Imagining Theology

Encounters with God in Scripture, Interpretation, and Aesthetics

Garrett Green

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781540961921
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493422548
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The imagination is where the Creator chooses to meet his creatures, says renowned theologian Garrett Green. The Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit set the imagination free for genuine and creative knowledge of God, the world, others, and the self. Green explains that theology is best understood as human imagination faithfully conformed to the Bible as the paradigmatic key to the Christian gospel. He unpacks the implications of the imagination for a variety of theological issues, such as interpretation, aesthetics, eschatology, and the relationship between church and culture.

1
Toward a Normative Christian Imagination

Theologians have long been occupied with the question of how human beings can know God. Since the European Enlightenment, however, this question has assumed a new and more urgent form. For the Enlightenment inaugurated a radical change of worldview, beginning in seventeenth-century Europe and spreading eventually to the entire world. The factors leading to this change are many and complex,1 but one of the root causes—the one of greatest importance to Christian theology—was the advent of the “new science,” which has evolved into what today we call modern science. This new way of thinking about reality had its origin in the revolutionary astronomy of Copernicus (1473–1543), but its powerful impact on modern thinking was first felt as a result of the work of Galileo (1564–1642), who employed the new technology of the telescope to provide empirical proof of the Copernican system. By demonstrating that the mechanics of the heavens (the moons of Jupiter were his prime example) operate according to the same mathematically defined laws governing motion on the earth, he delivered a fatal blow to the Aristotelian-Christian worldview. This way of envisioning the world, as composed of concentric celestial spheres with the earth at its center, had dominated classical and Christian thought for two millennia. It is no accident that the opening battle in the modern war between “science” and “religion” was provoked by Galileo’s work. And the controversy has continued to this day: questions about “science and religion” still occasion widespread interest and heated debates among believers, skeptics, and the general public.

The worldview of the new science truly came of age with the epochal achievement of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1687. According to Newton’s system, the universe consists of an infinite expanse of space containing material bodies that move in accordance with universal laws that can be described in the language of mathematics, the lingua franca of modern science. This view of the world, unlike the one it replaced, is in principle fully accessible to the natural capabilities of human reason. The theological implication of this new worldview is epitomized in an exchange (perhaps apocryphal) between Napoleon and his former teacher, the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. The emperor, having been told that Laplace’s book contained no mention of the Creator, asked him, “Where is God in your system of the universe?” Laplace is said to have answered, “Sire, we have no need for that hypothesis.” The scientific account, by offering an explanation of the world devoid of theological grounding, thereby called into question not only the authority of the church but the truth of Christianity itself.

The antithesis of “science and religion” runs like a scarlet thread through the history of modern thought from its origins in the new science of seventeenth-century Europe to the global secularism of the twenty-first century. It has captured the imagination of most of the technologically advanced societies of today and seems poised to overwhelm the remaining traditional backwaters that continue to resist its advance. The scare quotes around the two central terms call attention to the way in which our notions of both “science” and “religion,” especially in their perceived incompatibility, have been shaped—and distorted—by the very forces that drive the advance of modern culture. If Christian theology is to escape this intellectual and cultural deluge, it will be necessary to deconstruct and demystify the mythical story of how “science” has displaced “religion” as the privileged key to understanding the world today. Only as we are able to see how the advocates of each side have misunderstood both themselves and one another can we regain our cultural bearings and form a truer picture of how modernity has shaped our world. And only then can theology begin to correct the misperceptions of the past and chart a better path forward.

The Metaphysics of Modern Science

Two influential books that appeared late in the nineteenth century epitomize and chronicle the way in which people in the modern West have imagined a struggle between science and religion that has now raged for more than three centuries. John William Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874, and it was followed two decades later by Andrew Dickson White’s massive two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The assumption that such a conflict exists is deeply rooted in the imagination of modernity and is shared both by advocates of “science” and by those who defend “religion.” Even those who believe this warfare to be unfounded cannot ignore the battle that continues to rage around them. The issue that should concern us first of all is not who is right, or even whether the whole struggle is futile or unnecessary, but rather how our culture came to view things under this set of images in the first place. E. A. Burtt, author of the monumental study The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, maintains that “the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world . . . is its most fundamental possession.” Accordingly, he sets out to discover “the cosmology underlying our mental processes” by exposing the unexamined metaphysical assumptions bequeathed to modernity by the founders of modern science along with their revolutionary new empirical method of understanding the physical world.2 This new and unacknowledged metaphysics has achieved virtually universal acceptance in the modern world due especially to the authority accorded to Newton for his revolutionary scientific achievements. Modern philosophy, simply taking modern science for granted, has accepted uncritically the metaphysical assumptions of its founders along with their scientific method.3 Not only philosophers, however, have fallen into this unconscious error but modernity as a whole, including those religious thinkers who have engaged in an ongoing battle with science.

Burtt’s detailed demonstration of how these unexamined principles came to be presupposed in the modern world is a major scholarly accomplishment that has not been sufficiently acknowledged and taken into account by other interpreters of modern thought and culture over the past century—most especially by those who wrestle with the problem of “science and religion.” Burtt himself was concerned primarily with the way in which these “metaphysical foundations” have affected and distorted modern philosophy. What disturbs him most of all is the “banishing of man from the great world of nature and his treatment as an effect of what happens in the latter.”4 His complaint: “Man begins to appear for the first time in the history of thought as an irrelevant spectator and insignificant effect of the great mathematical system which is the substance of reality.”5 But this displacement of humanity in the modern era is the consequence of a more fundamental shift in the metaphysics of modernity—namely, the displacement of God. The diction in Laplace’s response to Napoleon is a dead giveaway: we modern scientists, he says, have no need for that hypothesis. How did the God of the Bible, the God worshiped by Jews and Christians, become the “God-hypothesis”? At least one seventeenth-century European, Blaise Pascal (1623–62), recognized the immense difference between the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” and the “God of the philosophers”—by which he surely meant those modern philosophers who have adopted the implicit metaphysics of modern science.

The misunderstanding of science by both sides in the “science and religion” debate is rooted in what we might call the teleological amnesia of modern science. The revolution in science initiated by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and their peers is rooted in a methodological innovation first articulated by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620) and taken for granted in all subsequent science. Explicitly departing from Aristotle’s fourfold account of causality that had been the standard teaching for centuries, Bacon proposes a new experimental empiricism based entirely on efficient causality. In other words, the modern scientist explains the phenomena of nature inductively by attending to the immediately preceding conditions. Doing science this way, however, means ignoring what Aristotle calls “final causes”—that is, questions of end or ultimate purpose. The modern scientist thus excludes all teleological considerations in order to describe how things move and change in the present, how they come about in the light of the preceding conditions. By bracketing consideration of the end or purpose of things (the why question), they are able to observe and test the immediate causes of natural phenomena (the how question)—and thus to gain greater control over them. The importance of this last point—control—which Bacon emphasizes, can be seen in the stupendous technological advances that have flowed from the findings of modern science. What has happened, however, is that our culture, including many of its influential philosophical and religious leaders, has forgotten that the bracketing of teleology by scientists was a methodological choice, a presupposition of scientific method, not a conclusion induced from observation of natural phenomena. Having forgotten that questions of purpose and ultimate meaning had been deliberately set aside, people now imagine that science has discovered that nature is devoid of purpose. This teleological amnesia has encouraged the widespread modern notion that “science” has proven the beliefs of “religion” to be mistaken or implausible since the natural world is devoid of purpose and is guided by no ultimate end. What has really happened is that a particular scientific method has been mistaken for a metaphysics. The fact that this transformation has mostly occurred unintentionally, even unconsciously, makes it all the more difficult to perceive and to criticize. Through a meticulous examination of the writings of the founders of modern science, Burtt shows how the transformation from method to metaphysics began in the thinking of Galileo, Descartes, and others in the seventeenth century—especially Newton—and came to shape the whole of modern thought and culture.

The “Religious” Misunderstanding of Science

The same misreading of science that seduced philosophers into uncritically adopting the metaphysical assumptions of the architects of early modern science has not been confined to the field of philosophy. Precisely because the underlying sources of confusion were unrecognized even by scientists themselves, the new metaphysics has transformed the thinking of nearly every modern person, including those religious thinkers who set out to defend the Christian faith. The abandonment of teleological explanations in favor of efficient causality in science has encouraged religious apologists to try to defend religion on the same assumption—that is, without recourse to teleological considerations. “With final causality gone,” Burtt summarizes, “the only way to keep [God] in the universe was to . . . regard him as the First Efficient Cause,” thus leaving behind the understanding of God as Supreme Good.6 Christian apologists who start down this road today can scarcely avoid arriving at the deism championed by so many of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. These well-meaning apologists have unwittingly adopted the metaphysics of modern science without realizi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Toward a Normative Christian Imagination
• Part 1: Imagination and Theological Hermeneutics
• Part 2: Metaphor, Aesthetics, and Gender
• Part 3: Modernity and Eschatology in Christian Imagination
• Part 4: Theology of Religion and the Religions
• Part 5: Conclusion
• Credits
• Index
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover