Part XI Significant Figures of the Twentieth Century in Science and Christianity

John Polkinghorne

CHRISTOPHER C. KNIGHT

Biography

John Charlton Polkinghorne, one of the most significant figures in the dialogue between science and theology in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, was born in 1930. Much of his working life has been spent in the University of Cambridge, where as an undergraduate he read mathematics at Trinity College, remaining to work for his doctorate in mathematical physics in the group led by Paul Dirac. After a Harkness fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (where he collaborated with Murray Gell-Mann), he worked for two years as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh before returning, in 1958, to a lectureship in Cambridge. He was promoted to reader in 1965 and to a professorship in mathematical physics in 1968, a position which he held until 1979. During this period he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In his undergraduate years, the distinctive evangelical approach of the (non-denominational) Christian Union played a significant role in Polkinghorne’s religious development, and throughout his career in physics his Christian commitment remained strong. By the late 1970s, it seemed to him that his best mathematical work probably lay behind him, and that an appropriate step would be to offer himself for the ordained ministry of the Anglican Church. Having been accepted for training for that ministry, he resigned his university chair and studied for two years at Westcott House, Cambridge, in the accelerated scheme for ordination preparation available to older candidates. Ordained deacon in 1981 and priest in 1982, he worked first as an assistant curate in Bristol and subsequently as vicar of Blean, in Kent. During this period of parish ministry, Polkinghorne’s first book of thoughts about the relationship between science and theology was published.

While perhaps rather simplistic by the standard of his later theological work, this book – The Way the World Is (Polkinghorne 1983) – made clear that Polkinghorne might have a significant part to play in the new phase of the dialogue between science and theology that had recently been inaugurated by books like Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion (1966) and Arthur Peacock’s Science and the Christian Experiment (1971). This possibility was no doubt a factor in Polkinghorne’s return to Cambridge in 1986 – first as Dean and Chaplain of Trinity Hall and subsequently as President of Queens’ College.

This return to Cambridge allowed Polkinghorne not only the time to pursue the theological agenda outlined in his first book on the science–theology dialogue, but also to carry forward the teaching on that dialogue that Arthur Peacocke had fostered within the university until his recent move to Oxford. In the year of Polkinghorne’s return, his book One World (1986) appeared, soon to be followed by two more volumes, Science and Creation (1988) and Science and Providence (1989). In this trilogy – still perhaps the best introduction to Polkinghorne’s thinking – he not only manifested the extraordinarily effective style of communication that was to characterize all his later work on the science–theology dialogue, but also set out the main outlines of the theology that he was to defend and expand in the more than 20 books that followed.

The Scientist-Theologians

One of these later books – Scientists as Theologians (1996) – had a significant subtitle: A Comparison of the Writings of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne. The appropriateness of such a book lay in the fact that these three writers were not only (as Polkinghorne called them) “scientist-theologians” – people who had started as scientists and had brought their scientific knowledge and commitment to bear on theological issues. In addition, they had become, and were to remain for some years, the three leading figures in the science–theology dialogue. Thus a comparison of their views (albeit inevitably written from Polkinghorne’s own perspective) was of major interest to everyone involved in that dialogue. (Ian Barbour was, in fact, to write a much shorter comparison (Barbour 2010) from his own point of view some years later.) Indeed, in many ways, the work of Polkinghorne is still perhaps best understood in terms of this kind of comparison, since the three manifest many similarities – attributable perhaps to their scientific backgrounds – but also some significant differences.

One of the things that unites the work of all three of these scientist-theologians is a determination to show that our current scientific understanding – including aspects of it that some Christians have found problematical, such as evolutionary theory – is consonant with a commitment to religious faith in general and to the Christian faith in particular. In this sense, there is clearly an apologetic motivation to at least some of their work. Central to this apologetic, for all three, is a rejection of the sort of reductionism in which religious experience and faith are seen as being explicable in purely psychological or biological terms. Each, in his own way, defends the concept of emergence as a way of countering the notion that ultimately the only valid description of any complex system is that which deals with the components of that system at the lowest level of complexity. Each regards the reductionistic methodology of the sciences as valid, but argues that a recognition of the appropriateness of this methodology does not imply that high levels of complexity in the world may be understood fully in terms of the properties of the components of which they are made up. New emergent properties, they argue, arise with growing complexity in the cosmos, and any full appreciation of the created order must recognize that these new emergent levels of complexity have an autonomous aspect.

It may be, as some have suggested, that a fully coherent view of emergence requires a more sophisticated philosophical analysis (of the kind begun by people like Philip Clayton) than these three scientist-theologians provide. Nevertheless, their own perspectives have clearly inspired much of this later and more thorough work, and in apologetic terms their antireductionist stance has been highly effective. Largely as a result of their work, ontological reductionism is now widely seen in Christian circles as no more than a questionable assumption, often adopted through philosophical laziness in much contemporary criticism of religious belief.

Does the lack of a fully convincing analysis of emergence in the scientist-theologians’ work perhaps point to a general weakness in their work, arising from their being under-equipped to grapple adequately with philosophical issues? Some have thought this to be the case, and have asked in particular whether Polkinghorne – perhaps more than the other two scientist-theologians – sometimes deals with complex philosophical issues in too cavalier a manner, regarding them as issues that can be answered simply in terms of his experience as a physicist. However, others have argued that this impression is mistaken and arises only because Polkinghorne has in general been writing for a broad audience, for which too much emphasis on such issues would have been counterproductive. (Certainly he makes regular references to these issues in a way that makes clear that he is aware of them.) Some have, nevertheless, still posed awkward questions of this kind in the light of Polkinghorne’s approach to another position broadly shared by all three scientist-theologians: their view of the “critical realism” that is to be attributed to the languages of science and theology.

All three scientist-theologians argue that scientific and religious languages point to the reality of the world. They share a scientific background in which it is generally assumed that scientific language provides descriptions of reality that relate directly to ontology, and they attribute a comparable sort of “realism” to the language of their faith community. Their view that theological language can be seen as puzzle-solving on the basis of experience, in a way that is comparable to how scientific language is developed, is held by many to be not unreasonable, so that their view of theological language has seemed justifiable. The fact that they are clearly aware of the historical development of scientific language, which makes the adoption of a “naive” realism impossible, has also reassured many that their views are philosophically sound, with the result that their conclusions have been widely accepted. It is inadequate, they all say, to see either scientific or theological language simply as a social construction without genuine reference, and they opt for a sort of realism that is “critical” in the sense of allowing for future development of the sort that Karl Popper spoke of (in the scientific context) in terms of “increasing verisimilitude.”

This kind of argument is, however, a problematical one for many philosophers and theologians, some of whom prefer a purely instrumentalist view of one or both languages, and some of whom (e.g., Knight 2001, 91–106) adopt a critical realism of a rather more subtle kind. In relation to these arguments, some suggest, none of the three scientist-theologians has grappled fully with the philosophical problems of the position that they defend, and of the three, it is perhaps Polkinghorne who manifests the least subtle understanding. While both Peacocke (1984) and Barbour (1976) have clearly grappled with the issues that arise from various philosophical analyses of both scientific and religious language, Polkinghorne’s slogan that “epistemology models ontology” – despite being argued for at length (e.g., Polkinghorne 1991) – arises, in their view, as much from a sort of “gut instinct” as from a comparable grappling with the philosophical issues.

Bottom-Up Thinking and Consonance

In this context, Polkinghorne’s categorization of himself as a “bottom-up thinker” (e.g., Polkinghorne 1994) is clearly a significant factor in his justification of his view. Valid thinking, in both science and theology, does not, for him, start with broad theory but with experience of various kinds. He recognizes that in each case the community that attempts to interpret this experience has an effect on the data that arise from it. So his approach is by no means a simplistic one that fails to acknowledge the theory-laden nature of data and the way in which theoretical concepts in both science and theology are culturally influenced and paradigm-dependent. He insists that it is the surprising nature of the results of such thinking that leads to his belief that these results relate to the ontology of the real world. Scientific findings are sometimes surprising, he says, and therefore so too might theological ones be. We must, he suggests, be open to these surprises when the evidence – approached in a “bottom-up” way – leads us towards them.

Polkinghorne’s attempts at this kind of thinking in theology suggest to some, however, that he may be more open to “surprises” that are congenial to the conservative Christian than to the atheist. (The biblical historians he tends to cite, for example, do not really reflect the breadth of the community of such historians.) In an age in which there has been widespread criticism, from within the Christian community, of the basic understanding which that community has inherited – or at least of the categories through which that understanding has been articulated – it has been surprising to some that while Polkinghorne’s knowledge of theological thinking has increased, his understanding of the Christian faith has remained fundamentally unchanged. While by no means a fundamentalist, he exhibits a trust in the biblical record and in the sort of Protestant version of Nicene orthodoxy with which his adult faith began that many find difficult to understand. Is it only his “bottom-up thinking,” they ask, that has led him to this position? Or has the apologetic component of his work – perhaps in an unconscious way – led him to give greater weight to those aspects of experience that are congenial to an essentially conservative theological outlook?

However we may judge this question, there is undoubtedly a positive aspect to the effect of Polkinghorne’s relatively conservative position, for despite all his talk about bottom-up thinking, he in fact exhibits – especially in his later work – a subtle awareness of the tension between inference from experience and something more subtle and complex. He is, among the scientist-theologians, undoubtedly the one who most clearly perceives the need for a carefully nuanced theological appraisal of competing positions that arise within the science–theology dialogue. While Barbour famously spoke of those approaches that assume real interaction between science and theology as falling into the categories of dialogue and integration, Polkinghorne has spoken in terms of a different categorization: of consonance – something to pursue in his view – and of a more questionable assimilation (into which he sees both Barbour and Peacocke as sometimes falling). His own position, Polkinghorne stresses, is one that argues for consonance between science and theology. Science “does not determine theological thought but constrains it” in the sense that the “scientific and theological accounts of the world must fit together in a mutually consistent way.” More radical approaches than his own, he goes on to say, involve “assimilation” in the sense that they allow “a degree of accommodation of the one to the other that could seem to threaten [theology’s] justified autonomy” (Polkinghorne 1996, 6–7).

Traditional Theological Concerns

In this wariness of allowing too much modification to traditional Christian beliefs on the supposed basis of scientific or other secular insights, there seems, especially in Polkinghorne’s earlier work, to have been an influence on him from the work of Thomas Torrance. However, in his later work Polkinghorne seems in some respects to have moved away from Torrance’s perspectives (with their Barthian overtones) and towards something more subtle and in accordance with the sacramental emphasis of his own Anglican tradition. This is brought out in particular in his book Science and the Trinity (Polkinghorne 2004), which sets his whole way of thinking in its Christian context. Here he speaks, in particular, of the way in which the totality of his Christian ecclesial experience influences his thought. While still defending his earlier notion of the appropriateness of being a bottom-up thinker who “seeks to move from experience to understanding,” in this later work he clearly recognizes the complexity of this experience for the Christian. A substantial part of this experience is, he says, “vicarious, deriving from the acceptance of the accounts of the foundational events and insights recorded in scripture. A further part also comes to us externally, from the testimony of outstanding religious figures.” However, he goes on, “for a living encounter between faith and understanding, there must be an internal resource.” For him, he explains, this “centres on a certain degree of faithfulness in prayer, worship and service. A particularly important part of this experience is located in my regular participation, week by week, in the Eucharistic celebration of the Church. … For me, theological thinking proceeds by a kind of ‘liturgy-assisted logic’” (Polkinghorne 2004, 118–120).

In expanding on this, Polkinghorne cites a figure who has clearly been important to him in the latter part of his career, the German protestant theologian Michael Welker, with whom he has collaborated on a number of occasions, not least in work focused on the Christian eschatological hope (Polkinghorne and Welker 2000; Polkinghorne 2002b). While his perspectives do not always coincide with Welker’s, this collaboration does seem to have had a positive effect on Polkinghorne’s later work, making it theologically more nuanced and rich. In certain respects, however, it may also have reinforced an aspect of Polkinghorne’s approach that was present from the beginning, and which perhaps has its roots in his experience of evangelical Protestantism in early adulthood. This is his focus on Scripture, which he reads in a way that is far from fundamentalist but is still relatively conservative.

It is sometimes said, in this context, that Polkinghorne – with his attempt to hold Scripture, tradition, and reason in a creative tension – is a typically Anglican theologian. However, both his early background and his later collaborative work have possibly meant that, consciously or unconsciously, he interprets this balance in a way that makes the solid, learned Protestantism of people like Welker – reflected in one strand of Anglican theological thinking – more congenial than other strands of that thinking (such as that which has been influenced by neo-Thomism). Informally, at least, Polkinghorne has sometimes claimed as a virtue that his perspectives may not always be in accordance with the tradition of Christian philosophical thinking, but that they are, in his view, “biblical.” In this respect his “Anglican” approach differs in emphasis from the approach of Arthur Peacocke, whose combination of a strong sacramental understanding of the cosmos and openness to new insights in biblical scholarship is perhaps more characteristic of the Anglicanism of their generation.

An example of this leaning towards supposedly biblical perspectives at the expense of the traditional thinking of the post-biblical era may be found in Polkinghorne’s insistence on the wrongness of the classical notion of divine eternity, in which God is seen (as Aquinas put it) as wholly outside the order of time, so that the whole course of time is subject to eternity in one simple glance. As with the other scientist-theologians, this essentially philosophical perspective is discarded by Polkinghorne in favor of the notion of a God who does not know the future. In his rejection of the classical Christian understanding of divine eternity, there are clearly many factors at play, but one of the most significant seems to be his notion of a “personal” God who acts by responding – much as any temporal, created agent must – to events in the world.

Here again, an essentially “biblical” notion – that of a “personal” God who acts in response to events – is upheld at the expense of a traditional but more complex philosophical understanding of the way in which God may be seen as more than personal. What Wesley Wildman has said of Robert J. Russell’s personalistic theism seems here applicable to that of Polkinghorne (to whom Russell is close in his basic views). This kind of theism is, says Wildman, “of the distinctively modern kind, which sprang up when the seeds of the Hebrew Bible’s anthropomorphism germinated in the fertile soil of an increasingly literate culture. … It is a distinctively Protestant deviation from the mainstream Christian view, preferring the Jerusalem to the Athens side of the famous tension that has dominated Christian theology from the beginning.” What happened, Wildman asks, “to the classical doctrines of aseity and immutability, the affirmations that God is self-contained and does not change through acting and feeling? What happened to God as the ground of being or being itself, as pure act and first cause?” How is the holder of this kind of view “to deflect the classical intuition that God as a being can be no God at all but merely an idol of the human imagination?” (Wildman 2006, 166).

Polkinghorne’s answer to such questions has been, essentially, that the classical Christian notion of God is based too much on a flawed philosophy and too little on the revelation of God in Christ. In this, moreover, his position is not significantly different from that of the other scientist-theologians, even though their view of the content of that Christian revelation is less conservative than his. All three are, in fact, willing to set aside aspects of classical Christian philosophical theism, not because of a mistrust of systematic theology, but because of a perception of the need to develop such a theology anew. In the outlines of a systematic theology that each has offered, the differences between them relate primarily to historical and Christological understanding, with Polkinghorne’s “biblical” outlook leading him to be more conservative than the other two scientist-theologians on these issues.

In particular, while Barbour’s theism is strongly influenced by process philosophy (of which Polkinghorne is suspicious), and Peacocke’s involves a rather modified Trinitarianism (affected by Geoffrey Lampe’s thinking about the Holy Spirit), Polkinghorne remains a staunch defender of Nicene Trinitarianism (albeit with a sense of modesty about what can be said about the Trinity, which not all defenders of a Trinitarian theology share). On the subject of Christ himself, Polkinghorne is a defender of a traditional position. For Barbour, the intent of classical Christological doctrines is now best preserved through the categories of relationship and history, so that Jesus is understood by him primarily as a man responsive to God’s call. He finds helpful Peacocke’s use of evolutionary categories to develop a contemporary Christology, so that just as Christ is, for Peacocke, a new emergent in history, so for Barbour he may be seen as a continuation and intensification of what had occurred previously. For Polkinghorne, however, these approaches by the other scientist-theologians are fundamentally flawed, just as is their rejection of the notion of Jesus’ virginal conception and their questioning of his bodily Resurrection. Polkinghorne defends the notion of a pre-existent second person of the Trinity becoming incarnate with two natures, and – though by no means a biblical fundamentalist – he accepts, far more readily than the other two, the basic integrity of the biblical texts that he sees as fundamental to this defense.

Polkinghorne’s defense of traditional theological perspectives is not, however, based solely on theological arguments of the sort that would be common in any conservative Christian milieu. The scientific and philosophical perspectives that he brings to his arguments are often both ingenious and engaging. In relation to the Christian eschatological hope, for example, his use of the notion of the soul as an information-bearing pattern that can be re-embodied in a new kind of matter and time has proved, for many, an extremely helpful notion. Similarly, in his reflection on the Resurrection, his notion of laws of nature as both “reflections of the faithfulness of the Creator who ordains them” and, at the same time, “not as immutable necessities, but as holding simply for as long as the Creator determines that they should do so” (Polkinghorne 2002a, 46), ties in intriguingly with his notion of Christ’s Resurrection as a foretaste of an eschatological future with a new set of such laws.

Divine Action

Polkinghorne’s acute intelligence is also brought to bear in the particular model of divine action that he proposes, which is of the kind that – in order to avoid a “God of the gaps” approach – seeks to identify some sort of “causal joint” between God and the world, through which God can act without setting aside the laws of nature. While his theological motivation for attempting this kind of model is similar, as we have noted, to that of Robert John Russell, Polkinghorne’s scientific insight into quantum mechanics leads him to reject the specific model that Russell and others have developed from the earlier work of William Pollard, which focuses on quantum indeterminacy. Polkinghorne’s focus is, rather, on the way in which both quantum mechanics and chaotic phenomena point, in his view, to a more “subtle and supple” universe than these phenomena in themselves indicate – one in which the “cloudy unpredictabilities of physical process” can be interpreted as “the sites of ontological openness” (Polkinghorne 1996, 40).

What is interesting here is that Polkinghorne does not base himself on scientific insights as such. By using deterministic chaos theory to posit a non-deterministic aspect of the universe – as yet unknown to science – he is in fact extrapolating from scientific insights in a way that is motivated by theological considerations. His understanding of “the way the world is” is clearly, here, a scientifically informed account of “the way the world ought to be” if his fundamental theological instincts are correct. However, as we have seen from the perceptive comments of Wesley Wildman, these theological instincts are of a very particular kind, and are by no means shared by all Christians. The nature of God and of his relationship to the creation are understood in a number of ways within the Christian world, and Polkinghorne’s type of theism – while at present the predominant one within the science–theology dialogue – is not the only one.

Indeed, even within this broad and currently dominant stream of thinking, there are interesting variations, not only in relation to aspects of Trinitarian and Christological formulation (of the sort already noted) but also in relation to the broader relationship between God and the world. The most important of these variations, as they impinge on the science–religion dialogue, are brought out by Polkinghorne’s criticisms of two aspects of the understanding of Arthur Peacocke, one of which Polkinghorne thinks distances God too much from the world, and one of which brings God too close. The first of these criticisms is leveled at Peacocke’s sense that God’s “personal” involvement with the world is restricted to what Peacocke calls God’s “providential” action, as distinct from his action as Creator (which latter he interprets entirely naturalistically). For Polkinghorne, this kind of understanding leans towards a kind of deism. Over and above what he calls divine action in its “impersonal, relatively deistic mode” he says, it is necessary to recognize examples of “Creatorly action in a more personal mode”; otherwise, he thinks, one will be guilty of an “implicit deism … whose nakedness is only thinly covered by a garment of personalized metaphor” (Polkinghorne 1994, 78–79). The second type of criticism focuses on Peacocke’s panentheism – his sense that the world is in some sense “in God.” This too, for Polkinghorne poses a threat to a proper understanding of the relationship between God and the world (and here too the difference between the two men has major implications, not least on understandings of divine action (see Peacocke and Clayton 2004)).

Natural Theology

How, then, is Polkinghorne’s theological work ultimately to be understood and evaluated? One approach might be to see him as someone who fits much more clearly than he himself might recognize as a proponent of natural theology. He himself tends to use this term in the rather narrow sense in which it is defined in terms of attempts to “prove” the existence of God, either through purely philosophical arguments (as in the scholastic period) or through design arguments (of the kind associated with early modern science). He himself has seen such attempts as deeply flawed, but has nevertheless defended a more modest “revived and revised” natural theology, in which, for example, considerations related to the anthropic cosmological principle are seen as giving rise to “a meta-question … to which theism provides a persuasive (but not logically coercive) answer” (Polkinghorne 1991, 80). However, in the wider historical sense of the term natural theology – which Polkinghorne actually points towards in speaking of such a revision – he may arguably be seen as a remarkable example of a natural theologian.

What I mean by this is that Polkinghorne’s characteristic approach exhibits significant parallels with the practice of natural theology that Jaroslav Pelikan has spoken of as characteristic of the pre-scholastic period, and especially of the three Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. This natural theology was, for Pelikan, essentially an encounter between Christian conviction and the philosophy and science of a particular epoch and culture. It involved what he calls “natural theology as apologetic” and “natural theology as presupposition” (Pelikan 1993). The first of these categories relates to making the Christian faith seem reasonable in relation to the philosophical and scientific understanding of a particular period. The second relates to the way in which the semi-instinctive philosophical and scientific presuppositions of a particular epoch and culture inevitably affect the articulation of religious faith, even though this faith ultimately has roots less in apologetic argument than in the experience of the individual and of the historical faith community with which that individual identifies. These two categories of natural theology did not, for the Cappadocians, exist in isolation from one another, but there was, inevitably, a complex interplay between them.

The same interplay of apologetic and presupposition, it might be argued, has been characteristic of the development of Polkinghorne’s work, for the scientific and philosophical understandings our own era have, in a way that exhibits significant parallels with the work of those Fathers of the Church, clearly both influenced him and been used by him in his defense and articulation of the Christian faith. The same might also be said of the other scientist-theologians, and indeed Arthur Peacocke once spoke of his hope that, through the modern science–theology dialogue, “a new coherent theology might emerge … and so continue in our own day what, for example, the Cappadocian Fathers … did in their time in relation to contemporary philosophy and science” (Peacocke 1986, 128).

Might one, in the light of this comment, perhaps push the comparison with the Cappadocians further? Just as there were three Cappadocian Fathers, who worked largely on the basis of a common understanding – but with significant differences of stress and of willingness to speculate beyond the bounds of accepted views – so there have been three principal scientist-theologians, and their work has had something of the same character as theirs, at least in its basic interplay of natural theology as apologetic and natural theology as presupposition. Might one, perhaps, see in Peacocke’s work something of the speculative adventurousness of Gregory of Nyssa, with Polkinghorne as the more cautious and conservative Basil, and Barbour as the Nazianzen in-between? Certainly the parallels should not be pushed too far, but the comparison is an interesting one.

Of course, the importance of Polkinghorne and the other two scientist-theologians may ultimately not match that of the Cappadocians in Christian history, since the sort of synthesis which these modern scientist-theologians have sought has not yet been fully developed. Moreover, if such a synthesis does eventually emerge, it may, some think, be based on different foundations from those they have laid. Even if their work is judged simply as an inspiration to attempt a Cappadocian-type synthesis, however, their work has an importance that can hardly be overestimated. And in this endeavor, Polkinghorne’s contribution has been an immense one, especially in relation to the need to demonstrate that contemporary scientific understanding may be seen as consonant not only with theism but with the fundamental categories of Christian belief. In the history of Christian theology, his place is an assured one.

References

Barbour, Ian. 1966. Issues in Science and Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Barbour, Ian. 1976. Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper & Row.

Barbour, Ian. 2010. John Polkinghorne on Three Scientist-Theologians. Theology and Science, 8, pp. 247–264.

Knight, Christopher C. 2001. Wrestling with the Divine: Religion, Science, and Revelation. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

Peacocke, Arthur. 1971. Science and the Christian Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peacocke, Arthur. 1984. Intimations of Realty: Critical Realism in Science and Theology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Peacocke, Arthur. 1986. God and the New Biology. London: J. Dent & Sons.

Peacocke, Arthur and Clayton, Philip, eds. 2004. In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1993. Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Polkinghorne, John. 1983. The Way the World Is: The Christian Perspective of a Scientist. London: Triangle.

Polkinghorne, John. 1986. One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 1988. Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 1989. Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 1991. Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 1994. Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 1996. Scientists as Theologians: A Comparison of the Writings of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 2002a. Eschatological Credibility: Emergent and Teleological Processes. In Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker, eds. Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 43–55.

Polkinghorne, John. 2002b. The God of Hope and the End of the World. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 2004. Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John and Welker, Michael, eds. 2000. The Ends of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press.

Wildman, Wesley. 2006. Robert John Russell’s Theology of God’s Action. In Ted Peters and Nathan Hallanger, eds. God’s Action in the World: Essays in Honour of Robert John Russell. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 147–170.