Christus Victor!

I've been doing some thinking about the meaning of Jesus's ministry and death (not because I've got nothing else to do, but because this stuff really matters to me, believe it or not). This gets a little repetitive, so be warned.

Was it something completely unplanned on God's part, something he came up with at the last minute? Or did he always intend to do what he did in Christ? And do the OT prophecies actually point forward to Christ, or predict his life?

I think God from the beginning intended to bring about his purposes for creation, and humans within creation, by becoming part of the creation. Israel was chosen as the vessel, so to speak, to receive his revelations and develop an actual relationship with him. Israel was supposed to be the light of the world, the nation to show all nations what it means to serve God. But Israel could never do this perfectly, so God himself had to become human for a truly perfect life to be lived. Whether this was a change in the tactics--a response to Israel's inability--or part of the scheme all along is a question beyond me, but like I said, I think God always desired to become one of his creatures so as to fully unite mortality with immortality. The context of Israel produced a human in whom God would be able to dwell. I don't think Jesus came full equipped with memories of his life in heaven and full-blown empirical knowledge of his special relationship to deity. Rather, I think he was a "normal" person who felt called out by God to live out the story of Israel and complete its journey in his own actions. He then appropriated to himself the scriptures of Israel and understood himself to be the one who would be for Israel what it had long called for: a representative, a suffering servant, a high priest, a true king. The prophets and psalmists had cried out to God for these things and had suffered under evil, so to be true to his covenant promises God "must" in a sense undergo the same experiences as his people, take it all on himself and by submitting to the powers of mortality and "darkness" undermine and defeat them...however that actually works out in practice. Maybe death is not an ontological force to be defeated, but rather our fear of the idea of death keeps us from seeing beyond it into the reality of God's new world; so Jesus becomes the fixed point onto which we place our hope and enter into the relationship with God that actually allows us to receive his resurrecting power (i.e., God always had power over death, but he "transferred" it to Christ in the sense that Christ is the measure now of who receives the new life...whatever). Another complication is trying to figure whether God chose to act through Jesus because Jesus was such a pure adherent to Torah or whatever--i.e., Jesus was chosen as the Messiah because he chose to be the Messiah (adoptionism)--or rather the converse, that Jesus felt led to do this and was empowered to do this because he had been chosen to be the true vessel of God and God dwelt in him from the beginning. The interplay between the human Jesus and the Word of God at work in him is subtle beyond our power of reckoning, but I do think that in his earthly ministry Jesus was not 100% sure he was the chosen one, or the Son of God, but he felt it so strongly that he went through the whole thing on faith, and was proven right by the resurrection. And whatever the reality of causation, whether Jesus did what he did because it was part of God's plans all along or God decided to use Jesus because Jesus was such a good guy (and when I put it like that, I really start to see how unconvincing the idea; does God choose anyone based on previous merit? doubtful), the way I understand the Gospels is that Jesus understood himself as and most certainly was the true Temple, the central point of God's presence in the world, the place that bridged our world with God's.

But no one neat little theory can do justice to the whole complexity of all these questions. Still, I believe strongly that the OT, while all its prophecies and psalms do not exist solely to refer forward to Christ, does point to Christ in that it points, in hope, toward one who will bring Israel's story to its conclusion and stand in its place as the representative of God in the world. The words of the OT are not planted by God in human heads; they are products of human hearts struggling to better understand God and his purposes, and their faith in God and love for him as a just Father led them to speak of such things as the Messiah, and the resurrection. It could be argued that God gave Israel these things because they asked for it. But that seems a little silly. Rather I think it was always part of God's designs to "come down" himself as a savior and to be true to his covenant promises even beyond death, which means a resurrection. But Israel's realization of these things was slow in coming. Still, God underwent what he did through the person of Jesus because Israel had underwent those things. Jesus's trials, in a real sense, are the ultimate answer to the prayers of Israel, the pleas of David in the wilderness. Of course God would have known that any people would suffer in life, so whichever nation he chose would experience hardship, and if he were going to truly become one of them he too would have to undergo hardship; in that case it's not a question of whether God himself must suffer, but rather what manner of suffering he must endure. It must coincide with the sufferings of the chosen people. So there's a complicated interplay of God's predetermined plans and the unfolding drama of human existence. To a great extent I think God lets humans determine the course of how his designs will play out, even if the "general framework" is set from the beginning.

Jesus stood at the high point of Israelite understanding of God. Of course he was the greatest and final prophet of the nation of Israel (the nation was for all intents and purposes disbanded within a generation after his life), and he ministered to the afflicted in fulfillment of the long tradition of anguished supplication to God for the healing of the sick, hope to the poor, etc. He embodied the crystallization of all that Israel had hoped for. A true Jubilee--remission of debts--and a true age of renewal came upon the land. The spiritual exile was over, for those who would accept the King who was to lead the faithful out of captivity. So Jesus filled several very important OT roles. But on a more general level, Jesus was the first (only?) person to fully grasp what God is like, and what God demands. So Jesus's principal mission was to take it on himself to do what God demands, to be like God; and knowing from the scriptures that God's faithfulness to Torah extends beyond death, Jesus was convinced that if he lived exactly according to the principles of Torah, God would be faithful to him beyond death--i.e., raise him. Jesus did, and God did. Part of that obedience was to trust God, to not take matters into one's own hands, to let God work things out. Jesus either a) got in trouble with the authorities "by accident" and did not retaliate when they decided to do away with him, or b) purposefully delivered himself into their hands to make a point that one need not fear death when one trusts in God. I like the latter. So God appoints Jesus to be the one in whom "salvation" is achieved. Jesus was faithful to the letter of the law and put his whole trust in God. The cosmic Christ, raised by God, stands as the bridge between God and humanity. We trust in Jesus, who is closer to us than the vague idea of "God", who is one of our own, and because of the power conferred to him by God, our trust in his name secures our salvation, our hope of resurrection. So Jesus becomes the means by which God makes new life possible. Resurrection, life beyond the mortal realm, was always part of God's plan. But Jesus as the faithful Messiah became the one through whom that plan was put into actual effect. Our hope of new life, our belief in it, is what saves us, but our belief must rest in the actual new life offered by the actual creator. Jesus is the representative of that hope and reality. He is the fixed point upon which our faith must rest. Resurrection, new life, was always there, so to speak. The only thing keeping us from it is our own ignorance and fear (and of course moral insufficiencies).

Another way to look at it: God must overcome the power of death. Death holds a dominion over people and keeps us away from God. Only God can defeat death, and that only by himself experiencing it. But taking it on himself he can "exhaust" its power as it were. He can get beneath it and uproot it and take control of it. So God chooses a human to experience death through. It is his will that this human suffer and die. Jesus realizes this is the will of God for him, even if he doesn't understand why it must be so. And he believes, from the scriptures, that God will be faithful to his obedience and trust beyond death, and will raise him. That is the hope Jesus clings to. God says, "I want you to die, that is my will for you." Jesus follows that, and the rest of God's laws, to the very last, perfectly. Through his death God conquers death, and the resurrection of Christ is the first sign of death's defeat. So the resurrection of Christ is God's keeping of his promises to his faithful servant, as well as God's great victory over the powers of mortality. The two things are very closely bound, because the point of being obedient to God all along was to achieve God's purposes for the world. Israel was chosen to carry God's plans ahead toward fruition, and those plans always were about bringing this world into the next. Torah-faithfulness and cosmic redemption go together and cannot be separated.

I think both of these perspectives can help us get a grasp on things. In the first, Jesus is more of an exemplary, one who shows us what to hope for and how to live. But more than that, he himself becomes the object of our hope and the strength of our living, because he himself was a perfect servant of God. God is the end of Torah-obedience, of a pure and holy life. Jesus shows us how to go about entering a relationship with God, but at the same time he himself becomes the physical representative of God, the image on which to fix our hope and aim our lives. So the pattern he sets toward God is now taken up by Christians and lived for Christ, because Christ is the channel through which the relationship of God to humans is made actual. In the second, Jesus's power comes from being the embodiment of God, and death is some ontological force to be overcome rather than an idea, the fear of which must be overcome. I think death is something of both of these. Death was never meant to last, and God always planned for us to pass through it to the new world. But perhaps somewhere along the way we lost sight of that reality, and needed a new point to focus our hope on; or else we never knew about it until the Jews began speculating on it and Jesus proved it. Death was part of the created order but the only way God could bring us out of it was to defeat death itself. Or rather, the only way for us to move beyond death was to put our hope in God, and Jesus stands as the evidence of that hope and the source of strength to maintain that hope. Jesus is the way in which we come to realize the true measure of God's faithfulness and power. God always had power over death, then transferred it to Jesus as the one who is the measure of what it takes to receive the new life. The new life can only be received through free acceptance of God's will; and the way we now accept God's will for ourselves is by surrendering to Christ, who is the only one to completely do all God asked of him and who now reigns over life and death. The question remains, was Jesus able to completely obey God only because he was God, or did he manage it himself and get rewarded for it........or a strange mixture of both?? That's a question for another day.

A remaining subject, one I will have to deal more with later: what does it mean to say that Jesus "died for sins"? Well, "sin" in Jewish thinking is that which runs counter to the Law. And the Law is set up to point humans on the path to a Godly life. No human can actually meet all the demands of Torah, so sacrifices are needed to compensate for the failure. The idea of an angry god being personally affronted and insulted by sin and demanding blood to satiate his wrath is, admittedly, a little off-putting; rather we should think of sacrifice as the means by which the faith community of Israel expressed its recognition of its own failures and its continuing devotion to God and the covenant of righteousness. The sacrifices were not themselves ontologically effective but symbolically meaningful. So the sacrifice of God is a sign that God himself is committed to the covenant, that he is willing to give up something of his own in the cause of holiness, and unlike the human rituals it was efficacious and actually brought about a change, actually made the way to life accessible by giving people a source of spiritual energy to stake their lives on and become renewed by. The sacrifice was also a way for the community to set aside its guilt, recognize it and banish it in a symbolic act, so in Christ all our guilt is completely permanently done away with. Our failures are finally compensated for. You may say, "I don't have guilt. I've never done anything worth feeling terrible over." Hmmm...well, part of encountering the true God is realizing how far beyond our own ideas of perfection and goodness he actually is. Jesus himself said, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but the Father." By our very natures as created beings, as creatures produced by evolutionary chaos, we are imperfect and incomplete. So even if you've never done anything really "bad", still you haven't done anything "good" enough to be on a level with God. Our natures simply do not mix with his, like oil with water; water does not choose to not mix with the oil, but by virtue of what they are "in default" there can be no mingling. So the greatest person in the world--Gandhi, say--is still not good enough to warrant an immortal nature. And most of us have actually done bad things. The race as a whole has committed unthinkable atrocity and dug itself into a deep hole of blindness and madness for its whole career. But Christ was more than mere mortal, and by his strength and faithfulness achieved something no one else could have. His strength is conferred to us that we may strive for the true will of the true God. We do not have to worry about striving for Torah perfection on our own strength; rather we rely upon the strength of Christ to bridge the divide for us and bring us into that sphere of holiness where our souls are compatible with the presence of God and capable of fully entering into relationship with the Creator, a relationship that transforms and allows our beings to be transferred into the new world. And yet we still fail, even as Christians, to meet the standards of godliness in this life. But here's what counts: first, our willingness to try, our efforts for the kingdom which prepare the way for the new creation within the present--because that's what salvation is really about, being called into Christ's service to build for God's tomorrow, so our "works" are important and seal our place within the covenant; Christ's "righteousness" is not magically imputed to us so that we become holy and pure, but rather, as he achieved the highest end and stands on a "cosmic" all-embracing level, he can bestow upon us his Spirit to take part in the work he began. God desires relationship with his creatures. The individual relationship stands at the heart of the whole scheme of creation. The destiny of reality is bound up in intimate, personal communion. That can only happen if the creatures comply and give their willing assent. But our own ignorance, pride, etc. gets in the way. So Christ steps in to show us the road to walk and to give us clarity and strength "to will and to work". That willingness, coupled with the atoning work of Christ in uniting humanity and divinity, with his perfecting of human faithfulness to Torah through divine power, covers over the remaining imperfections in human nature. We are no longer barred from God by our lack of goodness, by our fears and uncertainties, our stupidity. The process of real "becoming" begins. Upon entering into Christ we truly become "one" with him--humanity in its basic state is unable to reach the level of deity; in Christ Jesus, humanity does reach the level of deity (or deity reaches down to the level of humanity, whatever); Christ then is the ultimate representative of humanity; so all humanity can stand within him as a single body, and the individual discrepancies are lost in the overwhelming virtue of his glory--and we as one are taken into the presence of God by the power of Christ's lordship. That lordship is the agency by which God achieves his purposes for creation; it's not through the whole race or a nation that the world is transformed (Torah was set up to show the people of God what a truly godly world would be like, in a sense), it's through one Man, and by pledging our allegiance to that Man we become partakers in the kingdom project. The work is done in Christ: but there is still much work to be done. It's infinitely complicated and way beyond our agencies of comprehension. But remember this much: it's called grace, and it works.

The sign of the gods

An appendix to my last note that quickly got so long that I figured it could stand as its own post. It deals more with evolutionary science and religion.

It seems tenable to entertain the notion that morality could be "traced back" to the evolutionary mechanism, and in theory at least somehow proven to be a product of natural development. Morality most likely did not just appear in the head of the first human, by miraculous intervention.I don't think even the most conservative Christian would say that (they would say that God wrote it on our hearts from the moment of Creation....what would that look like though, I wonder, if we were to "find" the moral law written on us? Could science ever map out the chemical reactions in our brains that give rise to morality?) Nor is morality necessarily tied to belief in God or gods. Atheists certainly can have a sense of moral imperative, feeling that as rational creatures we are by our very nature required to treat one another with decency and justice. I have seen the claim made that without God, morality makes no sense. This is not true in my opinion. Most sane people feel some sort of inclination to do good. As for why atheists feel they must, it could be said that it's because it's simply the right thing to do. (Christians should seek such altruism--too often I think our motives for doing good are based on ideas of reward and retribution. Rather we should desire what is good because God is good; we should act with love toward our neighbors because we are all humans and that is what it means to be human, not because, at least primarily, we fear the wrath of God.)

We come to a worldview dilemma here. First off, I'm not so sure science will ever pinpoint exactly where in the development of life a "moral fiber" came into play. I rather think the inclination is there from the start, and only comes to fruition with the higher rational life forms. Moreover, religion is not needed for ethical behavior to be important; rather it sheds new light on the mystery. And the mystery is this: why should there be this notion of right and wrong in the first place--especially when in the free-for-all animal kingdom, not looking after your own skin can get you killed? I'm sure atheistic scientists will strive to show how morality is somehow conducive to survival, and was thus part of nature's designs to enhance the lifespan of creatures; or that evolution is intrinsically oriented toward moving beyond mere survival into something deeper. It is my estimation that morality is more useful for enhancing the meaningfulness and beauty of life. From a strictly naturalistic basis, in which the primary goal is, in fact, to survive, value seems somewhat pointless. But if the highest aim is to enjoy existence then it makes perfect sense. And if the purpose of relationships based on morality and trust and honor and self-sacrifice is to enrich the experience, to satisfy some innate craving for intimacy....well, who says that's the purpose? Evolution? Why should that be the case?

If atheists would concede my point that morality and rational relationships are intended for making life more valuable, and that this seems to be what natural selection works toward, rather than simply the endurance of species, where, I wonder, would they place the source of "intention"? They would probably just be content to say that evolution happens to work out that way, it's "set up" for that from initiation. But we would here be allowing evolution a sort of willfulness that I'm not so sure the blind mechanism really warrants. (Of course that's what pure naturalism already does, it holds that evolution is all there is and it alone determines the route it will take...purely by chance.) Besides that I think it should be hard to demonstrate, biologically or psychologically, that this is the chief aim of evolution. Rather, it should take an appeal to some metaphysical factor to show that evolution was designed for such ends. And again, we are faced with the conundrum of why natural selection should so value minds that can appreciate value, why humans as value-cognizant entities have risen to such prominence.

Of course it can be rebutted that humans have survived because of their intellectual prowess; morality and appreciation of beauty are lagniappe, offshoots of cognitive complexity. And it is no real surprise that trust-based relationships contribute to stability within a society. But what if after all science comes to show--and I have no idea what this would look like--that the evolutionary process is served by morality and value-recognition? That these abstracts somehow stimulate the process? What if relationships in which both parties are willing to die for one another are what will carry our species forward? I would think that in the instinct-based animal kingdom, sacrifice isn't to be prized above self-preservation. So if it turns out that sacrificial attitudes actually move the human species further up the evolutionary ladder...I know it sounds like I'm flip-flopping, saying that survival is not the main point, but at the same time it really is. I'm trying to cover all bases and potentialities here. Even if it is found that rational, moral species are better fitted for survival, that does not definitively prove that survival is the be-all and end-all. We could just as easily say that the primary goal of evolution is to produce a species that can enjoy ethical relationships for a long time; the survival of the species would then serve a secondary role to the agencies of morality and rationality--i.e., the particular species is made to last so long so that it can fully develop those agencies. Furthermore, if it is shown that morality and the desire for relationships and the appreciation of beauty are all chance by-products of the mental fine-tuning undergone by hominids to prolong life, and thus that these elements of personhood are not evolutionary necessary (perhaps not even desirable with regard to survival), that yet leaves us with the question of why we should ever feel these urges. Why would natural selection produce in us such strong inclinations if they were largely irrelevant to natural selection's designs? And if we conclude that those inclinations are indeed central to the whole process, we arrive at the fundamental worldview issue of ultimate purpose.

The point, then, is this: here we get down to this issue of purpose, and atheists will attribute all the developments to nature's whim, or nature's nature if you will; theists will go further and attribute all the developments to the will of God. It cannot be stressed enough, science can only say what happens. And if it turns out that natural selection is more disposed to moral, relational creatures than creatures that just kill and hide for the pitiful duration of their existences--in other words, if it can be shown that the "laws" of the universe are so arranged, that it is true that moral strength, aesthetic refinement, and "love" best serve nature's "purposes" and accommodate ideal evolutionary growth, whatever that may be--still that says nothing about why that must be the case in the first place. That does not rule out the possibility that there is a God who prefers, or who is himself disposed to, righteous communion and appreciation of beauty, so that the universe he creates is "geared" toward producing morally responsible, intentionally relational, value-aware creatures. Rather, the fact of nature's preference for such can be seen as pointing away from brute physical processes to an external "force" of personality.

I say that nature prefers this because all the variables in the structure of the universe are in the exact precarious positions necessary for life to thrive on this one solitary world; and the evolutionary drive has in a real sense "ended", or culminated, with us. I made the point earlier about the animal kingdom being based largely on the instinctual drive of kill-or-be-killed. That was mostly just to make a negative point, that maybe mere survival is not an end unto itself. All the stuff about "survival of the fittest" can be seen as preliminary to rational sophistication. The fact that the majority of species operate on this brutal system could be used to uphold the theory that natural selection does indeed work toward survival primarily. It could be countered either that a) this majority is to be expected, because rational agents developed to the degree of sophistication required for morality, aesthetic taste, and self-sacrificing relationships are the result of very precise "tinkerings", so difficult to get just right that it is to be expected that only a few species could ever get close and only one could ever master it, or b) survival only seems to be the most important factor, when in fact all the struggles between creatures to find permanent niches was a set-up for the arrival of a group that could finally settle down and really enjoy life, focusing on the construction of meaningful relationships and taking joy in the grandeur perceived in the universe. If the latter is the case, then we could only know it by "faith", by recognition of the intentional purpose present in creation; and that recognition, that faith-assumption, comes from an encounter with, let's say, the Divine, or at least openness to the possibility of divinity.

It all begins on your starting assumptions. Atheists end at, "This is how the universe works--this what it wants, this is what it aims to achieve"; theists go further and say, "The universe works like that because it is the work of a loving God." If atheists can attribute so much power to the impersonal will of the universe, why can we not suppose that there is something at work in the universe that is personal, and is distinct from the universe itself? And as for morality, we can never come to the point where we can confidently rule out the possibility that our moral understanding is in accordance to some external principle. Indeed, many people for many millennia have felt that the moral law was ingrained into reality by the decree of deity, just as many have believed that there is a reality external and distinctive to our own, a world of spirit. Why would the evolutionary drive foster this odd idea if there were not some measure of actual truth to it? And if it is a fluke, why hasn't it gone away? The faith tradition is a powerful voice, and should be heeded with seriousness.

Yes, our ideas of what is right and what is wrong certainly arise from within us: they stem from an awareness of what makes for relationships and what destroys relationships. We could say that we are "wired" for rational engagement and have at our disposal the means to make it happen. But here we are again at the issue of why evolution should work toward relationality in the first place. The further back we go, the more and more weight evolution has to bear, until we are almost pressed to say it has a mind of its own, unless we are willing to look outside the system. When we look at the fact of rationality, morality, relationship, value, etc., the whole picture begins to look suspiciously rigged--from a certain perspective, of course. One that is open to the idea that there is intentional purpose behind everything. And from the theistic worldview we can confidently say that we have a moral passion because God is holy; and that relationships are desirable because God is relational. So atheists can say that morality is an evolutionary capacity for sustaining relationships, and they can say that relationships are "favored" by evolution, whatever that means. They can say that ethics-based community happens to be what advances the evolutionary drive. And we as believers can affirm, that is true because of who God is, and the universe, in this regard, reflects his essence.

For the record, I don't think the highest aim of all things is to lead a long, happy life, full of good behavior, friends and family, romance, artistic indulgence, hard work, cultivation of the earth, wisdom. These things certainly arise from the advent of rationality and morality, but they are secondary to the real reason any of us is here in the first place. As humans we are called to look beyond the mundane and seek the Creator himself. What joys we experience here should instill in us a deeper love and humility for the goodness of God. They should strengthen our resolve and encourage us to grow closer to our heavenly Father. Our perception of beauty, our understanding of morality, our communion with one another, all serve to remind us of what we are and what we are summoned unto, enrich our appreciation of the handiwork of the Almighty. So the point is not to merely live as long as you can: rather, the ultimate purpose of life is to encounter God in worship and adoration, to receive his love and return it to him by whatever capacity nature has bestowed upon us individually. And whatever science can determine about what the universe is working toward, or what natural selection favors, or what evolution produces, we as the people of faith know that we live to glorify the Creator; and this knowledge does not arrive as a logical conclusion at the end of a long journey of intellectual contemplation or investigation, but arrives when our hearts are laid bare before the mystery and splendor of existence, in the person of the Father himself, coming after us in his longing to be known.

Sensing the divine

Some vague ruminations on spirituality, world religions, and mysticism. The writing is rushed and repetitive and rough, but it gets my point across well enough. The issue here is how Christianity relates to other "faiths" and such hocus-pocus as evidenced in the spiritualist/New Age movement. What about, for instance, psychics--are they really doing anything? I believe it is possible that divination and even some form of "spellcraft" is legitimate (though not necessarily advisable). I also think that the other religions are in tune with something real. There is a spiritual dimension to reality, and it connects all humans; indeed, there is a sacred "connectedness" to all creation. The source of "magic" and the source of mysticism may be different levels of that intangible world, but I think it is the same unfathomable dimension whence they hail. Humans are sensitive to this spiritual realm, and "tap into" it through mysticism, meditation, incantations, nature worship, etc. Humans have enormous mental potential, and I believe we can somehow influence the spiritual realm, and in turn effect the physical in ways inexplicable by science, and thus influence one another. The question is, does this capability, this distinct reality, stem from humanity's development? In other words, do humans make it an actual dimension? Is there something in humans that gives rise to the common experience of spirituality and mysticism?

Of course, it could all be a delusion, a spark in the human imagination that got out of control, an upset in the digestion. Maybe all the spiritual people, everyone who ever believed in a "spooky" supernatural realm, were just lying to themselves. Humans are all related and we all think alike, so it's not big surprise that we should all come up with the same quaint notions of spirits and magic and eternity. But let us just assume that there is something more than the tangible, and that the stubbornness of religion to leave us alone is a pretty good indicator of the fact. Perhaps the spiritual dimension arises from the evolutionary process by means of some kind of latent energy contained within the material spectrum... but that does not explain how it comes about, or why it should in the first place; besides, the fact of its becoming a reality tying all people together entails some preceding element or force separate from the merely physical and which somehow comes to reside in the rational agency of humans. Then the spiritual realm would be working through the physical to produce common experience. Which leads us back where we started: a separate dimension acting on the physical. That "latent energy" in the system is not the system itself. Besides, the mystery of why anything exists at all is most sensibly answered by appeal to the "supernatural"; thus we do not need to suppose that all things are simply products of natural circumstance. It is easy to imagine the physical deriving from the spiritual, carnal from numinous, but the testimony of the Judeo-Christian tradition suggests that both derive from an actual entity. (That we call God "spirit" does not necessarily mean that the spiritual realm exists alongside with God, rather than stemming from him; the unseen world is most likely "closer" to God than the physical, since it is more of a kind with God's actual essence, but still I think we should see it as a created reality. As for where God actually "dwells", that's beyond me. Maybe it is the spiritual dimension, but I suspect he's way past all of it, in a completely different category altogether.)

So what is most probably the case is that there is a realm of transcendence already at work within the universe from the beginning, penetrating the mundane sphere. Humans simply become aware of this reality, as they become aware of morals, virtue, beauty, value, etc., and this awareness can lead them to better comprehend their place in the universe, since the unseen sphere is nearer the heart of all reality. Does the ontological independence of morals and value arise from the evolutionary process--i.e., do they not come into play until the ability to reason arrives? If so, this would give the evolutionary process a deity-status, something it most certainly doesn't warrant. Rather we should envision the evolutionary process as a vehicle through which an agency wholly separate from the physical world acts upon creation, imbuing it with meaning and order and aesthetic depth. The spiritual and moral realms (and our sense of awe at the wonders of Nature) press upon us, although of course cognizance of them rises from within our merely natural brains. It can be argued that if there is no mind around to think about beauty, or goodness, or any of it, then those things simply don't exist; and while to some degree the realms of morality and spirituality reside within self-aware minds, still they reside within the physical realm itself and have from the start. These separate dimensions can be seen as deriving from God himself, just as the physical world derives from him. They serve to enhance the glory of the physical by giving it depth and mystery and purpose; they may also serve to connect it, in a sense, to God himself. And just as things in the physical world are all somehow connected, so our souls are bound in unity through the spiritual/moral dimension. There is a common experience of transcendence (and, yes, perhaps even psychic communication) that suggests something real and other than our own neurological processes. But even if we were to say that the spiritual/moral reality was something that came to be out of humanity's collective consciousness, rather than something to be accessed by brains sensitive to "otherness" and geared toward willful investigation and contemplation, that doesn't effect the testimony of the Christian message: for the Christian message, like the Jewish message which precedes it, is completely different from the other "ultimate purpose" messages.

Whereas the primordial religions and Eastern thought envision reality as a wheel, and either understand the universe as peopled by multiple gods or the universe as god or the universe as something to be abandoned, the Judeo-Christian faith envisions the universe as something progressing toward a goal. In the Abrahamic story, God breaks into creation and invites humans on a journey. This is not something humans tap into of their own accord. It begins with a sudden mysterious idea. Whether that idea grew out of long reflection or not is irrelevant. What matters is that the history of the faith has proven that it was God working through the ideas of the ancient Hebrews as they responded to this sense of destiny and purpose. God bent down as it were and took up the thoughts of a minute tribe--actually it probably did start with God "speaking" to Abram, just one curious man who had a radical notion of history as an arrow--and used those human thoughts to express his purposes for creation. God is not identifiable with the spiritual realm toward which mysticism, etc., climbs, even if that is the plane of his dwelling (if that is the case, is it a created realm?--if it is, the natural question would be, Where did God live before he made it?...and that's a genuine conundrum). God is something separate: he is an entity, an actual person. And while I believe that morality is such an absolute principle, bearing down upon us as an often unwelcome disciplinarian, that it must be laid as a foundation from the dawn of time, being rooted in the holiness of God himself, and thus is not a product, however potent, of human imagining or evolutionary miracle; and while I believe also that the spiritual experience shared by all people groups of all times (mostly) is compelling and convincing enough to warrant the claim that there is a separate reality underlying the visible, into which our souls can delve and by which our essences are all strangely tied (without compromising identity of course), and that this dimension too exists from the beginning and stems from God--while I believe these things, I do not believe that all people who live in purity or seek enlightenment are on the same path toward "salvation", much less "God". For the moral/spiritual reality is something that is simply "here" by default, and it is the lot of rational agents to experience that objective dimension and figure out how to incorporate it into daily physical existence. (Note: I'm of the inclination that morality and spirituality are separate principles. The former is purely abstract, more a groundwork, or blueprint, for how things are to go, so to speak, more a reflection of God's person; the latter is more an actual plane of being to be explored. But both function as forces external to the material that humans encounter, and both are intangible and immeasurable so they are easy to lump together.)

God, however, is not something to be stumbled upon, nor is he to be sought out with clever contemplation. He seeks us out, he enters upon the scene when we are ready to behold him and take on his dire mission. The full purposes of God for the world are not revealed through the ideals of good behavior, nor through rapturous transcendence in which one becomes lost in the "all" (the Eastern notion of losing oneself in the great thrum of universal life-force is actually probably contrary to the way spirituality is to be utilized). They are revealed by God's word speaking through humans in a certain mode, under certain circumstances, at certain times. This happens throughout the long story of Israel. How it happens is another matter altogether: but that it is God who is speaking is apparent to those whose hearts are open. Because people do seek God, and he will come to those who desire him. But the full measure of his intent, and the true shape of his nature, are only known through the faith passed down from Abraham to Christ and on to the Church.

All in all, mystical/spiritual/psychic

experience is a very bizarre phenomenon; we wonder why this enigmatic facet of reality should be at all. Where exactly does it come from? Does it come from the dark depths of the human mind? Or is it something that has always been here separate from our minds, "waiting" to be appreciated by self-aware beings? Whatever the case, I believe that it is God's will for there to be a spiritual spectrum in which all humans are connected. His plans are unfolded through that medium; his purposes are revealed by people "in touch" with spirituality. This does not mean that anyone who concentrates hard enough upon the mystery of existence will find God. It certainly does not mean that aligning yourself with nature, or whatever, by worshiping it, will get you there--if God is distinct from creation, then nothing in creation is to be hailed as sovereign but him. What it does mean is that at a particular point in history, God called out a single man or single group, using their dreams and myths and aspirations to gradually make himself known (and while the revelation may have come through a long development of reflection, I suspect that it came upon the chosen party unawares and as a source of much discomfort, something external pressing upon the consciousness). And it is that God, revealed through the Judeo-Christian faith, who is the God of creation, to whom all people must bow. Other religions may have caught glimpses of God along the way, but more likely, they have simply made contact with that overarching web of spirituality and morality that pulses through the cosmos, and have fashioned gods based on introspection and whim.

The God of Abraham is a strange, unexpected sort of deity, full of actual personality, making real demands of humans. This God is the one who rules all things, and who has a plan for bring this creation to fulfillment. This is the one and only God--and if a person desires to get "in touch" with the actual Absolute, the ultimate Source of life, then that person must call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't know to what extent people of other faiths can encounter God, but I am not so sure that their religious convictions are based upon any actual encounter with the true God at all. They could very well merely originate from that spiritual realm to which all people have access, which offers clues to the meaning of existence but nothing really definitive. In that regard, whether we see that sphere as part of creation, or as the domain of divinity itself and thus existing from beyond all worlds, we can safely say that anyone who makes inroads into the spiritual reality with a mind eager for truth, will witness some aspect of God. But it will never be as much as what God desires us to see and understand. Granted, we cannot hope to ever really understand the inner workings of reality: it is far too deep and far too wondrous. But we can know that in the person of Christ, the one who sums up the story of Israel and points toward a new world of hope, we see Truth itself embodied; we behold the face of the creator, and witness his love for us. More still, we receive his will for us.

Christ is the definitive Word, the great inbreaking of the Other into our reality. We experience his glory through both the physical and spiritual dimensions--neither of these is an end unto itself. They are mere channels for entering into the life that is in God and made open to all by Christ's work. When we trust in the power of Jesus, and when we accept him for who he is, we can put aside the silly puzzles of clairvoyance, incantation, and superstition. Magic will have no place, whether or not it is actually possible to bend the universe to your will by mere thought; we are here to work with our hands, and the spiritual effects we have are to be accomplished through prayer and supplication to God, not the attempt to get benefits without physical effort. Divination will also be ruled out--if there is a mystery to be understood, let us go to the Lord for clarity. Let us never presume to subjugate the spiritual by setting up shop on our own, deploying our mental powers to connect with the unseen realm by ritual unsupervised by doctrine. This is the descent into darkness. Mysticism can have a place in this faith, but it must be grounded in the solid conviction that Christ is Lord and that he is the clearest picture of the Father ever given. A "transcendental experience" that seeks to go deeper into that Person and so on to the Deity behind it--rather, one that yearns for that Person to draw into itself the mortal soul--can be considered legitimate; not one that flippantly expects to cut around the "man-made images" and search out the secrets of God/god/"Everything" on its own steam.

More me preachy

Some more reflections on "science v. religion", fueled by a video I just watched....

Preeminent physicist and atheist author Richard Dawkins, in an interview with his fellow Oxford intellectual and Christian scientist/theologian Alister McGrath that was cut from the final edit of Dawkins's documentary The Root of All Evil? (in which he confronts various religious believers in his quest to better understand faith so that he might better assault its foundations), claims that as the eye in its complexity is "improbable" and only explained by long, gradual evolutionary refinement, so God must be subject to the same kind of explanation. Nothing can just pop into existence. Both Dawkins and McGrath (who comes out looking a little weak in the interview unfortunately, but mostly because Dawkins is leading the discussion and doing so rather aggressively though cordially) agree that this is a logical imperative.

I of course must contend the demand that theists have an explanation for God's existence readily at hand (the idea of mortals "explaining" God! as if he were not the one who must explain what we are!). The "idea" of God certainly did not just appear in the mind of one unwitting caveman, at least not as we understand the term "God". Our conception of the monotheistic creator is the result of a very complicated tradition of serious contemplation and wrestling with faith through the midst of arduous circumstances. Notice what I'm saying though: our conception is a natural product, not the object of our conception. The widespread attestation to some external reality which acts upon the observable reality is strong enough, I think, to warrant legitimate credibility. The question that arises then is which voice among the throng speaks clearest of the reality itself--and that is a strictly religious (maybe philosophical) issue for which this brief rant has no use. My point is, there are reasons for taking seriously the supernatural witness. Another point that needs to be stressed is that if there is in fact a "God" as he is understood within theology and philosophy, as being the ground of all reality, the absolute and uncaused first principle, then he cannot be lumped in the same category of things created; so the insistence that God must be able to be explained in the same fashion as the eye, is actually rather stupid and disturbingly ignorant of a rather simple categorical distinction. God is a means by which all things are explained--indeed, in my view, the very standard against which all reality is weighed--not another item among trillions to be deduced, argued for, or apprehended. (Nor as the source of being does his being demand, let alone allow for, causation or rationalization.) Rather, belief in God follows a full paradigm shift, a complete repositioning of one's outlook, that is only accomplished through what we can rightly label "faith".

Pure naturalism exercises a great deal of faith of its own. Faith of course is not necessarily "blind", but is built upon particular reasons or experiences, and serves to make an adjudication on the data where no further data exists to objectively rule on the "hard" evidence. So atheistic/agnostic science looks at the whole panaroma of nature and says, "This is all there is." That of course is not "definitive". That is a worldview-based judgment cast in lieu of "definitive" proof that, after all, the natural order is the only objective reality. (What's really boggling is that naturalists use the sciences, which by definition study the empirically observable and testable, to determine that there is nothing beyond the empirical--isn't this a misuse of science? Isn't this rather like expecting a thermometer to tell you whether there is rain on the other side of the world? All analogies fall apart when talking about God of course, but that in itself is much the point--God is totally beyond the realm of itemization, totally beyond compare, for he is the source of all distinctions.) How can we ever objectively prove such a bold statement, when we have already seen that reality as we know it is itself infinitely mysterious?--unless of course we say that science gives us all we need, and thus is all-sufficient, and thus the All? But that is a highly contentious claim right there. Purely naturalistic understanding, the ability to "see through" everything, gives no real substance to anything, provides humanity no grasp of what its existence serves in the long run, or why it should have these feelings of purpose and destiny.

And how can we so quickly dismiss the testimony of millions who say that there is something more than what the eye can see or the mind can even logically make sense of? Naturalists who relegate all notions of virtue, value, and spirituality to mere ideas are, in my estimation, more hard-pressed to offer "proofs" of their position than the believers who say that there is a realm beyond our own whence we derive such notions--for the power of those "ideas" has in fact determined the entire shape and substance of human society, and have so proven to encourage meaningful relationships and produce a real sense of identity, that it is doubtful they are mere illusions of human fancy. Blind, cold evolution itself could not dictate that spirituality, or the arts, or romance, or self-sacrifice, any of it, should be the order of the day. There may very well be more at work than the unfeeling natural laws. The act of loving engagement itself, or rational engagement for the sake thereof, makes no final sense with appeal only to the sciences, but rather points beyond the tangible and the chemical and the neurotic to some objective principle of cognizant relationality. (Miracles could be offered as further "evidence" of religions' claims, whatever the skeptics may say in advance about their probability; indeed, it is their improbability that make them such witnesses to a reality beyond the observable. Witness to truly bizarre occurrences that have no apparent cause in the "regular order of things" cannot always of course be counted reliable, as ignorance of the more quirky (quark-y?) facets of nature can lead to superstitious assumption. But there are such things as "miracle healings" where even doctors are baffled. And if we are to take the Gospels seriously....That being said, I do not think miracles are arbitrary cessations of universal order. They are rather rooted in the overarching, interconnected purposes of God that hold all the universe together and make it what it actually is.)

Science cannot be the measure of all things, for science cannot measure the principles of virtue and value, which, from the powerful collective testimony of conscience and the objective appreciation of such abstracts as aesthetic beauty, hold out as being realities distinguishable from human conjuring, forcing themselves upon us from without. Of course our awareness of virtue and value, of morality and responsibility, even our tendency for relationship, all arises from "natural" developments and long pyschological evolution--this is the means by which all things within the physical world come to be. But that says nothing about whether there is an external "force" acting upon the reality we inhabit, eliciting from the evolutionary process these reactions of praise and humility. The sheer complexity of our sense of morality and aesthetics, which from a strictly biological or physical standpoint is neither necessary nor even always preferable (compassion for the weak may lead the strong to drown in the same boat; a recognition of nature as beautiful can easily mask its harmful tendencies), can reasonably suggest that perhaps the long roiling hit-and-miss evolutionary adventure was purposefully "set up" in the primary intent of bringing about such qualities.

What I want to stress most of all is that our understanding of the empirical processes which give birth to all things physical (and psychosomatic) can say nothing of itself about whether or not there is a deity "willing" all these things to be, whatever that might mean in practice. Yes, the remarkable rational and relational traits exhibited by the higher forms of consciousness are a deep mystery, and some more sober-minded cynics may claim that there is no knowing how it all came about; but I believe that it is in seriously, honestly focusing upon that mystery, as well as looking beyond the universe itself to wonder why there is something rather than nothing in the first place, that we behold a Face. And if it were our own face projected into the cosmic screen of ignorance, why then have we not yet been able to look away?

Bible-thumping in a technological age

This is the second follow-up to my note "God and the Test-tube". This essay still wanders around the territory explored there and in "A dose of everything", but goes a bit further afield and explores even more really broad subjects, even though there is a specific hub around which the whole discussion takes its form (hence the title).

A crucial issue for the science-religion debate is the testimony of Scripture. The Bible seems to make certain claims that would, taken as they stand, be out of consonance with what we know about the actual processes of universal or natural history, even human history (at times even out of consonance with what we know, or at least like to think we know, about morality). Really this is a matter tied up in the culture wars of postmodernity. The secular world looks on the Scripture as something hopelessly outdated, or sadly naive, or savage and wicked; Christians are accused of blind allegiance to a book produced by a totally different culture in a totally different world. When the Bible is championed as a beacon of righteousness, or a standard to live by, a scornful agnostic or atheist may retaliate by bringing up the law condemning homosexuals or Paul's instruction for women to be quiet during church. It is true that there are many stories and injunctions in Scripture that can be embarrassing to our sensitive Western proprieties, whether for their seeming immorality or their fantastical claims. But it is my estimation that the problem lies in our failure to understand what makes the Bible actually "true" and thus relevant. I envision the "authority" of Scripture lying not so much in its propositions and edicts (so that it really becomes something so base as a rule-book or a "manual of instruction"), but more in its place within the faith tradition and its status as an instrument whereby believers are equipped to spread God's message throughout the world by actually immersing themselves within the story that the Word is telling.

It must be grasped that the Bible is a product of a long religious experience. The authors, certainly in touch with the divine reality, interpreted their unique encounters, or the encounters of their forerunners, within the context of their primitive understandings. To put it another way, the Bible is largely a record of how the Jewish nation wrestled with the new ideas that forced themselves onto that society as they developed a radical and unique attitude toward the world, history, and the gods. Even in the Christ event, the explanation of this wonderful occurrence (and, more importantly, this wonderful person) was not handed down from on high ready-packaged for dissemination amongst the masses, but rather had to be "built" as it were by deep reflection and the re-application of cultural imagery, terminology, and ideology. Thus from that angle what was going on was a very mundane sort of activity, feverish and fervent perhaps, but ultimately just another evolutionary cognitive exercise, not apparently any different from all the other intellectual struggles humanity has undergone throughout the millennia, as the human race brews up fresh thought-frameworks to accommodate its budding self-awareness. (Of course this naturalistic view assumes that all rational enterprise is completely explicable by appeal to materialism, thus robbing cultural, artistic, philosophic, literary and religious innovations of their mysterious beauty--not by any means the route I take in understanding humanity's creativity.)

For instance, the creation account could be seen as an outcome of the inspired community's attempts to make sense of the structure, and, more basically, the given fact, of the natural world, and to find some meaningful position within that vast cosmos for humans to reside in confidence. They used the language of myth, with all its supernaturalist exaggerations, to articulate their convictions of an orderly, God-given creation. It may even be that the whole idea of a purposeful creation and a personal God who calls out a group of people to carry forth the destiny of creation, was produced as a means of giving the ragtag nomadic tribe of Hebrews a sense of place and direction. (I doubt that they came up with such an idea out of the blue, though. While their dissatisfaction with being a people without a home and without a seeming destiny was probably a definite factor in the formation of the Genesis stories, I think the whole Israel epic is rooted in the spiritual experience of Abraham, a man who did have a home but felt compelled to leave it for another. So the later Hebrews looked back to Abraham as a man with a destiny, a man somehow "in touch" with a creator who cared so much for humans as to actually communicate with them, and used this to shape their worldview; and their original status as a wandering tribe, far from dampening the wild dream, fueled their yearning to further understand and make actual the reality which their ancestor had encountered, thus prompting them to tell stories of a world with purpose, and the special status of humanity within that world.) Whether they thought this to be an accurate account of how things actually happened or whether they used their language in a metaphorical sense, knowing that the actual events were beyond their reckoning, really doesn't matter. (The way I see it, there are three main ways to understand the author's(s') intentions here. One, he/they had in mind a literal seven days, plain as that. Two, the seven days refer to seven epochs of creation. Three, the seven days are not meant as periods of time at all, but are categories utilized to arrange all the components of the visible creation into a perfect hierarchy of sorts, with humanity as the crowning achievement, one level short of God himself. I tend toward the latter theory, but the first would be acceptable as well, especially if combined with the latter, so that the seven literal days for the author(s) hold special metaphysical significance. As for the second theory, I'm not sure the ancients would have thought in terms of "epochs" or geological ages. At any rate, it may be a happy stroke of luck, or the mysterious handiwork of God using human convention to express truth, that in a very broad sense the Genesis story can somewhat line up with what we know of the world. The order of creation seems to reflect the actual processes involved in the birth of a world and life within that world. Genesis holds that the first life originated in the sea. The "formation from dust" and the placing of the Man in Eden can be seen as reflecting the slow origins of humanity out of lower life-forms and the race's migration over millennia to the Middle East. It could even be suggested that this vague, mythic retelling of natural history arises from a dim recollection of the actual processes that has been ingrained with the collective human psyche, and "peeks out" from the subconscious in the guise of story; it may even be that the author(s), taking a wild shot at describing what they thought of as the origins of the world, by chance got it generally right, even though they may have thought they were talking about something more like a literal seven-day creation. This is all idle speculation, however. We cannot really know what the original author(s) believed about the relation of this particular story to the hard facts, and it is my belief that they did not write it to explain the physical development of creation or the length of time it took. If we can find parallels between their literary masterpiece and what we now know of geology and evolution, let us praise God for the mysterious unity of human insight into reality across time and cultures, but not jump the gun and decree that the Hebrews knew--in the sense of fully cognizant, objective epistemic certainty--their science as well as we do after all.) What gives the creation stories worth is their testimony to a world of purpose structured according to the holy designs of a transcendent creator. As the Scripture moves toward the decisive revelation in Jesus, the purely mythological dilutes through the dirt and grit of history to coalesce into a very specific flesh-and-blood episode. But still, even while we may like to think that the New Testament is more sensible than the Old, it retains much of the mythic overtones and utilizes language from the classical world to give form to its foundational allegiance to Christ. Thus the early church's eschatology was not so much granted by plainly spoken words from the Lord himself, but rather was worked out by debate and contemplation within the confines of the faith community, building upon the assurance of Christ's victory over evil and death. (That is why there is always room for growth in our interpretation of both halves of the Bible--granted a small set of unshakeable truths, we are to figure out what these things actually mean in practice and what they entail for our hope, how we engage with the world and look toward the future.)

We must use discernment to ascertain what parts of the Bible are intended as legitimate history or documentation of what we know as scientific facts (though it is my opinion that there is really little, if any, of the latter in Scripture), and which are intended for more "spiritual" usage. Were the original authors attempting careful historical documentation, or were they editing historical events to make a spiritual point, or were they fabricating entire stories to make a spiritual point? Which stories become meaningless if they are not strictly "literal" or at least based in very definite historical events? For that matter, which teachings of the Bible are timeless and which can we (I speak with great caution) set aside? Surely all pieces of Scripture are to be checked against the total canon. Furthermore, there is the tricky task of distinguishing between what the authors actually intended in their work and what we as the faith community are now supposed to take from that work for practical purposes, in accordance with the will of the Father. Beginning with the "assumption" that the Bible is a medium through which God communicates with humanity (this is not really something that can be proven, but something that has to be experienced through some kind of conversion experience), we must explore that Word with open hearts and open minds, entering into joint worship with the authors of the texts by "feeling out" what it is they were seeing or feeling and what they were understanding about it all, appreciating the insights offered, while prayerfully searching for the purposes of God behind the particular passages as we strive to comprehend "why this is in here in the first place"; and all in all, taking part in the narrative to which the whole collection of texts bears witness by letting that united testimony transform our lives around the central realization of the Lordship of Christ (the Bible is a prime example of the whole being far more than the sum of the parts).

It may be the case that some of what was written is even morally unsound--at least the motives behind what was written, the way it's framed and the ideological agenda behind it, so to speak--so that to take the teaching of a certain passage at face value could lead to a misunderstanding of what's going on in the author's scheme, and even be detrimental to one's genuine spiritual growth. But what really matters is how that part fits into the bigger picture, which of course is this panorama of a journey toward realization of who and what God really is, and who we are in relation to him; and what holds even those passages with which we today may not be able to agree intact with the larger teaching of Scripture is the fact of the writers' genuine desire to know the will of God and enact his rulings in their societies, so that their being morally mistaken in one or two instances does not negate the authority of the Word as a whole. If issues of spiritual truth can be so "relativized" but yet balanced by the objectivity of the entire construct, certainly then we can excuse factual fallacies, such as ignorance on the shape of the earth or the substance of the sky. Another aspect of my view of Biblical inspiration is that what are recorded as visionary experiences are not "direct" revelations to a prophet or mystic, but rather literary devices employed by the religious devout in his effort to profess the great burden he feels he must share with the world; and while I am not so sure that anyone has ever received such clear, cut-and-dry messages from God as it is expressed in literary form within the prophetic records, I do believe that the biblical authors were conveying truths "directly" from God, having this great weight of responsibility and special insight placed on their minds and hearts, so that while they may have not "known" that what they were saying was from God in the narrow sense of knowing our culture demands (I rather think they were convinced in another way, not based on sight, but based on love and faith), still their message was indeed what God would have his people hear, and it all contributes to the metanarrative of salvation history.

However, this allowance should not be used to simply explain away parts of the Bible that pose threats to our tastes and sensibilities or upset our notions of political correctness or even at first blush appear to contradict scientific or historical claims (the "factually faulty" portions are by and large, thankfully, not so important to the grand theological scheme with regard to their being literally accurate; rather their contribution serves in more nuanced fashion, such as to demonstrate how the inspired author made sense of history and nature with the underdeveloped empirical skills available, or, more likely, in the place they serve within the story at large in regard to development and progression). Especially we should exercise caution in how we approach the miracles of the New Testament, realizing that whereas many of the Old Testament histories were written long after the fact, the documentation of the Gospels and Acts is intended as a pretty straightforward historical report (with theological embellishments, naturally); and many of the miraculous elements are crucial to the message of the story in such a way that if they were simply exaggerations or fabrications, the story would lose its power and purpose. A work like Revelation, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether, and it intentionally uses the conventions of "myth and legend" to compose a fantasy-like account meant to express the author's vision of God's ultimate purposes. The Prophets of the Old Testament are another kind of challenge: they seem to have been written shortly after the careers of the respective prophets, and they document some pretty remarkable visions and phenomena. Are we to view these supernatural elements as mere literary devices? Or are they vague attempts to communicate a "transcendent experience" in the language available at the time?

Each book of the Bible is different in how it should be interpreted. Honest investigation, and an epistemology based in open dialogue with fellow believers and discourse with other disciplines, is vital in determining exactly how the various portions of the Bible are to be taken; and only after careful analyzation, meditation, and of course prayer should we pass a ruling on the implications and necessariness of taking a passage literally. It helps to recall that if the Bible were completely mistaken on the rudiments of natural processes and the actual conditions of the world we live in, we may be inclined to lend our allegiance to science (or some other secular order) after all. But the Bible is accurate enough in its general outlook toward the orderliness and beauty of the universe, and the place of humans within it, that we can be confident that where it comes into conflict with contemporary scientific advances, it should be realized that the Bible's purpose is not to explain the details of physical systems and that the passage in question does not damage the Bible's claim to offer a powerfully true framework for understanding the meaning of existence. Here's another way to put this: if the Bible were completely out of joint with what we know by pure observation, we would have no reason to listen to it; but the Bible is clear enough in its address to the real world in which we actually live, its general picture being consonant enough with what we know of life, and when we grasp what the Bible's picture is--to teach us our place and purpose in the world--we can "excuse" those instances where it falls short of scientific precision. All the same, much of the thrust of the Biblical message is its challenge, so it certainly should upset some of our preconceptions; but I'm not convinced that this applies to our understanding of how the world works physically. Rather I see the Word as functioning to in a real sense "threaten" us on the level of our assumptions about the metaphysical/value-based meaning behind the merely physical, and what we are called to do within the context of this very real, very structured, very precise world we find ourselves in. In any event, we must be careful in how much of the Biblical text we relegate to the limitations of perspective, and not be quick to dismiss a particular claim on the basis of modern prejudices.

I believe that God communicates through the Bible primarily by using the religious perspectives of many different persons to form a united voice, so that what appears to be a natural, unimpressive (or non-miraculous) process of cultural thought-development, easy enough to analyze with modern psychology, is actually God using human faculties to reveal himself. His working behind the scenes of the mundane, using the limitations of mortal comprehension and language to make himself known, is simply further evidence of the loving kind of deity he is--one who allows his creatures to explore reality for themselves, allows them a measure of independence in their quest for truth, all the while drawing them on mysteriously by gradual revelation. How we know that it is God speaking is by the uniformity of the whole tradition present in the Bible, and by actually living out the story of the Bible in our own lives to witness its transforming power (and furthermore by the radiant witness of the church in its worldwide mission, though whether you actually see Christianity's progress and effects among the nations as substantial probably depends on whether or not you're willing to be convinced of its validity in the first place). What really matters is not so much the details of the tale but the overarching "thrust", this foundational idea of a personal God who loves his creation and calls humans into relationship with him and to look after his creation, of a God who actually stoops to the level of his creatures and teaches them how to live and gives them strength to realize his plans in the present. I'm going to have my cake and eat it too by claiming that certain key events certainly stand out as being indispensable, such as the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the "broad strokes" of the history of Israel from a nation of more-or-less rejects and slaves to a nation of great unity and vision.

It could be easily accused that I'm playing fast and loose with both sides here, simply picking and choosing within Scripture what should be held onto as "literal" and what should be understood either as mistaken or as being not originally intended in a literal sense based on the strict demands of academia; by this patchwork method of interpretation I can hold on to my infantile faith and still attempt to smooth over the accusations brought against my holy book by the surrounding secular culture. Fellow Christians could say I'm copping out, or selling out, trying to make everyone happy or allowing the poisonous teachings of atheism to cloud my view of the great truths of God. But I will plead guilty to neither charge. For one thing, I still hold the Bible as a supreme authority, and I still hold that God is calling the world at large to repent and believe the gospel. I am not backing down on my conviction in the hard-hitting impact of Scripture, and I am certainly not catering to political correctness or relativism. But I am, in truth, attempting to be honest to two legitimate fields: science and theology. The former has more than proven itself competent in telling us about the way the universe operates. The latter has more than proven itself competent (to believers anyway) in explaining the very real sense of the divine nature so many people share. The voice of religion is too strong to ignore, and the beautiful logic of the Christian message specifically is so overwhelming that I cannot dismiss the church's traditions as idle superstition. So I begin with this solid (by no means doubt-free) trust in Christianity's claims. This entails belief in the Scriptures as being divinely wrought and thus providing the clearest tangible pointer we possess to the purposes of the creator for his creation. But my reason dictates that I also take seriously the conclusions of science, for its objective findings and overwhelming reliability in the practical vein of technology testify to its veracity. (I could also lump with science the field of history. There is one little detail these categories leave out: morality. What am I trying to be honest to when I say that some things in the Bible are specific to that time and not to be taken at face value today? I would probably say, in general, our contemporary comprehension of ethics and the human consciousness. Science, I suppose, could be brought into the picture,because it has "proven" how through evolution humans develop clearer insight into reality. Then there are the anthropological/psychologi

cal fields that use the scientific method to determine the natural details of the growth of hominid rationality. These are rigorous disciplines that employ testable methodology and have actually enabled our society to better cope with its own quirks, and should be respected for what they accomplish. So the idea that we have advanced in our knowledge of morality, expressed through modern ethical philosophy, is tenable in relation to what we know about the rest of the world and human nature. This does not mean that I accept the notion that humans are always getting savvier and better. Rather, my religious convictions serve to check my "naturalistic" and overtly optimistic assumptions about mortal capabilities, making me think that while much of what we have come to believe in this day and age is truthful, we have yet sacrificed truths much more integral.)

So my mind and my heart go in apparently separate directions, both having been proven through life experience to be equally valuable in determining truth...so if I am to be consistent in my convictions I must explore the mysteries of how the two spectrums can coexist. This essay is one example of how I try and reconcile intellect (empirically-based belief) with faith (spiritual belief). But the extremists on both sides (and it's not just science on the other side, but the entire spectrum of critical, modern/postmodern rationality) will always accuse me of straddling the fence and of being completely confused and probably arrogant. I will respond that I think they're just not letting themselves look deep enough into the real fabric of reality. I suspect that both sides are equally, and simply, unwilling to put forth some mental effort to really think how the secular and religious, natural and supernatural, worlds actually interact. Why in this age of abounding knowledge and curiosity, when we have begun to explore the deepest reaches of this amazingly intricate universe, when all of us, Christian, atheist, and everything in between, encourage the pursuit of understanding (and enjoy the luxurious benefits of a massive increase in understanding, what is more), should we expect the Bible to be as boringly simple as "it means exactly what it says"? Why should it be such an inconvenience to learn that we must actually think about how the Bible might apply to our lives and how God might be using different parts of the Bible to talk to us? It's hard to say which side of dogmatism is more at fault, because both seem to think that the Bible should mean everything it states literally; one side says the Bible's right, so science and anthropology and psychology and philosophy is all wrong, the other side says the Bible's wrong and the whole Christian religion should just be done away with. Nobody in either camp seems willing to step out on a limb and ask, "What if there is some way the two spheres of human inquest meet?" Unfortunately our society is becoming more polarized in its worldviews, so there seem to be fewer "in-between" thinkers, especially as concerns the biblical tradition. It is time for Western society to stop being so intellectually lazy and naive in this regard, and begin to appreciate the subtleties and nuances of Biblical "truth" by a rich, multilayered hermeneutic that takes into account the great degree of human input and construct at work in the text, while avoiding the naturalistic assumption that human invention automatically precludes divine providence.



(A final note: there are some extremely intelligent Christians who, being prolific in science, attempt to correlate the mythical stories especially of Genesis and Exodus with explicable natural events, so that the Bible and science are essentially saying the same thing. While I certainly believe that God uses the regular routines of nature to further his plans, and at times circumstances seem set up in such happily coincidental form as to suggest "miracle" to the eye of faith, still I am not convinced that what is recorded in Scripture in stories, say, of the Exodus, is always a precise account of the real events. Where the Bible does record history it is often "dressed up" and approached from a spiritual angle that heightens the miraculous overtones to emphasize the fact of God's providence within the episode. So while the Israelites did indeed escape from Egypt, probably by a narrow scrape, it was most likely nothing so dramatic as the parting of a sea deep enough to drown chariots. If the sea-crossing tale is a legitimate memory of something that happened, the original occurrence was probably more along the lines of the Hebrews picking along through the mud of a marshy inlet at low tide, and a band of chariots getting bogged down when the tide came back in. But in truth the whole story of the Exodus seems a little grandiose, and the actual flight from Egypt more likely occurred in unexciting increments over a couple of centuries. The fact that the Gospels were written very close to the events they record--in contrast to much of the Old Testament histories which were written centuries after the original happenings--gives more credence to the Gospels' factual veracity, but even there we must be aware that they contain history elaborated by the convictions of religious encounter. So my point is, we must be cautious lest we bend over backward trying to match up the text with scientific fact when the text was never intended to seriously document the hard details of the events concerned; while miracles happen, they are often quite subtle and not glaring, the only monumental, earth-shattering miracle to ever occur being, in my opinion, the resurrection of Christ.)

A dose of everything? sure

This is a follow-up to my last note about science and religion. It's actually an email to a friend in response to his rather relativistic claims raised within a recent intriguing debate he and I carried out (somewhat spontaneously actually). I present it here to sharpen up my conceptions of how God relates to his creation, thus clarifying the philosophical/theological first principles I carry into my perceptions of the universe (and in extension my stance in the science-religion "conflict"). This essay rambles more than the last, but it covers a lot and gives good insight to the way I think, if anyone cares to know. Plus it has the happy bonus of dealing with the frustrating notion of "good and evil". So anyone in need for intellectual "stimulus" (at the very least to irritate you by my ignorance into expressing your own views) should find plenty to chew on here.

It may not make much sense to center a discussion of the universe's purpose around a study of good and evil, but everything will (hopefully not just to my muddled brain) fall into place soon enough. We begin by addressing two possibilities of relativism: epistemological, in which there may very well be an absolute standard of morality but humans can never hope to know it; and ontological, in which "good" and "evil" are mere constructs to accommodate taste. Along those broad lines we are in the domain of philosophy, and while philosophy does deal with the question of God and his various attributes, etc., once we cross into the realm of "God's desire for his creation and his creatures within that creation" we are, very certainly, in the realm of religion/theology. I'm not much of a philosopher, but I do see myself as something of a (budding at least) theologian. So I don't think I'm much out of my element here.

I have this to throw in, and I'm not sure where it would best fit, but I'll put it here and let you make of it what you will. This is a comment I made a while back, and the wording is pretty good so I'll just let it stand as a kind of summary of what's to come: By "evil" I mean that which, as humans, we discern as being counter to the design of God. Natural futility is not evil because it does not inhabit a moral spectrum. Morality becomes an issue strictly with the advent of rationality and the power of choice. Chaos and disorder are inevitable in a universe where chance operates; but if you throw into the mix the idea of a willful God whose overarching power holds the mess together and drives the creation toward a definite goal, this chaos and disorder (and futility) is not contrary to plan. Humans, however, with the power of will (image of God), have the ability to counter God's designs for relationality. As for the classic idea of the spectrum-ends of darkness and light, the former being the point of "growth" for "evil" and the latter being the point of "growth" for "good", this is not an altogether faulty picture. Human evil is rooted in taking part in the chaos of the universe. But on its own, chaos is not evil. Bad, maybe, but unavoidable, and contributing to the overall picture of order. But chaos taken up into the agency of reason and engaged with by an independent Mind is a completely different picture. A soul colluding with chaos becomes a soul colluding with evil. We should be careful to distinguish between "darkness" and "light", "less desirable" and "more desirable" (I would say "bad" and "good" but futility itself is not "bad" until it grows out of control, which I do not think the Creator will allow until his plans for this universe are up) as value categories, and "evil" and "good" as moral categories relating to the scheme of "loving communion".

Now most skeptics incline to the ontological assumption, holding that "good and evil" (and indeed most other concepts of absolution, or metaphysical truth) are matters of perspective. We label "evil" that which disrupts the order of our society. I concur, but I do not think it such a shallow thing as do many. This quickly becomes a matter of "human purpose" (which ties into the larger theme of the meaning of the universe--what a focused thinker am I!--and on that count connects with the more grounded context of science v. religion, in the sense of what can scientific discovery say about the meaning of life, and does science need religion to balance out its findings or lend them value-based and moral-based substance), and in that sense we are, very definitely, treading religious ground. But first, a glance at the universal condition. The creation is structured in a very certain way, despite the massive amounts of fluctuation and chance at work, and "geared" toward fruitfulness and order--in the sense that the vastness of creation accommodates the tiny area of space in which rational life dwells, and in the sense that the universe as a whole still manages to hold together and work in a fashion suitably routine to allow for study, measurement, and prediction of its behavior. It seems obvious enough that there are certain conditions that must be met for life to abound. Life being the primary aim of creation (I suppose one may prefer death over life, but I'm taking it as a first principle that what has purpose is preferable to that which is pointless--I hope you're not a nihilist) it follows then that what "laws" and ordinances make for life are those with which a rational creature capable of choosing alignment should actually align. And that's the real thrust: the lower animals follow mere appetite and instinct, acting out of desperation and fear. This is not an unfortunate hiccup in the evolutionary process. Creation is developing--and at this stage in the argument I'd like to throw in this idea. Creation is not something that's just thrown together and left to run on its own steam, with God sitting back to see what comes of it, as it were. Rather, creation is a "project" with which God remains involved. It is constantly changing and moving toward some definite goal, namely order. Granted, it will run down in time, but order is not so much an end in itself within this current reality; rather, order serves to accommodate the "highlight" of God's work (not that God actually designs every little detail, or even whole species--I rather think he lets evolution takes its own course, but his will "dictates" that it should work toward rationality and self-awareness). This crowning achievement--humanity--then works with God to move this creation toward the next. It may not be often posited as such in the popular forum, but the real purpose, I think, of Christianity, is to "sow the seeds" of the next world (NOT heaven). We are to work here in the present with love and reason and sacrifice and humility, to anticipate the time when God makes all things new. Our efforts in the mortal phase somehow will contribute to the glory of the phase to come. Humanity may disappear from the universe long before it itself freezes over and collapses on itself. But the work we do in service to the name of Christ will survive and be resurrected along with the entire creation (ourselves included--this is not a fanciful supernaturalist hope merely, either, as science has shown us that the universe works by "information" and so humans are bundles of "information", and information does not readily deteriorate and can easily be transported from one "mode" of being to another...anyway). That is the real aim of God's creation.

Humans, as rational agents (not the only intelligent species, but far and away the most advanced and gifted, and probably the most spiritually adept, though we cannot see into the souls of the apes; still, Christ did not come as an ape, so it's safe to say that humans are better able to enter into willing relationship with the Creator than the primates), are capable of great influence over the natural world, in ways I think once relegated to the realm of idle superstition but now being more fully explored by the sciences. The universe is, indeed, just what its name implies: a uniform sort of entity. All the parts are mysteriously connected. There is intrinsic order to the system. It can be argued that chaos and order co-exist, as though in equal portions. I argue that the universe has emerged from mere chaos and works toward order (even if in quantifiable terms chaos may outweigh order--a point I made in the last note about "entropy" comes into play here), so that destruction and decay intermingle with the abundance of reasonable life (and logical non-life). This is a point I lost in the last paragraph, but I'm picking it up here again. Animal savagery is potentially a threat to the notion of objectivity or a definite ontological reality of "good and evil". But the way animals behave is actually very understandable given the developing nature of the universe. Much of creation involves "chance", as God allows the universe to work itself out, with his hand guiding it along all the time, so to speak (a paradox, but they are real enough). Why God would produce such a slow-moving system and not a ready-made one is easy enough to see I think once we grasp what kind of God we're talking about: this is a God of substance and intentional relationality. "Love" is not something that can be manufactured, it must "develop" out of a gradual growth of awareness. The universe then is made to hold creatures capable of self-aware, and God-aware, relationship. Animals are a step toward that level of awareness, but still largely enslaved to the largely "chaotic" underpinnings (or inner workings) of nature. So their behavior is sporadic and often vicious, but life finds a way through it all. Order wins out. Life cannot exist in pure chaos, because chaos is the dissembling of all parts into final annihilation. And chaos is precisely the dissembling of relationships. So an orderly universe is necessary for creatures such as humans to conduct meaningful existences and enter into communion with one another and with God. Love is at the basis of it all, really, as sappy as that may sound. God is love, an unstoppable energy that yearns to give of itself and yearns for giving in return. This can be seen on God's part as "inevitable" since he is love in essence and has no "choice" but to give of himself; but I'm not sure that's ground we should be treading. God remains unfathomable, and rightly so, being the base of all existence (and I suppose it could be argued that God the creator is subject to an overarching principle himself, so that he is not really the ultimate ground, or foundation; but nothing in the Bible, nor in philosophy, demands us to view the personal God as other than the Absolute on which all things, including "laws", logical and otherwise, stand).

So the universe produces beasts, able to drive themselves, to feel and, tangentially at least, to think, but which are still largely bound to impersonal forces and the wild seas of subatomic process. After fourteen billion years, though, "persons" emerge. This itself is a slow climb. A potential stickler here is the "intermediate" stage of neanderthals, who were self-aware and religiously minded. But they were still driven in large part by raw animalism and primal fear of the unknown. (I can't remember exactly how, but the "neanderthal" thing was thrown at me by my friend as counter evidence of my whole theory. Someone reading this may have thought of the same objection, whatever it was, and if so, then there you go, enjoy my response.) The goal of humanity is to rise above fear and desperation, to look away from the largeness of the universe to the largeness of the loving God and to base their actions and desires in their knowledge of him. That God is loving, by the way, is intrinsic. What we know as "good" is what God is by "default". As all reality streams from him, it follows that the grain of reality runs in the direction of order, justice, reason, sacrifice, love. While we're on that, let me make this point. My friend gave the analogy of a dictator whose fondness of blue leads him to desire a world in which all things revolve around blueness. So he orders his subjects to like blue, and in time they come to see blue as the ultimate, the only thing worth liking. But the analogy is faulty. For one, the dictator remains a creature. The creator is quite a different sort of thing altogether. So his ruling is not nearly so arbitrary, nor based on taste, aesthetics. It could be held (as by my friend) that God prefers good because he just happens to like it. I say God prefers good because it is what he is, by no choice of his own. When he says "good is best" it has real ontological force: good is what gives shape and structure to reality, and, as I asserted earlier, it is intrinsically more desirable for there to be something than nothing. I'm not saying that chaos is intrinsically "evil", or order intrinsically "good" in a moral sense. In the sense though of final goals, then yes order is most certainly better, it is "good" in a way chaos is not. Chaos will breathe its last (as if it were an actual positive force! chaos itself is more the absence of order than anything; it could then be argued that "evil" is simply the absence of good, and while this is partially true, I think, it is also true that evil takes on a life of its own...more on that in a bit). God's ruling is not "opinion", which, by the way, falls into two camps. There is opinion on what is "correct". One opines about a certain fact when one does not directly know that fact. Let us assume that God knows all there is to be known, at least about the nature of the universe and the laws of reality (what makes it tick, as it were). Then there is opinion based in aesthetic preference, which we've already been through. Is this open to God? I think not, for if that were so, and the dictator analogy were to hold, what kind of God would that be? A God who coerces us into liking what he likes, to thinking like he thinks? Can a real relationship be built on the "brainwashing" scenario you envision, or even out of pure fear of the great terrible power overriding your own insignificance? Fear plays a part in the creaturely relation to the creator, but primarily "love" works through pure, earnest desire to know the other party. So if the moral law were but a programme fashioned after God's whims, it would not really be worth following, and we should rather die in defiance of the self-absorbed tyrant.

Our race is intelligent enough to realize what makes for peace. So we set up rules and regulations to set us apart from the animals. The factor that makes us different--our rationality, our power of free choice--is the very thing that makes us the most volatile force in the world. The agency of reason and morality that enables us to be true masters of the earth also tells us to be servants of the earth, to tend it out of love and reverence. This agency also tells us, in its truest form (as envisioned by Jesus), that the last will be first, that to lose yourself you must find it. This paradox is written large across the whole canvas of the cosmos really: through death, life. Then again, the pattern of "through chaos, order" is also there. Is this then incentive to encourage at least a dose of chaos within human society? Not at all. Chaos is the disruption of reasonable process, a formless flux of undirected energy (or non-energy?). The death of plants is not a chaotic process. There is an order, a pattern, to the descent to soil and the reascent to new life. Chaos is exactly that state where there is no pattern. And human self-sacrifice is not the raving lust for death, as life is to be desired more. Self-sacrifice comes when one realizes one's death will contribute to the greater cause of love and justice and order. Humanity is called to conduct itself around the principles with which God himself operates. These are the things that build trust, that build knowing and understanding. Murder, thievery, conniving, brutality, these things break bonds and throw the whole network of mutual dependency out of whack, as well as dehumanizing--derationalizing--the perpetrator (sometimes obviously, many times not; I suspect that often the fullest effects of sin are not visible until the flesh is stripped away and one stands before God in the nakedness of the soul--this is not me saying that humans are meant to escape from the body, because body and soul are meant to be one, but death is precisely a separation of the two and an exposing to the self, in the light of God's judgment, what one's merely physical works and mental attitudes were working upon the essence of the self). So these things are, by their very nature, by colluding with chaos (formlessness--a society of "anything goes" is really a society where "nothing goes" because everything eventually breaks down when there is no communication, no comprehension of one another's motives and desires, no help to be had but the pitiful self that is so consumed with its own self that it, ironically, destroys itself, because a soul's evolution to rationality is simultaneously an acquisition of awesome strength and tragic weakness, in that each soul, in order to be itself, must rely on direct intimate relationship with other souls), bad, evil, to be avoided, not acceptable. I don't know how to formulate the argument clearer. There is a realness, an objective finality, to the differentiation between "good" and "bad". They may be human categories, but they are categories made for reminding ourselves precisely what it means to be human. This is what we are called out for; and in us, as the central players in the ongoing project of creation (since we possess the "image of God" we possess, in whatever way, his powers of making visions reality, and for investing mere matter and mere energy with purpose and truly reasonable functionality, as well as producing things of aesthetic value--art is not so much a contribution to the development of the natural order as a celebration of the natural order and a further means of connecting with one another, in like-minded admiration, and with God, in our humble praise; when art becomes an exercise in self-satisfaction it may not lose its effectiveness but it certainly loses it potential as a sort of conduit between the artist and God, and so this misuse of the divine power to intentionally produce beauty may very well contribute to the dehumanizing of the artist).....anyway, in us, as the central players, the whole tapestry of creation somehow finds its direction and achieves its greatest good, or greatest terror. This may seem a bold, if not outright conceited, anthropological perspective; but remember that the universe is so large only because that was what was needed to fine-tune the conditions for life, or, from a more grounded perspective, life is only here because the universe is in fact so large. It depends really on whether you want to see a higher purpose in the construct of reality and humankind's position within it.

On that note, it goes back to first principles--starting assumptions. That's where I and my friend differed; that's where I and the skeptics (religious, atheistic, and agnostic) differ. The skeptic takes a more "pessimistic" tack and assume that all judgments, all rulings, even God's, must be simply the "preference" of the one who makes those judgments and rulings. In the realm of morality there is no intrinsic right or wrong, it's all a matter of taste. But there is certainly a right and wrong way to go about dealing with, say, physics, or chemistry; so if the brute operations of nature have actual values of "better" and "worse" (in regard to specific outcomes, say, the ongoing fruitfulness of the universe), what works as opposed to that which does not, why cannot the infinitely more subtle and complicated realm of morality? The soul is a universe unto itself, and all souls are connected to one another and to the source of all things; it is a dance and a symphony, and the pattern is set by the conductor, but in this case the conductor has not put together the piece because it tickled his fancy in a quirky human sense. The difference is precisely that this is the Creator we are speaking of: whereas humans can change their tastes and wants, the Creator, being the fixed principle upon which all systems stand, cannot, by virtue of being what he is.

And to wrap things up, this is where most atheists/agnostics and many religious people fall short, I think. They are inconvenienced by the idea of God, so they dismiss him altogether or perhaps imagine a scenario in which they "offer God a beer", i.e., treat him in a casual, almost indifferent, fashion. That latter I honestly think is either a failure to recognize just WHAT (more than simply "who") God actually is, or it is an attempt to bring the infinite to a manageable level, which is an understandable sentiment. The vast unknowability of God, though tempered by the fact of his incarnation in Christ, is dreadful to think on, and understandably so. When we turn to God, we turn to the wellspring from which the whole construct of reality flows, the root of our being. If we cannot even know ourselves, how do we expect to know the origin of ourselves? (As for the possibility of God being a creature himself, I'm just assumed here that he is the "ultimate" and that his creation is by divine fiat alone, not by manipulation of pre-existent material, so he does not stand at any intermediate level--all things come from him, whatever that means, and I don't think it means that he is composed of all things, but more that his will is such that it can call forth that which was not, save in the mind of God as an idea.) The anti-religious persons, and the believers who view God with such non-chalance, will doubtless deny the charge, and possibly take offense at my seeming arrogance. But know this: it is not arrogance, but a growing sense of awareness at my relation to the Creator, and thus a growing humility, that compels me to stress this truth. God does not demand our subservience because it satisfies his ego. We are compelled by the mere fact of our being created, and his being creator. It is the wind over the grass--the wind does not order the grass to kneel, but the two things being exactly what they are, this is how they interact; the grass flattens under the magnitude and power of the wind. Love entails recognition of God's awesomeness. In any event, we will all stand before God one day, and then we will see the disposition of our true selves. The soul that hates God will still bow, but it will be with much protesting. The soul that loves God will bow with tears of joy.

Another question my friend brought up was the issue of "those who've never heard about God". I'm not exactly sure (as with the neanderthal thing) how it fit into the overall discussion, but he brought it as another rebuttal to my theory. So again, someone reading this may have been bugged by the same perplexity and so this is for you. Regardless, it's another pretty decent summation of my views, so I include it for kicks (and it actually brings the whole topic of the "purpose of the universe" to a nice close). I kind of approached my friend's question with the issue of "fallenness" (i.e., humans were once well aware of God and his desire for relationship, etc., then fell from that happy state and had to be reinformed, so to speak) but I'm not sure there was ever a stage when humans were fully cognizant of God's purposes for their lives. Humans have always had understanding of morality and justice and order. The whole notion of the personal, loving God who speaks directly to us and calls us to walk with him and take part in governing the world and making ready fo the next, though...that's a realization that has to grow out of actual experience. Knowledge of the fact brings the danger of rejecting the invitation. Whatever that will entail I'm not sure. It may be there are two ways to hell: denial of the basic human perception of rightness and love (the one in denial must of course be mentally disposed to making rational choices), and denial of the much more specific truth of God's plan for his creation. The Jews got the "plan" first, for whatever reason; I rather suspect it's just further proof of how God works, gradually, from a tiny speck to a grand scheme. In any event, now it's spreading, and transforming the world (even if we can't see all the effects just yet), under the authority of the name of Jesus, the man who stands at the center of the human race and thus, metaphysically, at the center of the universe, summing up all things in himself and pointing all things toward their perfect fulfillment.