To Dust You Will Not Return

One of my favorite quotes is from Richard Feynman, because it alerts Christians to a fundamental problem they face in light of our changing understandings of the universe:

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all the atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil-which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

The problem with this quotation is that it perpetuates a myth about religion: that religion is about the struggle between good and evil.

Now this is a myth embraced by many religious people, including Christians. But it is wrong, and in our contemporary context is either a caricature targeting religion or an easy acquiescence to the caricature of religion by a contemporary culture unable to think outside the boxes of modernity. Consider for a moment the Christian creeds. Let’s take Nicaea as the more comprehensive and universal of those commonly used:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered, died, and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Nowhere in this concise statement of what Christians believe is there anything about a struggle between good and evil. Nor is there anything about a struggle between law and grace when it comes to it. The creed actually assumes a position beyond struggle. God has created all things. God in Christ will judge all things. God the Holy Spirit is worshipped and glorified. Sins are forgiven, the dead will be resurrected to eternal life. 

Struggle? That happens in mid-creed and pertains only to Jesus Christ, and it ends with  his resurrection. Christianity isn’t about God watching the struggle between good and evil, its about humans declaring the victory of good over evil. God’s interest, so far as we can discern it in revelation, is empowering Christians to realize that victory in their personal and communal lives. Resurrection, eternal life, the realm of unending fruitfulness and worship are the key themes.

Now this does raise the question about the real, daily battles with evil that Christians experience in the world. But here we have to be nuanced. Evil struggles. Christians are simply minimizing the harm it creates in its death throws. Evil is down by an unbridgeable margin but still wants to score. Christians are playing out the clock while they limit the damage. 

Now Christianity is an eschatological religion, and what I’ve sketched is a particularly Christian (as opposed to Manichaeistic) point of view. What about other religions? Well Buddhism is concerned about compassion and dharma, but not so much about struggles between good and evil. Hinduism is concerned about delusion and release, but again not so much a struggle between good and evil. Not that either religion doesn’t acknowledge the need for morality and the problem of evil in the world. Its just that the religion per se is concerned with more fundamental issues.

And this is true of Christianity as well. Satan as the personification of evil is a minor and highly confused personality in most of the Bible - despite his outsized role in Milton’s classic poem Paradise Lost. Jesus encounters him once, leading to a quick and decisive repudiation. And the disciples, on their first mission continuing Jesus’ ministry, are affirmed when Jesus says that he saw a vision of Satan’s downfall. And even that must be placed in context. Of the many miracles Jesus works only one portion, those involving exorcism of demons, represent a struggle (indirect) with Satan. Put another way, the struggle between good and evil and its personification is only one part of Jesus' ministry of realizing God’s Reign.

This does change in the later epistles of the New Testament, and particularly in the Book of Revelation. Although it must be said that never does Satan rise to being the sole source of evil. He is a fearsome adversary and tempter, but there is no hint of moral dualism here or of anything to suggest that humans can put off moral responsibility onto Satan. 

Ultimately it seems in scripture that there are two views of the same reality. The mundane view is that Christians are called to announce and pragmatically realize the God’s Reign manifest in Jesus Christ. It isn’t easy, but the outcome is decided. The supernatural view understands that there are vast forces at work to undermine God’s creative activity and create chaos in ever greater measure. Those forces are partially personified in the character of Satan, who in Revelation is specifically associated with the “chaos monster,” called a dragon or ancient serpent of the Old Testament.

The real struggle isn’t between good and evil, it is between creative ordering and chaos. That is how the world begins, and that is how according to the apocalyptic parts of the gospel it will end.  

And here we begin to see something that sounds quite contemporary, and perhaps immediately relevant to physicists like Feynmann and his successors. For on the contemporary view of reality, particularly with the rise of Big Bang cosmology and the discovery of the effects of what are called dark matter and dark energy, the real struggle within which humans are caught is between order and entropy. Which, at the root, is exactly the real struggle at the heart of Christianity. 

Dust is entropy in physical form, as is any form of chaos whether it be physical, social, or political. And the central teaching of Christianity, despite the popular sentiments by which we say goodby to our bodies, is that we do not return to dust, either as humans or a universe. What Christianity is about is living out the promise that all things end as all things began, with a God whose first and final word creates the universe: “Let there be light.”