Our God is Too Small to Believe.

I have the privilege most mornings of walking as the sun rises, and in this a chance to see the vastness of the universe folded slowly into the into the intimate relationship of earth and sun. 

Which always brings to mind the title of JB Phillips’ book, “Your God Is Too Small.”

It is worth thinking about two spacecraft in this regard: Voyager and Cassini. Voyager was sent on a grand tour of the outer planets. After decades it completed its mission and slipped into interstellar space, beyond the last reaches of that sun which so dominates our days. It’s future is utterly unknown.

Cassini’s fate was sealed just a few weeks ago after an equally fantastic voyage of discovery. Its creators intentionally guided it into an encounter with Saturn that would assuredly reduce it to a diffuse collection of molecules and atoms. 

Aboard Voyager was a message, inscribed on a gold disk, telling whoever might find it a little bit about the humans who created it and their planet and solar system. Aboard Cassini, it was feared, might be living remnants of earth’s biosphere that could contaminate and even destroy such non-terrestrial life as the spacecraft might encounter.

The ends of these craft were carefully plotted by their human creators in the greatest acts of faith in these last hundred years of human civilization. Because these two different ends were predicated on the belief that there is something beyond earth and its life forms. That there is something beyond humanity and our intelligence. The ends were based on the belief that we humans are stewards of more than the earth, and that we are fellow travelers with pilgrims we will never meet.

Do we believe in a God for whom earth, and indeed humanity, is just one of a countless other objects of love and concern? Certainly we need to think this way if we’ve going to understand and explain our actual place in the cosmos in a post-Copernican culture. Otherwise our God is really just a species-god, a subordinate deity responsible for a minor planet of a distant sun on the fringes of a smallish galaxy. 

And if our distinctly Christian faith is to be relevant, and not reduced to Deism, then this modern way of understanding our place in the universe requires us to reconsider the central doctrines of Christianity: the incarnation and the atonement. For as it stands both doctrines are deeply human-centric, placing humanity at the center of God’s universal purpose and plan. In their classical form the greater created order and its redemption rotate around the redemption of humanity, which makes sense only in a non-modern, pre-copernican worldview.

But can a contemporary theology, aware that humanity and its problems are those of a recently evolved species on a marginal planet, seriously assert that the central concern of the God of the entire universe is revealing God’s self to humans and reconciling God’s self with them? “The stage is too big for the drama.” as Richard Feynman once said. In the light of the vastness of the cosmos our human-centric doctrines are in danger of appearing to be human-created idols designed, like all those tribal gods in the Bible, to keep us and our problems at the center of God's concern. 

A bigger doctrine of incarnation and atonement is possible. But it will require an understanding that incarnation is more than an historic event, and is part of the essential character of the Triune God. And it will require an understanding of atonement not as merely a historical act, but part of the essential character of a Triune God ever concerned to reconcile God’s creatures to God’s self regardless of whether and how they understand the nature of their separation and regardless of whether they are human or even part of our solar system or galaxy. 

Although our journey to this reconsideration of incarnation and atonement begins with the faith of scientists designing spacecraft for the stars, its ending really isn’t rocket science. A theology for our contemporary world will need to shift away from an excessive concern with what God has done for us as humans. And certainly it will need to move away from endless disputes over the exact nature of how the cross reconciled humans to God. Instead I’ll suggest that we focus on how God’s incarnation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ illuminates for us the character of a God whose concerns far exceed the human problem however construed. 

Love is the English word we typically use to describe that character. When we can release that love from our own self-centered embrace then our God will become more credible within the contemporary experience of the cosmos, and our witness to that love in Christ will reflect a character more like that of Jesus himself.