How Big is Your Hamster Wheel?

What if instead of asking what we have to say we also asked what we have to learn? What if instead of defending the truth we attack our own ignorance? 

I was struck by a recent article in Scientific American reporting on the latest findings in astronomy based on the coordination of individual experiments designed to measure gravity waves, neutrinos, X-rays, gamma rays, and visible light. This coordination has led to the observation of never-before seen astronomical events of consequence in testing certain theories of the nature of reality and the origins of the universe. 

The excitement in the article, and in the responses of literally 10’s of thousands of scientists to these observations, is palpable. Indeed, hundreds of academic articles are the result of each observation. That excitement seems to stem from a sense of limitless possibilities for continuing discovery about a universe whose unbounded complexity and infinite reach gives humans never ending possibilities for growth in understanding and self-understanding. It is the excitement at the core of the modern scientific endeavor. 

And to tell the truth it make a lot of what Christians do seem pretty dreary. Oh, I know we think we are cutting edge in our engagement with the intense social issues of our day. But do we expect to actually learn anything new about God? Or are we simply offering a contemporary application of what we’ve always known about God. 

And I know that at some of us are at the cutting edge of epistemological and philosophical questions, exploring the enormous complexity of making truth claims in our contemporary culture. But do we expect to learn anything new about God? Or are we simply engaged in the apologetic task of making what has always and everywhere been known by the Church available in a credible and coherent fashion to whatever small segment of society will listen to us? 

And I know that some of us (including myself) are engaged in an intense exploration of non-Christian theologies, seeking to understand better what Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and others say about transcendent reality. But do we expect to learn anything new about God? Or are we simply engaged in identifying long-existing similarities and differences before a break for refreshments and some vague kind of spiritual fellowship?

None of the endeavors above is bad. In fact they are critical parts of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. But do any of them bring the distinctively Christian experience of faith in Christ to bear on discovering something new, something unanticipated about reality? Or are we leaving that to scientists while we concentrate on timeless truths which by their very nature are also antique? Are we going somewhere in our theology? Or are we on a hamster wheel, moving fast but running over and over the same ground?

Back when I was in seminary I remember a professor who said there were only four essential heresies. I think the point was logical, but I remember thinking that when I was studying astronomy I was exploring previously unknown dimensions to reality and when I joined the seminary I was with people who after 2000 years couldn't even come up with a new heresy. 

I’ve just been re-reading Leslie Newbigin’s work, and reflections on it after nearly three decades. And I’ve realized that a great deal of both theological and missiological reflection in the last half century and more has focused on a single question: Do Christians have anything distinctive to say in the context of modern culture, and if so how do they say it? And these questions lead us into endlessly self-referential circles around the content of the Gospel and what it might “mean” in a modern/post-modern/secular context. 

What if instead of asking what we have to say in the context of modernity we also asked what we have to learn? What if instead of defending the truth we attack our own ignorance? 

While driving through Richardson Texas I saw a bumper sticker. It said. “All Truth is in the Quran.” Now I’ve studied Islam and know that whoever had that bumper sticker didn’t know the religion. Because Islam has a robust belief in both natural revelation and revelations outside the Quran. But I also knew that many Christians, and indeed many of my students in the seminary would say the same thing about the Bible, at least with regard to knowledge of God. 

And that is a fallacy. Christians have always believed (as Paul states clearly in Romans 1) that God reveals God’s self in God’s creation. And on a specifically Christian level this means that nature is a revelation of the nature of Christ, the creating Word of God. 

But I find there is no rarer bird in a theological seminary, or indeed most churches, than a person who shows any interest in what scientists are learning about the natural world, and thus God (if they looked) every day. Sure, we are interested in the aesthetics of nature and the emotions to which they give rise. That is our inheritance from Romanticism. But that is not the meaning of natural revelation.

In an culture both obsessed with and drawing massive human benefits from its knowledge of the natural world fidelity to the gospel demands more than asserting the historical fact that Jesus Christ was raised from dead (although making that claim is central to our witness.) Fidelity to the gospel demands that we join scientists in their study of nature with the intention of discovering what it reveals about God. 

Put another way, contextualization of the gospel isn’t accommodation to modernity, it is the recognition of that we who live in the context of modernity share a common commitment to finding the truth. To find that common commitment to truth we as Christians have work to do.

First we need to get over our hurt feelings of rejection by various anti-religious forces in contemporary society. Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk have always been around in some form, running in their own materialist hamster wheels. Let them run. Making claims about who has the better hamster wheel isn’t likely to advance the preaching of the gospel. 

Secondly we need to get over our jealousy of all the attention our culture showers on the so called “STEM” subjects in schools and universities. Ever since Adam and Eve left the garden the chief concern of humans has been how to shape their environment to meet their human needs. When Jesus said that “the sabbath was made for humans and not humans made for the sabbath” he spoke a central truth theologians too readily forget: humans are natural scientists and leisure time theologians. The fact that our society has become so rich that some of us can pursue theology full time shouldn’t fool us into thinking its the most important thing humans do. At any given moment any rational society will put a theologian to work planting the fields before they put a farmer to work doing theology. 

Third we need to become curious about the world again. In a recent conversation with a bishop I was told: “In 90% of the pastor’s offices I visited I could tell the year they graduated from seminary by the books on their shelves.” The primary characteristic of modern culture is curiosity and the desire to discover new things and venture into new realms. But too many of us graduate from seminary and immediately jump onto an ecclesial hamster wheel in which, if we do read anything at all, we read about the wheel and not the world outside it.

Finally we need to become problem solvers.  Because that is the second major characteristic of modern culture; an orientation toward finding solutions to immediate human problems and questions. Nothing puts us more out of touch with our cultural context than our continual rumination on our context. The nature of modern culture is to be a platform for finding solutions to human problems, not to be an object of study. 

Modernity begins as a means of solving the problem of how humans can be free: intellectually, politically, socially, economically, and in every other dimension of human existence. Its key markers are not Kant and Schleiermacher, or Barth or Hauerwas. Its key markers are new churches, new nations, political and scientific revolutions, the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, and a host of new technologies that meet real human needs. Nothing is less contextual than our obsession with describing and contesting our context.

As one atheist responded to one of my blogs, “You keep looking for your lost God, we’ll get on with  curing diseases, feeding the world, and sending rockets into space."  

And that’s what I like about Newbigin. He didn’t see modernity so much as an intellectual puzzle as a missiological context. He described it only to clarify what it means to proclaim the gospel within it. But we need to move beyond that as well. 

The Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once said that the “stage” revealed by science was too big for the story told by Christians. In part that’s because we haven’t done a good job telling our story. He simply hadn’t heard all of it. But in part its because we haven’t explored the stage enough to grasp fully the story that God is trying to tell in Jesus Christ. The stage isn’t too big for God's story, but its way too big for our story. Maybe if we’d join the scientists in exploring its furthest parameters we’d find ourselves out of the hamster wheel and running free.