Itinerant Mind

Discovered an interesting web site recently titled Itinerant Mind.  I responded to a post regarding an article in the Stone Campbell Journal from 2010 titled Evolution as Mythology.  Itinerant Mind summarized the contents of the article.  There is an inclination inside of me to want to attempt to refute some of the things the authors assert and imply about the legitimacy and validity of evolution.  But I will not.  Instead, it may be noted that mythology and "not true" are not synonymous.  Humans must have vibrant and viable myths to live by.  And note  in my blog post below, the quote from Richard Rohr where he says that historical cultures all understood this.  Throughout human history we have crafted narratives concerning our origin which are designed to be useful for our living.  Since evolution has to do with who we are and where we came from, it is inevitable that we should weave it into our story.  And we will do it well and we will do it poorly.  I reckon that we do not live at the end of history and down the road our myths will continue to change and adapt with our conditions and knowledge. 

What is Faith II

This quote from Falling Upward by Richard Rohr is a beginning to my previous question regarding the nature of Faith.  Things that have to do with sentient creatures who have such a wide range of response due to their feelings and their interactions are on a different plane and of a different nature than the consistent and mechanical world of matter.  Weather and climate is an example of the latter. 

"Western rationalism no longer understands myths, and their importance, although almost all historic cultures did."

So we have over literalized the Bible and its meaning. A scientific, constitutional reading of the Bible is misguided. 

"You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to “believe” or “trust” or “hold on.” They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real—which you cannot possibly know yet."

It appears that in regard to "faith", the evangelical world thinks it is a badge of honor if one can make the leap of faith even if the evidence is not conclusive.  The explanation that Rohr puts forth is that experience or journey can take us to where we need to be.  I've got to think that the content of what one becomes confident about is different in these contrasting cases.

What is Faith?

I came across something that gave me pause.  It is a quote by a Christian man, Paul Douglas, who is a Meteorologist by profession and moderate Republican.  He says:

I’m a Christian and ultimately come to Christ through faith. With climate change no faith is required. There is a large and growing body of evidence. (link)

My conundrum is this.  I was always taught that we should believe in Christ and Christianity because the teaching about him and the story of Christianity is reasonable and has been proven to be correct by a substantial body of evidence.  After all, why should I accept it if not proven true?  But here he is contrasting faith with something else that does have, in his opinion, a large body of evidence.  So if Christianity does not have this body of evidence, why should we place so much confidence in it? 

The Gospel of Trees

One of the recurring themes of this blog relates to the meaning of trees.  Recently came across a website called The Gospel of Trees.  They have nice pictures and nice quotes, from ancient to modern times.  Trees have roots and they reach down into the depths of the earth and the depths of our psyches.  The first section was lifted from the About section of the blog.  Then follows a quote from Miroslav Wolf from another pane.

The Bible is a story about trees. It begins, or nearly enough, with two trees in a garden: the Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The pivotal event in the book comes when a man named Jesus is hanged on a tree. And the last chapter of the last book features a remade Jerusalem: “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” If you understand the trees, you understand the story.

The words and images here are presented in no particular order: this is a mosaic rather than a narrative. Clicking on the arrow at the top right of each content page will take you randomly to another page on the site. 

Also, this mosaic is a work in progress: more text and images will be added to it over time.

This site is one of the lesser fruits of the Project on Lived Theology. I am greatly indebted to Charles Marsh, the founder and Director of PLT, and to the other members of the Virginia Seminar, who have greatly enriched my life in recent years.

My name is Alan Jacobs. Any text and images on this site that are not explicitly credited to others are created by me.

The site is designed by my very talented friend Brad Cathey. Hosting is by Highgate Cross. 

The Gospel of the Trees by Alan Jacobs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

There is a remarkable image in the closing pages of Scripture that has become a touchstone for the way my colleagues and I think about faith and culture. Amid its descriptions of the New Jerusalem, Revelation includes “the tree of life, bearing 12 crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2). The tree holds out hope that whole cultures will be healed and mended, becoming places where people can flourish. And it sets an agenda for faith as a way of life that contributes to that flourishing, in anticipation, here and now.

— Miroslav Volf

 

The Cutest Little Doll-Shaped Molecules You Ever Did See

The Cutest Little Doll-Shaped Molecules You Ever Did See

Christ in Evolution

Have taken up Ilia Delio's Christ in Evolution.  This book was prior to her The Emergent Christ which I completed a few weeks ago.  Here are a few of the many things that have jumped out at me so far. 

The mechanistic view of the world associated with Newtonian physics has been replaced with a dynamic, open ended view of the world in which some events are in principle unpredictable. At the infinitesimal level of the atom and its subatomic particles, quantum mechanics has uncovered a realm where time, space, and matter itself behave according to laws whose very functioning have uncertainty built into them. Quantum physics has given us a new view of matter today as not only indeterminate but also as relational.The universe seems to be inherently relational.*

*Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (London:  SCM Press 1997)

John Polkinghorne, who notes that “both chance and necessity are indispensable partners in the fruitful history of the universe.” “The role of chance does not turn evolution into a cosmic lottery,” he states, “but is the way the physical world explores and realizes its potential.”**

** John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology, (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 1998).

In the light of this, what she says earlier in the book about Christ makes a lot of sense to me.  The universe is evolving according to a plan and

Christ is the “design” of the universe because the universe is modeled on Christ, the divine Word of God; the universe is Christologically structured. Because the universe has a “plan,” we can speak of the evolution of this plan as the unfolding of Christ in the universe, who is “the mystery hidden from the beginning” (Eph 3:9).

International Surface Temperature Initiative

This week I am attending the 9th International Temperature Symposium.  It is held once every ten years.  Heard an interesting talk this morning by Peter Thorne.  He is involved in the International Surface Temperature Initiative. He indicated that even without temperature information, we can be assured that there is global warming is occurring.  Nonetheless, this initiative is attempting to improve the temperature records and make them available since "the rate and temporal/spatial details are the issue."

Did Jesus “Do What the Bible Says”? Some thoughts on Jesus, Biblical Formalism, and Problem of Indeterminacy

Did Jesus “Do What the Bible Says”? Some thoughts on Jesus, Biblical Formalism, and Problem of Indeterminacy  

Matt's Theoprudence blog  at the above link discusses two types of interpretation of Biblical text:  formalist and purposive.  The prime example that illustrates this problem of interpretation concerns Jesus healing on the Sabbath.  From a formalist approach, Jesus clearly broke the rule that prohibits work being performed on the Sabbath.  However, in one of the texts, it is said that he says that the Sabbath was made for mankind and not mankind for the Sabbath.  This implies that the rule is not absolute but has lots of wiggle room based on an inferred purpose of the rule.

Since early adulthood, in a break with my traditional conservative Reformation and Restoration Movement roots, I have come down on the purposive side of things.  I would give a hat tip to Professor Andy T. Richie for aid in starting me down that path.  He took us through the book of Matthew in the Life of Christ class my sophomore year at Harding.  How can one think otherwise after a close reading of the Sermon on the Mount?

For a humorous application of the formalist approach see my daughter-in-law's blog post here.  She is in law school and the interpretation of laws is somewhat important in that occupation.

What Problem is God Trying to Solve and Teilhard de Chardin's Answer

I've followed Wade Rogers' blog for a number of years and have benefited in many ways.  A recent post of his asked the question What Problem is God Trying to Solve?  He lays out the question and gives what he thinks is hinted at by scripture and I think he is headed the right direction.  He is pondering clues from scripture  I won't summarize but here is a morsel of what he is aiming at:

Wade:  The best clue I can find in the story itself is that God created human beings “in his image.” We were the last to be created, but not an afterthought. More like the ultimate aim. God created a world perfectly suited to sustain creatures bearing his image.

 I've been pondering, on the other hand, with clues from the book of nature in combo with scripture.  I responded with: 

Steve:  I think what you say overlaps some with process theology, which I’m wanting to look into more. Philip Clayton has somewhat this view and he writes about process and the principle of emergence. He is another interesting author, like Nancey Murphy, many of whose books are quite expensive but who cover this interesting territory. While I’m at it, Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man was assigned in my Philosophy of Religion class at Harding University in the spring of 1971. At the time I thought his conjecture was odd and warrantless. Now I find him inspiring and many others do now as well. What he predicted is coming true with the internet and impending connectedness of everything. Your “god-like beings” finds more resonance with the theosis concept of Orthodox Christianity. So the idea goes back quite a way actually.

and later with

Steve:  Wade, I slogged through the Phenomenon of Man just this past year. It was hard going for me. He was charting new territory by himself and had no special jargon or vocabulary to help or push away from. Still glad I did it. What has also aided me is reference to him and use of him by others. Modern interpreters of him like John Haught in “Deeper than Darwin” and Ilia Delio in “The Emergent Christ” often place things that du Chardin said in a fitting context that makes sense to me. For instance she explains de Chardin as saying that God is “a divine source not in the past or “up above” in a timeless present but “up ahead” in the future. He described the God of the future, the God “up ahead,” as the ultimate force of attraction for the universe, drawing the universe toward intensification of complexity and new creation.” … “Teilhard used the term Christogenesis to indicate that the biological and cosmological genesis of creation is, from the point of faith, christogenesis. By genesis he indicated that evolution involves directed change organized becoming, patterned process, cumulative order. … Teilhard’s faith in Christ led him to posit Christ, the future fullness of the whole evolutionary process, as the “centrating principle,” the “pleroma” and “Omega point” where the individual and collective adventure of humanity finds it end and fulfillment.”

History of Christianity

From the Theology and Culture blog.

I'm not saying that there is not value in each of these branches and that all of them are wrong.  In fact I think generally speaking that all of them have value and presented good in their time and place.  They are experiments that teach us.  Christianity is a work in progress.

Jonathan Franzen, Art, Science, and Ghostly Consciousness

At the Science + Religion Today website I came a across a quote from Jonathan Franzen that relates to art, science, and religion.  Here is a portion of what he said:

“So I spend quite a bit of time trying to make sense of how I seem to have a soul, I have this ghostly consciousness, yet I know as a believer in science that this is just coming from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules. I think if you take science seriously there are a lot of interesting questions to ask. I would be happy if more novelists, not just science fiction writers, paid attention to that.”

I share with Jonathan an interest in the mystery of “this ghostly consciousness” and how this arises given the material constituents from what we are constructed and which seem reducible to inexorable scientific laws. And yet I'm very religious.  At long last, I’ve come to the conclusion that the emergent character of reality holds clues to this mystery.

Aids to me in understanding this:

1. The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber.
2.  A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren
3.  The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex by Harold Morowitz.
4.  Philip Clayton & Paul Davies (eds.) The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion

In addition, various explorations into our postmodern age have been a help as well.

Disorientation is Desirable

Mountains serve liminality

Today I'm linking to a wonderful post by Len Hjalmarson over at NextReformation titled dis-orientation and renewal.  Here are some highlights:

Disorientation connotes liminality and chaos. Both of these conditions root a creative and adaptive response. In The Sky is Falling as in The Shaping of Things to Come, the authors argue that disorientation is a necessary condition to renewal. We generally have far too much invested in the status quo to freely embrace change. A shaking and breaking is necessary. We enter into most transitions only half-heartedly if at all, and most of us are dragged to that place against our will.
 ...

Disorientation and dislocation create marginality. Marginality generates openness to risk and innovation, openness to “the other.” 
...

Finally, the gift of disorientation is the possibility of communitas. In these strange times when the foundations of modernity are crumbling, and Christendom itself is breaking apart; in these times when those things we took as secure and predictable no longer seem so sure, we can react in one of two ways. We can turn more inward, and find ways to buoy up a false sense of security in our sameness. We can look for ways to save our lives and preserve our comforts and privilege.  

Or we can remember that in the Incarnation God became vulnerable and weak. He gave up status, privilege and security and entered our world and embraced us in our sin. He even took our wrongs on himself. 

Science and Spirit

From the Network of Spiritual Progressives.  This is cool and beautiful:

Everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe is the prelude to each of our lives. Everything that has happened from the beginning of time has become the platform from which we launch our lives.

We are the heirs of the long evolution of Spirit. Each of us is the latest unfolding of the event of Creation. Our bodies are composed of the material that was shaped in the Big Bang. And so, too, our spirits. The loving goodness of the universe breathes us and breathes through us, giving us life and consciousness, and the capacity to recognize and love others.

- Rabbi Michael Lerner

It is Obvious

see more Funny Graphs

From this Site

Rene Girard on Nietzsche and Irresponsible Rhetoric

Just read Rene Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.  Several blog/internet associates impelled me to read him and I finally gave in to my good fortune.  The following quote is kind of incidental to his main arguments of this fascinating book but struck me as pithy and relevant to our times.  The book came out in 1999.

"Nietzsche shared with many intellectuals of his time and our own a passion for irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents.  But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world.  Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all:  they take them at their word."