trust (faith).

Problematic translations of book titles

There is a world of difference between "A Christian view of science" and "The Christian view of science." The latter implies that there is only one possible view. However, publishers love The rather than A in book titles.

It turns out that translators do too. In Territories of Science and Religion, Peter Harrison discussed how the translated title of John Calvin's most influential work changed with time, reflecting underlying shifts in views about what Christianity was. 

unlike English, Latin has no article—no “a” or “the.” Accordingly, when rendering expressions such as “vera religion” or “christiana religio” into English, translators had to decide on the basis of context whether to add an article or not. As we have seen, such decisions can make a crucial difference, for the connotations of “true religion” and “christian religion” are rather different from those of “the true religion” and “the Christian religion.” The former can mean something like “genuine piety” and “Christlike piety” and are thus consistent with the idea of religion as an interior quality. Addition of the definite article, however, is suggestive of a system of belief.

 The translation history of Protestant Reformer John Calvin’s classic Institutio Christianae Religionis (1536) gives a good indication both of the importance of the definite article and of changing understandings of religion in the seventeenth century. Calvin’s work was intended as a manual for the inculcation of Christian piety, although this fact is disguised by the modern practice of rendering the title in English as The Institutes of the Christian Religion. The title page of the first English edition by Thomas Norton bears the more faithful “The Institution of Christian religion” (1561). The definite article is placed before “Christian” in the 1762 Glasgow edition: “The Institution of the Christian religion.” And the now familiar “Institutes” appears for the first time in John Allen’s 1813 edition: “The Institutes of the Christian religion.” 

The modern rendering is suggestive of an entity “the Christian religion” that is constituted by its propositional contents—“the institutes.” These connotations were completely absent from the original title. Calvin himself confirms this by declaring in the preface his intention “to furnish a kind of rudiments, by which those who feel some interest in religion might be trained to true godliness.”

Problematic translations of book titles continue today. Here are more examples.

"The Presence of the Kingdom'' is a wonderful book by Jacques Ellul. The title of the original French edition was Présence au monde moderne: Problèmes de la civilisation post-chrétienne. The literal translation is "Presence in the Modern World: Problems of Post-Christian Civilization''. I wonder if something is being lost in the English title.

A similar concern applies to Ellul's book, La Technique. The English edition has the title "The Technological Society.''
L.M. Sacasas states

Ellul defined Technique (la technique) as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” It was an expansive term meant to describe far more than what we ordinarily think of as technology, even when we use that term in the widest sense.

In the next two examples, the English titles are not problematic but have a different sense from the original German. The first took away something, and the second added something.

In 1955, Hans Urs von Balthasar  published Das Betrachtende Gebet, "Contemplative Prayer"). The English edition has the title Prayer.

The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had the title Nachfolge, which translates literally as "succession" or "following".

Did Jesus believe in miracles?

A legacy of the Enlightenment was the notion of a divide between the natural and supernatural. Miracles can only happen if God intervenes in the natural world.

There was a nice discussion of these issues in a podcast episode, The Intelligible Universe, where John Dickson has a discussion with Peter Harrison and two astrophysicists, Sarah Sweet and Luke Barnes. 

[Aside: It was a treat for my wife and I to be in the audience where this episode was recorded live in Brisbane earlier this year.]

Peter Harrison recently published Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age

Here is a summary of one of the relevant chapters

This chapter gives an account of the origins of our present understanding of the natural/supernatural divide, showing how the terminology of the ‘supernatural’ first emerged in the Middle Ages and gradually assumed its modern form between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The attendant ‘isms’—naturalism and supernaturalism—arrive at the end of this period, during the 1800s. The original context for the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction was neither science nor philosophy, but the sphere of biblical criticism. From there it was imported into a scientific context. The nineteenth century also witnessed attempts to reconstruct the history of science with a view to arguing for a long-standing alliance between naturalism and science. A more accurate portrayal of the relevant history shows, to the contrary, that ‘science’ had been consistently aligned with theistic assumptions about the regularities of nature. These regularities were formalised as laws of nature in the seventeenth century, at which time they were understood as divinely authored imperatives to which nature necessarily conformed. In the nineteenth century, what had originally been understood as expressions of the divine will were simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms by advocates of naturalism. Ironically, they were now claimed to represent evidence against theistic readings of nature.

In the episode, John Dickson makes the following provocative argument.

Jesus probably didn't believe in miracles. Jesus probably didn't believe in the supernatural. If what we mean by supernatural and miracle is the invasion of an outside alien force into nature, that definition of course comes from the enlightenment.

It assumes a dualism, a spiritual ethereal world and the physical one. And every now and then the spiritual injects itself into the material. The gospel writers didn't share this outlook from their viewpoint, which was really the Jewish viewpoint. There aren't two worlds. There's just one world. There is just the creation that comes from the creator.

Everything that happens in the universe from the regular rising of the sun to the very surprising sight given to the blind person. It's all the powerful Work of the one creator working in and through nature. What we call miracles are not invasions from a parallel world. They are just powers, God's powers in and through creation.

And this is why the gospels describe Jesus baffling deeds, not as supernatural events, not even as miracles. They see them as special examples of power. And as signs of the future. The Greek terms in the Gospels are Dunamis, which means strength or power, and Semea, which means sign. Powers, that's easy enough to comprehend.

But what about signs? What are they signs of? It'd be tempting to think that what Jesus means when he describes his powers, his healings, his signs, that what he means is these are signs of the spiritual world. If only you could pull the veil, you would see a spiritual world invading the natural. But actually that's not what Jesus says. 

He says they are signs from the future. They are little displays in the present of God's intentions with all of creation...

Don't portray a supernatural world as distinct from a natural one. There is just one world, God's world, where the creator acts powerfully in every moment, and wherein the moments of Jesus healings, the creator gave a preview that one day he will mend all things. 

Maps, terrain, routes, and travellers

 How do we make sense of science, God, and life? A metaphor that may be helpful is that of maps, terrain, routes, and travellers.

The terrain is the underlying reality. A map is a representation of that reality. A route is a particular path that might be taken or is taken as a traveller explores the terrain. The traveller may travel alone or with a guide or with other travellers.

Many types of maps, terrain, routes, and travellers exist. They are all dynamic, but they do not necessarily change synchronously. Different terrains change at different rates. A wilderness terrain may change little in one hundred years. In contrast, an urban landscape may become unrecognisable in one year.

Physical terrains are real and exist independently of any observer. Yet they are multi-faceted. A forest has a history, ecology, topography, and beauty. It can be viewed through lenses such as culture, aesthetics, economics, geography, or sport. 

Some terrains are not physically real. Below are maps of The Road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City in The Pilgrim's Progress (top) and of Middle Earth from Lord of the Rings (bottom). Yet these terrains are real in the imagination of the author and reader of these classic books. These maps are useful to the reader as they journey through the book. Furthermore, The Pilgrim's Progress has been useful to many Christians on their own life journey.

For a specific terrain, there may be different classes of maps: tourist, topographic, road, GPS, or Google. The maps within a specific class may differ by scale, level of detail, or accuracy. Maps can be cast in different media: paper, electronic, verbal, or in the mind. Indigenous people may represent their land in stories that are passed down orally from one generation to the next. An example, are the songlines of Australian aboriginal cultures.

Maps can also be used to organise information and represent the relationship between different concepts, as is done in concept maps and mind maps. The latter uses a tree or radial structure suggesting a hierarchy of concepts, showing the relations of the part to the whole, often with a central concept.

All maps are wrong, but some are useful. [Here I borrow from an important aphorism from statistics and social sciences, "All models are wrong, but some are useful"]. No map perfectly represents every single detail of the terrain. The only perfect representation is the terrain itself. For a given traveller, purpose, and journey a particular map may be useful. But it may not be useful in other contexts. Some maps are so wrong they are not useful.

Any map requires interpretation. Connecting the map to the terrain and route may be easy or challenging. A traveller may need specific training to be able to locate their current position on the map and to use the map to navigate along their desired route. This may be helped by navigational tools such as a compass or the stars in the sky.

A map may help a traveller notice things they would not otherwise see. On the other hand, it may distract them from seeing other things that are not on the map.

No map is completely morally or politically neutral. Any map is drawn from a particular perspective. A map that appeared in the movie, Barbie caused a political firestorm.

Warner Bros has described a map that appears in its coming Barbie movie as a “child-like crayon drawing” with no intended meaning, after Vietnam said it would ban the film after claiming the map depicted the disputed South China Sea.

Imperialists and colonists drew maps that continue to shape global politics today.

The earth is an approximate sphere but world maps represent it as a flat sheet. The Mercator projection was developed in 1569 to aid navigation, having the significant advantage that it accurately represents local shapes and directions. However, it is wrong in that it distorts the area of objects. Those further from the equator are much larger than those closer to the equator. For example, Africa appears to be the same size as Greenland, (as can be seen below) whereas it is fourteen times larger! These distortions mean that the European colonial powers would have seen their countries as disproportionate in size. If size was interpreted as a measure of importance, colonial prejudices of self-importance would have been reinforced.

This example of the Mercator projection illustrates several important issues. Maps can be wrong, but still useful. Maps require interpretation. Different interpretations can be used for political purposes.

Routes are also subjective. Who picks it? What is the goal of the route? Travellers get lost. Some never find their way. Some routes are silly. Even the technical prowess of Google Maps can fail, sending a driver on circuitous routes.

Travellers are diverse. They might consider themselves as explorers, pilgrims, colonialists, tourists, or commuters.

Later I hope to explore in more detail how this metaphor plays out in making sense of science, God, and life. Briefly, I find it to consider the sciences and theology as maps of terrains. Experience, reason, tradition, and transcendence can be guides to help my explorations, both in constructing maps and interpreting existing ones.  

In his wonderful book, The Territories of Science and Religion, Peter Harrison considered how people's conceptions of "science" and "religion" have changed over time. Territories is a helpful metaphor because it highlights how in our current era there is an assumption that these territories have not changed over time. History says otherwise. Hence, much current discussion about the relationship between "science" and "religion" is problematic. I like the "territory" metaphor because it captures the "colonising" mentality of adversaries competing for the same territory. On the other hand, I propose that science and religion are not territories but maps. 

Update. October 2025. Back in 2010, I discussed how C.S. Lewis used the map metaphor to explain the role of Christian theology in people's spiritual journeys. I had forgotten this when I wrote this post.

Christian Platonism and Science

Recently the theology reading group we discussed A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge by Paul Tyson. 

Paul is a former member of our group and so were happy he could join us to discuss his book. Here is one summary.

We have come to separate natural knowledge (science) from faith and moral beliefs (religion), leading to serious difficulties in integrating knowledge and meaning, facts and values, and immanence and transcendence.

At the root of these dissonances is the difficult relationship between a naturalistic philosophy that purports to be a scientific realism and the things that make us human: transcendence, faith, meaning, and purpose. This is the result of science displacing Christian theology as Western modernity's first truth discourse. However, Christian theology contains deep resources in its approach to knowledge and reality that have not been brought to the science and religion conversation since the late nineteenth century.

You can download the beginning of the book here.

I have a great interest in the subject of this book and it stimulated and challenged my thinking. 

Tyson builds on two important ideas from the historian Peter Harrison. In his book, Territories of Science and Religion, Harrison makes the case that "science" and "religion" are ill-defined entities and their definition and "territories" [the domain of their relevance and authority] have shifted over time. Second, in a 2006 article, Harrison, observes that in the late 19th century there was a "remarkable reversal" "from Christian theology interpreting the true meaning and validity of natural philosophy to science interpreting the true meaning and validity of Christian theology" (page 31).

In other words, "This is a profound shift from faith-based theocentric ontological foundationalism (TOF) to egocentric epistemological foundationalism (EEF)." (p. 32). 

Thankfully, there is a ten-page glossary at the back of the book so the reader can keep refreshing their memory of how the author defines different terms. This is important as terms such as truth, theory, quality, meaning, wisdom, knowledge, and understanding are used in the sense that Plato used them, not how a modern scientist or citizen might use such terms. For example, theory (theoria) is "A vision of meaning. An inescapably imaginative and interpretive act of the meaning-discerning mind" (p.120).

I appreciated the book for giving a gentle introduction to a range of philosophical concepts, particularly metaphysics and transcendence.

The heart of the book is chapter 7, which includes several helpful diagrams, such as the one below, based on Plato's metaphysics.

This is based on four distinct categories of awareness considered by Plato. Tyson translates these into wisdom, mathematics, belief, and perception.

The central claim of the book is that modern science as a "first truth cultural discourse" has made the line between rationalism and wisdom uncrossable. In other words, modern physics has reduced metaphysics to the unreal, the realm of speculation and fantasy. We cannot know the true essence of reality, the ground of being. We can only know existence. Tyson has a very different vision. He claims that the separation of metaphysics and physics is intellectually incoherent. He cannot accept the position of some Christian scientists, such as myself, that the methodological naturalism of science is not necessarily in tension with Christian theology. He wants to imagine that Christian theology can provide a vision of natural knowledge.

Today we are a long way from Plato who considered metaphysics as the basis of physics. That is, one starts with qualities such as the character of God and from that reason towards what one thinks the world is like. This led to Aristotelian physics, which was discredited by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. This is why scientists, Christians and non-Christians, are nervous about elevating Christian theology [a specific metaphysics] back to its pre-modern status as "the first truth discourse". It has a bad track record.

On the other hand, some atheist scientists claim physics determines metaphysics. In different words, the content of physical theories tells us what the world is really like. Science determines questions of meaning, purpose, values, and morality.

Update. (March 2024). Peter Harrison has written a helpful review of the book.

Relating Word (logos) and World (cosmos)

The last two posts reflected on the nature of the logos and the cosmos. I now consider how are the logos and cosmos to be related. 

What is the relationship between Word and World? More specifically what is the relationship between theology and the sciences? How are cosmos and logos in a university to be related? Going back to Plato there are rich and subtle philosophical issues concerning ontology [what is real] and epistemology [what is true] that are still being explored and debated in universities. Could a Christian perspective be even richer?

A place to begin is to acknowledge the central role of hermeneutics (how we read and interpret a text), not just the text of the Bible, but also how we “read” the world in which we live. To access the living Word requires engaging the text of the Bible in a manner that uses a “hermeneutical circle (or spiral)”, whereby a specific part of the text is related to its context (chapter, book, whole Bible) in an iterative manner that goes from the part to the whole and back to the whole. Any theology should also be constructed in an iterative interaction with the text. Similarly, a local context (cultural, social, political, economic, linguistic, religious) has to be “read”; this requires observation, recording, analysis, and interpretation. Too often this is done in an intuitive manner without reflection or a basis in evidence. However, this “reading” can be done in a more systematic and reflective manner, drawing from methods in the social sciences. The local context must also be related to the global context and one needs to discern the relationship between the particularity of the local context and universals that describe many contexts. 

When relating Word and world things become more complicated, challenging, and rich because these two hermeneutical practices are intertwined, perhaps more than we would like to admit. Again, perhaps the best approach is iterative, whereby both “readings” are done in parallel and allowed to influence one another in a constructive manner. Indeed, Peter Harrison has argued in detail that modern science arose in seventeenth-century Europe because the Protestant Reformation led to new ways of reading the Bible (in particular, a shift from the allegorical to the literal) that in turn led to new ways of “reading” the “book” of nature.

A key issue for the dialogue of logos and cosmos is the tension inherent in the Bible’s picture of the world. The cosmos is God’s creation, made through the logos (John 1:1). Christians need discernment as they live with a tension between the goodness of the creation and the fallen, rebellious nature of the world. What do we affirm and enjoy about the world? What do we deny or critique or resist or seek to redeem? Being made in the image of God, we have an incredible ability to read, analyse, and understand both the Word and the world. Yet, both these processes of observation and understanding are also corrupted by our sinful and rebellious nature. Sometimes we see what we want to see and don’t see what we don’t want to see. Pride, finitude, and self-deception diminish our understanding.

The good-bad tension is present in universities. Some of the logos about the cosmos that is presented to students and "discovered" by researchers reflect God’s truth about His amazing world and some of this knowledge reflects Kingdom values (truth, justice, human dignity, reconciliation, ...).  On the other hand, some of this so-called knowledge is false, hostile to God, or does violence to Kingdom values. Universities grew out of medieval monasteries and were centred around theology until the last century. In the monasteries, scholarship was integrated with worship, service, communal life, and virtue. Today universities aspire to be global corporations with multi-billion-dollar budgets. In the process of this transformation from God-centred institutions to powerful businesses, there is less of the good and more of the bad. 

For IFES some guidance comes from John Stott. In his book, The Contemporary Christian: An urgent plea for double listening, he discusses listening to the world and to the Word.

How can we develop a Christian mind, which is both shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity, and acquainted with the realities of the contemporary world? How can we relate the Word to the world, understanding the world in the light of the Word, and even understanding the Word in the light of the world? We have to begin with a double refusal. We refuse to become either so absorbed in the Word, that we escape into it and fail to let it confront the world, or so absorbed in the world, that we conform to it and fail to subject it to the judgement of the Word. Escapism and conformity are opposite mistakes, but neither is a Christian option. 

In place of this double refusal we are called to double listening, listening both to the Word and to the world. ... We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathise with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it. 

This is the origin of the title of the IFES journal, Word and World: Theological Conversations about the world students live in. How might we go about relating logos and cosmos? John Stott also says the framework of creation-fall-redemption-renewal is helpful for developing Christian thinking on a wide range of issues. 

Finally, I come back to the role of local context. There is not one world, but many worlds. The beauty and potential of God’s multi-faceted creation can be seen in the diversity of human cultures and local contexts. Tragically, this diversity also reflects the creativity of human rebellion and sin. 

Most discussions about science and theology are dominated by academics embedded in elite Western universities and seminaries. The discussions focus on issues associated with biological evolution, Big Bang cosmology, quantum physics, and human consciousness. Social sciences receive scant attention. It is contentious whether these Western discussions are helpful or relevant to other contexts, particularly in the Majority World.

One model for the logos-cosmos dialogue is provided by the Ph.D. program in Contextual Theology at Asian Theological Seminary in Manilla. Later I may discuss in more detail a few key elements of the philosophy of the program. These include a focus “on empowering local faith communities on empowering the faith community by giving it a language and praxis in its formation, growth, and service in the setting/s in which it finds itself”, bringing the local into dialogue with the global, and inter-disciplinarity.

The complete redemption of creation

 I earlier posted about how much I benefited from reading A New Heaven and A New Earth: Reclaiming a Biblical Eschatology by Richard Middleton, in our theology reading group. The book centres around elucidating the creation-fall-redemption-renewal narrative of the Bible.

This month we are reading and discussing the second half of the book.

The book can be viewed as an introductory text on biblical theology, as it attempts to provide a model for the narrative of the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.

It is helpful for me to consider what the essential message of the book is. In some ways, Middleton is elucidating what the Bible really does say about the theological concepts of creation, fall, redemption, and renewal. He considers that he is correcting common misunderstandings about these concepts.

What is creation?

Sometimes Genesis 1-2 is read solely as a description of material origins. Where did humans come from? When did it all begin? Where did the earth, animals, and plants come from?

According to modernism, humans and nature are distinct (but connected) entities [e.g., they have the same DNA], and both are just material. Consequently, creation is equated with nature, particularly what humans have not touched or used. "Creation care" is concerned with being good stewards of the natural environment and its resources. However, Middleton considers that a more Biblical perspective is that creation (and the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28) is broader. Creation is not just objects (humans and "nature") but much more. Creation is also what humans create by their interactions with one another and with the non-human world: agriculture and art, institutions and ideas,... Creation is the entire human socio-cultural order. The doctrine of creation is not only concerned with some single event in the past, but also the  present and future: how God sustains the world, works in the world, and what God wishes the world would be.

What is the fall?

This has affected everything: humans, the earth, animals, plants,... Sin (the rebellion of humans) has not just broken the relationship of humans with God, but also humans with one another, humans with nature, and humans with themselves. The creation is no longer what God intended it to be, both what God created and the culture that humans now create.

What is redemption?

In Scripture, redemption is conceived most fundamentally as the reversal of the fall and the restoration of God’s good purposes from the beginning. By way of contrast, in our dualistic philosophical inheritance from Plato, redemption is conceived as transferal from a lower, inferior realm (variously understood as body, earth, matter, nature or the secular) to a higher, more valued or esteemed realm (understood as soul, heaven, spirit, the realm of grace or the sacred). This dualistic assumption is often simply superimposed over biblical texts that address redemption and so leads to a distortion of the Bible’s message. Whereas a dualistic understanding of redemption typically devalues the good world God created and encourages an aspiration to transcend finitude, the biblical worldview leads to an affirmation of the goodness of creation, along with a desire to pray and work for the redemption of precisely this world (including human, socio‐cultural institutions) that earthly life might be restored to what it was meant to be. Being aware of the distinction between these two conceptions of redemption helps clarify the significance of the creation‐fall‐redemption paradigm that is utilized by many who are interested in developing a Christian worldview.

This summary is taken from the paper by Middleton, that he developed into the book. 

The human calling is not just to create culture but also to redeem culture, by participating in its transformation. I find it interesting that this redemptive view drove many of the founders of modern science, as chronicled by Peter Harrison in The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science.

What is the final renewal?

What is the end of it all, the eschaton? Sometimes words such as consummation or re-creation, are used instead of renewal. How does this relate to the idea that "when Christians die they go to heaven"? There will be a new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21) that will be free of sin, suffering, and death. Middleton gives particular attention to critiquing interpretations of 2 Peter 3, that claim that all of the existing creation is going to be destroyed/burned up/consumed and God will create something new from scratch, and the disembodied "souls" of Christians will live in a new place, "heaven". Rather, at the eschaton, God will complete the work of redeeming the fallen world that began with Abraham.

What is Religion? What is Science? How might they be related?

Peter Harrison has beautifully demonstrated that answers to these questions have changed significantly over the past few hundred years in the Western world, with reference to Christianity and the natural sciences. Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion, based on his Gifford lectures, has generated considerable interest. 

 

Similar issues of ambiguity and Western bias become even greater in South Asian contexts. This is nicely summarised below by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, 

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, which builds on field research by Duerksen, and engages concepts of emergence from the social sciences, that I will also discuss below. The quote is long but I include it because it highlights such a fundamental issue.

 

Defining religion is similar to the proverbial problem of defining time—it seems self-evident until one actually tries to put words to it. But for all the various definitions of religion—and there are many—there are at least two things upon which contemporary scholars agree. The first, as scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, and J. Z. Smith have suggested, is the idea that religion was, and to some degree continues to be, a concept that comes from outside of religions themselves and does not adequately describe various religious traditions. As Richard King has noted, early Greco-Roman uses of the concept referred to ritual practices and paying homage to the gods. With the rise of Christianity, however, it was redefined as “a matter of adherence to particular doctrines or beliefs rather than allegiance to ancient ritual practices.” This model tends to emphasize a theistic belief and a “fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world.” Such conceptions reflected particular ways of understanding the Christian religion in the West but did not and do not always adequately describe the religions of other contexts.

The second area of agreement is that the idea of “world religions” is also largely a Western concept born out of the Enlightenment and responds to the need to make sense of a changing world. As Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates in her influential book The Invention of World Religions, until the mid-nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans typically described the world as made up of Christians, Jews, Muhammadans (Muslims), and the rest. Western affinities for taxonomy began to be more specific about “the rest” in subsequent decades, …

What this required, however, was to somehow define and order in Western and Christian terms that which often defied categorization. An important example is the “religion” of Hinduism. As H. L. Richard and others have shown, historically the non-Muslims of the Indian continent did not understand themselves as sharing a common set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism, much less call themselves Hindus. In the eighteenth century onward, however, and particularly through interaction with British Christian colonialists and missionaries, Britons and then Indians started to categorize the widely ranging traditions of the subcontinent as an identifiable religion.

This signals an important point that we intend to explore in this book— that from a social science perspective the category of religion itself is an elastic concept and is not as self-evident as is often assumed.

Excellent lecture on the Christian origins of modern science

This lecture by my UQ colleague, historian Professor Peter Harrison, makes compelling arguments concerning how Protestant theology played a key role in the development of science in the 17th century. I have borrowed extensively from this lecture in my own lecture on the subject.