Keene Lecture 3
‘Science and the Future of Theology’ – some critical issues
Dr Arthur Peacocke
The awful word ‘theology’ appears in the title of my talk. I say ‘awful’ because if politicians want to really abuse an opposing politician today, they say ‘Well, you’re talking theology’ which tends to mean for them the equivalent either to nonsense or, say, something which has no established foundations and is entirely disputable. But as a matter of fact, anybody who goes to church and has any sort of beliefs at all and regards themselves as any sort of Christian, or even Muslim and Jew, is already a theologian. You are doing theology when you believe anything about God, nature and humanity; and I want to talk about the impact of science on the future of your and my thinking about God, nature and humanity.
I want to talk firstly about the intellectual reputations of science and theology. It’s now some 70 years since the mathematician-philosopher A N Whitehead considered the future course of history would depend on the decision of his generation – the 1930s – to the proper relation between science and religion, so powerful are religious symbols through which men and women confer meaning on their lives and so powerful are the scientific models through which they manipulate their environment. We today certainly still have the same pragmatic task with the religious fundamentalisms inflaming the political and international scene, but even more basic is the intellectual task of integrating the search for intelligibility, which is epitomized by the natural sciences, and that for meaning, which is enshrined in the world religions. Parallel, therefore, will be the relating at the intellectual thinking level of the distinct explorations of science and of theology, which I take to be the intellectual articulation and justification of all religious beliefs.
As I said, we all do theology whether we do it badly or well. Too often, in my view, the science and theology dialogue has been dominated by what I call the ‘bridge’ model. Just as the Golden Gate Bridge has an apparently frail but immensely strong bond between the solid rock of the north and south of the opening with San Francisco Bay onto the Pacific, so the interaction of science and theology has been conceived as building such a bridge between two solid, established disciplines. Indeed, the Centre for Theology and Natural Sciences at Berkeley, California, has that as its logo. Across the bridge, dialogue is conceived to occur, with the hope of achieving at least consonance, and perhaps even integration, between science and theology. But that picture actually represents only the Christian medieval enterprise of relating a natural philosophy to a revealed theology. Of course, in those medieval times, one had to change vehicles, as it were, half-way across. Reason was left behind and the deliverances of a revealed faith took over in going from science to religion. The reverse route from theology to science was in fact soon rendered impassable, at least from the point of view of scientists, by certain notorious interventions of the church in purely scientific matters – Galileo and all that.
Since the Enlightenment, this bridge-building has proved to be hazardous and in some quarters the attempt has been abandoned all together: the pupils of Karl Barth, for example. For although the foundations on the science side of the gulf seem solid rock enough, to the modern mind that on the side of theology was regarded but as shifting sand, having little solid, rational basis. For many decades now, the western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity. There are, to my reckoning, also many wistful agnostics who respect Christian ethics and the person of Jesus, but also believe that Christian ontological belief baggage can be discarded as not referring to realities. This deep alienation from religious belief of the key formers of western culture in recent times has been, and is being, lethal to a Christianity which has nearly always based its beliefs on authorities of the form ‘the Bible says’, ‘the Church says’, ‘the magisterium says’, even in the past ‘theologians say’. Educated people know that such authoritarian claims are circular for they cannot be justified because they cannot meet the demand for validation of their claims for many universally accepted slants. How do you prove what the church says, what the Bible says, what the magisterium says is true? You have to have some other criterion.
This bring us to my second point: ‘Science withstands the post-modernist critique’. In my view that situation which I’ve just described, the plight, one might say, of theology that does not meet present-day standards of rational enquiry continues. However, for causes obscure and to me themselves irrational, the very word ‘rationality’ or ‘reasonableness’ has come under a cloud of suspicion. The gale of post-modernism blows in from who knows what alien strand and removes it with the claim ‘any need for a bridge between science and theology at all, is just due to social contextualization: you believe what you think. What you think is because of the society you live in and your social upbringing’. Also it is sin. ‘Relativism rules’ is all the cry. So some theologians are seduced into retreating into spelling out what they call the grammar of their confessional, parochial even when it’s called ‘Catholic traditions’, and thereby exonerate themselves from justifiying their beliefs in the arena of public discourse. They say ‘Yes, we’re just a little community. We believe what we believe. We talk to each other, and that’s enough justification.’ And they say this is justified by post-modernism. The supporting base with structures on the theological side are deemed to quail before the onslaught of this relativism and that is how theology is regarded.
But what about the other side of the water, the scientists? Scientists still go on their way believing they are exploring a reality other than themselves, that their research is at least aimed to depict reality, that they do so fallibly and metaphorically and revisably, but that all the time they’re getting a bit nearer to such truth as is possible for human minds. I remember a scientist being criticized at a World Council of Churches symposium by delegates from the Third World who were exercised because of the exploitation of their country by multi-national corporations using technology which they deemed came from science, criticized the content of science, and he affirmed with some passion and indeed asperity that, ‘Quantum theory does not change as you go south across the equator.’ Science has proved a bastion against this kind of post-modern relativism.
The philosophical debate about scientific realism which raged ten years ago has quietened down. Science refers to realities, even if in a qualified way. I won’t go into all the various subtleties which recognize that science uses metaphors and that there are various ways of qualifying what it has to say about the world, but it is about the real world that they’re trying to get the truth and so, on the whole, science should be regarded as a champion in the cause for those who want to fight against relativism. It has withstood the gales of post-modernism very well indeed, I would judge. If you go to any conference of scientists, from whatever ethnic, religious, social, political, financial or other background they come from, you will find by and large a consensus as to what counts as good science and what counts as bad science, so that even the rawest research student can question the Fellow of the Royal Society if he has boobed in his arguments. The justification of theories and the existence of the entities and processes to which they refer in science is indeed subject to a rigorous sifting process in the community of science, so that they still believe they are exploring the realities of the natural world, so that science should be regarded, oddly enough from the point of view of many theologians, as a champion and a cause against excessive relativism.
Let’s return to the other side of the bridge spanning the gulf between science and theology. It now seems the science side is certainly not quicksand but much more like the lava flow from a volcano which inexorably moves forward in a fluid manner but leaves behind an increasingly solid base of established knowledge about the natural world. My conclusion so far is that in the event science has proved a bastion against the gales of post-modernism and justifies the idea that human rational enquiry can come to justify belief about certain matters. As a matter of fact there are reasons from evolutionary theory for justifying human rationality. In a nutshell, our cognitive faculties as biological organisms must have been and still be accurate enough in their representations of reality to enable us to survive, and in the case of human beings these cognitive faculties include representing external reality in ways that we individually and socially speak to ourselves. Hence these representations of reality are true enough to facilitate survival in the realities of our environment. So there are good biological reasons for not going down the road of excessive relativism that the post-modernists try to inveigle us into.
It seems to me that there can be little doubt that there is a kind of continuity in the evolution of homo sapiens between, firstly, the cognitive processes that allow a physically, relatively poorly-endowed creature such as the human being to survive against fierce predation and in a variety of environments, so much so that we’re dominating the earth: the continuity between that basic survival value of our knowing facilities and then what we call the processes of ordinary common sense. If something goes wrong with your heating system, you start applying common sense, and certainly if a plumber or heating engineer comes, start saying, ‘Well, could it be that locked valve? Is that valve sticking, or is there an air block in that pipe? Why is that tap running and not that one? Why is this one hot and not the other?’ And if your car breaks down, no doubt you do similar things. There is certain ordinary detective work in trying to work out what is the best explanation of what’s happening.
I think, and most scientists will say, that science, although it involves sophisticated ideas, is a kind of applied common sense. You use the same processes of ratiocination; what makes sense of data you have? The central consequence for us at this moment is that our confidence in the reality in referring(?) capacity of our cognitive processes which evolution has provided seems to be justified. This enhancement by evolutionary considerations of confidence in the possibility of human ratiocination, giving knowledge, does not, of course, in itself exonerate us from asking what are the criteria of proper knowledge. To that we must now turn.
My next heading is: Reasonableness through inference to the best explanation. Can we discern any features in these processes of thinking that are common to biological survival, everyday experience and the accounts we give of the activities that constitute human culture in, amongst other things, the sciences, humanities, and theology? I’ve given grounds, briefly, why I think science has been able to resist the siren calls of post-modernism. The continuity of its procedures with ordinary decision-making in ordinary life, which can now be attributed to their common biological origin, is significant for our estimate of human rationality in general. When one analyzes these two kinds of rationality, I think a strong case can be made for asserting that all these deliberations are not purely deductive. It’s not like logic or mathematics. We’re not deducing from axioms to things that are irrefutable. They’re not purely inductive. We’re not just getting hundreds of instances of saying ‘What’s the most common?’ There’s something much more like something we might call inference to the best explanation. A philosopher at Cambridge says the following:
‘According to ‘inference to the best explanation’, our practices are governed by explanatory considerations. Given our data and background beliefs we infer what would, if true, provide the best of the competing explanations we generate(?) of those data.’
And that’s the way we go about thinking what is reasonable in ordinary life. My plea is that this is the way we should do theology.
Bearing in mind the intention to use ‘inference to the best explanation’ in theology, what then might we say the criteria are for all our thinking including theology? First of all, you might say ‘comprehensiveness’. The ‘best explanation’ accounts for more of what we want to explain than anything else. The data, of course, will for theology include the whole range of human experience, including what we call religious experience, as well as the data of the sciences. A second criterion would be what we might call ‘fruitfulness’. The best explanation can often suggest new and corroborating observations. Thirdly, you might call ‘general cogency and plausibility’. Whatever we say is ‘best explanation’, has got to fit in with the whole web of our general knowledge of what the world is like. Fourthly, it must be coherent: no self-contradiction. And fifthly, there is a certain pressure to ‘simplicity’ or ‘elegance’ to avoid undue complexity. As another Cambridge philosopher, John Wisdom, once said: ‘The process of argument in all these matters is not a chain of demonstrative argument as in logical mathematics. It is a presenting and representing of those features of a case which together co-operate in favour of the conclusion that, by the way, are prologomena, a prelude.
Now we have to bring theology to this jury. Let us look at theology today and tomorrow. I drew attention to what I regard as the parlous state of the reputation of theology as an intellectual discipline. A very large proportion of educated people in our country - only 90% ever go to churches at all - do not find Christian theology reasonable. It’s not seen by them to reach the standards of modern intellectual discourse, not least in its relation to science. It has, it is thought, been tried in the balance and found wanting and they vote with their feet. So I would describe the first critical issue of theology, which is thinking about the content of the Christian faith, as the following: dare theology proceed in its search for even provisional truths by employing the criteria of reasonableness that characterize the rest of human enquiries? In the sciences a strong case has been made that they achieve their aims of depicting the realities of the natural world by inference of the best explanation. Because of the intellectual revolutions of our time, it is now essential in my view that the theological pier of the bridge to science be subject to the same demands as for science, and to relinquish the spurious confidence, for example, that believes our beliefs are divinely vindicated. Theology needs to be, as Hans Küng, the Catholic theologian, has put it, ‘truthful, free, critical and ecumenical’, a theology which deals with and interprets the realities of all that constitutes the world, especially human beings and their inner lives.
Keith Ward, who is Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, lists the following criteria for what he calls an ‘open theology’.
‘An open theology will seek a convergence of common core beliefs,
will seek to learn from complementary beliefs in their traditions,
will be prepared to reinterpret its beliefs in the light of new evidence – moral beliefs,
it will accept the full right of diverse belief systems to exist,
it will encourage a dialogue with conflicting and divergent views and
it will try to develop a sensitivity to the historical and cultural formation of its own beliefs.
I commend those criteria to you. So we have to ask, dare theology by inferring to the best explanation enter the fray of contemporary intellectual exchange and stand up and survive in its own right and not hide away in a little cosy coterie protected from the outside world? To do so it has, in my view, to become an open exploration in which nothing is unrevisable. The bridge model for the science and theology enterprise must go and be replaced by the sense of a joint exploration into a common reality of theology as it is.
What do we find? I think a number of theological procedures that do not meet those criteria that I’ve just given. There is reliance on an authoritative book: ‘the Bible says’. Even those not given to Biblical literalism and fundamentalism still have a habit of treating the contents of the Bible, now mostly 2000 years old, as a kind of oracle, as if quotations from past authorities could settle questions in our own times. What would you think of a doctor who took down from his shelf a book by the 14th century author Galen in order to decide what was wrong with you? This issue is the one that whatever they themselves believe, ordinary Christians think clergy and ministers ought to believe because they are paid to do so. Yet the library of books we call the Bible itself is constituted by self-critical dialogue, a process of constantly revising, repudiating and extending the work of earlier generations. The Deuteronomists rewrote the Pentateuch. The book of Chronicles rewrote the book of Kings. The fourth Gospel rewrote the synoptics, because Jesus had not returned physically. Again and again, the Bible is a book, a library of a culture of religious experience, which says we may have got it wrong, we’ve got to think again.
Secondly, there is reliance on an authoritative community: ‘The Church says, the Father said, the Creeds say, the magisterium says.’ Here the religious community listens and talks only to itself. According to this interpretation, the doctrines of the Christian Church function to establish the framework for that community’s conversation which elucidates the grammar of its own internal discourse without ever exposing itself to any external judgement of reasonableness. At its best it can be faith seeking understanding, but even this avoids rational justification for the faith. I would urge that the only defensible theology is one which consists of understanding seeking faith, in which the understanding involved cannot but be that of the natural and human worlds which the sciences and other aesthetic and mystical experiences of humanity have unveiled. There can indeed be within communities of faith a kind of submission to what I can only regard as a kind of revelatory dogmatism or doctrinal fundamentalism. We are in danger, particularly in the Church of England at the moment, of submitting to a kind of theological correctness just like the political one. However, the faith which is explicated and enriched within the communities, often fails to equip itself with the means whereby it can convince those outside of taking seriously its affirmations, and if it does so it has foregone and repudiated what I regard as the God-given lingua franca of human discourse, the use of reasonableness. If we follow this recipe, how can Christian communities ever convince the outside world that they proclaim any kind of truth comparable in cogency to that which the world recognizes in their application of science and other intellectual disciplines? This theological correctness seems to me to be debilitating our thinking, and there are other factors in theology which I won’t go into now of a more philosophical kind.
That’s my judgement of how theology is as it is. If theology is to meet the demands and standards of our times, it’s got to utilize reasonableness inferenced to the best explanation. And what will its data be? Its data will be the discovered realities of the world and humanity, partly through the sciences, but the sciences in the broad sense of established knowledge, scientu(?). It would also be what I call CRE, the Jewish and Christian communal inheritance of claim of classical, revelatory experiences; those which we expect in our sacred literature, liturgies, aesthetic expression, music and so on. And, thirdly, the data will be the perceptions and traditions of the world religions. So that’s the data of theology. So the next critical issue is this - and we’ll have to put it on one side for the moment: how do other religions relate to the scientific world view, and what can we learn from that? That is an issue which we’ll have to come back to, certainly in this next century, but for the moment we can put it on one side, because our immediate critical issue is this: how do we develop a theology which takes account not only of classical revelatory experiences, orthodox Christian theology, but also the new perceptions of the world which come from the sciences? What we need is, to use a kind of chemical equation going back to my origins,
S + CRE going to RT,
that is, the understanding of the modern world through the Sciences plus Classical Religious and revelatory Experiences, leading to a revised Theology. Eventually we’ll have to feed in the insights of other religions to get what might be called a global theology, but that is perhaps for the end of the 21st century.
There is at this point a fourth set of critical issues, and this concerns the methods by which we do this. This is a slightly esoteric and technical matter. Just to mention one point, we must in thinking about this, be very careful not to use speculative science. There’s a lot of speculative science about in the popular press; some of Hawking’s stuff, for example, and other stuff that appears in the popular press. Let us take only reasonably well-established scientific perspectives, such as I gave you in that ‘Genesis for the First Millennium’, for the 21st century, about the general development of the universe.
These are all in a way the preliminaries. They are all about how we go about the task which we have set us. But they do now raise substantive issues about the content of belief. What the sciences show is that this is one world; it’s a monistic world. Everything is constituted of, is made up of or is part of, whatever current physics discovers underlies all matter and energy. We are made up of quarks or atoms or whatever we like to call it. This does not have to be reductionist about the many levels in the world including human beings. We are seen as psychosomatic unities, not distinct bodies and minds and souls, and with respect to the mine-brain relation, we are, as it were, emergent creatures with a new kind of reality we call persons. But there is not this level of reality which we call souls or minds as distinct from bodies. We have no ghosts in the machine. This is in fact the Biblical view of human beings as psychosomatic entities. We are bodies which are capable of mental life and of spiritual activity. But to talk of the spirit or the soul as a noun, as a thing, is now becoming increasingly indefensible. So no more theological talk as I said in quoting from the Eastern Orthodox about the supernatural. The only dualism is that between God and the rest of the world. That’s the only ontological dualism, the only dualism in nature of being between God and all that is created.
This is one world. But this one world is also an interconnected web of processes which are increasingly intelligible to the sciences. These processes are more subtle and rational than ever we could have conceived. Their creativity is inbuilt, and for theists they’re inbuilt by God. It’s becoming increasingly incoherent to have a view of God as intervening in the processes of the world, which themselves express God’s creativity. It is self-contradictory for God to be interfering and altering the very processes to which he gives existence through aeons of time. This is now the notorious problem of God’s action in the world. When we take this into account, we have to take on board that miracles in the sense of disruption of the regularities of nature by God become increasingly implausible. We must have extraordinarily strong historical evidence to believe that God has actually ruptured the fabric of his own universe and done something different, and mostly that evidence is not forthcoming.
Let me take two very sensitive ones. Let me ask the question, are we going to make the doctrine of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus depend on the virgin birth? Do we only believe Jesus is God in human form because he did not have a human father? When we begin to look at the evidence, all sorts of questions arise. Let me take the biological one first of all. Why was Jesus not female? I won’t go into the details but he should have had a Y chromosome, and females only produce X chromosomes. To have a Y, to be a male, you must have had sperm which has a Y chromosome. If the sperm has an X chromosome it produces a female. So are we really postulating that God created de novo a total Y chromosome with all the DNA, ………. And proteins in the uterus of Mary so that nine months later she could have a male child and not a female one? What are we saying? Also, when we take on board that only Matthew and Luke have accounts of the birth narratives which cannot be by any, even the Roman Catholic scholar ………. cannot reconcile those historically, and they’re not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament, and the virgin birth is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament. Are we therefore bound to believe in the virgin birth in order to believe in the incarnation? Some do, and most Christians have, and most Christians will go on doing so; but in defending our ideas about the incarnation, are we going to make it more or less plausible to those wistful agnostics who look longingly at the Christian church and wish they could believe what we believe?
Secondly, does the affirmation of the resurrection have to depend on the empty tomb? The Church did not go around saying ‘We have found an empty tomb’. They went around saying ‘He is risen’. They’d met the full personhood of Jesus taken through death and now deemed to be in the presence of God. I ask you, do we have to assume the tomb was empty? There are lots of technical, Biblical, historical reasons for knowing those narratives are later, and certainly Paul doesn’t seem to know about the empty tomb. So what do we make of that?
Another critical issue is that human nature is increasingly understood, through the sciences, to be very much under the leash of our inherited genes. Perhaps 50% of our behaviour is conditioned by the kind of genes we have. What is the relation of this to original sin? After all, God created us with these biologically-derived genes. Another issue is that human beings appear in the light of the whole history of human history, through anthropology and palaeontology and discovering the sources of human evolution, we appear not to be fallen angels, but rising creatures. There is no evidence for a past, paradisal, fully-integrated harmonious virtue(?) existence of homo sapiens. On that basis, as many theologians have thought for the last two centuries, there was no historical ‘fall’. There is an alienation of human beings from God and from nature and from each other, but historical ‘fall’, which is what Augustine based a whole theology on, is that what we still have to buy into? Should we not now, more like the Orthodox Eastern Christians, be regarding the work of Christ less as the restoral of a past perfection than as the transformation of an as yet incomplete human being into a full state which can be in harmony with God? And won’t this alter the way we think of the life, death and claimed resurrection of Jesus and the way we think of what he accomplished in his life, death and resurrection for us here and now?
Another issue. If God is all the time creating in and through the processes of the world, so that they are themselves in God’s action, then the understanding of God’s immanence in the world has to be held in a much stronger sense than before. Last week I talked about the use of sacramental imagery for this, and I quoted the words attributed to St Paul at Athens about God being the one in whom we live and have our being. God’s relation to the world is through and through sacramental both instrumentally and symbolically; so a kind of sacramental pantheism in which the world is seen to be in God and God is more than the world seems to be required.
Another issue. Through the processes of evolution we see the role of chance and its interplay with necessity. I referred to this in my first talk, and this is a real feature of the processes of the world. It looks as though God, as it were, experiments and explores creation as though he’s going through all the permutations of possibilities by bringing into existence a whole range of creatures in addition to human beings through the creative processes of biological evolution. So we have to see God as the explorer, the innovator, the experimenter in creation.
Another issue. Human death. The death of the individual is essential to the evolutionary process. There could not have been new species unless individuals died so the species could evolve. So when Paul says ‘The wages of sin is death’ we cannot now take that as his meaning biological death. It may be death of our relationship to God, certainly, but it cannot be simply as it has been assumed for centuries, namely that we die because we sin. We die because we are creatures of God and homo sapiens would not have come into existence without the death of individuals and our predecessors all the way down the chain of biology. This has enormous implications for what we think about the atonement, that is, the at-one-ment of the work of Christ in death on the cross. How do we interpret that now? How can that be made meaningful for us here and now in that sense?
Another issue: if there is life on other planets, as at least seems possible, what does this imply for the uniqueness of Jesus as Redeemer, Lord and Saviour? How do we come to terms with the possibility of life on other planets? What sort of redemption, what sort of incarnation? Is it possible? How do we deal with that?
There is another great issue which is too subtle and too complicated to go into now; the relation of God to time. The classical view has been that God, as it were, stands on the top of the mountain and sees rather like a film set up from all past, present and future laid out. The future is already there for God to see. This is the classical view. A whole number of very substantial and responsible thinkers in Christian theology have now come to the conclusion that that is an inadequate way of understanding God’s relation to time. They recognize, as Richard Springburn, the philosopher at Oxford, puts it: that God is omniscient, that is, he knows all that it’s logically possible to know, but if the future does not yet exist with its content, God cannot know it. Logically, he cannot know it. He will know best what’s likely to happen, and sometimes almost with a probability of one, but he will not know definitively what happens until it happens. He will always be present at all future moments to react to it, but he does not know it in advance, because there is not anything to be known in advance. It is not there existing already, and this is a great help when dealing with the whole question of human free will.
Well, I’ve sketched over some very sensitive and great issues, all of which are raised by our present knowledge of the world and which 90% of our contemporaries are aware of in various ways. The Christian Church has got to face up to these questions and have a theology, a content of thinking which is going to be able to be believable and plausible and convincing. What I’ve been saying consists of both meta………….logical and content(?) challenges to Christian theology. I think, and my experience is, that intellectually educated, thinking people, if they are still attached in any way to the Christian churches, are, as it were, hanging on by their fingertips as they increasingly bracket off large sections of the liturgies in which they participate as either unintelligible or, if intelligible, unbelievable in their classical form. There is an increasingly alarming dissonance between the language of devotion, liturgies and doctrine and what people perceive themselves to be and to be becoming, in the light of our best knowledge of the world, which includes the epic of evolution and cognitive sciences. Up to now, apologetic (Christian apology) based on science has been a well-expressed reinventing the wheel that strengthens Christians who are wobbling in their faith, but is not convincing the general educated public. It’s still much too entangled in worn-out metaphors and images both Biblical and traditional. I myself have argued for a more dynamic view of God’s continuous action in the processes of the natural world, the action of a God who is indeed transcendent, incarnate and immanent, in whom the world exists and who is its circumambient reality. Be that as it may, what we all have to do in this interaction of Christian thinking with the sciences is by argument and imagination, to develop a notion of God, belief in the reality of whom, with all that entails, can coherently embrace what we now know about the cosmos, this planet, and our own and other species.
Theology, which I still take to be wisdom and words about God, has to develop concepts, images, notions, metaphors, that represent God’s purposes and implanted meanings for the world we actually now find ourselves to be in, through our new knowledge. We require what I think is an open, revisable, exploratory, radical and, dare I say it, liberal theology. This is, I know, unfashionable among Christians, who seem everywhere to be retreating into fortresses of classical, fundamentalist and Protestant evangelicalism, traditional Anglo-Catholicism and Biblical theology. Nevertheless, in my view, transition to a more open theology is actually unavoidable if Christians in the West, and I suspect eventually elsewhere, are not to degenerate in the next century into an esoteric society internally talking with itself and failing to transmit its good news, the evangel, to the universal catholicos world. As it goes on talking to itself, it would dig a deeper and deeper hole and go on talking more and more to itself and less to people outside.
Hence the paradox. To be truly evangelical and catholic in its impact and function, the Church of the next millennium, and certainly the next century, will need a theology that in its relation to a world view everywhere shaped by our new knowledge, will have necessarily to be more liberal and open and radical. For such a Christian theology to have any viability may well have to be stripped down to newly conceived essentials, certain very central, fundamental things and a periphery of other things which are more optional and variable amongst Christians. Only then will Christian theology attain that degree of verisimilitude with respect to ultimate realities which science and other disciplines have to natural ones and then only will they command respect as a vehicle of public truth. The Christian faith is no longer public truth in this country, and it can never come back to that unless it adopts some such path by emerging along the lines I’ve been saying.
To conclude with what I might call is a hopeful afterword: I want to indicate why I am full of hope in spite of this gargantuan task facing Christian thinking as it enters the 21st century. It is a hope based on the perennial character of God’s creative engagement in the world. Some time ago (30 years ago now) I noted there were signs of a kind of misfit, as it were, between human beings, persons, and their environment. We alone in the biological world commit suicide. We alone, by our burial rituals, evidence since ancient times a sense of another dimension’s existence. We alone go through our biological lives with a sense of incomplete fulfillment emphasized by the contemporary quest for self-realization and personal growth. Human beings seek to come to terms with death, pain and suffering and they need to realize their potentialities and to steer their paths through life. …………. Is not capable of satisfying those human aspirations, nor can the …….. of science describe, discern, ………. So our presence in the biological world raises questions quite outside the scope of the sciences to answer. For we are capable of happinesses and miseries quite unknown to other creatures. We have a kind of dis-ease with our evolved state. As human beings widen their environmental horizons, so this experience of a great gulf fixed between their biological and past environment out of which they have evolved, and that which they conceive themselves as wishing to exist in, increases. We may well ask something like this: why has, how has, the process whereby they have so successfully devolved living organisms finely adapted to their environment, failed in the case of homo sapiens to assure this fit between lived experience and the conditions of their lives? It appears that the human brain has capacities which were evolved in response to earlier challenges, but the exercise of which now engenders a whole range of needs, desires, aspirations and ambitions which cannot all be harmoniously fulfilled. Such considerations raise the further question of whether or not human beings have actually really identified what their true environment really is. That environment, to put it in ……… in which human flourishing is possible. It seems to be an endemic failure of human beings to be adapted to what they sense is the totality of their environment. Thomas Chalmers in 1822, the great Presbyterian teacher, put it like this:
‘There is in humanity a restlessness of ambition, a dissatisfaction with the present, which never is appeased but all the world has to follow; an unsated appetite for something larger and better which he fancies in the spectre(?) before him, to all of which there is nothing like among other animals. Does not the human condition raise the profound question of what humanity’s true environment really is?’
Thus it was that St Augustine, with whom I have difficulty in other respects, after years of travail and even despair addressed his Maker: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in you.”
Augustine’s Maker is ours, too, and no one who has asked has not had it given, and no one who has sought has not found. So in this gargantuan task of reconstruction of Christian thinking for the 21st century, let us knock and it will be opened to us.
Questions:
Thank you very much, Dr Peacocke. I’ve got two points I’d like to raise. One – you mentioned that the need to feed in the insights of other faiths was not a matter of urgency but could be left to the end of the century. I would question that. I think we in Christian culture and faith should be able to understand our Hindu, Islamic, Jewish and Buddhist brethren; and in the nature of the world of politics and economics, that puts an extra pressure that these new dialogues and understandings and sharings take place as a matter of urgency.
I’m glad you’ve given me a chance to correct the impression I gave you. I said it might take to the end of the century to do it. It doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t be proceeding as soon as we can with the process. As a matter of fact, many Christians are worried about how we understand the uniqueness of Jesus and what we understand about nations, humanity and God through Jesus. If we start taking seriously other religions, are we being disloyal to the Christian insights? As a matter of fact, I think this is often the case because, and I think again, I mean I………. The strong emphasis in the Eastern Orthodox Church on Jesus as the logos of God incarnate, what we really read in the preface to St John’s Gospel, does allow us a way of looking at other religions which is respectful and doesn’t derogate from Christianity or the Christian profession, because what was incarnate in Jesus was God as logos, God as Word, the self-expression of God which has been working in the world throughout aeons of time. It was hidden and concealed, as you can read in the first few verses in John’s Gospel, but now we see it, ‘the Word was made flesh’ in Jesus. But what Jesus revealed was what was going on in the world all the time; the very purposes that God expressed in and through the world in that sacramental imagery I used last week.
We have to ask ourselves a question – how was the logos of God being expressed in cultures other than our own in places where the simple resources of symbol and tradition are very different from our own, so we have to have a listening, tuning ear to hear the word of God in other cultures and other religions. I think that doesn’t derogate from our affirmation that in Jesus of Nazareth we have seen the Word of God expressed in the life, self-offering death and resurrection of a human being. I’ve been reading only recently in The Tablet* a Roman Catholic theologian, a Jesuit, has been saying precisely the same. So the time for a more logos-centred Christology, I think, has now arrived, in my view, because it both affirms the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Jesus the Christ but at the same time what is revealed in Jesus the Christ is so universal and pervasive and perennial that it can’t be silent in other places.
Thank you. My second point is about the new theology that you were talking about just now, and some ways in which I think you were seeing the Christian Church retreating into itself or failing to communicate to what you might call a large mass of reasonable people. I, who am a regular churchgoer, have regular difficulty with the Creed that is said as a central part of the Eucharist. I wonder if you’ve got any thoughts about whether we should be reviewing our liturgy to accommodate the new understandings that you have been describing this evening?
I have every sympathy with that. Many years ago I was a member of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England. We had as a brief from Michael Ramsay, the then Archbishop, to look at how we hold the creeds and the scriptures today, knowing that their terminology resides in a context, most of which is quite foreign to us. A lot of it is neo-Platonic philosophy of the 3rd and 4th centuries in which our creeds were born – ‘God of God’, ‘of one substance with the Father’ and so on. We produced a report called ‘Christian Believing’ which was in fact rubbished by the Synod who refused really to discuss it. Had they discussed it, they would have recognized that there is a whole range of interpretations of the creeds and the scriptures when we see them in their historical context, which will allow, for example, the controversies when David Jenkins was Bishop of Durham, to be seen in much more irenical context. I said something which some of you may have thought controversial about the virgin birth.
If you go back to the 1938 Doctrine Commission under William Temple, that report says a lot of theologians, looking over the previous 20 years, regard the birth narratives as mythological; symbolic of theological truths and not historical. That has already been an option in the Church of England for 60 or 70 years and now it goes back much further. If some of these themes had been taken on board then, I think we would have known how to contextualize and understand, for example, the creeds as they are – 3rd, 4th and 5th century documents meeting particular controversies of their time in the language of philosophical forms of their time. And of course the creeds, good as they are in many ways, are incomplete statements of the Christian faith. There is nothing in there, for example, about how Jesus’ death on the cross reconciles us to God. There have been a vast number of theories of the atonement but there is no one definitive theory which the Church has officially ever accepted, though there are people who try to persuade us that the one theory is definitive and the only one.
I think we’re going to need a lot more intelligent thinking about the creeds. I remember one member of that Doctrine Commission saying when we were at an impasse, ‘Well, you know, the thing about creeds is you shouldn’t say them like King’s or Queen’s Regulations, you should sing them like a hymn.’ And there is something in that. You are identifying with the people whose belief expressed itself in those forms at that time. You’re identifying yourself with the community of the church who believed in that way. Even though now we have the gloss to interpret what they say in all sorts of ways, I don’t believe there’s any clergyman or any informed theologian who can say the creeds meaning their literal truth for every single phrase; everybody glosses them in their own way. I liked it when the old ASB said ‘We believe’: a corporate statement, instead of ‘I believe’ as if I’m signing on the dotted line for every one of these phrases. It’s much better to take it as a sign of the corporateness, and this is precisely the way the Church of England takes the 39 Articles: as historic statements of the Anglican position at a certain time in history. There are very few of us, even the most conservative of us, who would ex anima agree to every single one of the 39 Articles as expressed in the 16th and 17th century.
The Western church has been obsessed with the kind of legalistic forms of expressing beliefs. It’s much more important to follow Jesus than to believe a set of propositions, and that is the crucial thing. To follow Jesus is really demanding enough in many ways. People find me unredeemably liberal in saying such things, but in the circles I move in, people of my generation, there are a lot of thinking people who think that they have to believe literally everything in the Bible or literally everything in the creeds: literally the virgin birth, literally the empty tomb, in order to follow Christ towards God. I think that is a shame.
I confess I’m very puzzled trying to figure out what it is you’re trying to say. You say you don’t believe in the soul or the spirit. You say you don’t believe in the supernatural. You presumably don’t believe in the angelic or any experience of intermediaries between the divine and the human. You say you believe in reality, but by reality you seem to mean the best explanation that scientific method at any one time can come up with, and naturally shifts from day to day; so in what sense can it be described as reality? I get no sense of the divine from your talk, other than as if you apprehend the divine through the natural universe. You talk of the divine as immanent in the natural universe. There seems to be no place for spiritual experience or experimentation in your position. I myself, for instance, am very interested in the arguments of the great Orthodox theologian, Philip Sherrard, who is deeply critical of modern science and its technological consequences. You seem to want to entirely disconnect modern technologies from modern science. You seem to regard science as if it is purely an explanatory system, and you are rather disparaging of some Third World clergy who you refer to as criticizing modern theology.
There are several points there. Sherrard actually, I think, is anti-science, but he identifies science with the multi-national corporations in technologically exploiting the Third World.
You’re trying to catch me on the horns of a dilemma which I don’t accept, because I do think science can be misapplied. The discovery of fire could be used to cook food to keep us alive, or to burn down your labourer’s hut. No discovery or knowledge about the natural world has ever failed to be misapplied because of human things. Does this mean we should not know anything unless you go back to the cave?
There is a lot of spiritual knowledge which you’ve been appearing to deny. You call yourself a theologian…
I’ve said God is and the world is. All I’ve said is that philosophically nowadays and theologically, we do not have to think of a thing called the spirit and a thing called the mind and a thing called the body. We are persons capable of mental and spiritual activities and spiritual relationship to God who is our source and ground of our being and becoming, and that is the most important thing of all, and that is a statement about God and everything else. That is the only dualism which seems to make much sense to all sorts of aspects to modern thinking and modern knowledge. That is not to deny that the word ‘spiritual’ and the word ‘mental’ apply to realities in our experience and in our activities. So let’s be clear about that. What God intends for human beings is to incorporate ourselves into the divine life. Let’s agree on that. Now, you can attack science because of the depredations of modern technology, but anybody in this room who is over the age of 45 is alive because of science.
What about the millions that die?
Who is causing them to die? Human beings are causing them to die. There are enough antibiotics, and science could be applied to produce enough food to keep everybody alive in the world. It is human cupidity and selfishness and human beings who are misapplying science.
I would not dispute with you. There is no reason to argue that there has been any essential change in human nature from now or 2000 years ago, but there is a very real change as a result of modern science in our ability to affect the material or natural processes.
What do you want to do – stop all research into cancer and disease? Science can be misapplied and it can be well applied. It depends on human will and human power politics and on money. If we would like to put our money into applying science well, we could feed all the population of the world and make sure they were free of disease, but the richer nations choose not to do so.
Yes.
Well, then, what on earth are you trying to do in this reconciliation of science and theology if you are saying science is ethically neutral?
That’s about ethical and practical matters. I am saying that any beliefs we have about God and our relation to humanity and the world have got to be based on our best knowledge of the world and of humanity, and some of that knowledge comes from science, some of it comes from literature and art and music and other experiences. In order to have a viable Christian belief we’ve got to have a belief that fits with our best knowledge of the world. Two hundred years ago most Christians believed devoutly that all people who weren’t Christians went to hellfire eternally. How many Christians today believe that?
I believe that, and I’m not a fundamentalist. But you appear to be a fundamentalist scientist, and you seem to be advocating a post-modernist theology.
I’m advocating a theology consistent with our best ethical insights and the best knowledge we have. We have to recognize that what Christians have believed has changed remarkably over the centuries, and you’d be surprised how much we have changed even within the last 50 years. It goes on all the time, because our understanding of God’s purposes for us has to be related to our best knowledge of the world. When Paul took the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome he had to deal with the whole question of the Jewish communities: how to relate the law to the Gospel? When the Cappadocian Fathers faced up to neo-Platonic philosophy, they had to relate their thinking to the best knowledge they had of the world. That’s why a lot of our creeds have neo-Platonic terms like ‘substance’ and so on in them. When Aquinas, with …………, met the knowledge coming from the East via the Arabs of the whole Greek corpus of writings, they re-thought the whole of the structure of Christian thinking in the light of Aristotelian thought. Now we have this perspective on the world which I tried to outline in my first lecture of this extraordinary picture of cosmic evolution, of the continuities of the world through history and of our rootedness in the stardust of the universe and we are all of that. We now have to relate what we think the purposes of God in Christ were to a world conceived in that way. We have no option – that is our knowledge of the world. So we have to relate it.
I wonder if I might try and refocus the debate a little. It seemed to me as I listened to you that you were arguing strongly for a re-establishment of natural theology, for the reasonableness of belief, as it actually was prepared to engage with the world we encounter and not simply treat our historic documents as the sources which contradicted anything we experienced naturally. I find myself very much in agreement with that position in the sense that I think the Biblical theology of, certainly the middle part of the last century, left us in a very difficult position if we wanted to engage with our neighbours who experienced the world as we did but couldn’t see where we were coming from. Now, admitting that, and admitting the sorts of skepticism you had about some of the ways in which Biblical material has been interpreted, how would you seek to explain to somebody today the notion of the resurrection of Jesus?
As a prelude to what I want to say, though I may sound a little bit skeptical and negative, I do want to emphasize that the Bible is an irreplaceable resource for us in understanding God’s relation to humanity. It’s the way we use that resource which can be sometimes wooden and unimaginative. You talk about the resurrection. I’m not sure whether that was a miracle in the sense of a breaking of the law of nature at all in one sense, because when you talk of laws of nature as you were talking of regularities (a is always followed by b followed by c) but whatever the risen state of Christ was, it wasn’t something that had ever been observed before, so we don’t know what the law was about it. All we know is that the disciples experienced the total personhood of Jesus taken through death so they recognized him and identified him and that he was in some sense with God, which is what the narratives about the ascension make very clear, and that God by that act had taken him through death to the presence of God. That’s enough for me to believe that that could happen to us, and that I think is all – I’m not sure if one could say much more than that with any degree of clarity. It’s enough for me to know that Jesus has been taken - because he was one with God - through death into the presence of God. That is the reason for thinking that, insofar as we relate to God, God will take us through death, and the evidence for that is the disciples’ recognizing that he is risen. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, gives the earliest account of the resurrection narratives. He is full of the fact that Jesus is risen and he puzzles over what kind of risen form he had: something like a body insofar that he could identify him, but it wasn’t the same as the body that he left in the tomb. It’s a glorious body. It’s a mystery. Sometimes, as in the resurrection narratives, Jesus goes through walls, sometimes he eats, sometimes he appears and disappears; but he doesn’t want to be a kind of ghost. It’s the real, full personhood of Jesus that has been taken by God through death. That’s what we are affirming in the resurrection, and that’s enough for me, I think, to go on.
You felt that science had defended itself against post-modernism very successfully. Do you feel that post-modernism has contributed anything positive in its own right, or has it been a totally negative phenomenon?
It’s a multi-headed hydra beast, of course, and it takes many forms. Insofar as it reminds us that in anything we say and do, we are liable to be voicing simply the cultural context in which we come, it’s a good warning. But of course the famous Delphic Oracle of ‘know thyself’ has now got to be extended ‘know yourselves’ – namely that the social contextualization of anything we’re liable to say has got to be taken on board; but that does not mean there isn’t a truth to be found, and is ‘worthing the finding’, as John Locke used to say.
There is a truth and it is worth the finding. We all the time have to try and decontextualize as we remember that we are Western Europeans brought up in what for some centuries has been a Protestant country with a certain perspective which is different from others. We’ve got to know how to correct the blinkers with which we are born in our society, and that’s what thinking does and that’s what a wider view does. Insofar as post-modernism has reminded us of that, I think that’s a healthy thing. Insofar as it leads to a kind of relativism which is ‘anything goes’ if you happen to be in that kind of society, I don’t think that’s good enough; I don’t think that follows at all. We have lost and it’s partly because of the way theology has been done, we have lost the sense of Christian affirmations as public truths. John Locke, the philosopher, said a very salutary thing which I’ll paraphrase in my own way, because he said it much better than I do: ‘If you have an experience of God yourself, that’s irrefutable. You just have to do what you think is the experience of God and follow it. But if somebody else says they have an experience of God and tells you what to believe, you have no option but to ask, what are your reasons for it? Why should I believe what you have experienced?’ You have no option but to say, public truth has got to meet public criteria. I’m afraid the Christian church at the moment is a coterie of people with private truths and not public truths, and that’s why we’ve got to get out into the public domain and use and meet the arguments, and have a defensible form of the Christian faith which can stand up. There will be large numbers of Christians who will keep to forms which are not defensible in the open arena. So be it, good luck to them. I am not going to impugn their experience of God through those traditional forms, if it is OK for them. But I am concerned at us losing the argument and influence in the public arena of most of our community, here and through Western Europe.
Dr Peacocke, my experience is very different from yours. I’ve spent 21 years working in Africa with the Anglican Church and most of the rest of my time with the World Church. Certainly in the parts of the world where I’ve been working, the Christian faith in the classic expression, which you feel needs to be revised as to make it possible for intellectuals in the West to be able to return to the Church, in Africa and many other parts of the Two Thirds World has in fact brought new life to people. They have found that in the Bible, in Jesus Christ as described in the Bible, in the Christian faith, that their lives have been changed. I could give you numerous examples of people who have come from a life which was going to be completely ruined by drink and immorality, and all this, who have come to be completely different people. They would owe it only to Jesus Christ and what he has done for them and how God has worked miracles in their lives. Within their own communities they have seen Jesus doing healing, which I, coming from my Western world, wouldn’t have believed, had I not actually seen it. I’ve seen people who have AIDS and their families and people like that who have found within this classic Christian faith something that has brought them new life and new hope for the future; coming into this experience of Christ, coming back to the Church, coming to the Church in huge numbers. As you no doubt know, the Anglican Communion today is very largely Two Thirds World Church. I believe the statistics say that 3,000 people are coming in to the Anglican Church every day, by baptism or confirmation, and that certainly isn’t in the West. If you think about Nigeria, where there are many, many intellectuals – I’ve met judges and people of extreme intellect who would hold to this sort of faith. It seems to me that you are wanting us in the West to move one way, to revise that, whereas the World Church is saying to us, ‘We have found that this is what we need for now and for eternity,’ and perhaps we need to look at what is happening within the World Church in this.
Well, God speaks to people according to their condition, and we have to face the fact that 90%, that is 45 million people or so in this country, have come away and don’t have any connection with the Christian Church, so I say to you, why doesn’t the recipe that works in Nigeria work in this country? And it doesn’t. It does in some small pockets, but for every fundamentalist evangelical, you get five people like myself who were turned away from the Christian faith because of its unbelievable content. I have only gradually come back to a Christian faith which I now know is part of the great tradition, because in the Christian faith there have been many variable forms, not only the sort of Protestant evangelicalism which many people know is also part of Orthodox and Catholic and many forms of Christian