Easter Dawns in the Laboratory

In the middle ages, we called science "natural philosophy" because we understood that science was the application of a particular philosophy to our understanding of the natural world.  The philosophy then employed was the philosophy of Aristotle, with its mixed bag of insight and nonsense.

Science still is natural philosophy, even though we’ve dropped the name.  The philosophy it now employs -- empiricism -- is exploded.  Even though the finest philosophers now rarely advocate empiricism, modern science still insists on being its laboratory application.  Someone needs to tell the scientists that the rest of the world has junked the scientists’ philosophy and might have been right to do so.

If bad ideas have bad consequences, and if empiricism is a philosophically bad idea, then one wonders what bad consequences flow from the bad philosophy that sits as the bedrock of modern science and is the engine of its movement.

Worth considering, that.

When challenged on the point, these otherwise empirical scientists often take resort to pragmatism:  “We use empiricism because it works.”  Pay no attention to the fact that as a worldview pragmatism has its own set of fatal flaws.  Simply notice that a moment earlier the scientists were talking as if science yielded truth and empirical facts.  Now they don’t.  They move seamlessly yet schizophrenically back and forth between supreme confidence and self-effacing mealy-mouthedness, depending upon which one serves their purposes best at the moment.   

The same nonsense holds true with the scientists’ faulty theology, which says that God, if He exists at all, is and ought to be irrelevant to scientific endeavor, that we can proceed quite nicely without Him, thank you very much.  Put on this lab coat and leave your Bible at the door.

That's perfectly bad theology, pure and simple.

It might be well for scientists to consider Wolfhart Pannenberg’s hypothesis that God is not only a field of force without limitations of time or extension, but that He is the field of force and, if so, then the scientists have been dealing with Him all along in one way and another yet never once realized it because their suffocating worldview made such recognition simply impossible. 

I'm not saying that the alternative to modern science is the bastardized nonsense that one gets at some Christian colleges, but neither ought it to be the bastardized nonsense one gets at shamelessly secular enclaves like Harvard or Oxford, as if Richard Dawkins, not John Lennox, John Polkinghorne, or Michael Polanyi were the master of interdisciplinary thinking on this subject (or any other).

All this academically myopic, self-congratulatory, under-informed, scientific delusion happens because we have divided human knowledge up into discreet and externally impenetrable academic disciplines, each with its own private set of presuppositions and methods, and each with the freedom to do as it sees fit without regard to the knowledge gained in other disciplines.

But it’s utterly unreal.  It’s utterly a rejection of things as they really are:  We don’t have, say, a mathematical universe alongside a historical universe, alongside a philosophical universe, alongside a chemical universe, alongside a theological universe, alongside a sociological universe, alongside a rhetorical universe, alongside a political universe.  We have but one world, and the answers we offer to life’s fundamental and enduring questions need to be true across the board.  Regarding origins, for example, it cannot be that (A.) the universe and matter are eternal and also that (B.) we have reached today -- any today.  Why not? Because it is impossible to traverse infinity, and if the universe is infinitely old, then you can’t get from infinity past to here.

Yet, here we are.

Some scientists, I am pleased to say, have escaped this prison and its “mind-forged manacles.”  They work at places like the Discovery Institute; they also have serious doubts about evolutionary theory and the very unpristine data concerning global warming.  

The prominence of contemporary scientific silliness is the by-product of academic segregation; it's just Jim Crow in charge of the curriculum:  “Separate (disciplines) but equal,” which means, we all know, separate but unequal.  No scientist I know thinks we ought to give equal weight to science and to Karl Barth’s intellectual earthquake, which brought down the towers of natural philosophy and natural theology, or to the first Christians’ discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning.  If, indeed, the tomb was empty, if Spirit reversed physical death -- doing what matter could never do -- then the scientific presupposition that only matter matters, and that only matter-based hypotheses are acceptable is simply false.  In such a world, science misses out on some of the most important, perhaps even the most important, explanatory principle in or out of the universe:  God.  Easter has dawned in the laboratory and no one there even noticed.

That’s because scientists don’t really think that Theology yields knowledge, that Theology is really an academic discipline that needs to be heard and taken into account.  But they do think the theologians ought to listen to the scientists.  They also think that the traffic between the two disciplines, if it exists at all, ought to be a one-way street from the laboratory to Jesus’ gravesite, not the other way round.

They think that Theology must sit in the back of the bus.

Understanding Eschatology (2)

        I have taken a lesson from the emphases of economists like Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek and applied it to the study of eschatology.  I have deliberately chosen to focus my attention on the individual rather than on the collective.  I have turned from macro-eschatology (God's plan for the nations and the world) to micro-eschatology (God's plan for individual people), not only because it is, in my view, a more profitable study, one more suitable for a theological pilgrimage, but because it is a subject upon which Scripture is more clear and accessible.  Young theologians, I am convinced, would be better served if they sought to master the Bible's teachings on personal destiny rather than global destiny.  And, with regard to micro-eschatology, nature is a far better model than is a bus schedule.

     When Paul, for example, explains the coming resurrection to the Corinthians, he resorts to agricultural imagery, to seeds planted in the ground now and to the coming harvest.  What is planted (or buried) a material body is harvested (or resurrected) a spiritual one.  Jesus does the same.  When He teaches micro-eschatology, He also employs natural, or agricultural, images, such as farmers at work separating sheep from goats and wheat from chaff.  Even when He addresses Himself to macro-eschatology, nature images predominate, as when He introduces lessons drawn from fig trees or from the atmospheric conditions that precede a storm.

     In that sense, because nature is a fertile source of images and analogies, it can be a useful means of prophetic pedagogy.  It also can help to decipher some of the more puzzling micro-eschatological phenomena in Scripture.  One such puzzling detail concerning which nature can be an aid actually occurs at least three times in the New Testament:  why Mary could not recognize the resurrected Jesus while standing at His empty tomb; why the disciples, fishing from their boat, could not recognize the resurrected Jesus, beckoning them from the nearby shore; and why the disciples on the road to Emmaus could not recognize the resurrected Jesus, the very man about whom they were speaking and to whom they spoke.

     Imagine, if you will, a caterpillar and a butterfly, one crawling, the other perched, upon the same twig.  Even had he a mind able to do so, the caterpillar would not recognize in his winged companion the same friend with whom he used to share a tasty leaf.  The transformation wrought in the cocoon would have masked his friend's true identity.  Nor would the caterpillar recognize in his companion his own destiny, even though it stood before his very eyes in all its Monarch splendor.  But something in the way that butterfly moved, or something in the way it nibbled at its food in the bright sunlight would stir the caterpillar deeply, would make his heart burn within him.  It would awaken the memory of twigs he'd travelled and leaves he'd tasted in the past, and of those with whom he'd shared summer days.  The welcome and revered image of his old friend's homely, wormlike countenance would cross his mind, and for an instant, for one brief but electric moment, charged with expectation and softened by nostalgia, he would catch a glimpse of both past and future, and he would understand.

     But moments of such transcending significance and insight are rare.  Only the keen-sighted or the visionary among us can see the seed that once was in the rose that now is.  In the oak trees towering above them they can see the destiny of humble acorns lying in the dirt.  They see in the green stalks of corn that sway in the breezes of a warm August morning, while they stand in an Indiana cornfield that fills their vision on every side all the way to the horizon, the very same kernels they buried in the earth just months before.  And if, like the caterpillar, they are blessed with a moment of insight, they will see their own destiny.  They will learn what graveyards really are:  not long lines of weathered headstones standing as silent testimonials to broken dreams or to separation without remedy, but  rows and rows of planted seeds, await­ing the harvest of the last day.  They will understand that what is harvested far ex­ceeds that which they laid in the ground.  They will see that caterpillar and butterfly, acorn and oak, kernel and stalk, bulb and tulip, and egg and rooster, are merely two stages in the development of the same life.  They will see that the transformation wrought in the unseen darkness behind the veil of death is so magnificent that what they themselves will become is hardly recognizable in what they now are.

     But they have a clue:  they know that they shall be like Christ.  And they know that some have actually seen the resurrected Jesus and have left behind an account of that amazing sight.  Then, the next time they read the inspired description of the awesome Christ in John's vision, they will understand why even Jesus' best friends did not recognize Him at first.  And they will catch a glimpse, at the same time, of their own Monarch destiny.

     And what will that world be like?                                 

     I don't know.  But I imagine it will be as startlingly and breathtakingly different from the one we now enjoy as the one we now enjoy is from the dark wetness of the womb we once inhabited, or as the brilliant blue skies and fresh warm breezes in which the violets now bloom are different from the dirt and darkness of the flower bed from which they arose.

“The resurrection of the body; and life everlasting." (part 2)

What the Scripture normally calls "eternal life," the creed calls "life everlasting."  Neither term means longevity of life, but a special quality of life, namely the life that comes from intimate knowledge of God and communion with Him.  According to Scripture, eternal life entails knowing and abiding in God (1 John 5: 20), which is why Scripture also says that eternal life is not something merely for the distant future.  It can be possessed and experienced right now, right here.  Eternal life is a knowledge, a relationship.  The One Whom we know and to Whom we relate is God.  In Peter's words, eternal life is our participation in God's own divine nature (2 Peter 1: 4), which means that we shall be like God, not in the foolish and sinful way attempted by Adam and Eve, but by the redeeming grace of God in Christ, the one into whose image and character we are ultimately transformed (Rom. 8: 29).

         Eternal life is not the same as mere endless existence, though such notions are included within it.  Nor does eternal life mean, as some commentators say it means, life "outside space and time" or "the absence of time."  Because eternal life entails resurrection of the body, because having a body implies a spatial context, and because space and time seem intimately and inextricably intertwined, eternal life cannot be timeless or spaceless life.  Eternal life is our life with Him Who is Life (John 11: 25), Light (1 John 1: 5), and Love (1 John 4: 8).  It is a life which death cannot end.  Quite the contrary; it is a life which in some ways death actually begins.  And as our resurrection is found solely in Christ, so also is our eternal life:  "God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son" (1 John 5: 11).

         Careful contemplation of the creed's teaching on this point is immensely practical and provides a much-needed spiritual therapy.  By contemplating the conditions of perfect beatitude that await us and the joy and satisfaction that arise from being precisely what our all-wise Creator intended us to be, we learn more effectively how to wean ourselves from the unprofitable attachments our fallen hearts too quickly make to evil.  Only in the face of infinite joy and godly bliss do we learn not to toy with the meager and shallow pleasures of sin, which can only hurt us.

         Eternal life is the final chapter of the world's great saga, a saga written by the hand of God, the Lord of History.  That chapter brings the end of sorrow, pain, evil and doubt.  Eternal life is God's final word to us -- not death, not annihilation, but life -- life eternal.  That is the creed's final word to us as well.  Where the creed leaves off, the life to come is just beginning.  Epilogue is but prologue after all.

“The resurrection of the body; and life everlasting." (part 1)

         "The sages have a hundred maps to give

         That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,

         They rattle reason out through many a sieve

         That stores the sand and lets the gold go free.

         And all these things are less than dust to me

         Because my name is Lazarus and I live."

                  G. K. Chesterton, "The Convert"

         "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." 

          Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

         If sin brings death and destruction, the forgiveness of sins brings life and hope, the result of which the creed brings before us in its twin affirmations concerning the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.  These two affirmations are the creed's last words to us, its parting declaration.  They are words of unparalleled hope and confidence:  If sin embraces the whole person and consigns the whole person to death, the forgiveness of sins and the blessedness to which it leads are equally all-embracing.  The victory to which the creed here refers is total.

         This is the second time the creed has struck the note of resurrection, the first being its reference to the resurrection of Jesus.  Those two grand events, his resurrection and ours, are intimately connected.  Christ is the head or pioneer of our race.  He is the first fruits of those who are raised from the dead (1 Cor. 15: 23).  The Spirit Who raised Him shall raise us (Rom. 8: 11).  We follow on to where Christ has gone before us, and He has gone to the grave and beyond.  Though He was dead, yet He lives.  So shall we, for what is true of Him shall be true of the race over which He is head. 

         From Christ's defeat of death we learn that earthly life is but a preface to the life to come.  This life is not all there is and must not be treated as if it were.  The grave that awaits us is a door not a wall, a beginning not merely an end.  The life to come, as the creed implies in its final words, is the end of the reign of death and of dying.  The life to come is the reign of life and glory, which makes it the death of death.  The One Who gave us life will give us life again.  Our Creator is also our Re-creator.

         As are so many of its affirmations, this part of the creed arose in response to the Gnostic heresy, which, because it contended that all matter was inherently evil, denied the resurrection of the body, which obviously is matter.  The Gnostic idea of redemption was to escape the confines and pollution of flesh altogether, not to grant it continued existence or redemption.  By contrast, the Christian doctrine of resurrection means not deliverance from the body but deliverance of the body.  Body and soul are not opposed; they are not enemies.  Their conjunction was pronounced good by God Himself at the creation, and He has not changed his mind, though the Gnostics might have wished otherwise.

         The Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection also stands over against both the ancient Greek belief in the immortality of the soul and the eastern notion of reincarnation, ideas that have some distant similarity to the Christian doctrine of resurrection, but that are by no means the same.  Immortality of the soul implies that our survival of death happens automatically or naturally, as if something in us were immortal of its own accord, or by its own power, rather than by the power and love of God, Who raises us from the dead.  If the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body really were the same as the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul, then the apostle Paul would not have been mocked by the Athenians for preaching it (Acts 17: 32).  By the same token, we must not confuse resurrection with reincarnation.  Reincarnation implies that we survive death only to die again, over and over.  Reincarnation is not the defeat of death, as is Christian resurrection, but rather its repeated victory over us.  Resurrection is the defeat of death, both body and soul, by Christ.  The death we must die is real, but no more so than the resurrection that overturns it, a resurrection found only in Jesus Christ, Who is the resurrection and the life (John 11: 25).

         The resurrection of the body is but a part of the restoration and renewal of all things, a part of Christ's work to create a new Heaven and a new earth, not out of nothing as He did at the world's beginning, but out of the only creation that is or ever shall be.  Just as the new Heaven and the new earth are made from those that now are, the resurrected body flowers from the one we lay in the grave, though that fact must not be crudely understood or misinterpreted, as if the phrase "resurrection of the body" meant something like the reassembling of the particular set of molecules that one's body happened to possess at one specific point in time, which cannot be:

         "Matter which appertains to one body at one time appertains to another body at another.  The notion of particle being joined to particle, so as to re-form a certain body, involves an impossibility, because that same particle may have belonged to a thousand different bodies, and may be claimed by one as rightfully as by another.  In fact, it is only necessary to bring the notion into contact with what we certainly know concerning material particles to break down and annihilate it." (Goodwin, The Foundations of the Creed 384)

Or, as George Hedley puts it, "the single datum of cannibalism absolutely refutes any notion that all human bodies can be raised again in their former constituencies of particular proteins" (The Symbol of the Faith 142).  Monseigneur Ronald Knox makes the same point more comically by bringing before us the bizarre sight of a cannibal and his victim engaged in heated debate over whether the physical matter in the victim's big toe belonged to him or to the stomach that digested it.

         But let us not miss the point by moving too far in the opposite direction.  Between the physical body we lay in the grave and the resurrected body that shall be ours forever there indeed exists "a physical continuity; but it is a continuity of life and not of simple reconstruction" (Westcott, The Historic Faith 138).  In other words, the physical bodies we now have and the resurrected bodies we shall inherit are materially continuous but not materially identical.  Rather, much as a seed is planted in the ground and by its decay gives rise to a stalk of corn or a mighty oak, the physical body that we lay in the grave decays and gives rise to a spiritual body, one no longer subject to death and weakness, one well suited to its purpose as the vehicle of eternal life.  In Paul's words, "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory.  It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15: 42-44).  Though it springs from the physical body that now is, we must not think of the spiritual body in precisely the same terms, as if it were flesh and blood as we now know them.  As Paul also says, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15: 50), and to that kingdom, and to the day of resurrection and judgment that precedes it, we all are hastening, both body and soul.

         Because they make it possible for us to see, hear, speak, touch and smell, our bodies make it possible for us to have relationships.  Spirit expresses itself by matter.  Our bodies allow us to exist at a particular place, to have a context, to come into contact with the universe around us and with those beings who inhabit it.  Our bodies are our means of self-expression.  To be without any means of gathering information from the world around us, or of injecting information into it, to be unable to respond to our world or to help shape it, is to be less than a person, is to be no different from those who are dead.  Bodies make possible our interaction with our universe.  To say that we are to have bodies in the resurrected life means that we are to be then what we are now -- real persons capable of real life.  We shall not be bodiless wraiths or phantoms, not ephemeral, ethereal, or unsubstantial.  We shall be genuine, solid, authentic human beings.  Our complete and genuine identity shall be preserved.  We shall be fully human, more human even than now we are.  This affirmation of the creed means that we lose nothing at death but our sin and its attendant hindrances.  Our bodies are not a tomb, they are the implements of eternal life:

                  "Our ultimate expectation is that our entire personality will conquer death, and thereby attain to a life fuller and richer than any which we can lead or even picture here.  This is what we mean when we speak of the Resurrection of the body.  Experience shows that the phrase is liable to crude and childish misinterpretation.  But it would be difficult (as with the Ascension) to find a substitute sufficiently terse to be included in a creed, and sufficiently concrete to convey any meaning whatever to the great majority of people."  (Malden, Christian Belief 82).

In other words, we anticipate the resurrection of the whole person, an entire human being, not simply a disembodied soul and not simply the physical body as it now is.  Had the creed meant to suggest only the resurrection of the physical body, it perhaps would have said "corporis resurrectionem" rather than "carnis resurrectionem."  By saying what it does, it teaches that our resurrection entails, but is not limited to, the body we now possess.  Nor is the resurrection we anticipate like that of Lazarus, who was raised only to die again.  Having died once, we shall put death forever behind us.