Breathing New Life Into the World‐Soul? Revisiting an Old Doctrine Through the Lens of Current Debates on Special Divine Action

Nicholas Saunders’ 2002 book Divine Action and Modern Science remains among the most significant and widely‐cited recent contributions to the literature on special divine action (SDA). One of the tasks he takes up in that work is to critique a wide assortment of models of SDA, including that of Grace Jantzen. Her account employs the panentheistic notion that the physical universe is related to God in a manner closely analogous to the way in which a human body is related to the human mind—that is, the cosmos is God’s body. And just as we humans can exercise basic actions on and with our bodies without violating the laws of nature, God can exercise basic action on parts of the cosmos without such violations, thereby providing a workable non‐interventionist model of SDA. Saunders critiques this model on both philosophical and theological grounds, and moves on to consider another: the idea that God never acts directly on the cosmos, but instead interacts with the world by influencing human minds, which influence needn’t involve the violation of laws. This model too comes in for heavy criticism. In this essay I suggest a way of retaining important aspects of both of these accounts while sidestepping the criticisms levelled by Saunders. This can be done by reviving an idea sympathetically entertained by such notables as Plato, several early Church fathers (including Augustine), and Isaac Newton: that of a World‐Soul distinct from God.     

An‐Archy and Awakening: The Ethical and Political Temporalities of Christology and Pneumatology

This article constructs an ecological theology following Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of religion. I suggest that the Son and Spirit express divinity through corporeal and temporal realities best described through Levinas’ ideas concerning the an‐archy and awakening of time. Following Levinas, and theologians such as Mark I Wallace, I construct a materialist theology that blurs the line between God and corporeal bodies, positing that such an understanding of the Son and Spirit re‐sacralizes nature in a way that assists Christianity in overcoming the tenuous relationship between humanity and Earth.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM AND “REVEALED RELIGION”: SOME PROBLEMS WITH CAIAZZA'S ANALYSIS

Abstract. Instead of focusing my remarks on John Caiazza's interesting and important thesis about the way in which modern technology is drastically secularizing our culture today, I examine the frame within which he sets out his thesis, a frame I regard as seriously flawed. Caiazza's argument is concerned with the broad range of religion/science/technology issues in today's world, but the only religion that he seems to take seriously is what he calls “revealed religion” (Christianity). His consideration of religion is thus narrow and cramped, and this makes it difficult to assess properly the significance of what he calls techno‐secularism. I suggest that employing a broader conception of religion would enable us to see more clearly what is really at stake in the rise of techno‐secularism. Instead of defining the issues in the polarizing terms of revealed religion versus secularity, I argue for a more integrative approach in which concepts are developed that can bring together and hold together major religious insights and themes with modern scientific thinking. If, for example, we give up the anthropomorphism of the traditional idea of God as creator and think of God as simply creativity, it becomes possible to integrate theological insights with current scientific thinking and to formulate the issues posed by the rise of techno‐secularism in a more illuminating way. This in turn should facilitate effective address of those issues.     

SOME CORRELATIONS BETWEEN METHODS OF KNOWING AND THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS IN ARTHUR PEACOCKE'S PERSONALISTIC PANENTHEISM AND NONPERSONAL NATURALISTIC THEISM

Differences in methods of knowing correlate with differences in concepts about what is known. This is an underlying issue in science and religion. It is seen, first, in Arthur Peacocke's reasoning about God as transcendent and personal, is based on an assumption of correlative thinking that like causes like. This contrasts with a notion of causation in empirical science, which explains the emergence of new phenomena as originating from temporally prior phenomena quite unlike that which emerges. The scientific understanding of causation is compatible with a naturalistic theism that holds a nonpersonal model of God as the creative process. However, focusing on the immanence of God, there is a second correlation between methods of knowing and concepts of God. Classical empiricism, used by science, correlates with God understood nonpersonally as the creative process. Radical empiricism, in which feelings and not only sense perceptions have cognitive import, opens up the possibility that one can experience Peacocke's personal, panentheistic God as pattern‐forming influence. I illustrate this second method‐concept correlation with a personal experience.     

PANTHEISM RECONSTRUCTED: ECOTHEOLOGY AS A SUCCESSOR TO THE JUDEO‐CHRISTIAN,ENLIGHTENMENT, AND POSTMODERNIST PARADIGMS

The Judeo‐Christian, Enlightenment, and postmodernist paradigms have become intellectually and ethically exhausted. They are obviously failing to provide a conceptual framework conducive to eliminating some of humanity's worst scourges, including war and environmental destruction. This raises the issue of a successor, which necessitates a reexamination of first principles, starting with our concept of God. Pantheism, which is differentiated from panentheism, denies the existence of a transcendent, supernatural creator and instead asserts that God and the universe are one and the same. Understood via intuition, modern cosmology, and other natural sciences, it offers an alternative worldview that posits the divine and sacred nature of the universe/creation. By asserting the fallacy of the creator/creation dichotomy and any attempts to anthropomorphize or personalize God, pantheism precludes hubris stemming from erroneous notions of divine favoritism. The links between Judeo‐Christianity and the Enlightenment are traced and a case made that the latter has resulted in the equally erroneous and hubristic notion of human ascendancy to a Godlike status, with the concept of progress providing a secular version of the Christian belief in salvation. By reestablishing the natural sciences’metanarrative, even as it asserts the divinity of the material universe, pantheism simultaneously demotes postmodernism and reconciles science with religion. Pantheism provides a theological foundation for deep ecology and also stakes out a viable third position in relation to the ongoing dispute between advocates of intelligent design and the scientific establishment.     

Noah J. Toly and Daniel I. Block,eds. Keeping God's Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective

Abstract

Ted Peters rightly rejects, on biblical and theological grounds, the understanding of kenosis presumably endorsed by Niels Gregersen (and with him Jürgen Moltmann, John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke) as divine withdrawal from creation (tsim tsum). That said, a second version of kenosis, one more consistent with Scripture and early patristic theology, meets Peters' criticism by presenting kenosis not as a creative withdrawal of divine power but as a self-negation on the part of God that results in the generation of created reality along with God's reappearance and presence in it, albeit in another form. This is the kenosis-plerosis model, one according to which God gives history its momentum and empowers finite beings as a consequence of God's own self-negation; this would make possible a way for Gregersen meaningfully to affirm God's action at higher levels of nature without violating nature's integrity, even though it does so in a heterodox way.     

“One Nation Under God”: The System‐Justifying Function of Symbolically Aligning God and Government

Do references to God in political discourse increase confidence in the U.S. sociopolitical system? Using a system justification framework (Jost & Banaji, 1994 ), five studies provide evidence that, (1) increasingly governments symbolically associate the nation with God when public confidence in the social system may be threatened and (2) associating the nation with God serves a system‐justifying function by increasing public confidence in the system. In an analysis of U.S. presidential speeches, presidents were more likely to symbolically associate the nation with God during threatening times (Study 1). Among religious individuals, referencing God in political rhetoric increased the perceived trustworthiness of politicians, compared to patriotic secular rhetoric (Study 2) or simply priming the concept of God (Study 3). These effects were also unique to politicians from one's own sociopolitical system (Study 4). Finally, believing God has a plan for the United States attenuates the deleterious effect that perceptions of national decline have on system confidence (Study 5). Implications for the system‐justifying function of religion are discussed.     

“You Cannot Serve God and Mammon”: Economic Relations and Human Flourishing in Luke

Abstract : Economics is essentially a matter of value, and capitalism is a system of value creation in which the individual is valued at the expense of the community and the cosmos. In contrast to this, Luke tells the story of Jesus as a vision of salvation that is covenantal and communal, encompassing every dimension of life, including the economic. God and mammon represent two antithetical wellsprings of value and desire that orient intentions and actions in different directions. Mammon represents the realm of self‐justification, self‐reliance, self‐aggrandizement, and in our own disenchanted world the “buffered” and disengaged self, while God represents the domain of human flourishing characterized by interdependence and sharing.     

EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THEOLOGY: A MUTUALLY ILLUMINATIVE DIALOGUE

Scientific perspectives often are perceived to challenge biblically based cosmologies and theologies. Arthur Peacocke, biochemist and theologian, recognized that this challenge actually represents an opportunity for Christian theology to reenvision and reinterpret its traditions in ways that take into account scientific theories of evolution. In the course of his career, Peacocke offered a new paradigm for the dialogue between theology and science. This paper explores his proposals, in particular his theories of language, the God‐world relation, and the nature of God, and exemplifies the impact these proposals had on his theological insights.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Special Topic:</Emphasis> Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity

In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) is explored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concept today because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: new orders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity are explored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes; the human creation of culture. It is suggested that this creativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given a referent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human. God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modern understanding of the world and human life. This article includes text and ideas taken from my book, In the beginning…Creativity (Kaufman 2004).     

Bulgakov's Account of Creation: Neglected Aspects,Critics and Contemporary Relevance

The article focuses on a central, yet neglected dimension of the ‘Sophia Debate’ in twentieth‐century Russian Orthodox theology: Bulgakov's panentheistic account of creation and its critique by Nikolai Lossky. Bulgakov understood the doctrine of creation to be negatively defined as creatio ex nihilo and positively defined as creatio ex Deo. Bulgakov's sophiology seeks to relate God and the world through the intermediate concept of Sophia, balancing an account of God's being in the world with an account of the world's eternal foundation in God. Lossky objected that Bulgakov's account underemphasizes novelty, contingency and the free character of creation. Lossky's objections notwithstanding, Bulgakov's version of panentheism – especially its trinitarian, antinomian and kenotic dimensions – finds significant points of contact with contemporary accounts of creation.     

SEVEN CONCEPTS OF CREATION

Professor Broadie identifies for us a number of features of the account of creation in the Timaeus:
(1) The cosmos-the ordered universe in which we live is to be accounted for as a whole.
(2) The cosmos is supremely beautiful and good.
(3) The cause of the cosmos is non-physical, intelligent, good, and divine, i.e. God.
(4) God worked on pre-existent matter.
(5) God was copying an eternal paradigm.
It would, I think, be very widely agreed that these five theses are true of Plato's account and pick out its significant points.     

PEIRCE'S PRAGMATIC THEOLOGY AND STOIC RELIGIOUS ETHICS1

Charles S. Peirce believed that his pragmatic philosophy could reconcile religion and science and that this reconciliation involves a religious ethics creating a real community with the cosmos and God. After some rival pragmatic approaches to God and religious belief inconsistent with Peirce's philosophy are set aside, his metaphysical plan for a reconciliation of religion and science is outlined. A panentheistic God makes the best match with his desired conclusions from the Neglected Argument for the reality of God, and this God is also capable of fulfilling the pragmatic role demanded by Peirce's ethical expectations for the intelligent functioning of religion. The discussion proceeds to an elaboration of the aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Peirce's philosophical system, which indicate why Peirce's religious ethics is best categorized as akin to Stoicism, with some Christian elements. For Peirce, religious ethics proceeds from the (potentially universal) agapic community's cooperation with God's loving creativity of the universe.     

SPACE AND TIME FROM A NEO‐WHITEHEADIAN PERSPECTIVE

Russell Stannard distinguishes between objective time as measured in theoretical physics and subjective time, or time as experienced by human beings in normal consciousness. Because objective time, or four‐dimensional space‐time for the physicist, does not change but exists all at once, Stannard argues that this is presumably how God views time from eternity which is beyond time. We human beings are limited to experiencing the moments of time successively and thus cannot know the future as already existing in the same way that God does. I argue that Stannard is basically correct in his theological assumptions about God's understanding of time but that his explanation would be more persuasive within the context of a neo‐Whiteheadian metaphysics. The key points in that metaphysics are (1) that creation is contained within the structured field of activity proper to the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and (2) that the spontaneous decisions of creatures are continually ordered and reordered into an ever‐expanding totality already known in its fullness by the divine persons.     

GOD EMBODIED IN,GOD BODYING FORTH THE WORLD: EMERGENCE AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

Abstract. I expand on Philip Clayton's application of emergence—in the context of a metaphysical position he calls emergent monism—to conceiving God's relationship to the world. Like Clayton, I adopt a panentheistic perspective, but in a way that I argue is consistent with classical philosophical theism and its grammatical analysis of Christian discourse about divine transcendence. In order to exploit further the analogical potential of an emergentist account of human mentality and agency, I argue that the standard panentheistic metaphor The world is the body of God should be complemented by the metaphor God is the body of the world.     

A GOD THAT COULD BE REAL IN THE NEW SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSE

We are living at the dawn of the first truly scientific picture of the universe‐as‐a‐whole, yet people are still dragging along prescientific ideas about God that cannot be true and are even meaningless (e.g., omniscience) in the universe we now know we live in. This makes it impossible to have a coherent big picture of the modern world that includes God. But we don't have to accept an impossible God or else no God. We can have a real God if we redefine God in light of knowledge no one ever had before. The key question is, “Could anything actually exist in the scientific universe that is worthy of the name, God?” My answer is yes: God is an “emergent phenomenon,” as real as the global economy or the government or the worldwide web, which are all emergent phenomena. But God arose from something deeper: the complex interactions of all humanity's aspirations. An emerging God has enormous implications.     

God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar

Abstract: A recent disagreement between Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar highlights some of the issues involved in discussing the relationship between God's triunity and determination to be God‐with‐us. Can we say that God's determination to be with us is the basis of God's triunity? Must we identify the Son's being as eternally toward‐incarnation? How does God's freedom relate to God's eternal decision to be God‐with‐humanity? In this article I argue (contra McCormack) that God's triunity logically precedes God's determination to be with us, but (contra Molnar) that this logical precedence entails neither that the pre‐incarnate Son is utterly unknown to us nor that God retains some freedom to be God‐without‐humanity.     

HIERARCHIES: THE CORE ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALISTIC CHRISTIAN FAITH

This article takes on a perhaps impossible task: not only to reconstruct the core argument of Arthur Peacocke's program in science and religion but also to evaluate it in two major areas where it would seem to be vulnerable, namely, more recent developments in systems biology and the philosophy of mind. If his theory of hierarchies is to be successful, it must stand up to developments in these two areas and then be able to apply the results in a productive way to Christian theological reflection. Peacocke recognized that one's model of the mind‐body relation is crucial for one's position on the God‐world relation and divine action. Of the three models that he constructed, it turns out that only the third can serve as a viable model for theology if it is to be more than purely deistic or metaphorical.     

THE VARIETY OF PANENTHEISMS

Abstract. In this article I review the efforts of eighteen scientists and theologians, recorded in this book, to describe the relation of God to the universe during a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation at Windsor Castle in 2001. Theologians from several branches of Christian faith articulate their understanding of panentheism, revealing a considerable diversity. I deal with each author in relation to six issues: the way God acts, how God's intimate relation to the world is to be described, the relation of God to spacetime, whether God is dependent upon the world, what type of language is used, and the problem of dipolar panentheism. I identify significant differences between these authors, suggest where fruitful dialogue is possible, and distinguish between intelligibility and plausibility in comparing dipolar panentheism with other types.     

TELESCOPE + MIRROR = REFLECTIONS ON THE COSMOS: UMBERTO ECO AND THE IMAGE OF RELIGION

Umberto Eco argues that a mirror image is not a sign. At best it is a double, a thing that ceases to be once the reflected object is removed. Harry Mulisch narratively suggests that mirror images function metaphorically as gateways between human suffering and the divine. And interestingly, science employs mirrors and mirror images both to turn our gaze upwards and to show us reflections of our place in the cosmos. Tying together Eco's notion of the double, Mulisch's insistence that mirror images reflect humanity's construction of the divine, and the Giant Magellan Telescope Project's cosmic images, it is my contention that modern, telescopic mirror images are much more than snapshots of the cosmos. They are constructions of human and divine meaning that—signifying—pose the question, what is reflected: the cosmos or humanity?