The case for it. LutherPunk and Fr. Chris comment.
I think there are good reasons to have only ordained persons presiding at the Lord’s Supper. However, in extreme cases I don’t see any insuperable theological objection to a lay person doing it. There’s a remark of Luther (perhaps apocryphal) that in emergencies “even” a woman or child could administer the sacrament. The idea that anyone could, in principle, administer sacraments would seem to follow in a fairly straightforward way from the priesthood of all believers. Naturally, what counts as an extreme case is a matter of debate.
Haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but I might have something to say about it later.
(Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian presuppositions, sharply divided the world into spiritual and material realms, with only human beings partaking of the former. Off the top of my head I can think of a few exceptions: John Wesley addressed the issue, as did C. S. Lewis. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the mainstream view has been that only human beings have an eternal destiny, either because they are specially loved by God or because only they possess immortal souls.
Polkinghorne doesn’t spend much time discussing animals, but they do have a role to play in his scheme of cosmic redemption. He balks at the notion that “every dinosaur that ever lived, let alone the vast multitude of bacteria … will each have its own individual eschatological future” (p. 122). But he does allow that representatives of each kind of animal will exist in the world to come, preserving the type if not each token. He also speculates that pets, “who could be thought to have acquired enhanced individual status through their interactions with humans,” might have a share in the new creation. This is similar to a suggestion made by Lewis, who argued that, in bonding with their human masters, pets may acquire a “self” that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
The question of animal “selfhood” is obviously a vexed one. Some philosophers and theologians have suggested that animals don’t have selves because they lack self-awareness. But this seems wrong: just because they aren’t self-aware (assuming they aren’t) doesn’t mean they don’t have selves to be aware of. The central question, it seems to me is whether animals posses some measure of individuality and interiority. And it seems clear that they do. Modern science indicates that there is a continuity between humans and other animals in capacity for feeling and thought. This isn’t to deny that human beings have capacities that animals lack, merely to say that many animals are in fact “subjects of a life” as Tom Regan puts it. The fact of individual personality among animals is obvious to anyone with a pet, and only dogmatic materialists and behaviorists deny that animals experience sensations like pain and pleasure. The ancients were actually wiser than some moderns here: they acknowledged that animals had souls that gave them the power of self-motion, feeling, and even a measure of thinking.
It seems at least possible, then, that God, if he wished, could preserve animal “selves” in existence beyond death. Certainly if a human soul consists of an “information bearing pattern” similar patterns would exist in the case of non-human animals. But would God have reason to do so? Why would God wish to provide post-morterm existence to individual animals? One reason is simply that God loves all things in his creation:
For you love all things that exist,
and detest none of the things that you have made,
for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.
How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?
Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?
You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. (Wisdom of Solomon, 11: 24-26)
A related consideration is the question of animal theodicy. Will there be some recompense for the animals who have suffered through no moral fault of their own? And would a world built on such enormous suffering be worth it without restoration for the victims? It would be presumptuous to insist that God has to resurrect individual animals, but at the same time we can hope that the wideness of God’s mercy might make room in his kingdom for all creatures.
At the end of the previous post I wrote that Polkinghorne sees embodiment as essential to what it means to be human, partly because of the interrelatedness that is an intrinsic feature of all things. A self existing in isolation is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least living an extremely diminished and attenuated life. Consequently, the biblical image of the “new creation” points toward a very different state of affairs than the ethereal bodiless idea of heaven we sometimes imagine.
Polkinghorne thus suggests “a destiny for the whole universe beyond its death” (p. 113). To create a suitable environment for a resurrected humanity, God will transform the entire physical cosmos into a new form. Just as the matter of Jesus’ dead body was transmuted into the stuff of his glorified risen body, so the humble material of the cosmos will be taken up into an everlasting destiny.
Just as the matter of our present universe possesses specific properties that allow for the development of life, the matter of the new creation will be specially suited to life there. And moreover, the entire cosmos will be “transparent” to the divine presence: “The new creation will be wholly sacramental, suffused with the presence of the life of God” (p. 115). And the “laws” of this new universe will, unlike our present world, be adapted to unending life rather than intrinsically involving the cycle of life and death.
Polkinghorne insists that there will be both continuity and discontinuity between the old and new creations, in keeping with his central principle. The new creation is not another creation ex nihilo, but a redemptive act that draws the new out of the old. The old creation provides the “raw material” for the new creation, one that will continue to be constituted (though in a new way) by space, time and matter. Polkinghorne denies that the new creation will be an eternal (timeless) state of being; instead, he says following Gregory of Nyssa, we will spend everlasting ages moving more and more deeply into the inexhaustible mystery of the divine nature.
One of the consequences of Polkinghorne’s view that the old creation is, in some sense, the raw material of the new is that it gives some account of why God created this world in the first place:
The pressing question of why the Creator brought into being this vale of tears if it is the case that God can eventually create a world that is free from suffering, here finds its answer. God’s total creative intent is seen to be intrinsically a two-step process: first the old creation, allowed to explore and realise its potentiality at some metaphysical distance from its Creator; then the redeemed new creation which, through the Cosmic Christ, is brought into a freely embraced and intimate relationship with the life of God. (p. 116)
What makes this an explanation of the sufferings of the present world? The idea seems to be that, in order to allow creation to develop freely, God had to hide, or at least dim, the divine presence. This allowed creaturely freedom, but also introduced the possibility of sin. At the same time, the laws that govern the development of the cosmos seem to intrinsically involve the possibility of suffering. “Its unfolding process develops within the ‘space’ that God has given it, within which it is allowed to be itself” (p. 114).
This is a question we’ve tackled here before: is suffering an intrinsic feature of life in this universe because of the constitution of the laws that govern it? Or is the world as we experience it fallen from a primeval state of perfection? Polkinghorne opts for the first answer, but with the proviso that the universe is on its way to being something different. His proposal has the virtue of investing what we do here and now with a certain importance: there are aspects of the present world that will persist in the world to come. If we foster beauty, harmony, and excellence in this world, we can hope that they will be drawn up into the next and reflect the divine glory.
As we’ve seen, Polkinghorne is developing an eschatological vision that takes the findings of modern cosmology seriously, but is consonant with the deepest insights of the biblical tradition. The key principles are: that any hope for life beyond this world must be rooted in God’s faithfulness and that the shape of this hope will be determined by the kind of discontinuity-in-continuity. This is displayed preeminently in the resurrection of Jesus.
Polkinghorne believes that the view of human nature that is most consistent with modern biology and neuroscience is one that sees human beings as integrated wholes rather than soul-body compounds. The language of “the soul” can be maintained, he thinks, but we should think of it as the “information-bearing pattern” which makes me the unique individual I am. Polkinghorne sees this as an updating of the traditional Thomistic-Aristotelian language of the soul as the “form” of the body. “It would be altogether too crude to say that the soul is the software running on the hardware of the body–for we have good reason to believe that human beings are very much more than ‘computers made of meat’–but that unsatisfactory image catches a little of what is being proposed” (p. 106).
Polkinghorne’s suggestion, then, is that our destiny beyond death consists of God “re-embodying” our “information-bearing pattern” in a new form:
It is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is a human being could be held in the divine memory after that person’s death. Such a disembodied existence, even if located in the divine remembrance, would be less than fully human. It would be more like the Hebrew concept of shades in Sheol, though now a Sheol from which the Lord was not absent but, quite to the contrary, God was sustaining it. It is a further coherent hope, and one for which the resurrection of Jesus provides the foretaste and guarantee, that God in the eschatological future will re-embody this multitude of preserved information-bearing patterns in some new environment of God’s choosing. (p. 108)
Polkinghorne addresses the objections that some philosophers have had to this notion of “re-embodiment” or “replication.” The concern is that such a replicated person living in the eschaton would not really be me, but merely a new person who resembled me with respect to certain psychological traits. This has sometimes been expressed by the hypothetical scenario in which two replicated individuals with the same “information pattern” are brought into existence – which one is the authentic “descendant” of the deceased person?
Polkinghonrne argues that this is a pseudo-worry. “The answer is surely that only God has the power to effect such re-embodiment and divine consistency would never permit the duplication of a person” (p. 108). But this seems to me not to do justice to the objection. The problem isn’t that there’s any reason to believe that God would actually bring about such a state of affairs. It’s that the mere logical possibility of post-mortem “twins” shows that this kind of resemblance is an insufficient criterion for continuity of individual identity.
It’s actually somewhat surprising that Polkinghorne invokes St. Thomas in trying to articulate the relation between body and soul. For, though Thomas certainly employs Aristotle’s “form/matter” terminology, he also clearly believed in a substantial soul that survives the death of the body. Whatever qualifications he makes, Thomas is clearly a kind of dualist. (Though Thomas is clear that a human soul without a body is fundamentally “incomplete” and that we will be re-joined to our bodies at the final resurrection).
Polkinghorne admittedly is treading a middle ground between outright dualism and a pure replication theory. He’s not entirely clear what type of subjectivity a disembodied “soul” has in the “intermediate” state. So, there may be room for him to assert a degree of continuity that is sufficient to guarantee personal identity. There’s support for this in Polkinghorne’s suggestion that there will be a kind of purgatorial “healing” in the intermediate state.
Wherever one comes down on this particular issue, Polkinghorne is right, I think, to insist that our hope for resurrection is grounded in the love of God, and that God intends to save us in our entirety, not as disembodied shades. This point is reinforced by Polkinghorne’s insistence on the fundamental importance of relationality in constituting our selves. The people we become are formed by our relationship to the world around us, and these relationships are mediated by our bodies. To exist without bodies of some kind would to be cut off from any kind of relationship. And these relationships extend beyond other human beings to all of creation.
I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out.
(See here and here for previous posts.)
The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus, in its illustration of the principle of continuity/discontinuity, provides the key to understanding the future of the cosmos as a whole. Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical promises that God will redeem the entire creation, not just human beings. He envisions a transmutation of the material cosmos into a new cosmos that parallels the transmutation of Jesus’ dead body into his glorified raised body (Polkinghorne suggests that part of the significance of the empty tomb is to be found here; matter is not to be discarded, but taken up into something new).
Eschatology is concerned with hope. What can we hope for in a world in which it appears that human aspirations, both individual and collective, are destined for ultimate defeat? “Hope,” says Polkinghorne
is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect. (p. 94)
But what is hope’s positive content? It’s the conviction that “all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning” (p. 94). But the only thing that can guarantee this kind of meaning is “the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history” (p. 94). Polkinghorne says that a “thick” eschatology requires an equally “thick” theology and Christology. “To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4:17)” (p. 95).
This is a robust, “supernaturalist” eschatology, wherein God will act to bring about a new creation that will supplant the old. Polkinghorne’s background as a physicist may give him a more cosmic perspective here. Theologians frequently seem to reduce eschatology to concerns with human destiny, sometimes even to political aspirations. Polkinghorne distinguishes his view from a fully “realized” eschatology that doesn’t privilege the future over the present (a view he attributes to Kathryn Tanner; I’m not sure if this is right since I find Tanner pretty obscure on that point), as well as from the concept of “objective immortality” favored by some process theologians. Both of these options condemn the lives of countless beings to permanent incompleteness. “Actual eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem” (p. 100).
Polkinghorne thus stakes out a position between a fully “realized” eschatology and a strictly “futurist” one which he calls an “inagurated eschatology.” The pledge of God’s future victory of sin, death, and suffering has been given in the resurrection of Jesus, but the final consummation is still in the future. We can to some extent participate in that future now by being incorporated into Christ’s body through his church and the sacraments. Ethically, this means that follow the way of the crucified and risen one, even though we can’t see exactly where that way is leading us. But we can be assured that “our strivings for the attainment of good within the course of present history are never wasted but will bear everlasting fruit” (p. 102).
The key principle that Polkinghorne uses to construct his eschatological vision is that of continuity/discontinuity. If God is going to bring new life out of this fated-for-death universe, it must be both continuous with what has come before and discontinuous in overcoming the frailties, limitations, and evils of the present universe. The paradigmatic expression of this principle for Polkinghorne is the resurrection of Jesus: it is both the same pre-Easter Jesus who has been raised, but he has been raised to a new kind of life that is qualitatively different from earthly life.
In terms of physical continuity, Polkinghorne attempts to isolate some of the fundamental aspects of the universe. He sees the cosmos as essentially a process, a self-evolving spatio-temporal cosmos that eventually gives rise to intelligent, self-aware beings. This cosmos is also characterized by a deep relationality: everything from quarks to human beings find their identity in relation to other parts of the universe; it is imbued with information: patterns and wholes exert genuine causal effect on what happens; and it displays a deep intelligibility and transparency to mathematical reasoning. Polkinghorne’s suggestion is that these deep features of the present universe reflect the will of the Creator and that we can reasonably expect them to persist in some way in the new Creation.
Hope for a new creation, though, can only be rooted in the faithfulness of God. Consequently, it’s important to discern what we can of the divine nature and character if we are to have hope for the future. In a survey of the biblical material that manages to be both extremely concise and comprehensive, Polkinghorne paints a picture of a faithful, loving deity that emerges from the Old and New Testaments. The Bible, for Polkinghorne, is not “a conveniently divinely dictated handbook in which to look up the answers, but it is the record of the persons and events that have been particularly open to the presence of the divine reality and through which the divine nature may most transparently be discerned” (p. 53). In God’s faithfulness to Israel, in its growing eschatological expectations, and preeminently in his raising of Jesus from the dead, Polkinghorne discerns a God who, because of his loving faithfulness, will act to bring about a state of affairs where God’s presence is made immediately apparent to God’s people and in which the sufferings and limitations of this present life are overcome.
A Thinking Reed 