The paths we have been following, from our knowledge of the world as described today by the sciences towards an understanding of God and of God’s relation to that world, have led to various kinds of insight. The first is represented by the results of inference to the best explanation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming as summarised at the beginning of chapter 7. These inferences were necessarily abstract because of the nature of the process and had to be couched in general terms.
The second kind of insight arose from reflecting on the first and developing (chapters 8, 9) an understanding of God’s immanent presence in the world in terms of theistic naturalism and sacramental panentheism. At that point, a third kind of insight resulted from our going back (chapter 10) to the roots of most of our thinking about God and the world, namely, the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and tradition. We found there a rich resource of concepts concerning God’s relation to the world which are surprisingly apt for representing the insights to which our explorations from science towards God had led us.
As we expounded these concepts – of the Wisdom, Word/Logos and Uncreated Energies of God – again and again we were led to the edges of specifically Christian territory, the understanding of God and of God’s relation to the human part of nature which resulted from the experience of the community stemming from the encounter with the historical Jesus the Christ.1
The New Testament records how Jesus’ first followers experienced him and came to express the significance for them of his teaching, life, death and resurrection. For this purpose, they drew on the concepts that were available in their own sacred literature – for example the Wisdom and Word/Logos of God. Succeeding centuries added to these resources, for example in the evocative idea of the Uncreated Energies of God. Over some four centuries or so, Christian thinkers hammered out a way of least inaccurately representing and speaking about that initial communal experience and its continuation in the life of their diverse communities, the ‘church’. So the church developed its formulations of faith in its creeds, in particular the Nicene Creed. Prominent among this creed’s distinctive affirmations and those of later pronouncements were that Jesus the Christ is the incarnation, in some sense, of God in a human person, and that God is a Trinity-in-Unity subsisting in three ‘persons’. Inevitably, these often controversial works of intellectual clarification and synthesis which led to the classical (often credal) formulations were couched in the terms available to Christian thinkers at the time. These were mostly those of Hellenistic philosophy, both Aristotelian and Neoplatonist, and used language (for example, of ‘substance’) that is not philosophical currency today. However, these early Christian thinkers were largely successful in drawing together in these classical formulations various threads in their cultural inheritance and weaving them into their own experience of God in Jesus the Christ and their communal experience of God (as Holy Spirit). They achieved a synthesis between their inheritance and their experience which, in the language of orthodox Christian doctrinal formulations, is still available to us as a base and a tool in our explorations. Indeed, our mode of exploration now takes the form not so much of discarding these classical formulations but rather of reinhabiting them and giving them new nuances and reference. This process inevitably involves relating them to those ways about thinking about God and God’s relation to the world which we have inferred from our scientific understanding of the world. For we see through the eyes of people at the beginning of the third millennium since the birth of Jesus, to whom science has revealed the deep wonders of the created world to an extent that has altered the whole horizon and context of humanity’s thinking about itself and its place in the world and so of God’s relation to both.
At this point in our exploration, this guide feels himself (if the comparison dare with humility be made) to be somewhat in the position of Virgil, the embodiment of human wisdom who, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, leads the Everyman figure of Dante to the very threshold of Heaven. He took that pilgrim and explorer as far as human intellectual resources could and at that boundary handed him over to the figure of Beatrice, who represents all the agencies that have become for humanity the bearers of images of God and the revealers of God’s presence. She finally led him to the sublime, consummatory vision of the Triune God as ‘the Love that moves the sun and other stars’. The kind of exploration we have been undertaking here too can lead us so far but no further. Our ‘inferences to the best explanation’ of the world described by the sciences led us to conceptual formulations about God and God’s relation to it; reflection on these evoked a theistic naturalism and sacramental panentheism; and we found in the Judaeo-Christian tradition rich resources for imaging these ideas. From this point, the seeker has to ask whether the significance Christians have found in the teaching, life, death and resurrection of the historical Jesus (who appeared to refer to himself primarily as ‘Son of Man’) warrants his being given his early title of ‘Son of God’ – as a human being designated and anointed by God for a unique revelatory role. Subsequently, Christians regarded him as the incarnation in a human person of God’s very Being and Becoming; the Word of God ‘became flesh’2 in him, it was claimed.
Many paths may be taken from here and I have tried elsewhere3 to outline the reasonable basis on which specifically Christian affirmations may be based. Here I can only indicate how I integrate where we have arrived in this exploration with some of the classical formulations of the Christian church. For Jews, Muslims and Christians, God is experienced as transcendent: as totally ‘other’; as the source and ground of all existing entities, structures and processes; as ineffable, whose nature is inherently inexpressible and beyond words. God is also experienced by them as immanent, closer to human beings than their own heartbeats, omnipresent in and to everything that is created. For Christian theists, God was also present in the historical Jesus of Nazareth, in whose teaching, life and self-abandoning death the character of God’s self-offering love was embodied and revealed. All of this God vindicated for them – and continues to do so – by Jesus’ resurrection, in which God revealed explicitly the unique closeness of the relation of Jesus to God his ‘Father’, as he characteristically and intimately called him. This led his first followers, mostly monotheist Jews as they were, to affirm him, initially, as ‘Son of God’, a Messianic title implying that he was ‘anointed’ as a royal Davidic figure uniquely commissioned by God. He was therefore given the designation of Jesus the Christ (Greek Christos = Anointed). Furthermore, against all their monotheistic instincts, they came to affirm that he was in himself a unique human being fully manifesting the true character of God’s own self-offering, suffering Love – as God expressed in a human being insofar as a historical person could do so. To express this the Gospel of John appropriated the image of the Word/Logos, which continuously creates all and is itself a mode of the very Being and Becoming of God (and behind this image lies that of the Wisdom of God). The evangelist says this Word/Logos was ‘made flesh’ (incarnate, embodied) in the historical Jesus. As Christian reflection developed in minds shaped by both Hellenistic philosophy and Hebrew tradition, Jesus of Nazareth, called the ‘Christ’ from the earliest times, came to be seen as the embodiment of God within the created order. He became identified with God’s Word/Logos and with the Wisdom of God, images of that through which God created the world and of the rationality that penetrates everything and is immanent especially in humanity.
That inherent mode of God so embodied came eventually to be designated as ‘God the Son’ as a transmutation of the Messianic–Davidic title of ‘Son of God’ which we have seen had already early been attached to Jesus. Moreover, the Christian experience, both initially and in the succeeding millennia, of encountering God in Jesus the Christ has so often been communal, dynamic and overwhelming in character (recall the ‘rushing mighty wind’ of Acts 2:2) that an enhanced emphasis on God’s immanence in the human community occurred. Hence the active immanence of God has especially been associated with regarding God as ‘Holy Spirit’, where ‘Spirit’ links with words related to ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ (and so to ‘life’).
Hence the Christian experience of God is not only as transcendent and immanent, but also as incarnate in the historical Jesus – a threefold experience and manifestation of God in God’s encounter with humanity. These various nuances are encapsulated in the triple description of the Christian experience of God:
Transcendent |
God as Father |
Creator; the ultimate source and origin of all being and becoming |
Incarnate |
God as Word/Logos/Son |
Redeemer and Liberator; the self-expression of God within creation, and manifested fully in Jesus the Christ |
Immanent |
God as Holy Spirit |
Sanctifier and Unifier of human beings according to the likeness of Jesus the Christ, and dynamically energising all created being and becoming |
This way of schematising the Christian experience of God is, of course, too wooden and structured to articulate the fullness and richness of its variety and depth. It is important to recognise that in all these modalities it is the One God who is experienced (hence my use of the phrase ‘God as ...’). Nevertheless these broad distinctions have been widely recognised and indeed most Christian theologies have gone further. They have affirmed that this differentiation is related to one within God’s inner Being and Becoming and that three distinctive ‘persons’ (L persona)4 within the one Godhead may be said to exist. Hence the use of the phrases ‘God the Father’, ‘God the Son’, ‘God the Holy Spirit’.
How to avoid such affirmations spilling over into tri-theism and still to maintain the unity of the Godhead has been a perpetual challenge to Christian thought. I prefer to be non-assertive about the nature of any differentiation within the divine Being and Becoming, willing to accept that it is threefold but not to speculate about the relationship of the three to each other. The triple nature of Christian experience certainly points to a threefoldness in the modes of Being and Becoming of God, but I prefer to remain reticent about any more positive, ontological affirmations concerning the, by definition, ineffable and inaccessible Godhead.
Furthermore, for Christian theists, all of what Jesus the Christ was experienced as and found to be has shown us what is possible for humanity. He can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity. In Jesus the Christ, Christians affirm, there was a divine act of new creation because the initiative was from God, within human history, within the responsive human will of Jesus inspired by the outreach of God into humanity – ‘God as Holy Spirit’. Jesus the Christ is thereby seen, in the context of the whole complex of events in which he participated, as the paradigm of the self-offering love that God intends for all human beings to embody. Human beings are thereby revealed to have the potential to respond to, be open to, and become united with God who is Love. In this perspective, Jesus the Christ represents the consummation and apogee of the divine creative process which God has been effecting in and through the world in the process described by the epic of evolution.
Our exploration has, inevitably in view of the limitations and social milieu of the author, been formulated in terms that to some may seem to be excessively, and so too exclusively, Christian. However, the way our understanding of God’s relation to the world has been developed here now allows an inclusive interpretation of the central themes in Christian belief, which may be amenable to those of other faiths. For it is God as Word/Logos who is believed to be incarnate, embodied in the historical Jesus the Christ – and God as Word/Logos has been continuously active throughout creation at all times and in all places. So what Jesus the Christ manifested is what is universal and perennial. It existed long before the historical Jesus and now continues to exist eternally, for, according to Christian belief, Jesus was taken into the life of God in his resurrection and ascension. Although for Christians Jesus is the unique, historical embodiment of God as Word/Logos, this does not preclude God as such being expressed in other people, cultures and times. Who dare affirm that God was not at work expressing Godself, God as Word/Logos, in other times and places to reshape humanity through the great founders of other religions and in the continued experience of their disciples and followers? From this global perspective, it is the ever-present self-expression in all-that-is of God as Word/Logos that is explicitly, and uniquely historically, revealed in the person of Jesus the Christ. He was and is a particular manifestation of what is the eternal and perennial mode of God’s interaction in, with and under the created order. Hence, what was revealed in Jesus the Christ should also, in principle, be capable of being manifest in other human beings and so in the other world religions. Indeed, it should also be capable of being manifest on other planets, in any sentient, self-conscious, non-human persons inhabiting them who (whatever their physical form) are capable of relating to God. This vision of a universe permeated by the ever-acting, ever-working and potentially explicit self-expression of the divine Word/Logos incarnate in extraterrestrial personal beings has been adumbrated in a poem by Alice Meynell (1847–1922) where ‘Christ’ now designates not the historical Jesus as such but the eternal Word/Logos of God that was incarnate in him on Earth two millennia ago:
Christ in the Universe
With this ambiguous earth
His dealing have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
the lesson and the young Man crucified.
But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How he administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word...
•
•
Nor, in our little day,
May his devices with the heavens he guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or his bestowals there be manifest.
But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.5
For Christians the epic of evolution has been consummated in the incarnation in a human person of the cosmic self-expression of God, God’s Word/Logos – and in the hope this gives to all self-conscious persons of being united with the Source of all Being and Becoming. Indeed, in the second century Irenaeus invited his contemporaries to contemplate
The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ
Who of his boundless love
became what we are
to make us what even he himself is.6
This apparently purely Christian affirmation can have, I am proposing, universal and inclusive intent when the full implications of what the ‘Word of God’ means are taken into account. The Word/Logos that Christians believe was incarnate in the human Jesus cannot be confined in its manifestations to Jesus alone even if he transpires to be a uniquely explicit, historical embodiment. So Christians, indeed all of us, should be ready with humility to hear and to be open to the Word/Logos as it is manifested in other religions as not at all derogating from the Christian revelation.
I therefore hope that the place at which we have arrived in this exploration may turn out to be one from which the seekers of many religions have started and that we all might be prepared to know it ‘for the first time’ – that is, to recognise that, though our imagings of God and of God’s relation to the world have been restricted by our respective traditions, the new vistas presented by the sciences allow us to make inferences that enrich and develop all of them, whatever the cultures in which we are rooted. I have tried to show how this development can be fruitfully and particularly linked to certain images in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I would urge those of all faiths, or of none, to join in a more cooperative, common search by humanity for a clearer and more intimate apprehension of that Ultimate Reality, the God ‘in Whom we live and move and have our being’. Everyone needs to recognise that, though we each have our own distinctive cluster of symbolic, conceptual and imaginative resources, we are all attempting to peer into the depths of that same creative Ultimate Reality.
The world of science has pointed us towards inferring certain appropriate ways – some of them new – of talking about this Ultimate Reality. Since science is a truly global cognitive resource accepted across all cultures, might not these inferences constitute a common pool of resources for the exploration towards God by the seekers of many religious traditions, or of none? To ‘arrive where we started’ by the route signposted by the sciences and to ‘know the place for the first time’ is an opportunity to establish a new, surer, shared base from which the long search of humanity for God might set out. In that search our resources will certainly be richly diverse and usually other than scientific – historical, aesthetic, symbolic, mystical, experiential, philosophical – but at least we might, with our new scientifically informed insights, share a starting point more common than hitherto.