The WORLD is unknown, till the Value and Glory of it is seen: till the Beauty and the Serviceableness of its parts is considered. When you enter into it, it is an illimited field of Variety and Beauty: where you may lose yourself in the multitude of Wonder and Delights. But it is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity: and to find GOD in exchange for oneself. Which we then do when we see Him in His Gifts, and adore His Glory.
... Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of a monarch, in her husband’s chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you.
Thomas Traherne1
The instrumental and symbolic relation of God and humanity to the world
We are accustomed in our mutual interactions to use material things in ways that both express our minds, or intentions, and simultaneously effect what is in our minds, or fulfil our intentions. Thus a signed order form both expresses the desire of the one who signs it to purchase, say, a book and sets a sequence of events in motion which leads to the possessing of it; a deed of covenant both expresses the attitudes of benevolence of an individual towards some project and itself contributes to the realisation of that project. Analogously, in the Christian understanding of God’s relation to physical reality, the world of matter is seen as both expressing the mind of God, its Creator, and effecting God’s purposes. These two aspects of our and of God’s relation to the material world were perceptively analysed over seventy years ago by Oliver Quick in his study of the Christian sacraments.2
He pointed out that in human experience we make the distinction, while recognising its frequent arbitrariness, between ‘outward’ realities that occupy space and time and are in principle, though possibly not in fact, perceptible by bodily senses and ‘inward’ realities that do not satisfy those conditions. He went on to point out that the material objects that constitute part of our outward reality can have two different relations to our inward mental life: they can be instruments that take their character from what is done with them; or they can be symbols that take their character from what is known by them. This useful working distinction in human experience has a parallel in two ways in which God may be regarded as related to the world. The world may be viewed as the instrument whereby God is effecting some cosmic purpose by acting on or doing something with it. Or the world may be viewed as the symbol through which God is expressing God’s eternal nature to those who have eyes to see, that is, revealing Godself within it. Let us look at these two aspects of God’s relation to the world.
As we have seen, the scientific picture of the natural world is of a process that is continuous from its cosmic beginning, in the ‘hot big bang’, to the present – with no non-natural causes required to explain the observations and inferences of scientists about the past. The processes that have occurred display emergence (p.49) for new forms of matter, and a hierarchy of organisation of these forms, appear. To these new organisations of matter it is, very often, possible to ascribe new levels of what can only be called ‘reality’. New kinds of reality may be said to ‘emerge’ in time. Notably, on the surface of the Earth, new forms of living matter (that is, living organisms) have come into existence by a continuous process. Any notion of God as Creator has to take into account that God is continuously creating, continuously giving existence to, what is new. We saw that the traditional notion of God sustaining the world in its general order and structure has now had to be enriched by a dynamic and creative dimension – the model of God sustaining and giving continuous existence to a process that has creativity built into it by God. God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the world. God makes things make themselves.
The scientific perspective, and especially that of biological evolution, has impelled us to take more seriously and in stronger sense than hitherto the notion of the immanence of God as Creator – that God is the immanent Creator creating through the processes of the natural order. If one asks where do we see God as Creator during, say, the processes of biological evolution, one has to reply: the processes themselves, as unveiled by the biological sciences, are the action of God as Creator. (This is theistic naturalism and panentheism, not pantheism.) God gives existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new: thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms by which, God might be supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world. There is no need to look for God as some kind of additional factor supplementing the processes of the world. God, to use again language usually applied in sacramental theology, is ‘in, with and under’ all-that-is and all-that-goes-on.
Moreover, God is intimately related to what is created, for it exists within God according to the panentheistic view which (pp.138ff.) provides a coherent model of God’s agency in the world – God’s instrumental relation to it.
We have to ask, what does this process signify? What does it mean? At each emergent level in evolution, matter in its newly evolved mode of organisation manifests properties that could not, in principle, be discerned in the earlier levels from which the new emerges. In a sense, therefore, one could say that the potentialities of matter have been, and still are being, realised in cosmic development. In particular, matter organised in the way we call ‘human’ is capable of distinctive activities such as: conscious thought, self-consciousness, communication of abstract thoughts to other human beings, the interrelations of personal life and ethical behaviour, creativity in art and science, the apprehension of values – and all that characterises and differentiates humanity from the rest of the biological world. Matter has evolved into humanity and we cannot avoid concluding, even from the most materialistic point of view, that this demonstrates the ability of matter to display in humanity functions and properties for which we have to use special terms such as ‘mental’, ‘personal’, ‘spiritual’. These properties are characteristically human. Affirmation of, for example, the reality of human conscious and self-conscious activities is not dependent on any particular philosophy of the relation of an entity called ‘mind’ to one called ‘body’. This problem remains open to philosophical analysis; what is significant is that the problem arises and can be posed. It seems that by taking seriously the scientific perspective, we cannot avoid arriving at a view of matter which sees it as manifesting mental, personal and spiritual activities.
It is in the light of this new evolutionary perspective that, over a hundred years ago, the significance for Christians of Jesus the Christ was enriched when J.R. Illingworth wrote,
[I]n scientific language, the Incarnation [of Jesus as the Christ] may be said to have introduced a new species into the world – the Divine man transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations.3
Jesus’ resurrection convinced his followers that the union of his personal identity with God had not been broken by death and that he had been taken up into God. This has been central to Christian belief ever since. Jesus manifested the kind of human life which, it was believed, can become fully life with God not only here and now, but eternally beyond the threshold of death. Hence, for Christians, his imperative ‘Follow me’ constitutes a call for the transformation of humanity into a new kind of human being and becoming. What happened to Jesus, it was thought, could happen to all.
In this Christian perspective, Jesus the Christ, the whole Christ event, shows us what is possible for humanity. The actualisation of this potentiality can then properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God begun but incompletely manifested in evolution. The created and creating world in its evolving and emergent aspects is thus symbolic of God’s deepest purposes. In Jesus, Christians have seen a divine act of new creation because the initiative was from God within human history, within the responsive human will of Jesus inspired by that outreach of God into humanity designated as ‘God the Holy Spirit’. Jesus the Christ is thereby seen as the paradigm of what God intends for all human beings, now revealed as having the potentiality of responding to, of being open to, of becoming united with God. In this perspective, Jesus represents the consummation of the evolutionary creative process that God has been effecting in and through the world of matter.
We have been suggesting, in the light of the evolutionary epic, that the world of matter in its relation to God has both the instrumental function of being the means whereby God acts in the world and the symbolic function of effecting and expressing his purpose. The created world can be valued for what God is effecting through it. It can also be seen as a symbol because it is a mode of God’s revelation, an expression of the divine truth and beauty that are the ‘spiritual’ aspects of its reality. But these two functions of matter, the instrumental and symbolical, also constitute the special character of the use of matter in particular Christian sacraments. There is, in each particular sacrament, a universal reference to this double character of created physical reality. Correspondingly, meaning can be attached to speaking of the created world as a sacrament or, at least, as sacramental even if this sacramental character is only implicit. For it is obscure and partial both because of the limited perception and sensitivity of humanity and because of evil. The significance for Christians of their belief in the incarnation of God in a human being, Jesus the Christ, within the created world is that in him the sacramental character of that world was made explicit and perfected. In this sense, it seems legitimate for them to regard the incarnate life of Christ as the supreme sacrament. For in this outward historical life, Christians claim, there was both uniquely expressed and uniquely operative that purpose of goodness which is the purpose of God himself that all life and all nature should fulfil.
In the sacraments of the church, these two ultimate sacraments, the created order and Jesus the Christ as God incarnate, regularly come together and are brought into one focus in time and place. There is strong historical evidence that at the Last Supper, which developed into the church’s Eucharist, Jesus identified the mode of his incarnation and reconciliation of God and humanity (his ‘body and blood’) with the very stuff of the universe when he took the bread, blessed, broke and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘This: my flesh for you’ – and similarly the wine, saying, ‘This: my blood of the [new] covenant’, or, in parallel to the other saying and more simply, ‘This: my blood for you [and for many]’. It seems to me that it is a legitimate extension of the ideas and symbolic references which are implicit in these features of this original historical act to affirm that in this act a new value was explicitly set upon the bread and wine, obstinately molecular as they are, an intimate part of the natural world (corn and grapes) and a product of human cooperation with nature (bread and wine). Jesus’ words and these acts seem to me to have involved a revaluation of the things themselves, a new value assigned to the world of matter by God’s own act in Jesus the Christ.
Furthermore, the very stuff of the universe is in this act manifest as the means whereby the self-offering, self-emptying, self-limiting of the Creator in the very act of creation is made explicit as also involving the perennial suffering of God. The bread and wine symbolise the broken Body of divine suffering and the outpouring of the divine Life. The cruciform Eucharist makes explicit the cruciform nature of the created order.
A further development seems natural in the light of what I have been saying about the universal reference of sacramental acts: a new value was imputed not only to these particular elements of bread and wine used in this way, but to the whole created material world. For sacraments have general significance only as part of a whole whose true relation to God is being represented and effectively realised. This value was implicit, though not available to human observation, in the act of creation. It remained a potentiality of matter, only partially realised in humanity. It was the ground of the incarnation, the root of its possibility, for it was in God’s own world that God as Logos was incarnate in a human being, that world of which God was already the formative principle. Even at the historic Last Supper, God was still largely incognito to the disciples, but to Christians God is now no longer unknown. So in Christian thinking the sacraments as a whole, especially the Eucharist, manifest continually the ultimate meaning of matter as a symbol and instrument of God’s purpose.
The participants in the Eucharist consciously and humbly offer their own lives in service to God and humanity in unity with the self-offered life of God as the Christ which is believed to be present ‘in, with and under’ the elements of bread and wine in the context of the total communal act. Thus, in this act, Christians believe they are participating in that reformation and new creation of humanity which the coming of Jesus initiated through his incarnation and self-offering. Their self-offering is cogently represented by the bread and wine offered with sacrificial reference both at the original Last Supper and at every Eucharist of the church since then. This union with the offering of Christ is not self-directed, but ‘for others’, and it is worth noticing that what Christ took and what is used in the Eucharist is the product of human action on nature – bread not corn, wine not grapes. So the whole life and work of human beings may be regarded as offered in this act that is so closely associated with the historic initiation of the new humanity ‘in Christ’.
Many themes interlock and interweave in this central act of Christian worship, and all of them have immense significance for our attitude to the stuff of the cosmos of which we are part. For the Eucharist of the Christian church, like a parabolic mirror, focuses many parallel rays into one point of time and space. From the earliest times its liturgy contained overt references to God’s creative activity, although this insight has been somewhat obscured since then. The ‘words of institution’ of Jesus, already referred to, took place within the context of the Jewish mealtime blessing over bread and wine (the ‘cup of blessing’). These blessings took the form of thanksgiving to God for creation. Similarly directed thanksgiving appears in the earliest liturgies of the Eucharist and are referred to by Irenaeus (c. 130–200 CE), who speaks of Jesus as
Instructing his disciples to offer to God the first-fruits of his own creation, not as though he had need of them, but, that they themselves might be neither unfruitful nor ungrateful. He took that bread which comes of the [material] creation and gave thanks saying, This is my body. And the cup likewise, which is [taken] from created things, like ourselves, he acknowledged for his own blood, and taught the new oblation of the New Covenant ... we ought to make oblation to God ... offering first fruits of those things which are his creatures.4
These prayers of thanksgiving in the Eucharist developed into an offertory of other foods in addition to the bread and wine. In the course of a complex history this basic feature has been fragmented and overlaid, but survives in the ‘these thy creatures of bread and wine’ in Holy Communion in The Book of Common Prayer and in the ‘haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata’ of the traditional Latin Mass.
I am suggesting that there is a convergence between, on the one hand, the implications of the scientific perspective for the spiritual capabilities of matter and, on the other hand, the sacramental view of matter which Christians have adopted as the consequence of the meaning they attach to Jesus’ life and the continued existence of the church. Christians have had to understand matter both in the light of their conviction that matter was able in the human Jesus to express the being of God – who is nevertheless regarded as supra-mental, supra-personal and supra-spiritual, so that God’s mode of being lies beyond any sequence of mental or other predicates we can supply – and in the light of their understanding of the sacramental acts of Jesus, made in the context of his death and resurrection, and in which the continuing life of Christian humanity originates.
It looks as if Christians, starting from their experience of God in Christ (through the Holy Spirit, they would say) acting in the stuff of the world, have developed an insight into matter which is consonant with that which is now evoked by the scientific perspective of matter becoming humanity.
In the Eucharist, a conjunction occurs of a group of baptised Christians, who are committed to fulfilling God’s purposes in the world, with the elements of bread and wine which are present in communal continuity with the Last Supper of Jesus. We have in such events unique, though temporary, configurations of Christian people in relation to other Christians and of bread and wine taken, blessed, broken and given because of the intention of the historical Jesus. It is believed that God gives himself in a special way to human beings in this situation. This can be expressed as believing that in this distinctive configuration there emerges, in accordance with the divine purpose, a new potentiality of the stuff of the universe. This would parallel the actualisation of potentialities at other stages in the emergence of new complex configurations. Here a new potentiality is mediated to humanity through what the historic Jesus the Christ initiated and effected. God was and is able to act in and through the particular configuration of this corporate event in ways denoted by such terms as ‘presence’ and ‘sacrifice’. One could say, using our earlier terminology for the relation of complexes to their constituents, that in the holistic totality of the Eucharist, with all its elements, God acts within a ‘whole–part’ influence that reconstitutes the Christian person and community (see also p.62).
This way of looking at and speaking of the Eucharist shows that there can be a mutual enrichment between Christian incarnational and sacramental insights on the one hand and the scientific perspective of the evolutionary epic on the other. Each approach remains distinct and autonomous, but their relationship indicates a convergence into a new unified vision, even if the parallel lines meet only at the infinity of the divine. This convergence gives a new relevance5 to Christian sacramental worship, which is now seen not to represent some magical, cabbalistic and esoteric doctrine, but to express, in a communal context, the basic nature of the cosmic process that has brought humanity to this point and in which its creator now invites it to participate consciously and willingly.
Our explorations of the significance and meaning of the world as revealed by the sciences had hitherto principally and inevitably taken us deeper and deeper into that terra incognita where we can begin to discern signs of the nature and mystery of the God who gives existence to all. But now, in exploring the world as sacrament, we have had to cross the boundary into that landscape tilled and nurtured by Christian believers in God. These are they who have had their insights into God and God’s creation shaped and defined by their experience of God as distinctively discerned in the person of Jesus the Christ – and in the devotional and mystical experiences of the community stemming from him. So, from this point on, our exploration needs to go deeper into this territory to discover the resources it has guarded for humanity, resources themselves rooted in the experiences and literature of the Jewish people to whom Jesus himself belonged. We shall find there a rich treasure of images, metaphors and models for our deployment – and our spiritual nourishment.