God’s Creation can be described in terms of `mystery’ when we speak in certain modes, poetic or spiritual, but that’s not the truest way for a Christian to speak. It’s not the truest way because Christians, of all human beings, should be faithful to the Creator and open to what He’s telling us through this world and all that lies within it. This is the proper attitude because this world and all the creatures it contains—indeed, all of Creation and the creatures it contains—are manifested thoughts of God.
There is an analogy in the history of modern geometry for what I’m trying to get across. Einstein’s general theory of relativity deals with gravity and teaches us to consider space and time as a single geometric object, spacetime. There are a number of peculiarities to this theory from an ordinary human viewpoint. For example, the concept of `shortest distance’ is generalized and is generally a curved line rather than the straight line of Euclidean geometry. And I’ve just pointed to a major problem. To most modern human beings, including those who enjoy science fiction movies with black-holes, general relativity is a mystery, but only because we insist on trying to put a greater creature inside a smaller creature, a more abstract geometry inside of Euclidean geometry. It’s not at all a mystery for those who have the mathematical sophistication along with the necessary time to study this more abstract geometry. After such a study, the mind is reshaped, shaped properly to deal with that more abstract geometry, capable of dealing with the concepts of general relativity. The mysterious has become part of the common sense of a human being who has reshaped his mind in such a way.
We Christians, indeed all modern human beings, need to go through such a process to learn how to view this world in light of all that we have learned about it in modern times. What some call `mystery’ is part of God’s way of thinking in His role as Creator; we need to make that mystery part of our way of thinking if we are to be better images of God in the same way that modern scientists and engineers have made more abstract geometries part of their ways of thinking.
If it were true that the answers which we would give the world, the answers which would allow us to make sense of the world and move on to build a new and greater civilization, are beyond our knowledge and beyond our reach even in principle, then Christianity has nothing to tell the world, nothing to help us better order our lives, individual and communal. In this case, a religion which speaks of a savior both man and God, of a Creator immanent in His own work, would be no more than a lie, a set of delusions organized under some grand delusion.
By speaking of `mystery’ when we should be reshaping our minds to God’s way of thinking, we show ourselves lacking faith in the Creator and in Jesus Christ, true God and true man. This language of `mystery’ often arises when dealing with the modern questions, questions which have received some halfway decent answers, such as the words of the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution, but often those questions have led to the guillotine or concentration camps or to battlefields more gory than anything even Genghis Khan could have imagined.
We shy away from the questions raised in the modern world despite the clear evidence to those with open eyes and firm faith in the Creator that all this modern empirical knowledge is telling us much that is important about the work of God in His role as Creator. We are duty-bound as Christians to deal with these questions for they are raised by human exploration of God’s Creation, of thoughts He manifested. We are all duty-bound in our communal being and some are duty-bound by their individual callings in intellectual or spiritual realms of life.
Yet, we continue the language of `mystery’ as if we were still nomads gathered around a stone altar. We have no good answers to those modern questions, about pain and suffering, which tie back to ancient questions and we have no good answers to interestingly rich versions of these difficult questions which have arisen in our days. I’m pointing to such questions as:
- What greater, moral sense can we make of human life in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes which are bloody and seemingly morally chaotic?
- What sense can we make of the physical stuff of Creation in light of the discovery that even matter and energy are contingent things, not categorical entities, and that they have evolved and developed from more abstract forms of being?
We have no good answers to these and many other important questions, not because those who call themselves “images of God” have any right to shy away from participating in the Creator’s acts-of-being by way of understanding them. We have no good answers because we’ve not shown the faith and courage to deal with these questions in their modern or ancient formulations.
I think I’ve come up with a pretty good way of dealing with these and other questions which have arisen in our age. There is no doubt that we need answers which allow us to talk of Jesus Christ being the incarnate Son of God, of our salvation and resurrection into a life shared with God, of God as being the true Creator of all that is not Him, of His purposes in creating this world so chaotic and disordered at times.
I’ll give a very quick overview of what I’ve developed, the sort of complete Christian worldview which is needed though someone might produce a better one. I invite anyone to try. I don’t pretend to have the final answers and even if mine prove to be good enough for now, they’ll prove to be inadequate eventually, and eventually might be just the next generation.
First, we need a good understanding of being, of the stuff of which our bodies are made as well as the bodies of other creatures. I’ve proposed, consistent with both the school of St. John the Apostle and quantum mechanics, that relationships are primary, that stuff comes into existence and can be shaped or reshaped by relationships such as love. I’ve also proposed, consistent with modern understandings of the nature of spacetime and mass and energy, as developed in cosmological physics and particles physics, that being lies on a spectrum ranging from the abstract to the concrete with the concrete being shaped from, made more particular than, more abstract forms of being which are still present in the concrete stuff of this particular world. A marketing slogan: concrete things are frozen soul-stuff. (Judging by modern physics, more abstract forms of being are `hotter’, higher in energy.)
Second, we need to understand the human mind and human being in a more complete sense. I recently put a new book on my website, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, which deals with this issue in a way which is certainly preliminary but—at least in my opinion—far closer to the truth than any other such understanding of human being. Based upon modern neurosciences and evolutionary biology as well as my understanding of our relationship to our Creator, I’ve developed the idea that our minds are the result of that very complex organ, the human brain, shaping itself in response to the surrounding environments right up to the level of all of Creation. This shaping takes place on the species level over vast amounts of time, on the cultural level over generations, and on the personal level over our lifetimes. Furthermore, man can be viewed as mind and heart and hands with the strong qualification that our being becomes unified, in a God-like way, as we become true persons and as we prepare to share the life of God. Beyond even that, based upon the Church’s own admission that She is not omnicompetent and upon my limited understanding of history and politics and sociology, I’ve reinterpreted our understanding of the Body of Christ to be more inclusive of human nature and worthwhile human activities rather than limiting it to `churchy’ aspects of human nature. Download and read the book for more.
Third, we have to return to the Biblical understanding, shared with history and literature and even cosmological physics, that we live in a story which has many contingent aspects, even a certain amount of freedom suitable to our creaturely beings—greater freedom comes as we begin to share God’s life.
Fourth, we need to see and to truly live the purpose of Creation: the birth and maturing of the mortal manifestation of the Body of Christ.
The above, if fleshed out properly, will give a good Christian understanding of our world as a concrete level of Creation, but a level in which the more abstract levels, mathematical and metaphysical, can be seen present in the concrete. Such an understanding would allow a more coherent, more plausible, way of speaking with and dealing with such difficult issues as abortion, birth-control, stem-cell technology, waging of wars, capital punishment, and the organization of our political and economic communities. As things stand, we tend to confront these issues by opposing our assertions to the assertions of those holding different, but even more incoherent, views of reality.
This article by William B. Hurlbut, St. Francis, Christian Love, and the Biotechnological Future, was written by a medical doctor who apparently does research in the neurosciences. He’s trying to deal with our moral confusions as they specifically impact the biotechnological issues and has many good things to say, largely from the viewpoint of a Christian with deep respect for the ways in which St. Francis of Assisi viewed Creation and dealt with matters of human life in that Creation. There’s good stuff here but confusion as well. Professor Hurlbut first errs by engaging in that original sin of Christian moral theology, theodicy or the effort to vindicate an all-good and all-knowing and all-powerful God in light of the natural and moral evil in this world—as defined by human creatures. Professor Hurlbut tells us:
How, within the creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, there can be both suffering and love remains a mystery. But clearly for Francis, that creation was simultaneously material and spiritual—sacramental through and through.
Why is this a mystery? Because many thinkers over the century have imposed their own schemes upon a reality far richer than anything which might fit in their heads. Because many thinkers have thought to judge God’s work without having a good handle on God’s purposes in creating us.
Years ago, the Calvinist philosopher, Alvin Platinga, who works in a modern analytic framework, presented serious arguments that any such questions presume we can know enough to judge God, that we can judge whether the good which God is to accomplish in this world justifies all the pain and suffering and moral corruption and so forth. Professor Hurlbut has asked questions which imply we can evaluate God’s Creation in this way but he also proposes near the end of his essay the position more compatible with Christian beliefs:
All of creation, and its evolutionary ascent to mind and moral awareness, may be recognized as a kind of living language in an epic tale of the deepest spiritual significance. Through the eyes of faith, the entire cosmic order of time and space and material being may be seen as an arena for the revelation of Love, for the creation of a creature capable of ascending to an apprehension of its Creator; but more profoundly, for the reaching down, the compassionate condescension of Love Himself.
We’ve moved from theodicy into the dynamic realm of narratives. That’s good and proper. It’s what the Bible teaches us to do. Christ didn’t present Himself as a problem to be solved, nor did St. Francis view life as a problem to be solved. To be sure, I’ve spent a large amount of energy upon the metaphysical problems of being, “What is stuff and relationships and so on?” but I did so on my way to understanding this world which is stuff engaged in a story being told by God. As soon as we have a handle on the nature of matter and energy and spacetime, a handle on relationships and things or love and stuff, we can move to the main task of understanding all of that in the context of the story God is telling.
The questions remain but they become measurements of the gap between what we are and what we are to be if we are to share God’s thoughts and even His life.
I develop views of human being, individual and communal (right up to the Body of Christ), in that book I recently released, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. I also have written a large number of essays over the previous seven years as I developed that viewpoint on my blog at my website, Acts of Being. Most of the writings on that blog have been collected into a large book, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2012.