The Renewal of All Things

An Alternative Missiology

Scott

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274753
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Universal Salvation is a hotly debated doctrine today among Christians. In The Renewal of All Things Waldron Scott argues that it provides a more relevant and more effective basis for Christian mission in a globalized, pluralistic, and postmodern world than does the contemporary model.

Part One

The Setting

1

The Big Bang

He stretches out the heavens like a tent.

Psalm 104:2

We were walking toward Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, my grandson Scott and I. After reflecting on the evil events of September 11, 2001, we fell to discussing whether God had created the universe. I argued that God had. At the time, Scott was a graduate student at Duke University in North Carolina, working on a doctorate in statistics. Between long strides he remonstrated, “Why must the universe be thought to be created? Why should we not think it simply is, in the same way Christians believe God simply is?”

A good question and one that is raised repeatedly. The Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos argues that if everything has a cause, then as a matter of infinite regression God does too.1 And if there is any “something” that doesn’t have a cause, he continues, that something may just as well be the physical universe as God.2

For ten thousand years and likely much longer, human beings have wondered about the origin of all things, or whether the notion of origin itself is an illusion. The question seems important to many people in their search for ultimate truth and reality. The philosopher Gottfried Leibniz famously asked, “Why is there anything at all?” Origins are also important because human beings suspect they may convey existential answers to the meaning and purpose of human life:

• Who am I?

• Where did I come from?

• Why am I here?

• Do I have value and significance?

• What is my destiny?

Some look to science or to some scientific theory for the answer to these questions. But questions of ultimate value cannot be answered scientifically—only philosophically, theologically, or ideologically as an expression of one’s worldview. The theory of evolution, for example, is a valid scientific model. Evolutionism, which holds that there is no God, is not science but mere ideology. As the renowned South African cosmologist3 George F. R. Ellis cogently notes, “People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the [scientific] observations . . . . We are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmo-logy tries to hide that.”4

Nontheistic and theistic (no-God and God-affirming) worldviews inform both scientific and philosophic religious inquiry. Five thousand years ago Eastern civilizations were forming myths about the origin of the universe. Hindu mythology portrayed the universe as coming into being through the dismemberment of a cosmic man, or originating from within a dream of Brahma, the creator god, or arising from the tears of Prajapati, lord of all creatures. The unknown authors of the ancient Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads, ultimately decided that the source of creation is profoundly unknowable.

Living during the Axial Age in the fifth century b.c.e., the Buddha also thought it was a waste of time to speculate about the origin of the universe. Our limited minds and limitless cravings make such speculation a useless task, he insisted. Yet even the Buddha intuited or formulated ideas about the nature of reality and whether the universe had a beginning. In the Buddhist canon known as the Agganna Sutta, the Buddha described the universe as contracting and then re-evolving into its present form over countless millions of years. Life, he theorized, first formed on the surface of the water and again, over countless millions of years, evolved from simpler into more complex organisms. All these processes are without beginning or end, he asserted, and are set in motion by natural causes.5

What these natural causes included, the Buddha did not say. He lived 2550 years ago and was a sage, not a scientist. He insisted that people should be preoccupied with the immediate problem of suffering rather than the origin of the universe. In our time, both the Estonian astrophysicist Ernst Öpik and the late American quantum physicist6 David Bohm, like the Buddha, believe in an oscillating or pulsating universe that has no alpha or omega. Bohm is remembered as saying,

I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let’s say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter.7

For others who believe the universe simply is, some version of the steady-state model adequately describes its existence. The British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle promoted this model throughout his career. Such plasma8 cosmologists as the late Swedish Hannes C. Alfvén also assume a universe with no beginning and no end. Alfvén wrote,

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago . . . . An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end.9

Cosmologies intuited, or information transferred from a higher source (i. e., divine inspiration) via the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), the New Testament, or the Qur’an (Islam’s holy text)—all these come to us from a prescientific era. But we live in a scientific age, and I address this book to a late modern and postmodern audience that has grown up with scientific explanations of material reality. Unfortunately, many Christians still adhere to a literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis on the assumption that there is an inherent contradiction between science and biblical inspiration. They are convinced that if one places one’s faith in scientific explanations, then inspired scripture is excluded, and vice versa. In my opinion, this approach generates unnecessary confusion and doubt toward both science and faith.

Further, as my friend and geneticist Bisharah Libbus has reminded me, there are many issues—time, causality, relatedness, change—that take on different meanings by virtue of differences in scale.10 Many Christians are most comfortable with a scale that implies immediacy and direct causality. But some of the issues I am raising in this book take on different meanings and exhibit different dynamics when the scales are grand: time, infinity, space, eternity. The noted Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould expressed it neatly: From outer space, even the Himalayas will appear as a minor wrinkle on the surface of the earth.11

When David Bohm spoke of a particular pulse coming together, creating our universe, he was referencing the Big Bang. The Big Bang model is currently the prevailing scientific theory of the origin and early history of the universe. The Belgian priest Abbeé Georges Lemaître, who was also an accomplished scientist, first proposed this theory in the years between 1927 and 1931. Sir Fred Hoyle opposed the theory vehemently and sarcastically bestowed the label “Big Bang” on it in 1950. Ironically, the scientific community adopted the label. The Big Bang can be understood as part of the larger theory of evolution, dealing with its earliest phases.

All civilizations, ancient and modern, have constructed myths and metanarratives as explanations of the deeper questions of existence that haunt human beings. The standard theory of evolution itself constitutes a scientific metanarrative.

Responding therefore to my grandson Scott’s question posed at the beginning of this introduction, I would say: What we choose to believe will depend largely on our worldview, whether with respect to God it is fundamentally believing, agnostic, atheist...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part One: The Setting
• Part Two: Good News
• Part Three: Universal Redemption
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography