Ephesians 4:1-6: A Call of Christian Unity, Pt. 5

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Today's entry was written by Ross Hastings. Ross Hastings is an associate professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College, Vancouver British Columbia. Hastings teaches in the areas of the theology and spirituality of mission, pastoral theology and ethics. He has served as a pastor in Kingston, ON, Burnaby, BC, and Montreal, QC, and for eleven years as the senior pastor of Peace Portal Alliance Church in White Rock, BC. He has earned two PhDs, one in organo-metallic chemistry at Queen’s University (ON), and the other in theology at St. Andrew’s University, in his native Scotland. His theological dissertation is a comparative study of the Trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth and is in the publication process.

In the previous post, Dr. Ross Hastings began his elaboration on the six tenets that comprise the core set of beliefs about creation that can open doors as Christians discuss the “how” of creation. We ended the last post in the middle of Hastings’s fifth tenet: “A theology of the imago Dei for created humans, which involves the following: Reason and moral conscience (structural) and rule, which includes work (functional), but both of which were designed to be exercised in relationship with God.”

Hastings ended that post with the promise to provide an example of how theological and scientific discoveries can be made in a similar fashion: the doctrine of the Trinity. Along the way, Hastings continues his critique of modernism’s myth of “Cartesian certainty,” which affects both the scientific and theological pursuits.

Hastings concludes is thoughts on a Christian theology of creation with his sixth tenet: a Trinitarian, incarnational worldview is compatible with the pursuit of science. In fact, true scientific pursuit is possible only because the Creator has willingly taken up residence in his creation. Accessing scientific truth, therefore, cannot be undertaken with the modernist presumption that the pursuit of knowledge is the task of mind detached from the senses and spiritual commitment.

Let me give one example of how a theological discovery was made in a fashion similar to how scientific discoveries are made. Scientists tend to privilege scientifically verifiable fact to the neglect of historical fact. But both have merit.

The development of the most important doctrine of the Christian faith, that is, the identity of Christ and then the Trinity, was in response to the historical and tangible experience of the apostles and the early church. John’s particular description of this as sensual experience is intriguing: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life (1 John 1:1).

As Lesslie Newbigin writes, the doctrine of the Trinity “was not the result of any kind of theological speculation within the tradition of classical thought. It was the result of a new fact (in the original sense of the word factum, something done).”¹ God had done those things that are the content of the good news that the church is commissioned to tell, the gospel. This fact required a complete rethinking of the meaning of the word “God.” One could, of course, decline to believe the “facts” alleged in the gospel. This is always a possibility. But if one believes that they are true, then this has to be a new starting point for thought. It is not something that can be fitted into existing models of thought—theological or metaphysical.²

Of course the correspondence is not complete in that science does require reproducibility. However, given that historical “facts” do not by their nature allow such a possibility, forming theological knowledge on history is not absurd, but reasonable. We will have to wait to the end of the age to argue a reproducibility of Christian experience of resurrection, but we can see some evidence of it in the spiritual regeneration of human believers and in the continuity of the church.

But personally I have found that scientific training served me well in the pursuit of exegesis and theological thinking. Both entail forming hypotheses based on the available data, both are empirical in that sense, and both share the rigorous application of intellect, and both ought also to appreciate the limits of intellect. The scientific community and the fundamentalist religious community are strange bedfellows in that they are less likely to acknowledge the insight that faith commitments affect how we see truth in science and in theology.

This is an insight of postmodernity but I would argue it was already present as far back as Augustine and Anselm. Philosophers like Michael Polanyi have pointed out that this is always true in all pursuit of truth, including scientific truth. Though I want to avoid the popular move of equating Christianity with postmodernity, I do want to say that postmodernity has done the Christian church a great favor in the arena of its honesty about the relative uncertainty of knowledge, reminding us that we need to be honest and say that all knowledge, including our own, is faith seeking understanding, that all human knowledge has a fiduciary character.

It may be more difficult for scientists to accept that Cartesian certainty is a myth than theologians (depending on the theologians), and the work of philosophers like Michael Polanyi and Alasdair MacIntyre are helpful in this department. My only point here is to express the fact that science and Christianity are not as far apart as my golfing buddies’ incredulities suggest.³

Another way to say this is that science is also an art. Michael Polanyi believed that “Science can’t be done without imagination and passion.” Central to Polanyi's thinking was the belief that creative acts (especially acts of discovery) are shot-through or charged with strong personal feelings and commitments (hence the title of his most famous work Personal Knowledge). Arguing against the then-dominant position that science was somehow value-free, Michael Polanyi sought to bring into creative tension a concern with reasoned and critical interrogation with other, more “tacit” forms of knowing.

One has to admit that while prejudices do influence science, the levels of certainty achieved by some of the harder sciences in which conclusions are tested by instrumentation and reproducibility, are of a higher level than those achieved by some of the softer sciences. It is however at the higher level of the philosophy of science that theology and science share the common limits of reason.

A proper understanding of the imago Dei will not only guide our discussions about culture, but will also unite us around the pursuit of appropriate ethics of science. The articulation of ethics in light of the vocation of humanity, especially as that has been recapitulated in Christ, with its Godward and communal orientation, is especially urgent when the tyranny of human convenience and individualism seem to dominate the ethical arena in contemporary society.

A proper understanding of the imago Dei appropriated Christologically will also unite us around an eschatology that includes creation and assumes care for it in the now dimension of the eschaton.

(vi) A distinctively Trinitarian, incarnational worldview is compatible with the pursuit of science.

I suggest that what may embolden us against the common enemy of scientism and what may unite and embolden us as Christians doing science is the notion that science is Christian in its historical origins, and that a specifically Trinitarian, incarnational worldview is more compatible with the pursuit of science than any other worldview. The reason that this sounds counter-intuitive has a lot to do with Enlightenment prejudices. Interestingly, in this, the postmodern era, the compatibility of science and Christian theology as “faith seeking understanding” has edged closer together.

As Tom Smail has written, “In our own day, the deconstructing skepticism that Feuerbach applied to religion has in much postmodern thinking been extended to all claims to know the truth about any reality that is objective to us.”⁴ Postmodernity has therefore exposed the gods of modernity as unreliable, and this can only be good for Christian mission. Smail refers to Hans Küng who stated, “Atheism too lives by an indemonstrable faith; whether it is faith in human nature (Feuerbach), or faith in the future socialist society (Marx) or faith in rational science (Freud). The question then can be asked of any form of atheism whether it is not itself an understandable projection of man (Feuerbach), a consolation serving vested interests (Marx) or an infantile illusion (Freud).’”⁵

Smail also asserts, of course, that the postmodernity that has seen through the gods of the Enlightenment has also rejected the possibility of revelation. Having rejected the humanistic optimism of Feuerbach and Freud and the political utopianism of Marx as themselves illusions, it has offered no new faith to take their place. As scientists who are Christian we unite together also against the radical doubt and nihilist tendencies in postmodernity.

Beyond this, our confidence may be bolstered and our unity enhanced as we recognize that doing science within a Christian framework was in fact the way in which science has prospered best in the history of human civilization, as Michael Foster, an Oxford philosopher of the 1930s, has indicated. As Loren Wilkinson has indicated, Foster sought to overcome the warfare language with respect to science and faith propagated by Bertrand Russell and John Draper by demonstrating amongst other things that the medieval Christian view of matter as created and as such at an ontological remove from God, made study of science possible.⁶

Many nations of a pantheistic bent were too fearful of nature to study it by means of sensuous experience. Other nations like the Greeks saw it as unimportant and could never advance science beyond abstract reasoning. Empirical science through sensuous experience took root, as Wilkinson writes:

[T]he Christian experience of the Creator-God of love who invented physical reality, and who in Jesus, became a part of it, changed forever how we value that knowledge. We cannot know the world God has made simply by thinking about it. What God does, like who God is, is inexhaustible, surprising and gracious. Knowledge comes through engaged experience, not detached contemplation. The Psalmist said it well: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” This recognition that sensuous experience is the source of knowledge is basic to Hebrew understanding. And it is here, rather than in Greek ideas of the superiority of the knowledge abstracted from the senses, that the tradition of empirical science took root.⁷

In this essay I given a basis for the preservation of the unity of the church as it comes at the issues of science and faith, and in particular as it dialogues over the more controversial areas in this arena. I would suspect this is not groundbreaking new information for most of us, but necessary exhortation nevertheless, especially given the disparate opinions of the kind that characterize the Christian church on matters of science and faith.

In my next essay, to follow in due time, I want to point to some areas that may be called “front edges” in ongoing healthy dialogue in the field of science and Christian theology, specifically of a theological nature. This I see as fulfillment of the exhortation that comes later in this first section of the paraenesis of the Ephesian epistle, Ephesians 4:7-16.

Notes

1. Newbigin is referring to the resurrection of the Son, by which the apostles reasoned that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God; similarly the coming of the Spirit historically caused them to reason that God was Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

2. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Trinity as Public Truth” in KevinVanhoozer, ed., The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 2, 3.

3. A book I recommend on this whole area of epistemology is Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). It does, as Lamin Sanneh suggests in the credits, chart a “course between the fundamentalist reaction and postmodernist radical nihilism” and it “unmasks the unspoken and concealed conditions that have intimidated and effectively held Christians in check.”

4. Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in our Humanity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 24.

5. Hans Küng, Why I am Still a Christian (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), 229-30.

6. Loren Wilkinson, "Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls and a Synchotron: Some Thoughts from France on Science and Taste" CRUX 42/1 (Spring 2006): 9.

7. Wilkinson, “Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls and a Synchotron,” 9-10.