I’ve started rereading Science and Creation by John Polkinghorne, the physicist at Cambridge University who left his professorship to enter an Anglican seminary before returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator.
Father Polkinghorne is quite polite to those who denigrate natural theology and to those who simply question what natural theology can really tell us about God. In particular, he responds in a respectful manner to Karl Barth, one of a number of those who study ‘theology proper’ and deny any possibility of understanding God at all through an understanding of God’s acts as Creator. I put the case in my own way to show why I once published some essays in which I showed no respect whatsoever for this position, even on the part of so brave and distinguished a servant of Christ as Barth was. It’s an absurd position, one which makes a mockery of God as a rational and coherent entity. It’s more than absurd to say we learn nothing of an entity by studying his/His decisions and acts. In God’s case, those decisions and acts come from a pure freedom which is itself beyond our total understanding, but even that freedom can be somewhat understood by studying and contemplating two implications of what we do understand about this universe:
- It didn’t have to be.
- It could have been a radically different universe.
I’ve expanded this view out to the entirety of Creation, but it remains essentially the same argument at least to those willing and able to deal with very abstract realms of being. The concept of “abstract realms of being” is itself a major part of my worldview, but I’ll deal with that, in passing, near the end of this short essay. First, I’ll quote part of Father Polkinghorne’s response to Barth and those who deny we can learn anything important about God by studying His Creation.
[T]he world is not just a neutral theatre in which these revelatory acts take place. Rather, it is itself, if theism is true, the creation of God and so potentially a vehicle also for his self-disclosure. God is to be found in the general as well as the particular. [page 3]
That is, we learn about the Creator by understanding what man is and why he can be said to be the ‘image of God’, not just by experiencing the presence of God in some particular and ‘personal’ revelation. The reader should be aware that I try to be very careful about using the term ‘Creator’ whenever I’m writing or speaking about God in His freely chosen role as such.
This needs a few comments. First, Father Polkinghorne should not have qualified his claim with the word ‘potentially’ in the second sentence. A man’s decisions and acts are what he is. God is different in that His act of Creation, the primary act-of-being by which He manifested the truths from which He shaped all of created being, is itself an act of absolutely free-will. He creates His own context for further acts-of-being and for what might be called His narrative acts. This means that Creation, in principle fully accessible to human exploration, isn’t a guide to all that God is or all that He could do.
When a man studies any realm of Creation, the possible movements of his own body so that he might dance more freely or the role of genes in vulnerability to HIV infection, he doesn’t just learn some facts or a way of better interacting with reality, though such claims help us in understanding the more complete and more radical claim which arises from this way of looking at matters: man shapes himself to encapsulate some smaller or greater realm of Creation. Man shapes himself to be some realm of created being which is a manifestation of particular thoughts of God in His freely chosen role of Creator. To become a true morally well-ordered human person, man must also shape himself to the flow of the morally well-ordered narrative which is the world and also to a multitude of morally well-ordered or ill-ordered narratives which are our lives or the history of our particular culture or nation or…
Let me drop back to writing as if we acquire knowledge of being rather than writing in terms of the greater truth that we shape ourselves to become that being.
I wrote a book, freely downloadable, dealing with knowledge from that semi-traditional viewpoint: Four Kinds of Knowledge. In that book, I explain that there are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of God in His transcendence (theology proper) and knowledge of God in His thoughts and acts as Creator of this particular Creation. At the same time, I concede the limitations and general weaknesses of our human minds make it useful to think of knowledge as being of four kinds:
- revealed knowledge;
- speculative knowledge;
- scientific empirical knowledge; and
- practical empirical knowledge.
In my way of thinking about Creation, natural theology includes all knowledge but that of God in His transcendence and that natural knowledge is broken out into three major realms of knowledge. Ultimately, natural theology is knowledge of the transcendent God in His role as the Creator of this Creation. Ultimately, there is no real conflict between ‘natural theology’ and ‘theology proper’. Natural theology deals with God wearing His mask of a Creator of a particular Creation while theology proper deals with God in His fullness and transcendence.
The usual ways of splitting knowledge assume inadequate accounts of being, as I noted above. Ultimately, the human mind is a set of relationships, some dealing directly with our bodily actions or our practical plans of action and some dealing with more abstract realms, including the understanding and doing — very inadequate for now — of our more complex social and political and economic relationships. This last is my current main interest and it’s a good one for quickly giving a somewhat concrete shape to my claim that we engage in natural theology to make ourselves images of the Creator, to shape ourselves to the thoughts God manifested in His freely chosen role as Creator.
We don’t learn what civilization is and fit that knowledge into some slots in a generic human mind common to all men from that undefinable beginning of our race to the end of man’s time in this mortal realm. We shape ourselves to a slowly developing cultural context which might be part or a civilization or might even grow into the core of a new civilization. Those particular cultures and civilizations are branches, fruitful or otherwise, on an evolutionary tree of sorts. Unlike the evolution of life, the evolution of human civilizations is guided to a goal, though one which leaves much room for various sorts of playful response in our ways of doing science and arts, technology and agriculture, politics and home economics. The goal is simply stated: by definition, a civilization must shape itself, in a faithful and profound way, to some substantial realm of this world, of the universe understood in light of God’s purposes. A civilization is an imperfect and incomplete image of the Body of Christ, as more particular and focused communities are images of organs in that Body.
Even human politics, if we had the insight or integrity to do it right, gives us greater understanding of our Creator. In fact, these human social realms can even give us a greater understanding of one of the greatest of all mysteries of God. Despite what some think, God has manifested in Creation a potential image of those great mysteries, though we’ve not yet done well in developing that potential:
- The Holy Trinity: God is three Persons in one God.
- The nature of Christ: The Lord Jesus Christ is two natures in one Person.
We are individuals yet we are learning to be also true members of various communities in a complex network which reached its peak, so far, in this world as Western Civilization including that spiritual organ of worship — the Christian Church (however defined). We are following complex paths of evolution, not all cultures or civilizations are equally fruitful, and development, not all potentially fruitful cultures or civilizations reach harvest in a healthy state. Ultimately, as I’ve said before, a properly complex and rich understanding of the Body of Christ and a corresponding understanding of human communities in this mortal realm which give lesser or greater hints of that Body will include an account of human beings remaining individuals while becoming fully members of the Body of Christ. Each of us, in a manner of speaking, will remain an individual human being while becoming fully a member of the one Body of Christ. If we can understand this, we will have some substantial understanding of the Triune God, three Persons — who remain individuals — in one God.
Let me summarize at the risk of repetitiveness:
- The Triune God is three Persons, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, in one God.
- The Body of Christ is a multitude of human persons and the divine Person of the Son in one Body.
It is possible to come to a better understanding of our Creator by better understanding a realm of Creation, in this case, human nature. In this case, we achieve a better understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of His transcendental Self which God chose to manifest in human nature in its more complete individual and communal aspects. We also achieve a greater respect for the faithfulness and rationality of our maker and a greater respect for our relationship to Him, even two ways in which we can be images of God as individuals and as communities.