Christology and Science

F. LeRon Shults

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351951678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The dialogue between theology and science has blossomed in recent decades, but particular beliefs about Jesus Christ have not often been brought to the forefront of this interdisciplinary discussion even in explicitly Christian contexts. This book breaks new ground by explicitly bringing the specific themes of Christology into dialogue with contemporary science. It engages recent developments in late modern philosophy of science in order to articulate the Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ in a way that responds to challenges and opportunities that have arisen in light of various scientific discoveries. The main chapters deal with Incarnation, Atonement and Parousia. After a brief treatment of the history of the shaping of these ideas, the author traces developments in some of the sciences that have challenged these formulations: evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and physical cosmology. Each chapter also summarises some of the popular constructive responses to these developments. After clarifying the way in which the Christian understanding of God and of humanity shape the task of reforming Christology, each chapter concludes with a programmatic outline of ways in which we might articulate the identity, agency and presence of Jesus Christ in dialogue with late modern science and culture.

Chapter 1

Reforming Christology

In every generation Christian theology is faced with the task of articulating the intuitions of the biblical tradition about the significance of Jesus Christ in a way that engages its own cultural context. This task feels especially daunting and dangerous in the context of interdisciplinary dialogue with contemporary sciences such as evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and physical cosmology, which question the coherence and plausibility of many traditional christological formulations. However, as we reflect on the philosophical shifts that have shaped the conceptual space of late modern discourse about human life in the cosmos we may find that these challenges also provide theology with new opportunities for explicating and clarifying the Christian experience and understanding of Jesus Christ. This book is my attempt to show that engaging in this interdisciplinary endeavor is both possible and promising.

The task of reforming Christology will indeed require the reconstruction of previous doctrinal formulations, as it has throughout church history. Many traditional depictions of the person, work and coming of Christ are shaped by assumptions about humanity and the world that no longer make sense in light of contemporary science. One way of responding to these challenges would be to try to insulate theology from science, defensively maintaining one’s favored ancient or early modern doctrinal formulation. Or one might try to insulate science from theology, defensively reducing the human longing for redemptive transformation to one’s favored disciplinary explanation. Extreme responses are often the easiest. However, the more difficult reconstructive response, which attempts to maintain the integrity of theology while integrating relevant scientific and philosophical insights, will also be the more rewarding. As we will see in the following chapters, reconstructing Christology has always been an important part of the ongoing reformation of the Christian church.

This brings us to a second sense in which this book aims at reforming Christology. The study of Jesus Christ ought to have a reformative effect on contemporary life. An articulation of Christian doctrine should not only help us make sense of our experience in the world; it should also facilitate the reformation of our ways of living in the world. Many traditional formulations of Christology rely so heavily on ancient concepts of substance or medieval concepts of jurisprudence that they seem irrelevant to the concrete concerns that shape late modern culture. Yet, the human longing to understand and be understood, to love and be loved, to hold and be held onto in healthy relations with others is as strong as ever in contemporary life. One of the functions of christological discourse is to illuminate the origin, condition and goal of these desires. Bringing Christology and science into explicit, concrete dialogue will have a disturbing effect on many of our comfortable assumptions about our life together, but this is an important part of any deeply transformative process.

It is important to face the fears that we bring to such an endeavor. Some theologians will be concerned that discussion of particular claims about Christ may offend the pluralist sensibilities of the interdisciplinary community, while others will be anxious that serious engagement with science will simply render implausible some cherished christological formulations. Some scientists will worry that talking about Jesus in public will undermine their reputation among their colleagues, while others will suspect that religionists are encroaching on their territory. Some laypersons will fear that any change in inherited formulations brings the destruction of faith itself, while others will wonder whether maintaining the centrality of Christology is really worth the effort.

How can we enhance the desirability of the reconstructive task of interdisciplinary dialogue without obscuring the real terror that it sometimes brings? Part of the problem is the way in which we have imagined the relation between the disciplines. Theology and science have often been depicted as enemies, sometimes as friends, and occasionally as disinterested acquaintances. These are quite obviously inter-personal metaphors for inter-disciplinary relations. Nevertheless, such similes can have a powerful heuristic function. The complexity of the relations between disciplines and disciplinarians calls for different ways of interacting in varying contexts, which means that no single metaphor will fit every situation. We may sometimes need to be friendly, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes to leave the other alone. Indeed there may be some dialogues in which the partners are both amicable and inimical during the same conversation.

Accepting a default image of interdisciplinary engagement, however, has an effect on the way one approaches the dialogue. I would like to suggest an interpersonal metaphor that is rarely considered appropriate (if considered at all) for the interaction between the disciplines. Is it possible that we might think of theology and science as lovers? Like the other metaphors, it has its limitations – most obviously its sexual innuendo. However, there are ways in which this simile can help us make sense of and even facilitate our interdisciplinary affairs. First and foremost, comparing theology and science to lovers provides us with a way to make sense of our mutual fear and fascination. We fear existential encounters that we cannot control. This inability to control the other, which evokes trembling in the presence of the beloved, is ingredient to true love. The risk of losing control is part of the delightful experience that binds lovers together.

Lovers are fascinated by their differences, as well as their shared interests. Self-discovery and discovery of the other are reciprocally related for lovers, as they search together for new ways of understanding one another and their place in a shared cosmos. A good lover delights in learning from the beloved and rejoices when the beloved experiences a transformative insight. However, real love takes hard work at mutual interpretation. Mature lovers do not spend all their time gazing into each other’s eyes, blind to all faults. They are willing to confront one another for the sake of illumination and transformation. This interpersonal metaphor elicits an image of shared delightful terror in the other that promotes mutual understanding. In this sense, the disciplines of theology and science must learn to become better lovers.

Objections will arise from members of both disciplines. Some will object that if Christology (or theology) marries the science of today it will become a widow tomorrow, or soon be forced to seek divorce. This is a rather strange attitude toward marriage. Does one partner’s transformation require the dissolution of the relationship? Tension arises in any relation in which one person is open to the transformative experience of discovery and critical interpretation while the other is not. Moreover, why should we assume that marriage is the only possible construct within which the delightful terror of love can emerge and grow? Theology once had her fair share of suitors. The problem today is not so much the danger of getting married to a particular science, as it is the unlikely prospect of getting a date. Isn’t the former queen of the sciences even allowed to flirt a little? Many theologians and scientists find the prospect of serious engagement purely terrifying. The metaphor of disciplinary lovers may open up new ways of looking at each other, new ways of facing our fear that enhance mutual fascination and release us from our obsession with controlling one another.

Of course even lovers who are interested in learning together may still get annoyed with each other. Probably what annoys scientists the most is when theologians try to prove claims about Jesus by appealing to scientific theories or discoveries, or when they attempt to use specific christological beliefs to fill in alleged gaps in scientific knowledge. Probably what annoys theologians the most is when scientists try to protect their allegedly neutral fields of inquiry by dismissing all religious belief as delusional, or when they attempt to reduce religious experience to factors that may be wholly explained by their own disciplines. Although readers may find themselves perturbed by what follows for other reasons, I have attempted to avoid these particularly annoying habits.

How can these interdisciplinary lovers strengthen their relation to one another without one discipline alienating or becoming co-dependent on the other? One way is to attend to the mediating role of philosophy in this dialogue. Theology and science are both guided by a love of knowledge, and reflecting together on the way in which philosophical categories shape our inquiry can facilitate a deeper level of interaction. We are dealing here with a reciprocal triangular mediation. We should not imagine that philosophers do their work and then scientists and theologians are left to figure out how it helps (or hurts) them. Nor should we think of science as simply providing facts, which then must be dealt with by philosophy and theology, nor of theology as a finalized set of assertions which may or may not be engaged by the other disciplines. Theology, science and philosophy all search for ways of making sense of the human experience of life in the cosmos, often shaping each other in ways that are not immediately obvious; our attention will be on the interwoven dynamics of this reciprocity.

Throughout the course of this book we will concentrate on ways in which particular categories have shaped this reciprocal mediation. In this sense we are engaged in philosophical theology, which in my view is dialectically linked to systematic theology as part of a broader dynamic process (cf. Shults, 1999, 206–11). Although issues related to the interpretation of the biblical tradition will be woven throughout our discussion, our focus in this context will be on the ways in which these interpretations have been (and are) shaped by the triangular mediation of Christology, philosophy and science. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we will explore three different ways of configuring the reciprocal relations among these disciplines.

Jesus Christ and the Philosophy of Science

The “philosophy of science” involves critical reflection on the relations among and self-understanding of organized fields of study. This form of inquiry analyzes the nature, process and outcome of inquiry itself, which requires abstraction from particular disciplines in order to attend to broader epistemological and hermeneutical issues. In cultures where universities play a significant role in public discourse, philosophers of science often focus on what counts as academic or positive knowledge (Wissenschaft, vitenskap) and how it is properly acquired, formulated and defended. The self-understanding of theology is shaped by this debate, even (or especially) when the response of theologians is one of attempted self-isolation from the threat of interdisciplinary discourse.

Does the study of Jesus Christ involve the acquisition of new knowledge and, if so, how ought such knowledge to be formulated and defended? This question may feel threatening for those who continue to operate within the assumptions of early modern philosophy of science. Before the Enlightenment, the themes that are now treated by science and theology were often self-consciously integrated as part of a holistic understanding of the world. The split between these disciplines had already begun to emerge in the late middle ages, but during the 17^th and 18^th centuries it was widened into a chasm. Increasingly, theology was associated with “faith” in distinction from science, which was associated with “reason.” Whereas theology might be passionate and subjective, science was supposed to be neutral and objective. Truly “scientific” conclusions are those deduced from empirical analysis and experimentation that could be repeated by any dispassionate rational individual; nomological proofs were increasingly privileged over ideographic observations. In the 19^th century this ideal contributed to the hardening of a separation between the “natural” sciences and the “human” sciences.

The dichotomies at the heart of this approach to the philosophy of science created an atmosphere in which some educators began to argue that theology should be excluded from the academy. Some theologians responded by trying to emulate the “hard” sciences (e.g., logically deducing propositions from “data” posited in the Bible) while others attempted to refigure theology as a “soft” science (e.g., merely interpreting the narrative or drama of church history). Others gave up on the idea that theology was a “science” at all. Each of these decisions affected the way in which the theologians understood the task of (or need for) acquiring, formulating and defending “knowledge” of Jesus Christ.

In the following chapters we will explore several concrete examples of the deleterious effects of this early modern view of “science” on the self-understanding of theology in general and on the task of christological reconstruction in particular. The main purpose of this sub-section, however, is to point to three developments within late modern philosophy of science that have shaped the contemporary conceptual landscape in a way that provides new opportunities for reforming Christology in dialogue with other disciplines.

The first development has to do with the growing appeal of relationality as a heuristic category in the philosophy of science. I have rehearsed this history in more detail elsewhere (Shults, 2003; 2005), but it is important to review it again briefly because understanding this shift is crucial for clarifying the task of reconstructing Christology in late modern culture. The suppression of the concept of relation goes back to Aristotle, whose influential philosophy of science privileged the concept of substance in human knowledge. In his Categories he argued that knowing a thing involves defining its substance (or essence). We may also be interested in describing the way in which the thing is related to other things, but such relations are only “accidental” – not “essential” to knowing its thingyness.

The category of relation appears in Aristotle’s list of categories but (like the others) it is subordinated to the category of substance. He was not alone here. “Relation” does not even appear on Plato’s list, although he does include “the different” as we will see in chapter 2. The concept of ousia (substance) also played a central role in Plato’s metaphysical distinction between perceptible and intelligible reality. Although the Stoics placed more emphasis on relationality, their typical listing of four categories exhibits the same prioritization: substance, quality, disposed in a certain way and disposed in a certain way in relation to something else. The demotion of relationality in ontology was mirrored in the epistemology of these ancient Greek philosophical schools.

As we will see in our exploration of the historical development of Christology, this privileging of the category of substance dominated patristic and medieval theology (and philosophy). Over the centuries, however, the difficulties with a theory of knowledge (and predication) that failed to attend sufficiently to the relations between things became increasingly evident. Alongside the rise of modern empirical science, philosophers like Locke and Hume began to recognize that scientia – knowledge of reality – requires more than simply defining the substances of things. Understanding the relations in which a “thing” is embedded is necessary for understanding what it is.

By the late 18^th century Kant found it necessary to reverse Aristotle, making “substance and accidents” a sub-category of the broader category “of Relation.” Hegel emphasized the concept of relationality even more, challenging the basic separation between substance and accidents. For him “absolute relation” is the highest category in objective logic. This intuition played itself out in various ways in other 19^th century philosophical proposals, such as C.S. Peirce’s “new list” of categories, in which scientific knowledge is parsed in terms of three “classes of relations.” For our purposes here, the details of these proposals are less important than the major conceptual shift they illustrate in the philosophy of science.

This turn to relationality can also be traced in the history of the development of the philosophy of logic and mathematics, which shape the underlying structure of argumentation within the natural sciences. As Ernst Cassirer has shown in his Substance and Function (1923), the concept of a “thing” with its “attributes,” which was essential to Aristotelian logic and dominated mathematics throughout most of the early modern period, proved to be unsuitable for the analysis of complex systems of logical relations. Defining the concept of “number” in generic (substantial) terms hindered the discovery of the way in which constitutive differentiated relations among numbers open up new possibilities for analysis (e.g., infinitesimal calculus, set theory). Eventually the category of substance lost its hold in meta-mathematics and was increasingly replaced by the concept of function. Once “freed of all thing-like being,” the peculiar functional character of logical concepts was revealed. Cassirer demonstrates how shifting from reliance on the generic concept to the relational concept made it possible for Gauss to develop the theory of imaginary numbers, for Dedekind to offer an explanation of the irrational numbers, and for Cantor to use generating relations for the production of transfinite numbers.

As we will see in our case studies below, this shift had ramifications beyond pure mathematics. Physicists soon discovered that the natural world could be more adequately explained using relational concepts. So Einstein’s field equations for general special relativity, for example, are based on the use of functional relations. Quantum physics pressed philosophers of science even further, leading them to challenge the adequacy of substance/attribute predication theory to make sense of the entanglement phenomena discovered at the subatomic level. Here reality itself resists the abstraction associated with the category of “thing” (substance), and physicists increasingly appealed to inherently relational and dynamic modes of talking about what “happens between” and within the unpredictable flow of “interphenomena” (cf. Reichenbach, 1988 [1944], 21, 176–7; Bohm, 1981, 28–47). The biological and social sciences have also progressively paid more attention to the constitutive function of relations within complex organizational systems in order to make better sense of the world.

In the chapters that follow we will attempt to clarify the challenges and opportunities that this phi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Ashgate Science and Religion Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Reforming Christology
• 2 Incarnation and Evolutionary Biology
• 3 Atonement and Cultural Anthropology
• 4 Parousia and Physical Cosmology
• Epilogue
• References
• Index