An Evolving God, An Evolving Purpose, An Evolving World

Joan Chittister, C. Clifton Black

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506484617
• eBook ISBN: 9781506484624
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The God that we were brought up on is not big enough to be God. To be both religious and spiritual, modernity must be able to absorb the notion of a cosmic and evolving God. This notion redefines the place and purpose of humanity itself. The old notions of who is in charge, who is superior and whose theology is paramount is in a state of flux. Unless, or until, this new vision comes into play, directs our hearts, guides our business, underlies our technology, the world itself is not ready to understand or survive the horizon of Newness on which it stands.

Ithe My Theology series, the world’s leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books. 

1

Who is God?

TO BE A CATHOLIC child in the 1940s and 1950s is to have been brought up on The Baltimore Catechism Vol I-5. This fragile little book of about 200 pages was the national Catholic catechism for children in the United States. It was enjoined by the Third Council of Baltimore in 1891 and based on Charles Bellarmine’s Small Catechism written in 1614. Some of the most difficult questions in theology were reduced to question-answer format and shaped the basis of Catholic school theological education from the 1890s to at least the 1960s. Those answers ring through that generation – and me – to this day.

And yet, at the same time, I heard a story that signaled the end of such rote answers and universal perception. ‘Computers are so powerful,’ the story-teller declares, ‘that pretty soon the country will be run by one computer, one man, and a dog.’ ‘Really?’ says the hearer. ‘How’s that work?’ ‘Well,’ the teller says, ‘the man is there to feed the dog. And the dog is there to make sure the man doesn’t touch the computer.’

Between the rote learning of catechetical surety and the computerisation of modern life lie two different kinds of learning, two different kinds of social development, two different ways of seeing life, and two completely distinct theologies of life. One of the models has all the answers before anyone asks the question; the second model has few, if any, universally held answers at all in a world where change is commonplace, yesterday is a vague memory and tomorrow is a work in progress.

In this current world, ‘belief’ is more an experience than an encyclopedia of data. It is reasoned, not recited.

Now, laughing at the improbability of non-human dominance over human rationality that the dog and the computer imply, are dying out. And with it, the Baltimore Catechism, as well. In fact, who would have thought? In one lifetime – yours and mine – the world we expected to live in has all but totally disappeared.

We live from screen to screen now. Our children ‘talk’ to one another on their smart phones sitting across the room from each other instead of across their fences. Our cars run on electricity which means that gas and oil have suddenly become a liability rather than a miracle. Robots do our basic work and are about to become our closest companions. We talk across oceans to people we haven’t really seen for years. We hold Zoom parties with the grand-children we have yet to meet in person. We shop in global bazaars on-line. We begin to save money for that first ticket to outer space. Some people have frozen their own bodies at death in expectation of their own resurrection as science gets closer and closer to extending life indefinitely.

But the way of doing business – on site or online – of raising families, all here or all somewhere else – and our sense of identity, biracial or intermarried or not – are not the only shifting stars on the human horizon these days. God-talk – religious belief – has swung from hard right, as in we know the mind of God – to scattered leftisms, as in what mind of God? Yours, mine, or ours?

Mainstream churches, too, are reeling and rocking from challenges to ecclesiastical givens such as who may marry whom? Or why churches anyway? Or male-female genders – or not, of course. Then, in the face of new understandings of life and sex and gender an even bigger question: ‘Who said so?’

Not surprisingly, in a time of massive global shifting of some very basic but very old principles, many ministers of many denominations are preaching to smaller congregations now. Some past believers have begun to look almost exclusively to science for truth they can count and touch rather than rules that now seem either lifeless or totally out of date.

Life has become more technological than human. More individual than communal. More independent than constrained by a universal conscience.

Deprived now of a common search for the meaning of life, secularism has emptied itself of faith, of hope even, and put in its place the worship of personal rights rather than communal or canonical responsibilities.

So then, what is there for me to believe in anymore? The answer is clear: Not what I once did, for sure – and yet, at the same time, I believe more now than I ever really understood. I began to see the loss of rainforests and the need for mountains as more meaningful than ministers preaching at us. Oceans and seashores, I could see, were more vulnerable than we. Classes and races of people, it became clear, were those whose lives were in our hands.

As seriously wrong as the divisions of society may be, the degrees of discomfort the outer limits of science may bring as we go on recklessly doing what can be done rather than determining what should be done, there is also an eternal reason for hope. After all, the dimensions of public power describe only our institutions. Not our people. Not our hearts. Not our souls. What public officials and institutions are doing wrong we can undo. If we ourselves are holy enough, committed enough, responsible enough to realise that the God we must believe in is the God who believes in us and relies on us to save this world.

We do still, in fact, have living models of the good life. Nurses who risked their own lives to save others from dying of COVID. Young people of all ages and ethnicities who protested police brutality and age-old racism marching night after night to wake up the rest of us. Leaders everywhere who took the helm of the country to maintain its democracy, to save its rainforests, to feed its starving children. They are the saints of our time.

Such as these spur us on to integrity, to generosity, to fullness of heart. And yet, many mourn the loss of a sense of common values and moral responsibilities, of the general acceptance of a Power beyond the power that comes with simply being alive and which once pointed all our hearts in the same direction.

Yet, I have also discovered that, as the end of my life approache...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Who is God?
• 2. What Must I Do to Gain Heaven?
• 3. Why Did God Make Us?
• In summary
• My final declaration of belief