Paul Tillich’s discussion of historical Jesus research in volume 2 of his Systematic Theology is a minor tour de force and could still apply today without too much change. The problem of historical Jesus research, Tillich says, is that you can’t get “behind” the New Testament documents to the “real” historical Jesus of Nazareth because the records we have were shaped in very fundamental ways by the authors’ conviction that Jesus was the Christ. And any overall “portrait” of the historical Jesus is likely to be heavily dependent on which specific facts about or sayings of Jesus one takes to be historical. (For example, if one thinks that the historical Jesus applied the title “Son of Man” to himself, this will have a big effect on one’s overall picture of him.) Historical research can, at best, provide statements of greater or lesser probability. As Tillich notes bluntly, “The search for the historical Jesus was an attempt to discover a minimum of reliable facts about the man Jesus of Nazareth, in order to provide a safe foundation for the Christian faith. This attempt was a failure” (p. 105).
One attempt to get around this was to shift the focus away from the facts about Jesus and onto his words, or teachings. This was done in one of two ways. First, they can be regarded as general moral truths or insights into human nature. “As such, they belong to law, prophecy, or Wisdom literature such as is found in the Old Testament. They may transcend all three categories in terms of depth and power; but they do not transcend them in terms of character” (pp. 105-6). The second, “more profound” approach is to focus on Jesus’ announcement of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. This is not a set of general rules, but a “concrete demand,” and the proper response is to decide for the Kingdom.
The problem with both approaches, Tillich says, is that neither one addresses the existential predicament of human beings–our estrangement from God. This isn’t something we can overcome through our own efforts. What we need is not a new law or a new set of teachings, but a new form of existence:
But neither method can answer the question of wherein lies the power to obey the teachings of Jesus or to make the decision for the Kingdom of God. This these methods cannot do because the answer must come from a new reality, which, according to the Christian message, is the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. The Cross is the symbol of a gift before it is the symbol of a demand. But, if this is accepted, it is impossible to retreat from the being of the Christ to his words. The last avenue of the search for the historical Jesus is barred, and the failure of the attempt to give a foundation to the Christian faith through historical research becomes obvious. (p. 106)
The only foundation for Christian faith, Tillich argues, is “the appearance of that reality which has created the faith” (p. 114).
This reality is the New Being, who conquers existential estrangement and thereby makes faith possible. This alone faith is able to guarantee–and that because its own existence is identical with the presence of the New Being. Faith itself is the immediate (not mediated by conclusions) evidence of the New Being within and under the conditions of existence. Precisely that is guaranteed by the very nature of the Christian faith. No historical criticism can question the immediate awareness of those who find themselves transformed into the state of faith. (p. 114)
In other words, the experience of the “New Being”–Tillich’s term for the state of overcoming the forces of sin and estrangement–is itself its own warrant. It requires no outside justification.
But surely this has something to do with Jesus? Otherwise, what makes this specifically Christian? Tillich says that the “power which has created and preserved the community of the New Being is not an abstract statement about its appearance; it is the picture of him in whom it has appeared (p. 114). Specifically he means the picture of Jesus in the New Testament. This isn’t an “empirically factual” portrait like the one a historian might attempt. It is the record of the impact Jesus had on those who first encountered and were transformed by him. Tillich says there is an “analogy between the picture and the actual personal life from which it has arisen”:
It was this reality, when encountered by the disciples, which created the picture. And it was, and still is, this picture which mediates the transforming power of the New Being. One can compare the analogia imaginis suggested here with the analogia entis–not as a method of knowing God but as a way (actually the only way) of speaking of God. In both cases it is impossible to push behind the analogy and to state directly what can be stated only indirectly, that is, symbolically in the knowledge of God and mediated through faith in the knowledge of Jesus. But this indirect, symbolic, and mediated character of our knowledge does not diminish its truth-value. For in both cases what is given to us as material for our indirect knowledge is dependent on the object of our knowledge. The symbolic material through which we speak about God is an expression of the divine self-manifestation, and the mediated material which is given to us in the biblical picture of the Christ is the result of the reception of the New Being and its transforming power on the part of the first witnesses. The concrete biblical material is not guaranteed by faith in respect to empirical factuality; but it is guaranteed as an adequate expression of the transforming power of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. (p. 115)
Just as the symbols we use about God can mediate God’s self-manifestation, the picture of Christ in the New Testament can mediate the “New Being” of which he is the bearer. The only possible validation of this is the experience of being transformed. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as it were.
The positions Tillich criticized live on in contemporary Christianity. More conservative Christians sometimes use historical research as a basis of apologetics, on the assumption that establishing certain historical facts about Jesus can prove, or at least provide warrant for, theological claims. On the other side of the spectrum, more liberal or progressive Christians sometimes try to identify a core set of “teachings of Jesus” that can be detached from the claims the New Testament makes about his status as the Christ. Tillich would argue that both of these approaches are doomed to failure because they try to build faith on varying degrees of historical probability.
At the beginning of the second volume of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich provides a recap of the major themes of the first volume, in part to address criticisms he had received since its publication. In particular, Tillich discusses his doctrine of God. He characterizes the “basic intention” of his position as an attempt to go “beyond naturalism and supranaturalism.”
Tillich identifies three ways of interpreting the meaning of “God.” The first treats God as “the highest being” who “brought the universe into being at a certain moment (five thousand or five billion years ago), governs it according to a plan, directs it toward an end, interferes with its ordinary processes in order to overcome resistance and fulfil his purpose, and will bring it to consummation in a final catastrophe” (p. 6). The problem with this view, according to Tillich, is that it “transforms the infinity of God into a finiteness which is merely an extension of the categories of finitude” (p. 6). In other words, it treats God as a being alongside other beings, one cause among many, etc. He says this view fails to adequately respect “the infinity of the infinite, and the inviolability of created structures of the finite” (p. 6). There is a qualitative difference between God and the created order.
The second position is “naturalism,” which “identifies God with the universe, with its essence or with special powers within it” (p. 6). This is not the same as simply identifying God with the “totality of things,” which would be absurd. But its God is the “dynamic and creative center of reality”–the deus sive natura of pantheistic thinkers like Baruch Spinoza. For Tillich, however, naturalism also “denies the infinite distance between the whole of finite things and their infinite ground, with the consequence that the term ‘God’ becomes interchangeable with the term ‘universe’ and therefore is semantically superfluous” (p. 7). An essential element in human religious experience, Tillich maintains, is that the holy can be encountered as a numinous presence set over against us.
Tillich proposes a “third way”–which he insists is not new, but a position found, albeit not always clearly, in the great theologians of the tradition. It emphasizes both God’s immanence and God’s transcendence. Against supranaturalism, God is not one being among others, even if the highest, but “the creative ground of everything that has being” or “the infinite and unconditional power of being.” God is “neither alongside things nor even ‘above’ them; he is nearer to them than they are to themselves” (p. 7). At the same time, parting ways with naturalism, Tillich insists that God “infinitely transcends that of which he is the ground” (p. 7). There is a certain mutual freedom between God and creation such that creatures can encounter God as something “outside” of themselves.
Moreover, this freedom creates the possibility of creaturely alienation from God. If “God” simply named the power at the heart of the natural processes of the world, then it wouldn’t make sense to talk about human estrangement from God. Spatial imagery of God being “in” us, or “above” us can be misleading; but the concept of “finite freedom” allows us to say more precisely that created being is both “substantially independent of the divine ground” and yet “remains in substantial unity with it” (p. 8).
Tillich’s theology has sometimes been characterized (caricatured?) as atheism dressed up in religious symbolism. But I think it’s clear here (as elsewhere) that his intention, at least, was to affirm the reality of a transcendent God, even if he was dissatisfied with certain popular formulations of theism.
I posted a while back that I had started dipping into the vast catalog of classic Doctor Who serials, and since then I’ve watched a few more. As befits the show, I’ve been jumping around in time, watching adventures of various Doctors. These are three I’ve watched and enjoyed since my last post (WARNING: contains spoilers!):
“The Aztecs” (1964)
The first Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions–Susan the Doctor’s granddaughter and her former teachers Ian and Barbara–materialize inside the tomb of an Aztec temple in pre-Columbian Mexico. As they emerge from the tomb, Barbara is hailed by the Aztecs as the reincarnation of one of their gods. She then decides to use her new influence to steer the Aztecs away from the practice of human sacrifice. This raises the suspicions of the high priest of sacrifice–the conniving Tlotoxl–who then tries to reveal Barbara as a fraud. Meanwhile, the Doctor tries to figure out how to get back into the tomb, which is sealed behind them, so they can escape in the TARDIS; Ian goes into training to become an Aztec warrior and develops a rivalry with his competitor for the top warrior spot; and Susan enters a “seminary” to learn about the Aztecs’ religious ways and is faced with a possible forced marriage to an upcoming sacrificial victim.
This story is interesting in a number of ways, particularly from the perspective of later Who. First, apart from the obvious time-traveling, there’s no sci-fi element to this story. The setting is purely historical, unlike in the Doctor Who revival, where any trip to a historical period invariably includes an encounter with an alien or monster of some sort, Second, the Doctor seems to adhere to a time-traveler’s version of the prime directive–he urges Barbara not to try to change the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice because you can’t interfere with history. It’s not totally clear if he means that it’s impossible to change history or just a really bad idea, but ultimately Barbara fails. The crew of the TARDIS is lucky to escape with their lives, much less change history in any meaningful way.
The Doctor isn’t particularly heroic here–his overriding concern is to get himself and his companions out of the situation A.S.A.P. He’s certainly not interested in saving the victims of human sacrifice. There is also an amusing subplot wherein the Doctor becomes “engaged” to an Aztec lady in the process of trying to get information from her about how to access the temple. The episode comes down pretty strongly against trying to interfere with the Aztecs’ practices, and the Doctor seems a bit more cold-blooded and manipulative than in some of his other incarnations.
“City of Death” (1979)
The fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and his companion and fellow time lord (“time lady,” I guess) Romana are on holiday in Paris in 1979 (the Doctor has an amusing line about how 1979 may not exactly be Paris at its peak). They inadvertently discover both that someone is trying to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and that someone is messing with the space-time continuum. They meet up with a hard-boiled detective type who’s investigating crime in the art world, and the three of them are led to a certain Count Scarloni. But of course, the count is not what he seems–he’s an alien who arrived on Earth in prehistoric times and was subsequently splintered into multiple selves existing at different points in time when his space ship exploded. He is trying to build a machine that will allow him to travel back to that point and prevent the explosion of his ship (and in some way that was not quite clear to me, saving his entire race). This elaborate project is financed by the selling of priceless artifacts like Gutenberg Bibles that he is able to acquire via his selves existing in past eras. The completion of the time machine will be funded through the sale of multiple copies of the Mona Lisa (painted by Leonardo himself, who is being forced to make them by a past version of the Count). But of course, no one is going to buy a Mona Lisa when they know the real one is hanging in the Louvre, so the Count has to steal the original so he can sell his copies on the black market.
Once the Count realizes that the Doctor and Romana are able to travel in time, he forces Romana to help him complete his machine. But if he’s successful in his quest, it will actually prevent the existence of the human race because it turns out . . . the explosion of the ship actually provided the energy that caused the primeval ooze on Earth to begin generating life! So the Doctor, Romana, and Duggan the detective follow the Count (whose real name is Scaroth) back in time using the TARDIS and stop him from preventing his ship’s explosion (in what is frankly a rather anticlimactic scene).
This episode was written in part by Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, and it’s pretty much pure fun. There’s plenty of witty banter, and Baker is in fine form as the fourth Doctor. It was partly shot on location in Paris and includes some nice exterior shots of the city. Scarloni/Scaroth makes a great villain, and there is actually some pathos to his plight.
“Earthshock” (1982)
This has the fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his companions Tegan, Nyssa, and Adric showing up in a network of subterranean caves on Earth in the 26th century. A detachment of soldiers, led by a Lieutenant Scott, is investigating the mysterious deaths of a group of archeologists who were excavating the caves, and when they encounter the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa, they assume they’re responsible. But it turns out that the archeologists were killed by some creepy faceless androids who were down in the caves guarding a bomb. The Doctor disables the bomb but traces the signal controlling it back to a freighter in space headed for Earth. The Doctor, his companions, the soldiers, and the surviving archeologist follow the signal back to the freighter in the TARDIS. They eventually discover that the culprits behind the bomb are the Doctor’s old enemies the Cybermen, who are stowed away on the freighter and who are planning to attack an interplanetary summit taking place on Earth among leaders who are joining forces to fight the Cybermen.
Since the Doctor has disabled their bomb, the Cybermen have to resort to plan B, locking the freighter itself on a collision course with Earth. The Cybermen’s leader takes the Doctor and Tegan back to the TARDIS and forces them to leave Adric–who’s a boy-genius science whiz type–on the freighter along with the freighter’s captain and first officer as well as Lieutenant Scott. Meanwhile, Adric is trying to disable the controls the Cybermen have placed on the freighter’s navigation, and through some kind of hiccup involving the warp drive, the ship starts to travel backwards in time–65 million years to be precise. The Cyberman leader thinks this is even better than his original plan because now it looks like the collision will prevent human beings from ever existing at all. But the Doctor points out that what the freighter will actually do is cause the extinction of the dinosaurs! And this of course will actually pave the way for the emergence of humanity. The Doctor and his companions then overpower the Cyber-leader and his henchman on the TARDIS, but unfortunately Adric is still on the freighter as it collides with the Earth and is destroyed. He had stayed on board when the others evacuated on an escape pod for the noble (but ultimately unnecessary) purpose of disabling the Cybermen’s controls and steering the ship away from the Earth. The episode ends on quite a downer with the Doctor speechlessly staring at the TARDIS view screen, on which they just witnessed Adric’s demise.
I really enjoyed “Earthshock”–it was tense, fast-paced (at least by classic Who standards), and packed a pretty solid dramatic punch with the death of Adric. But the Doctor himself seems rather passive and even ineffectual throughout the serial. Not only does he not come up with some brilliant scheme to defeat the Cybermen, he isn’t even able to save his companion. In contrast with some of the other incarnations, the fifth Doctor (at least here) seems somewhat hapless. I gather from what I’ve read that this was something the people in charge of the show at the time did on purpose. They wanted to portray a more vulnerable Doctor to change things up after Tom Baker’s nigh-infallible Doctor who laughed in the face of danger (or at least offered it a jelly-baby). But the problem here is that it’s hard to see why we’re supposed to regard the Doctor as particularly heroic. He’s compassionate and noble, but he doesn’t really do much (except when he blasts the Cyberman leader at point-blank range with one the Cybermen’s own guns, which seems rather un-Doctor like). I’m curious whether this characterization carries through the other fifth Doctor adventures.
James McGrath shared a cartoon today from David Hayward that depicted the cross on a church steeple being replaced with a question mark.
I don’t want to read too much into the cartoon, which may have just been meant to be provocative or get people thinking, but it seems to me that progressive Christians sometimes make a fetish out of “questioning.” The problem wit this is that (1) it implies that other types of Christians don’t ask questions and (2) questioning for its own sake can become a substitute for having a positive message or agenda. When I think of the great icons of liberal/progressive Christianity (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. or Desmond Tutu), I think of people who, yes, wrestled with doubt, but who also had a strong vision of what was true and right and were willing to fight for it. The life of perpetual questioning, with answers indefinitely deferred, can sometimes become an excuse for not taking responsibility or making a stand.
I realize that many people who now identify as progressive Christians may come from fundamentalist and/or abusive church backgrounds where questioning received beliefs was verboten. Churches should definitely be places where people feel safe asking questions and expressing doubts (and they often fail to be such places). But a church whose highest reason for being is to ask questions sounds more like a debating society than a herald of the gospel.
One of the impulses motivating “revisionist” views of the divine nature (process theology, et al.) is not only that they can seem more consonant with modern science, but that they provide a more intimate and relational view of God. Many theologians have argued, in fact, that seeing God in responsive, relational terms such as those offered by process theology is truer to the biblical portrait of God. This view has widespread currency in recent theology. Even theologians with important differences from process theology have accepted that God is in some respects changeable and affected by what happens in the world. These included feminist, liberation, and other “contextual” theologians as well as “neo-trinitarian” thinkers like Jurgen Moltmann and Robert Jenson. Such thinkers tend to emphasize the differences between the biblical God and the Greek-inspired God of classical theism.
In light of this, Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod (see previous posts here and here) ask “Can a transcendent God be a personal God?” That is, can a God who exists “outside” of time and space and who brings the entire history of creation into being through one timeless divine act also be related to individual human beings in a personal and responsive way?
C&O think the answer is yes:
[C]lassical theism presents us with a God who is infinitely responsive, who has responded so fully and so completely in the one divine act of creation that no further response is possible or needed[.] In the one infinite act of creation, past, present, and future for us , God responds to all our prayers and petitions, answers all our needs, all guided by an infinite divine loving wisdom and wise loving. . . . And while God’s response to us is itself eternal and unchanging, it unfolds for us in the fullness of time. Thus God responds to this prayer in our here and now. And if we do not pray, God does not so respond. Prayer is meaningful, it does change the situation, and God does act in response to our prayers. But this does not amount to some intervention along the lines of stirring an inactive God into action, but is part of the one creative act of God who brings into existence everything that is. (p. 128)
God has, in effect, “already” taken into account every action, intention, prayer, and desire in the history of the universe and responded accordingly in the single, eternal creative act.
But even on this view, there seems to be an aspect of God that is contingent, namely God’s perfect response to the world. For if God had chosen to actualize a different world from among the (presumably) many possible ones, then to the extent that the choices, prayers,etc. of the people in that world were different from ours, God’s response would have to have been different. This seems to imply that God is not wholly unchangeable, at least on the assumption that God’s actualization of other worlds than this one was a genuine possibility.
Maybe C&O would respond that God is nevertheless not dependent on creation because it is God who chooses which possible world to make actual. This certainly distinguishes their position from those forms of process theology that deny creation ex nihilo and appear to give creation an independent ontological status. I agree with C&O in rejecting such a view. But I’m less certain how much daylight there is between their position and the more moderate “dipolar” theism espoused by someone like Christopher Southgate or Keith Ward. Both Southgate and Ward affirm creation ex nihilo and thus God’s ontological ultimacy; but both also argue that there is an aspect of God that is involved in and affected by what happens in the world.
It’s not clear to me that C&O couldn’t accept the modified dipolar theism of Southgate and Ward while still upholding their other positions. In fact, both Southgate and Ward make arguments similar to theirs in relating theism to modern science. Alternatively, C&O could bite the bullet and say that the actual world is the only possible world. God’s creative act would give rise to this world out of necessity, rather than from God’s free choice. This seems to be essentially the view of Schleiermacher, whose views C&O’s arguments echo at several points. While this would salvage divine impassibility, it would seem to mean giving up on genuine contingency in the world. If this is right, it raises the question of whether “classical theism” is as stable a construct as it seems.
These questions aside, I don’t want to suggest that Creator God, Evolving World is a bad book by any means. I found it incredibly stimulating (as these posts might suggest!) and also found a lot to agree with. Plus, at a time when “classical theism” has become something of a bogeyman, it’s refreshing to see it defended and brought into conversation with contemporary issues.
According to Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod’s (C&O) view, God creates in a single divine act “outside” of time and space (see the previous post). In Thomas Aquinas’ terms, God is the primary cause of the existence of everything that is, while creatures are secondary causes within the time-space framework. The implication is that God can’t be invoked to explain particular events within the world. This implies that there is no competition between scientific and theological explanations.
But what does this imply for the problem of evil? “If God chooses this universe, in all its details from beginning to end in a single act, why does God allow there to be suffering and evil?” And how is God’s providence over history exercised?
C&O deploy a variation of what Christopher Southgate calls the “only-way” argument. That is, this world, with its attendant suffering, is a “package deal” of sorts. You only get free personal agents like human beings through a process like the evolutionary one, “red in tooth and claw” though it may be. This is because the processes that make life possible are also the reason that suffering exists. The growth of life depends on predation, plate tectonics lead to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and genetic variation occasionally produces genetic disorders.
There is no you or I apart from the total world order that confronts us in creation. It is not as if God made all the component parts of creation and stuck them together to make the universe. Rather, the universe is an intelligible whole and our existence is inseparable from the existence of that whole. (p. 86)
We may think we can imagine a creation without suffering, but it’s not clear this is really the case:
In the end we have no idea what it means to create a universe, or what might be possible or impossible in such a creation. While it is easy for us to imagine a world without suffering, such imaginings might not translate into a coherent and intelligible world order. If the whole is not intelligible, then such an imagined creation is a mere pipe dream, a fantasy, not realizable in fact. (p. 89)
This line of response, assuming it works, may take some of the sting out of so-called natural evil. But what about moral evil–evil deeds intentionally chosen by free agents like us? Here C&O turn to a version of the free-will defense. They lean heavily on Augustine’s account of evil as a privation to argue that the choice of evil is a lack of purpose or meaning. “The evil act has no cause sufficient for the act, and so has no cause. It is our failure in the realm of achieving the good” (p. 97) and so “God is not the cause of this deficiency simply because it has no cause” (p. 98). God is not the cause of evil, but human freedom–which in itself is a great good–makes evil possible.
God’s providence, in this view, consists in the superintendence of the entire created order. God does not “intervene” as a secondary cause among secondary causes, but God wills a universe into existence that includes evil as an inextricable element. This is either because, in the case of natural evil, it is an unavoidable side-effect of certain kinds of finite existence, or, as with moral evil, because it is made possible by the exercise of creaturely freedom.
Beyond this, though, C&O suggest that there is a divinely originated response to evil on the level of practice. “[I]f evil is a lack, something that is missing that should be there, then the solution to the problem of evil is to make up for what is lacking, to repair the damage done, and turn the evil act into an opportunity for a greater good, the good of conversion, forgiveness, and mercy” (p. 99). They propose that God responds to evil by giving human beings the resources to live toward the good by taking suffering and violence as an opportunity for mercy and forgiveness. For Christians, of course, the life and death of Jesus is the ultimate expression of this response, which “has the power to change history, to shift us from decline and restore the path of genuine progress” (p. 101).
(I have some questions about C&O’s account, but I’m going to save them for my final post in this series.)
Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod’s book Creator God, Evolving World is fighting a two-front war. On one side, they argue, against scientific atheism, that an evolutionary worldview is compatible with theism. On the other front, they uphold a form of classical theism against various revisionist views like process theology that ascribe change, passibility, becoming, and temporality to God.
C&O offer a characterization of natural processes as an interweaving of universal laws and more probabilistic events. Nature is neither purely deterministic–with phenomena deducible from universal, invariable laws–but neither is it wholly “random” or chance-like. As revealed to us by the sciences, nature is better understood as a series of relatively stable systems of nested complexity.
There is order and regularity–some things occur in the same way always and everywhere, all things being equal. Other things occur without a systematic pattern or a direct causality but according to probabilities. And just as the two types of inquiry intersect and are mutually creative, so those events that occur according to probabilities (by chance) and those that occur systematically (according to natural laws) interweave to make a stable world process that is nevertheless subject to conditions that change. (pp. 31-2)
It is sometimes thought that theism is incompatible with a world of chance, but C&O argue that a certain directionality can be perceived in the world process–toward greater integration and higher levels of complexity. Subatomic elements stabilize in atoms, atoms stabilize in molecules, molecules form living organism, organisms increase in complexity and integration, and consciousness, and eventually self-consciousness, emerge from life. This process is not pre-determined; there is a genuine element of chance, as each of these levels of complexity is built on contingent events. But we can nevertheless trace a general arc toward greater complexity.
But what role does God play in this? C&O criticize the view, popular in science and religion circles and best exemplified by process theology, that God is also to some degree subject to chance and contingency. It is sometimes maintained that the God of classical theism–characterized as impassible, eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient–is inconsistent with a dynamic, evolving world-process that includes unpredictability and chance as essential elements. To be related to a changing world, God would also have to change.
But C&O argue that classical theism is actually more congruent with the world-picture offered by science than process theism and related views. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between primary and secondary causes, they contend that God is better thought of as the primary cause of all that exists–the ground of the entire world-order. The entire cosmos is contingent in the sense that it could have not existed, and God is the necessary being who actualizes this particular universe from a sea of possible universes.
Contrary to process theology, C&O say that it is difficult to make sense of the notion that God is subject to time and change. Drawing on relativity theory, they point out that there is no non-relative “now” that God could be present in. In fact, physics indicates that time is actually an aspect of the material world, so God as creator is also the creator of time. As Augustine saw, there is no sense in asking what God was doing “before” creation, since time is an aspect of the created order itself.
Yet, this doesn’t mean that there is no chance in the universe or that everything is determined. God actualizes this particular universe with its necessary laws and contingent events. God does not need to be invoked as an explanation for particular events (the “God of the gaps”). Rather, God is the ground of the entire series of events:
With perfect intelligence, God grasps all possible worlds, with all possible branchings, in all possible “universes,” precisely as possibilities, in a single act. With perfect wisdom and love, God chooses one possibility in its totality from its beginning to its final consummation, from all the myriad options presented by divine intelligence, in that same creative act. In Martin Ree’s expression, God “breathes fire” into one of the many mathematically possible worlds on offer. And so with complete power God realizes that one possibility, making it the one universe that exists, the one we inhabit, in all its necessity and contingency, determinisms and chance events, again in a single divine act. God’s election of this creation eliminates none of its contingency because God knows, loves, and creates this universe with precisely this set of contingencies “built in.” We do not need to place God in time in order to preserve the contingency of the universe, nor do we need to eliminate a divine and efficacious providence. For God is the answer, not to the contingency of chance events per se but to the much more profound contingency of being. It is the contingency of the very being of the universe that requires a necessary being as its source. Once we grasp this fact of divine transcendence, transcending matter, space, and time, the divine knowledge, love, and creation of the lesser contingency of chance events is implied as an automatic consequence. (p. 55)
C&O go on to discuss the implications of their view for providence and the problem of evil, human agency, ethics, and whether a transcendent God along the lines of classical theism can still be a “personal” God. I plan to dedicated at least one more post to their book.
I generally avoid “contemporary Christian music” (CCM), but I’ve long been a fan of Jars of Clay, who transcend much of what sails under that banner, both in the quality of their music and the sophistication and maturity of their lyrics. Their new album “Inland” is really good; here’s the first track:
A Thinking Reed 