If God is one, then how can reality be two? If God is the origin of all that is—earth, moon, and stars, as well as spirit, soul, and consciousness, then how can science (which means to tell me the truth about physical reality) and religion (which means to tell me the truth about spiritual reality) be enemies? And why should living my life require me to use two different operating manuals? If God is truly one and truly God of all, then how can truth be divided? —Barbara Brown Taylor
Norwich, Vermont – May 1, 2007 – Since the theme of a new transcendence has been playing throughout this book, this chapter will serve mainly to bring it to a crescendo. The new transcendence envisioned (and experienced) by Eugen and his fellow dialogical thinkers was based on their discovery that speech, a completely natural phenomenon, could also be seen as the only miracle. As I quoted Franz, “One knew that the distinction between immanence and transcendence disappears in language.”
Both the dialogical thinkers and their Russian counterparts—from Kireevsky to Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Bakhtin—were quite properly reacting to the 18th century Enlightenment’s over-assertion of Reason as well as to the result: the 19th century’s experience of religion’s near collapse. As I’ve been presenting their achievement in these pages, my German and Russian heroes have succeeded in giving us a new vision of God: no longer a Being external to us but one in whose life we participate. That panentheistic vision, as we’ve seen, is one of the main pillars of Christianity’s new paradigm.
Now this chapter will continue on the path of Chapter 6, with further reflections on how we can move from theism to panentheism—and to thereby reconciling science and religion. To get back on that path, I’ll undertake an engagement with two scientists, Stephen Hawking and Einstein, on the meaning of time, and then introduce the US “process theologians,” our own quite recent panentheists.
I’ll start with help from Barbara Brown Taylor, who joined Marcus Borg on the platform at that conference in Georgia three months ago. In preparation for that event, I read Taylor’s little book, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion, a work which deals quite successfully with the science-religion stand-off. Early on she describes “the dualism that has dogged me all my life….I grew up thinking of reality not as one but two.” On the one hand, there was the physical reality which “depends on science and reason.” On the other hand, there was the spiritual reality, “beyond sight and touch—which depends entirely on God.” However, she asks, “if God is one, then how can reality be two?”
A Brief History of Time
To explore that question, in the early 1990s, Taylor was led to read some science books, and was particularly engaged by Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. People bought an astounding nine million copies of that little book, and Taylor thinks it was “his quest for a ‘theory of everything’ that caught our attention....Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover the unity at the heart of all diversity?” She quotes the famed physicist’s concluding paragraph on this unity:
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.
Now, if I understand Hawking, his complete theory of everything would have to be expressible in a single mathematical equation, one that would be consistent with all that we know about physics and the universe. Presumably that equation would include, along with E=mc2, a good many more factors, ones that related time, space, matter, the speed of light, gravity, and energy (and undoubtedly other factors beyond my ken). Such an equation would certainly take into account Einstein’s critical discovery that time is a fourth dimension of space. And such an equation would reflect Descartes’ fundamental insight that everything we know can be reduced to mathematics. As S. V. Keeling writes in his Descartes, “He saw no reason why philosophy itself should not become a “Universal Mathematics.” That’s much like E. O. Wilson’s Consilience, in which all material and social phenomena “are ultimately reducible…to the laws of physics.”
Thus, Hawking is talking only about the world of space, the world of matter, the world on the outer front of the Cross of Reality. He is not talking about the world of human time, where we are certainly able to identify past and future. Hawking stresses that the “time” he is describing in his Brief History of Time has no past or future. Specifically, he writes that “the laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.”
Now I’ll ask the reader to recall what I wrote in Chapter 1 about “The Dimensions of Time.” I chose the title for that December 7, 1941 note with Einstein very much in mind. In the 1920s he’d had a tremendous impact on our understanding of the cosmos when he came up with that remarkable insight that time is a fourth dimension of space. In other words, we live in a space-time continuum. Without mentioning Einstein, I wanted to hint that his concept of time for physics might not be related to human time. I wrote, for example, that, “when applied to human beings…the term future has quite a different meaning than when applied to nature. We commit ourselves to the future as an act of faith. Our life in time is just as real and full as our life in space.”
Two Kinds of Time: Kairos and Chronos
What I’d like to do now is go beyond hinting. I’d like to make a proposition: that the kind of time Einstein needed to describe a space-time continuum may not be the same kind of time that we experience in our lives and in history. Since we’re near the end of this book, I have neither the space nor the time to fully develop my proposition. Still, I’d like to say enough about it so that you’ll be able to say—should my idea ever become commonly accepted—that you “first read about it in Gardner’s book.”
First, let’s make absolutely clear that the kind of time described by the laws of science, specifically physical science, does not have a past or future. Physical time is simply a duration, there’s no forward movement. Look it up in the encyclopedia! In the Columbia Encyclopedia, the article on time says: “In addition to relative time, another aspect of time relevant to physics is how one can distinguish the forward direction in time….According to classical physics....when all microscopic motions of individual particles are precisely defined, there is no fundamental distinction between forward and backward in time.” It goes on to say that the only way to distinguish a forward direction in the existence of matter is “by the increase of entropy or disorder,” as in thermodynamics. Hawking makes exactly that same point about entropy in his book.
Now entropy and disorder are hardly conditions which seem related to the way we perceive the future, or progress, in human time. Physical time, natural time, however, has a wonderful example of disorder: it can disappear! Hawking tells us that time and space merge together as they disappear into a black hole.
As I’ve thought about how human time may be fundamentally different from nature’s time, it’s occurred to me that Tillich may be helpful. He suggested that we should distinguish between the ordinary time of chronos, which just measures how the clock ticks on, and our higher experience of time, which we might call kairos, as the Greeks did. Kairos time we might think of as God’s time, the time which cannot be measured. Kairos time, human time, can have fullness and ripeness; it can have high moments, as the time described by physics cannot.
Eugen always recognized Tillich as a friend and fellow worker on the new Christian paradigm which began to be visible after the First World War. He certainly found Tillich more congenial than Barth. Still, their contributions to the new paradigm were very different. For example, Tillich attracted many with his description of God as “the ground of being,” while Eugen found few concepts more distasteful than that of “being.” However, when Tillich began to talk about kairos time, Eugen jumped to his support. He proposed that we might use the term “kaironomy” for a discipline which would educate us to understand the sort of time which is not “natural.” “Man’s time, unlike space, has no yardstick,” Eugen once exclaimed.
With that as background, I’ll rephrase my proposition: perhaps we can come to realize that there are two kinds of time, the natural time of physics, or chronos, and the human time of history, or kairos. When we consider the Cross of Reality, it shows us that we live at the high-tension intersection between past and future times. If we live responsibly at that intersection, we are always redeeming the time. At all creative moments of our lives, whenever we use or respond to high speech, we participate in the life of the Spirit; at those moments, which may occur almost daily, we live in kairos time, not chronos time.
In sum, natural science measures chronos time. A higher social science, be it called kaironomy or metanomics, would call our attention to how the human race, at its best, lives in kairos time.
I’ll give Eugen the last word on this issue. In a 1954 lecture, he exclaims: “Gentlemen, you and I don’t live in the fourth dimension of space. This is all nonsense….You couldn’t breathe for one minute if time was one-dimensional because at that very moment, gentlemen, the future would only be composed of the elements of the past.”
Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Process Theology
Toward the end of her Luminous Web, Taylor suggests that her readers might do well to read the work of Alfred North Whitehead, particularly his 1929 classic, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. She also recommends his theological heirs, Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and John Cobb, Jr. (1925-). All three will give you background on the development of panentheistic thought in America. However, I’d suggest that you read his heirs before Whitehead—unless you’re a glutton for dense philosophizing. After plowing through his lengthy tome, I’ve found only bits and pieces that were readily accessible. However, one of those bits is worth quoting at length because it’s such a devastating critique of theism:
The notion of God as the “unmoved mover” is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is concerned. The notion of God as “eminently real” is a favorite doctrine of Christian theology. The combination of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahometanism.
When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.
I know of no better comment than Whitehead’s on how Christianity was distorted by Constantine and the emperors and kings who followed in his wake. The Supreme Being version of God obviously derives from the rulers who saw themselves as Supreme Beings, as Tsars, as heirs of the Caesars. Worship him like you worship me!
Eugen got to know Whitehead at Harvard, but I never heard that he found his work of particular interest. However, I think he’d have agreed with that quotation. And I suspect he’d have approved of some of the final thoughts in Process and Reality. There Whitehead writes that “the kingdom of heaven is with us today” and affirms
”the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”
Now let’s turn to Hartshorne, who builds on Whitehead. His description of panentheism reminds me of Berdyaev:
God orders the universe, according to panentheism, by taking into his own life all the currents of feeling in existence. He is the most irresistible of influences precisely because he is himself the most open to influence. In the depths of their hearts all creatures (even those able to “rebel” against him) defer to God because they sense him as the one who alone is adequately moved by what moves them. He alone not only knows but feels (the only adequate knowledge, where feeling is concerned) how they feel, and he finds his own joy in sharing their lives, lived according to their own free decisions, not fully anticipated by any detailed plan of his own. Yet the extent to which they can be permitted to work out their own plan depends on the extent to which they can echo or imitate on their own level the divine sensitiveness to the needs and precious freedom of all.
While I liked that formulation when I first read it in the early 1960s, and while I still like it, looking back at it now, I find that it’s actually somewhat too theistic for me. That quotation still implies that God is some sort of knowing entity. Berdyaev, a generation before Hartshorne, came closer to what I’d want to say, when he described the Holy Spirit as becoming incarnate in every human being—and therefore suggested that we think of God as being like a whole humanity. As whole humanity, God takes into his life all the lives that have been lived, each a sentence in his story. Only God as whole humanity can be adequately moved by what each of us has said and done. Only God as whole humanity can know our shared joy; and feel, with a divine sensitivity, what it is that we all have in common.
John Cobb, a lively interpreter of both Hartshorne and Whitehead, is still with us. In his God and the World, Cobb makes Whitehead quite accessible and adds his own perspective. Like his mentor, he makes clear that we should be rid of “the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys.” Today you can hear Cobb on a widely-circulated DVD. Along with Borg, Spong, and several others, he’s participated in an educational project called “Living the Questions.” One of the best resources for those exploring Christianity’s new paradigm, I know its DVDs are used in several Vermont and New Hampshire churches.
As you see, I admire the process theology introduced by Whitehead and Hartshorne because I see it as an American version of the panentheism pioneered by Solovyov, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev. Not surprisingly, I find that Eugen’s still-unrecognized contribution to the new paradigm is just as important—and have devoted this book to explaining how.
Five Theses on Reconciling Science and Religion
I hope the reader will forgive me now for summing up this chapter—and the whole book—by using the same device I did at the end of Chapter 4: a list of several theses. Before I list five new theses, let me recall the main thrust of the first ten (which the diligent reader may also want to reread).
Chapter 4’s “Ten Theses on Language” described how four basic kinds of speech create our consciousness of an inner self, the outer world, future time, and past time. Thus, we live in a Cross of Reality, a model of the human condition that reveals how our souls are formed. That cross depicts the action of high speech in us, and we can come to see that such speech is the embodiment of what Christians call the Holy Spirit. It follows that the Trinitarian God is not something in which we need to believe; that God is already within us, as the very source of our humanity. Spirit, Son, and Father relate to three kinds of speech and their related grammatical persons: thou, I, and we. We represent all three persons of the Trinity as we act in the outer world, where we are recognized as he, she, or they.
That, in a nutshell, was what I described in my first four chapters and summed up in those ten theses on language. As you see, they moved from simple secular statements to increasingly religious ones. All ten of them were offered as reinforcements for Christianity’s new paradigm, a paradigm that moves away from the distant God of supernaturalist theism and toward the immediately-experienced God of panentheism. Now, below, I’ll add five more theses—to take into account what’s been said since Chapter 4:
1. The Holy Spirit as the Human Spirit
Neither natural nor social science should have any objection to the kind of Christianity—or religion generally—which I’ve presented here. The heart of Christianity—and of all truly inspired religion—is the recognition that God’s spirit lives in each of us. Eugen, and his allies in disclosing the secrets of speech, have been able to describe just how it is that God’s spirit lives in us. Today we can recognize the Holy Spirit as a universal creative principal, the action of spirit in all persons. And this spirit, which once had seemed expressed as a divine Logos, can now be recognized as the creative word. Thus, when we explore the mysteries of how speech, the word, works in us, we are simultaneously exploring how the Holy Spirit works in us.
2. The Logos Expressed in All Humanity
If we start by acknowledging that high speech is the body of the spirit, we can go on to realize that the Logos, the word which was in the beginning, is the word that was made flesh not only in Jesus Christ but in all the generations before and after him. That is, the generations of our faith extend backward to those who first buried their dead—and spoke or sang some words in their praise. They include all people of good will. They include those who lived in tribes and then in the great empires—the Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese. They include those Muslims who see their purpose as peace, just as they include the Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucians—who always tended to be more peaceful than their Christian or Muslim brethren.
3. Anthropurgy or Theosis
Since the Christian tradition has always declared that Father, Son, and Spirit are co-equal and co-eternal in the Godhead, whatever is true of the Spirit is also true of Father and Son. All three persons of the Trinity are powers that work in us—together. It follows that, when we come to understand how speech, as Spirit, turns us into valuable persons, we are also learning how God as Father and Son is simultaneously turning us into such persons. This is the process which our Christian Church Fathers described as anthropurgy and the Eastern Church has called “theosis.”
4. From Theism to Panentheism
The panentheistic understanding of God which I’ve been presenting here is not something new. Its briefest best expression was in St. Paul, and it came to full expression in Meister Eckhart. Then it has always been a major strain in Eastern Christianity. Through Solovyov, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and Florensky, it was the characteristic spirituality of Russia’s Silver Age. Through Whitehead, Hartshorne, Tillich (and many others), it found a home in the United States. While each expression of it is different, they all suggest that that we can and should give up the idea of God as an independent, knowing entity, a supernatural power who is separate from us, before us, and over us. That theistic conception of an autonomous entity who exists beyond creation is positively damaging—because it stands in the way of our realizing how God’s continuing life in us, and the very continuance of any life on earth, is up to us.
5. The New Transcendence
To sum up, Christianity’s new paradigm, as presented in the preceding four theses, offers us a new vision of transcendence. The old vision—be it in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—was based on imagining that there is a transcendental power, a supernatural power, which dwells outside of the universe, outside of creation, outside of history, outside of evolution, outside of human beings. By contrast, Eugen and his allies have given us convincing evidence that there is a transcendental power that is at work within the universe, within the process of creation, within history, working at the leading edge of evolution, always present in human beings. This power, however, is not supernatural. It is present in us all the time—and is made manifest whenever we say the word that needs to be spoken. It is the power of speech. It is the Word made flesh in all humanity.
Taking those five new theses together, along with their ten predecessors on language, we have fifteen continuing statements that build upon each other—and thus sum up this book’s whole argument. I contend that, since they start with verifiable statements about speech, and retain that base as they move into the realm of religion, they remain anchored in the verifiable, the rational, and the logical. Thus they should be quite acceptable to minds formed by Descartes and the Enlightenment, to minds that take science as a bedrock given. Of course, the Cross of Reality shows us that the bedrock of physical science lies only under what we know about the outer front, the material world of nature.
I began this chapter with Taylor’s question about the two realities, the physical and the spiritual—and how, “if God is one, then how can reality be two?” Now, as I’m at the end of it, I should underline just how I’ve answered her question. Those fifteeen theses remind us that the Cross of Reality shows us the intersection between those two realities: the physical outer space of the world, which is known by science, and the spiritual inner space of the person, which is known only to our selves. But then the cross goes further than that, enlarging our vision beyond that dualism. By adding the two dimensions of time, it shows that we live in a four-dimensional universe—and that we live God’s life whenever we turn chronos into kairos. Since each of us lives at the center of the cross, our lives are crucial, not only for ourselves but for all humankind. At the center of the cross there care not two realities; four realities become one. Now we don't need two different operating manuals.
In Chapter 2 I made the claim that Eugen had shown us how everything we know is connected, how everything relates, from the most spiritual to the most material. Now that we’ve lived with the Cross of Reality throughout the ensuing chapters, I think that I’ve shown just how the spiritual is connected with the physical. They intersect at the center of the cross, where our bodies that exist in space, like stardust, are crossed by the spirit that exists in time, in kairos time.
Finally, I’m under no illusion that my friends in Art Rosen’s class, the several who were reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion, will suddenly find the scales falling from their eyes as they read this counter-attack on the querulous quartet. Nor am I under any illusion that my several friends in the Norwich Church who are still at home with theism and supernaturalist Christianity will suddenly be converted to this alternate vision of our common faith. Both parties will have trouble: the atheists when they hit the brick wall of the Trinity—and the theists when they’re invited to abandon the supernatural. To both of them, I reply that one simple premise lies behind all fifteen steps in this book’s logic. It’s the premise that speech is the body of the spirit. That’s not a big hurdle for you. It’s the logic of the Logos.
To continue, click 14 On Cemetery Hill - In Conclusion