1. Julia Gatta, "The Catholic Feminism of Holy Mother Church" ( )

2. Luke Timothy Johnson, "Decision Making as a Theological Process" 39.4 (Michaelmas 1996)

3. Ellen T. Charry, "Biblical Preaching as Subversive" 38.1 (Christmas 1994)

4. Stephen Sykes, "Richard Hooker and the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood"36.2 (Easter 1993)

5. John Polkinghorne, "Is Science Enough?" 39.1 (Christmas 1995)

THE CATHOLIC FEMINISM OF HOLY MOTHER CHURCH

JULIA GATTA

The Samaritan woman's rightful pride as a descendant of Jacob emboldens her request, but her desire bespeaks a need deeper than she realizes. What begins as a mere wish to be included is transformed by her continuing contact with Jesus into an instance of salvation. The grace of the gospel descends not only upon her, but upon the city she evangelizes with missionary zeal. Living water for the woman quenches everybody's thirst.

In delineating the "Catholic feminism" of the Church, I hope to indicate some springs of refreshment for thirsting women and men available in Church tradition. For if the movement for women's ordination began like the Samaritan woman's request - as the simple desire to share in a common opportunity - it has come to signal deeper needs and possibilities yet to be fulfilled. We have still to understand fully how the spiritual authority of contemporary churchwomen builds upon that of previous generations. We need an anthropology with broader definitions of masculinity and femininity. We need a wider range of symbols to express our experience of the mystery of God. And we need some practical direction for the graceful incorporation of women, especially ordained women, into the mainstream of contemporary ecclesiastical life.

The feminism I am proposing is decidedly "catholic." I mean this in no narrow party spirit; still less, I hope, as naming that sort of universalism characterized, as a friend of mine once quipped, by "something to offend everyone" (though it may do just that). By catholicity I mean a commitment

to hold the diverse elements of Christian life together at the center, and in particular to seek expression for such an all-embracing fellowship as the Communion of Saints, the blessed bond uniting all who belong to Christ: men and women; and, as I shall stress later on, the dead as well as the living.

Perhaps the most definitively catholic characteristic of my recommendations is the attitude towards history that shapes and informs them. The essential premise here is that the centuries standing between our times and those of Christ form a connection, rather than a barrier, to the Incarnation. The successive generations represented in Christian history not only link us sequentially to the apostolic age, but also in themselves show forth God's abiding, tabernacled presence among us. Sacred history does not end with the New Testament, even if the canonical texts set fairly definitive standards by which the beliefs and spirits of subsequent ages must be tested.

In examining the past, especially the pre-reformation period with which I am most familiar, I am struck by certain modes of spirituality and models of anthropology considerably more comprehensive than those generally familiar to contemporary Christians. It seems that here, buried in our own history, lies a channel to that living water the Samaritan woman, and we ourselves, most deeply crave.

But the conduit of history is also an undeniably crude vessel. Like the story of the people of God contained in the Bible, Church history is as much a record of human fallibility as of divine fidelity. The pipeline to the spring of incarnate grace is, in places, rusted, twisted and bent; the water is often enough contaminated by human pollution. Yet still it runs into the well of Christ, where we may drink deeply and be satisfied.

How, then, shall we tap this artery for our present use? Since the task is not a simple one, I would like to delineate four principles that might lead to a richer integration of past and present experience within the Church. These principles I would name as follows: The Recovery of Instructive Tradition, Symbolic Plentitude, Generosity Towards the Past, and The Bold Appropriation of Traditional Symbolism.

1. The Recovery of Instructive Tradition

By now it is clear that the history of women in the Christian tradition is not a monochromatic tale of misogyny and subordination, relieved only by moments of female empowerment in gnostic or heretical sects. On the contrary, historians have begun to take notice of a significant undercurrent in women's history that challenges the picture of unmitigated oppression. We now see how the pursuit of holiness through asceticism - an ideal espoused by both sexes in the patristic and middle ages - particularly served women by creating an institutional space where they could enjoy a much greater degree of autonomy and personal development than society at large accorded them. It may be hard for contemporary people to view the renunciation of sex as liberating, but Christianity, like all major world religions, is essentially paradoxical. Freedom and discipline, self-fulfillment and self-abnegation, are dynamic, mutually inferential polarities. Historically, the high regard accorded celibacy by the Church gave women institutional support when they sought to define themselves against traditional roles. God could make claims on women that superceded those their families made to provide useful alliances and progeny through marriage1

Nor should we imagine that religious women merely traded dominance by father and husband for that exercised by bishop and priest. On the contrary, women's communities often enjoyed an astonishing measure of independence in ordering their own affairs. This is especially true of early medieval foundations and twelfth-century Cistercian convents.2 Double monasteries governed by abbesses such as St. Hilda of Whitby offered women administrative jurisdiction comparable to that of bishops, as well as internal authority over the men and women in their charge. In the later middle ages, women could embrace the vita apostolica popularized by the friars, and a less restricting form of religious life, as tertiaries or beguines. In any case, monasticism provided for the socialization of women by women; and there is evidence to suggest that women who grew up in a monastic setting were less influenced by demeaning cultural images of their sex, and more apt to see themselves embodying a full spectrum of human possibilities and activities that mirrored the operations of God.3

What is perhaps more germane to our contemporary situation is the eminent authority accorded women of holiness. When the authority of clerical office was denied women, another avenue of authority remained open: that of charismatic validation. The Church recognized that the pentecostal gift had been poured out upon the "menservants and the maidservants" (Acts 2:18), and affirmed prophecy as a spiritual charism available to women. Consequently, women of outstanding wisdom and holiness have been sought throughout Christian history for their discerning counsel.

In the patristic period, the spiritual mothers of the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts gathered devoted disciples around them. Macrina, sister of the Cappadocians Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, organized her household around a patterned schedule of prayer, Scripture study, and charitable work that is probably the basis for the Basilian Rule. Melania the Elder founded a monastery on the Mount of Olives, where she was free to devote herself to labors of painstaking biblical erudition. It was she who converted the future desert father and theologian Evagrius of Pontus to a life of asceticism when he visited her monastery in the 380s.4

The Celtic Church employed women as lay confessors; and even as late as the thirteenth century, when confession to a priest had become the Church's rule, Gertrude the Great of Helfta claimed authority to pronounce forgiveness on the basis of a vision in which Christ breathed upon her, saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven" John 20:22-23). And so greatly was Gertrude esteemed as a woman of spiritual authenticity that her quasi-sacerdotal power was accepted and revered.5 The reputation of Julian of Norwich in the late fourteenth century as an eminent spiritual director stands, then, within a long tradition of pastoral care exercised by women.

In the early twentieth century, and in a non-monastic context, the Anglican Evelyn Underhill perhaps best exemplifies the graceful entry of a woman into traditionally clerical ministries, with her tireless work as a spiritual mentor of clergy and laity and as a director of retreats. From Underhill as from her medieval predecessors, the Church called forth gifts of prodigious theological learning and singular holiness for the cure of souls.

However, it should not be thought that the influence of charismatic women was limited to the relatively private sphere of spiritual direction. The mystics' passionate love for God and the Church impelled them into the public arena as missionaries and reformers. Of the latter, St. Catherine of Siena is the most notable example. A Dominican tertiary, Catherine emerged from a three-year period of contemplative withdrawal to serve the poor and sick of her city. Gradually a group of disciples gathered around her to learn about living on close terms with God. In her middle twenties she' became involved in Italian and papal politics, serving as an ambassador from Florence to the Pope, and negotiating the end of the Avignon Papacy. Catherine was admired and feared by popes, bishops, cardinals, and the Italian aristocracy; she was a personality to be reckoned with. But it was not stubborn self-will that made her such a towering figure. It was the intensity of her love, experienced inwardly as a mystical marriage to Christ, and expressed outwardly as fierce devotion to God and the Church. Her radical obedience challenged prelates to be the pastors their offices signified.6

But it is not only in the recognition of women through holiness, wisdom, and prophecy that we can observe an emerging catholic feminism, but also in feminine images for God and figures of authority. Although today Julian of Norwich is best known for her development of this theme, it is well rooted in biblical and patristic tradition, and was most fully elaborated by male writers in the twelfth century.

The "Motherhood of God" has a long history. Second Isaiah portrays God as nursing, playing with, and maternally comforting the children of Israel (Is. 49:15; 66:11-13). Jesus compared himself to a mother hen gathering her wayward brood under her wings (Mt. 23:37). Patristic writers who mention the motherhood of Christ include Origen, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine. In his Paedagogue Clement of Alexandria develops at length the image of Christ as spiritual milk drawn from "the Father's breasts of love": "The Word is everything to His little ones, both father and mother, educator and nurse."7

In the middle ages St. Anselm picked up the theme of Christ's motherhood in his "Prayer to St. Paul." After elaborating the maternity of the Apostle suggested by Galatians 4:19 ("My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!"), Anselm turns to Christ to apply the image to him:
 

And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?

Are you not the mother who, like a hen,

gathers her chickens under her wings?

Truly, Lord, you are a mother;

for both they who are in labour

and they who are brought forth

are accepted by you.

You have died more than they, that they may labour to bear.

It is by your death that they have been born,

for if you had not been in labour,

you could not have borne death;

and if you had not died, you would not have brought forth.8

As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, the twelfth century witnessed an efflorescence of this theme, in conjunction with the "motherhood of the abbot," among Cistercian monks.9 As architects of the new affective spirituality, and as men concerned to imbue paradigms of authority with the virtues of tenderness, comfort, and nurture, the Cistercians developed the twin motifs of divine and abbatial maternity. In his famous set of sermons on the Song of Songs, for instance, St. Bernard of Clairvaux interprets the swelling of the beloved's breasts as readiness for pastoral responsibility. Here Bernard uses the interplay between bridegroom and bride as a metaphor for the relation between the active and the contemplative lives. The kiss of the lover, which is the grace of contemplative prayer, makes the soul a pastor--that is, a mother--one able to feed others from her "milky abundance." For Bernard the two enlarged breasts of the beloved signify the double aspect of pastoral care, compassion and encouragement: "For if she were not prompt to rejoice with those who rejoice, and ready to be sad with those who sorrow, her breasts would still be undeveloped; she would be no more than a girl too immature to marry. Should a person devoid of these affective qualities be confided with the direction of souls, or the work of preaching, he will do no good to others and great harm to himself''10

The Cistercian Guerric of Igny also uses imagery derived from the Song of Songs to discuss pastoral maternity. In a sermon for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, he considers the bride's two breasts as the two great apostles of the Church. Because Peter and Paul nursed the infant Church with the milk of doctrine and consolation, they are the two breasts of Mother Church. But the maternity of the apostles rests, in turn, upon that of Christ, for:

The Bridegroom himself in the days of his earthly life had begotten some children by the word of truth and as long as he was with them he had suckled them at the breasts of edification and consolation.... The Bridegroom, I say, has breasts, lest he should be lacking any one of the duties and titles of loving kindness. He is a father in virtue of natural creation or of the new birth which comes through grace, and also in virtue of the authority by which he instructs. He is a mother, too, in the mildness of his affections, and a nurse because he is so attentive to the care such duty imposes. 11

For the Cistercians, feminine images of the divine expressed both their experience of God as one who feeds, instructs, and comforts, and their longing for mystical union. At the same time, maternal imagery for abbots, prelates, and others holding pastoral office, applies this divine model of authority to life within the Christian, or monastic, community. Just as God was both father and mother, judge and savior, disciplinarian and upholder of the weak--so was the ideal abbot.

Variations on the feminine theme are manifold in the middle ages. Compared with Cistercian monks, women who employed maternal imagery for God generally reflect less predetermined notions of either sex than their male colleagues. Gertrude of Helfta, for example, considers God as both father and mother, but mothers in her scheme of things are as apt to chasten as to console.l2 For Julian of Norwich, God's fatherhood and motherhood reflect the respective operations of the First and Second Persons of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. The motherhood of Jesus functions for her as both a theological and affective vehicle for describing our incorporation into Christ. 13 Both male and female mystics explore the implications of Christ's nuptial relationship to the Church and to the individual soul, as tradition developed these motifs from the Song of Songs, the Epistle to the Ephesians, and the Book of Revelation.

I have suggested that the example of charismatic leadership exercised by women and the abundance of feminine imagery for God, for pastors, and for mystical souls is "instructive tradition." How do I propose that we recover this catholic feminism and use it today?

First of all, and most modestly, I would hope that more translations of saints' lives and their writings become available for reading and study.

What would happen if Christian people drew upon the spiritual writers I have cited, and many more, for their meditation and prayer? I suspect that the theological and affective power of the mystics would open doors for us into the mystery of God, as one who both transcends and fulfills all sexual categories. Under the guidance of the mystics, preachers might begin to incorporate feminine imagery for God, the Church, and the soul into their sermons and spiritual counsel. Attention to this richer language and symbolism brings me to my second point for the recovery of tradition: namely, the principle of symbolic plentitude.

II. Symbolic Plentitude

Feminists in and out of the Church are concerned today to redress the sexual imbalance in our categories of perception. For Christians, this entails assessing the symbols and language we use for God and for human beings. The question is: how might a better equilibrium be achieved, and what are the larger implications of the various strategies currently proposed? Symbols are, after all, multi-dimensional; they are inevitably freighted with overtones, some intentional and others not. Before we attempt a shift in the symbols we use, it is prudent to examine other, perhaps uncalculated, symbolic ramifications unavoidably occasioned by such changes.

What, for instance, is suggested by the repudiation of traditional Trinitarian language and the biblical, albeit patriarchal, images for God--Lord, king, governor, father? That God is not male, and that the fulness of the divine cannot be expressed by masculine images alone? Fair enough; but is not something more suggested by changes that in themselves betoken a radical break with the past? Are we not implying that neither biblical nor church tradition upholds the equal dignity of the sexes; that, as the opponents of women's ordination contend, the ordination of women is something altogether new and in no sense the organic development of a potential latent in the Church from the start?

As a catholic Anglican, I am troubled by the attempt to sever ourselves symbolically, linguistically, and theologically from the generations of Christians who have lived before us. The faith is that which is "passed down": paradosis. We stand indebted to those ho have communicated the word and sacraments of life to us. To be sure, our forebears, like we ourselves, carried this treasure in earthen vessels. Human beings never articulate or live the gospel in utter purity. And although God is continually renewing the Church, her reformation occurs within history, not apart from it. The past, whether individual or corporate, can be redeemed; it should not be amputated.

Hence, the posture of revisionist history that underlies the so-called ''Inclusive Language Lectionary" project of the National Council of Churches seems sorely at odds with a religion that claims to be historical and incarnational. In this case, the operative hermeneutic seems to be: if the text offends, pluck it out--or rewrite it according to one's own notion of how theology and history should have been. But the Bible is not a mere "resource," an ancient ruin whose treasures we are free to quarry for the building of our shrines. Among the manifold and complex duties of a translator, it seems to me, is fidelity to the received text--not because every word of it is inspired, nor because people today like it or can "relate" to it, but simply because the past was what it was, for good and ill. Sacred history, its events and literary tradition, stands over against us, challenging us to discern God at work in the confusing, sinful, and sometimes glorious lives of our ancestors. We cannot walk around this stumbling block without missing the scandal of particularity, the cornerstone which is Christ himself

But is there a way at once to affirm our essential connectedness to tradition, and to seek wider horizons for our conceptualizations of God and humanity? I think there is, and what we need to begin this task tradition itself provides.

As I have said, medieval mystics articulate a remarkable range of metaphors for God. For instance, Julian of Norwich can, in two sentences, speak of God as "father," "mother," "spouse," "brother," and ''saviour.''l4 No single metaphor exhausts the mystery of God; no one image is absolute. Each expresses some aspect of divinity the others cannot do as well. And, most important of all, Julian's language for God arises out of prayer, from her actual encounter with God in Christ. She does not use feminine language self-consciously, to make a point about herself or other members of her sex. Julian uses divine names theologically, not anthropologically. Anything else, of course, would be blasphemous: using God to serve creaturely ends.

The mystical tradition, then, furnishes us with paradigms and guidelines for our quest. Its symbolic plentitude is open to our prayerful exploration: feminine images for God, for the Church, and for the soul. We might begin with meditation upon Mary, who as Theotokos, has provided Christians since the patristic era with an inexhaustible icon of the Church, Mother of believers, whose vocation is carrying and bearing Christ to the world. As such, Mary is an exemplar of the priesthood, fruitful in the works of the Spirit. She is also every Christian soul, who knows what it is to be invaded by God, to be fearful of divine favor, to suffer through compassion, to have one's own soul pierced, to surrender.

Then again there is the tradition of marital imagery, in which the soul, the feminine anima, seeks and attains union with Christ the Bridegroom. Although critics tend to censure bridal mysticism for its implicit model of marriage--one in which the female is the inferior and receptive partner--they are apt to overlook its use of woman as representative humanity. In any case, as Julian of Norwich might remind us, no one image can "say it all." All metaphors have limitations. Nuptial imagery, in which women and men alike assume a feminine persona before God, is extraordinarily rich in spiritual possibility, suggesting intimacy and fulfillment through union with God in a covenant of everlasting fidelity.

In its conception of the human person, pre-Reformation spirituality is also instructive. Medieval anthropology is astonishingly comprehensive and, in its own way, relaxed. Medieval monks could see themselves as brides of Christ or babes at the maternal breast of God. Abbots strove to be mothers as well as fathers to their charges. Conversely, women found it natural to appropriate male typology. Female martyrs were styled "athletes" or "soldiers" of Christ. Medieval nuns identified with saints of both sexes, and thought of themselves as "preachers," "apostles," and princes leading armies. 15However this transference of sexual imagery corresponds to actual relations between the sexes, such flexibility in thought and expression does at least point to a readiness to employ metaphors whenever pertinent, and to an appreciation of metaphor as indeed metaphorical, not literal.

In contrast to medieval plentitude and pliability, modern attempts at comprehensiveness are frequently marked by symbolic meagerness and rigidity. Trapped in semiotic literalism, men, presumably, can no longer identify with feminine symbols, nor women with masculine symbols. Sexual connotation is reduced to safe and bloodless neutrality. Hence, the "handmaiden" of the Magnificat is collapsed to "lowly servant"; "sons" shrinks to "heirs"; and God becomes not "Father" or "Mother" but a nebulous "Parent." The Church is not "she" but "it." And Mary is either ignored, disdained as a figure of feminine passivity, or evoked as the patron saint of assertiveness training. Her embodiment of a central Christian paradox--that God's power is made perfect in weakness--is missed when the prophetic woman of the Visitation is divorced from the obedient woman of traditional piety.

The symbolic plentitude of catholic tradition, on the other hand, offers a more fertile climate for our spiritual and psychological growth. It is important that we appreciate and employ a wide range of apposite symbols to search deeply our relationship to God. It is healthful for men and women to enter imaginatively and sympathetically into the situation of the other sex, and to affirm those parts of their own psyches that are both feminine and masculine. But we shall never recover the feminine imagery for divine mysteries that exists in tradition and needs to be known until we pass beyond our nervous and defensive literalism to an appreciation of metaphor distinguished by literary sophistication and psychic adaptability.

III. Generosity Towards the Past

I recently found myself, as a spiritual director, comparing methodology with a friend of mine who is a practicing clinical psychologist. Scrutinizing the past, he told me, begins the therapeutic process. It then continues with a frank admission of wrongs and hurts. Your parents, say, did not give you the attention and affection you needed: your younger brother got it all instead. That wasn't fair; it wasn't right. You were denied a basic human need. That primal injustice must be faced and felt.

But for healing to take place, one has to find some other source of love and acceptance so the past can be released of its unfulfilled obligation. In classical psychological theory, this need is transferred to the therapist. But, my friend assured me, this process is furthered substantially if the patient is a person of faith. When God is seen and experienced as our utterly faithful, ever-sustaining Lover, our iron grip on the past, and its hold on us, can be relaxed. We might even begin to feel compassion for those who failed us, while discovering in them virtues previously hidden from our eyes.

It is in this spirit that I advocate "generosity towards the past": not to whitewash the sins of history, not to dismiss or trivialize the injustices our forebears perpetrated upon women, and many others. Why was the early Church so quick to accommodate herself to the cultural status quo? Why did she decide so soon that the eschatological state of equality between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female could only apply in the present dispensation to ethnic difference? Why, in the high middle ages, was there a predisposition to accept the Aristotelian definition of woman as a misbegotten male, an intrinsically inferior human being, when other aspects of "the Philosopher's" scientific theory were criticized as incompatible with Christian doctrine? We will not come to peace with the past or within ourselves by flights into historical revisionism or historical romanticism. In the Christian scheme of things, sin--whether personal or corporate--must be acknowledged and confessed.

At the same time, we all know how an exclusive focusing upon defect in others blinds us to goodness and beauty. I have tried to indicate how much of Christian tradition, including women's history, is instructive and nourishing for our symbol-starved culture. And the past also judges us. The biblical, patristic, and medieval sense of community, for instance, stands as an indictment of, and alternative to, American individualism. The medieval sense of joy in God, its esteem for contemplation, contrasts sharply with our overworked, harried lives, in which we tacitly practice a species of justification by works more pernicious than anything that plagued the late middle ages. We are not without our blind spots; we cannot throw the first stone.

Likewise it is unfair to paint the sins of the past blacker than they actually were, or to take offense where no offense was intended or really given. In the past ten or fifteen years, the English language tradition has itself become a focal point for feminist reformist efforts. "Man" and "men," we are told, are "gender-specific" words; they presume to define women solely in relation to men, and make women feel excluded. Consequently, other words--person, humanity, human being--or new words yet to be invented--that are not male-oriented need to be employed and substituted.

That the generic use of "man" or "men" has it origins in the values of an androcentric culture is undeniable. "Man" as a generic term is linked to "man" in its specific reference. The male is, in etymological history, normative. The same criticism could be made, however, of the word "woman"--an augmentation, obviously, of the primary word "man." Those who seek etymological purity ought to follow the example of radical linguists and call the female of our species "woperson." But even here etymology is murky, for by "person" do we really intend its original connotation of "mask"?

I hope that "man" will be retained in English usage as a generic term for the human race and the individuals who comprise it, and not be shrunk to a meaning that really does exclude women. For one thing, the generic "man" is an extremely useful word. It is pithy and succinct and, more importantly, has the unique ability to denote the generic singular and universal at the same time. No other word can do this: "humanity" and "human race" are collective terms; "person," "human being," or "individual" are singular. This gives "man" a linguistic utility in the philosophical and theological disciplines especially, for which we have no substitute. How else could George Herbert address God saying--"Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch / A crumb of dust from heav'n to hell?"--and still convey the cosmic, yet personal senses suggested by his usage?

Besides, even given its androcentric origin, the word "man" is not, in traditional usage, "gender-specific." "Woman" is gender-specific; but "man" is gender-ambiguous . Its meaning depends upon context. of course, the need for context to illumine meaning is true of a host of other words, in English and other languages.

Here again I would like to press the question of symbolism. What are we doing, what are we saying, if we limit the word "man" to males only? We are, as I have argued, narrowing our range of verbal expression. But we are doing more: we are erecting a barrier between our generation and all English writers prior to 1970. We are rendering the English spiritual, theological, and literary tradition less accessible--the very tradition that has so much to offer our contemporary as well as our perennial spiritual hunger. Will we be able to read Julian of Norwich, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, Evelyn Underhill, or T.S. Eliot without taking offense at their putative male bias? Or can we see that when they use the generic "man," women are included, not excluded, in their thinking. Should we not consider, before we create a verbal wall of separation between ourselves and past writers, whether we are honoring the comprehensiveness implied by the doctrine of the Communion of Saints? Will women be self-confident enough to claim their just place in our linguistic and religious heritage, and not permit themselves to be excluded from it by zealous literalism?

IV. The Bold Appropriation of Traditional Symbolism

The recovery of instructive tradition, and the creative appropriation of its symbols and models, opens possibilities for our generation that are genuinely new. But in some cases, we have yet to recognize what these occasions of grace are. In the pre-Reformation period, as I have already indicated, exceptional learning and holiness of life gave women authority in the Church that was sometimes even greater than that exercised through clerical office. Yet something about our post-Reformation mentality seems to prevent us from recognizing sanctity among modern women. Lesser Feasts and Fasts, for example, commemorates no women after the fifteenth century. Surely this is not because the Holy Spirit departed from the female sex five hundred years ago Those of us of an ecumenical temper might wish that the great mystical theologian, Teresa of Avila, be included in our calendar; but even if we limit ourselves to Anglicans, are there not numerous candidates? What about courageous women like Marion Hughes, Priscilla Lydia Sellon, and Anne Ayers who, before the men, revived religious life within Anglicanism in the nineteenth century? Perhaps we might also remember our saintly deaconesses and missionaries; vigorous reformers like Florence Nightingale; and scholars, spiritual directors, and mystics like Evelyn Underhill.

It seems that the recent revision of the Book of Common Prayer also missed an opportunity to honor the woman regarded as the greatest of the saints in the propers appointed for Various Occasions. While one notes with appreciation the expansion of Marian feasts to include the Visitation, and the commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Eucharistic Prayers B and D, and the Prayers of the People: Form V, still it seems odd to have propers designated to honor the Holy Angels but not she who is "higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim." If this omission signals a desire to avoid rekindling Reformation polemic regarding the appropriate place of Mary in liturgy and Christian devotion, we have missed the signs of our own times. The veneration of the Mother of God is properly exercised in relation to Christ and the Church. If in the past a distorted and exaggerated Marian piety tended to obscure the Incarnation, the danger today is exactly the reverse. By failing to honor or even acknowledge the woman from whose human flesh the Word became flesh, our incarnationalism is liable to fall into the self-contradiction of existing only in the realm of ideas.

But if some opportunities still await fulfillment, the rich potentiality latent in women's ordination is finally beginning to flower. I refer here not so much to the enhanced possibilities for leadership and service ordained women now enjoy, though these are manifold. What I wish to point out, rather, are the new and marvelous resonances struck within tradition when women boldly and thoughtfully appropriate its symbols.

Let us consider, most simply, the layers of symbolism present when a woman stands at the altar and celebrates the Eucharist according to the "doctrine, discipline, and worship of this Church." Unlike those who tamper with the Prayer Book, seeking to expunge male pronouns and traditional symbols for God, this priest, like holy women and men before her, keeps the prayer of the Church focused on God, not God's human representative. She is deliberately situating herself in the generations of priests before her, exercising the same priesthood of Christ as did the apostles, Athanasius, Augustine of Canterbury, Lancelot Andrewes, and Samuel Seabury.

If she happens to be wearing a chasuble, certain other, visual resonances are set in motion, for the unisex chasuble appears on both sexes on traditional eastern iconography. A chasubled woman standing in the "orans" position at the Great Thanksgiving renews the famous icon of the Virgin Orans, and also our Lady of the Sign, mystically interpreted as an icon of the Church. It shows Mary, hands raised in prayer, and carrying Christ within her in glory. Like the Church herself, she expresses the mystery of the finite containing and manifesting the Infinite.

I could multiply my examples: the woman preaching, the woman offering spiritual counsel, evokes Sophia, Holy Wisdom. When I administer the Sacrament on Christmas Eve, I recall Mary receiving into her hands for the first time her Incarnate Lord. At a recent baptism, I reminded my congregation that they all had been born anew from the womb of Holy Mother Church. The bold appropriation of highly traditional symbolism situates women in their rightful place of glory as God's handmaidens, and makes tradition for all of us living faith, living water.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article with Eleanor McLaughlin urging women priests to consider adopting the title ''Mother.''l6 I wish now to report: it works. The two things congregations wonder about most when they first encounter an ordained woman are: how will she dress, and what will we call her? These are superficial matters, in a way; but they are also deeply symbolic. The Church needs women who can meet the challenge of assuming the traditional symbols of priesthood with grace, forthrightness, and dignity.

Title and dress bespeak our sources of authority and sense of continuity. There are times, of course, when it is natural and appropriate to call clergy by their Christian names, or for them to assume secular dress. But the secularization of the priesthood--the tendency to regard the priest as a sort of middle-management executive or an ecclesiastical "facilitator"--needs to be firmly resisted. In returning to our holy history, women can help all priests be spiritual fathers and mothers within the eschatological family of God. The titles "Father" and "Mother" for priests signal not despotism or authoritarianism, but true spiritual authority lovingly exercised in the context of mutual responsibility. As icons of the Church, the Theotokos, as icons of God whom tradition calls "Father" as well as "Mother," women priests who boldly claim the symbols of tradition do so for the sake of all of us in the Church: "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ" (Eph. 4:12).

--Julia Gatta SLJT, December 1985, Volume XXIX, Number I. [Return to Top]

1. Rosemary Ruether, "Mothers of the Church: Ascetic Women in the Late Patristic Age," Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster 1979) pp 72-73. [Back to text]

2. R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, The Pelican History of the Church, 2 (1970; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 315-18. [Back to text]

3. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 182), p. 185. [Back to text]

4. Ruether, pp. 73-74, 83-85. [Back to text]

5. Bynum, pp. 205-07. [Back to text]

6 . Eleanor McLaughlin, "Women, Power and the Pursuit of Holiness in Medieval Christianity," Women of Spirit, pp. 115-19. [Back to text]

7 . Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator, trans. Simon P. Wood, Fathers of the Church, 23 (New York, 1954), pp. 40-43 (Bk. I, 6, par. 34-52). [Back to text]

8. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Sister Benedicta Ward S.L.G. (1973; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 153. [Back to text]

9. Bynum, pp. 1109. [Back to text]

10. "Sermon 9" and "Sermon 10," On the Song of Songs, trans. Kiliam Walsh, in ne Works of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 2, Cistercian Fathers series, 4 (Spencer, MA., 1971), I, 58-81. [Back to text]

11. Guerric of Igny, "The Second Sermon for Saints Peter and Paul: Sermon 45 ," Liturgical Sermons, trans. the Monks of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, Cistercian Fathers series, 32 (Spencer, MA., 1971), II, 154-55. [Back to text]

12. Bynum, pp. 189-90. [Back to text]

13. Revelations of Divine Love, Chap. 58. [Back to text]

14. Revelations, Chap. 52. [Back to text]

15. Bynum, p. 251. [Back to text]

16. Julia Gatta and Eleanor McLaughlin, "What Do You Call a Woman Priest" Episcopal Times, October 1981, p. 4. [Back to text]

Decision Making as a Theological Process: The Necessity and Difficulty of Discernment

In these three papers I want to invite you to a way of thinking about faith, theology, and the church that appears filled with risk and even some danger. It is also, I have become convinced, the way we must begin to think if we ate to be faithful to the One who calls us. I propose to do this by thinking with you about a particular ecclesial practice, namely, making decisions. Making decisions is as ordinary and bothersome as weeding a garden; we do it all the time. This is, then, an exercise in practical theology.

Practical thinking is often despised by theoreticians because it is not easy. Theory, after all, stands still. Thinking about real life is a slippery business and requires quick feet and an agile mind. One of the things of which I want to convince you, in fact, is that rather than being the stepchild of the theological disciplines practical theology is the very essence of theology upon which all other modes of theological thinking depend and to which they must refer.

My overall topic is decision making in the church. I will argue in this first presentation that decision making in the church is a theological process in which the exercise of discernment is critical; in the next two papers I will try to show that while discernment certainly is dangerous and difficult, it does have definite dimensions, and since "biblical reflections" is an important aspect of this series of papers, each will also engage some part of the New Testament.

How shall we get to this new way of thinking which is actually a very old way? There really is no shallow end where we can splash ourselves bit by bit until we grow accustomed to the chill. We shall have to dive in and splash about full body until we find ourselves swimming. So I will begin by proposing a series of propositions that will be our first plunge. Then we will splash about in the text of Acts for awhile, and finally we will try a couple of laps with this concept of discernment.
 

Opening Apophthegmata

One. Our faith is in the living God. This really is "first" in every respect, the grounding of everything. Faith is not a matter of right belief as though it involved only the mind but a matter of right response, involving the whole person in trust, obedience, hope, and loyalty to another. More significantly, the "other" in this case is the living God. God is not a remnant concept, referring to what is left over when everything else has been taken into account. God is the living reality that makes it possible to take anything into account. God is the source of all things, not simply by a creative act of the past, but by a continuing and constantly surprising creation in the present not simply the creation of gases and stars in the firmament overhead, but the creation of every human person at every moment, in every breath and heartbeat. God is the One who precedes us and presses on us at every moment. God is the one who, in creating and sustaining us now, also places a demand on us now and at every moment. That demand is a call to decision: whether to accept our being and worth from God as gift or to reject the ground of our being in the blind endeavor to create for ourselves our own life and value. And because creation is at every moment new, because God's immediate presence to creation at every moment places a demand on human freedom, faith must necessarily be an open-ended, never-ceasing, always-renewed response. At no moment before death can we say, "Stop. No more. I am finished," because at no moment before death does God stop creating us and thereby stop calling us to new belief, trust, obedience, hope, and loyalty.

Two. Theology is the articulation of faith. Theology articulates faith by bringing it to expression through prayer and worship, yes, but by narratives of faith spoken in the assembly through which the church hears declared what God is doing in the world. Theology also articulates faith by providing it with a structure, revealing how such experiences of God in the world are connected with the community's scriptures, creeds, and traditions. Finally, theology articulates faith by connecting our understanding of God with all the other ways of thinking about reality through philosophy, social sciences, poetry, art, and so on. The starting point for theology, however, is giving expression to God's work in the world, apprehended through faith. Since faith is open-ended and called always to respond to the God who never ceases to work in the fabric of human freedom, then theology also must be open-ended, always changing, and always responsive to the living God. In such an understanding the notion of "systematic theology" is a contradiction in terms since it suggests a stasis that one's faith in the living God rejects.

Three. Theology is an ecclesial activity. To say that theology is an activity of the church is to imply that it does not find its first or best home in the academy where, since the medieval universities, it has too often been located. The doing of theology is appropriate where faith lives: in communities where narratives of faith are spoken and where the activity of God in the world is recognized and praised. Theology is an ecclesial activity also because it is the church's faith not just that of the individual, however learned or bright that is articulated. The church's faith includes, of course, its scriptures, creeds, and tradition all of the ways in which its understanding of God's revelation in creation and history has been articulated in the past and this "faith" as symbolic world is of fundamental importance for the doing of theology. It is the church's faith also in that the church as community encounters the presence and power of God in the lives of its members, and is called to respond at every moment to the call implicit in such an encounter. Finally, theology is an ecclesial activity because everyone in the community of faith participates in its practice. Theology is not an activity only for the learned or the ordained. It is a practice to which all who have faith are invited; only if all are capable of articulating their faith can the church truly learn what God is up to in the world.

Four. Decision making is a hermeneutical process for any community. Whenever groups as groups make decisions, they engage in a process of self-interpretation. If groups are defined primarily in terms of the tasks they perform, decisions about ends and means are usually the most taxing. Groups whose identities are defined in terms of a certain way of being or a certain way of living find that decisions concerning membership, boundaries, and leadership are defined interpretively. In either case, communities more definitely become themselves by the decisions they make. They do so partially in terms of the process itself: Whose voice is heard in the making of the decision? How are voices coordinated? How are decisions reached, promulgated, and enforced? For groups as well as for individuals it should be noted that most decisions are of the upkeep and maintenance variety, that is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The interpretive yield in such a situation as this will be low. On the other hand, picture an association of scientists, "Physicists United." Up until now it has been male-only, but a female with a doctorate in physics applies for membership. It is the new which forces interpretation. In this case, is it a men's club that happens to fool around in physics, or is it really an association of scientists in which intellectual credentials are all that matters? Deciding this issue demands some sense of the group's tradition and purposes, but reaching a decision inevitably sharpens that identity in one direction or another: accepting the qualified woman means that we really are scientists; rejecting her means that we care less for science than for exclusively male companionship.

Five Decision making in the church should be a theological process. There is a "Q.E.D." here somewhere: if every group's mode of reaching decision reveals something about its true identity, if the church is a community constituted by faith in the living God, and if theology is the articulation of that faith, then it would seem to follow that the way in which the church as a human group reaches its decision ought to articulate its faith.

Six. Decision making in the church is a hermeneutical process. just as with other groups, most of the decisions made by the church fall into the upkeep and maintenance category. The precedents set by tradition and scripture are so strong that inertia is at times overwhelming. If God is the living God and breaks through our precedents and procedures, however, then God does confront the church with newness and with challenge. Indeed, if God did not so confront the church, we should have cause to worry whether it was really the living God with whom we are concerned. When God presses upon the church's precedents through the narratives of faith told by believers, narratives which in a disciplined and structured fashion witness to how God has acted in their experience, then the church's faith is challenged to respond with trust, obedience, hope, and loyalty. Its response must involve the reinterpretation of its normative symbols in light of the activity of God that it encounters through such narratives. This hermeneutical process by which the experience of God drives the community to reread its symbols of faith is what we mean by theology.

Seven. The gift of discernment is the key to making this process of decision an articulation of faith. Since the church is moved to decision by the activity of God brought to its attention through narratives of faith even though God's activity is scarcely ever unambiguous and human narratives seldom completely transparent the precise shape of the church's trust, obedience, hope, and loyalty in specific instances can hardly be presented to the community with utter and unassailable clarity. As each individual's faith in the living God is filled with risk and danger, so is the church's faith. The necessity for discernment is obvious, yet the difficulty of discernment at least for those of us who have tried it is at least equally as obvious. But God has apparently willed that we rely on this slippery and shaky gift. The options are simple and unattractive: without discernment, the church might say "yes" to every narrative spoken to it, to the destruction of its tradition and scripture; even more frightening, the church that was merely set on protecting its tradition and scripture might fail ever to hear the word of God spoken in present circumstances.
 

The Church Reaching Decision: A Biblical Model

The understanding of theology that I have sketched derives from my reading of the New Testament. In Christianity's normative texts we find precisely the same combination of elements that I have elaborated and in the same sort of dynamic tension. Indeed, the birth of the New Testament itself can best be understood as resulting from the effort to resolve the cognitive dissonance caused for the first believers by the contradiction between Jesus, whom they experienced as the risen Holy One and the source of the empowering Holy Spirit, and their scriptures (the texts of Torah), which appeared to exclude the possibility that one who died a death cursed by God could ever be "messiah," much less Lord. From beginning to end the writings of the New Testament show the signs of the generative matrix from which they emerged that is, the struggle to resolve experience and symbols in the midst of cultural realities and concrete circumstances that were no less complex than ours. This matrix is what gives to these writings both their distinctive energy and their capacity to instruct every generation.

It is above all in the narrative account of the apostolic council and the events leading up to it in Acts 10-15 that I find the best and most useful antecedent for the model of theology I am proposing. There is no time, and I hope no need, to work through this text in detail here. It is, I am sure, familiar to you all. I would, however, suggest that a careful reading and rereading of this sequence can have a powerful effect on our perception of what decision making in the church should be like and, therefore, what theology as an articulation of faith might be like.

Let us consider first the enormity of the decision itself, as Luke reports it. The decision to allow Gentiles to enter the messianic community and, more importantly, to allow them entrance without the requirements of circumcision and the ritual obligations of Torah is the single most important decision ever made in the history of Christianity's self-definition from its beginning until now. That decision defined Christianity in its first generation as an inclusive and world-wide religion, and had as its corollary the perception of Jesus not merely as a Jewish messiah but as the beginning of a new humanity.

As great as the significance of this decision is the mystery of how it was reached. To appreciate this we must remember the ancestral antipathy between Jews and Gentiles. For most pious Jews in the first century, an association with Gentiles was at best a necessity and at worst a profanation. The Gentiles were the pigs before whom pearls should not be cast. In Torah, to be sure, there are intimations of universality, of a "light to the Gentiles," but this was always conceived in terms of adherence to Israel and always involved coming within the symbolic and ritual world of the Law. The Jesus movement, likewise, had stayed within the bounds of Judaism, and the earliest followers of Jesus after Pentecost clearly thought of themselves as the restoration of Israel.

Looking back at those first decades from the distance of two thousand years, and at a cultural distance from our Jewish roots so profound that we must exercise great energy even to imagine them, the decision to convert Gentiles and accept them into table fellowship without requiring circumcision or the observance of other aspects of the Law may easily appear to us to have been natural, perhaps even inevitable. That is why it is important to immerse ourselves once more in Luke's narrative. One thing he makes abundantly clear is that, while the inclusion of the Gentiles was in God's plan from the start, no humans had a clue that this was the direction in which God was going. Indeed, Luke's narrative shows the tension between God's initiative moving ahead of the human characters and the human characters trying to catch up with what God was doing.

It is important, as we ponder these events, and especially Luke's telling of them, that we realize the stakes. First, as I have said, we need to understand as best we can how the antipathy felt by Jews toward Gentiles found its focus in table-fellowship. Gentiles were, after all, "by nature" ignorant idolaters whose lives were impure and corrupted. To share a meal with them was to risk one's own status among God's holy people. The world we live in is obsessed by sexuality; the ancient world was preoccupied with the significance of eating together. For a Jew to eat with a Gentile meant something larger than we can any longer imagine. We must remember, too, that the weight of Torah was entirely on the side of those Pharisaic Christians who resisted the inclusion of the Gentiles except on the condition that they be circumcised and keep Torah. The Pharisaic Christians had far more tradition and theological precedent on their side than did those who wished the Gentiles to be accepted as they were. In fact, the only argument that could be made in favor of such inclusion was: God seems to want it because that is what is happening in our experience but I anticipate the narrative to which we should now briefly turn.

Although from the start of his story Luke had shown his readers that God planned to call the Gentiles, so that "all flesh might see the salvation of God," his account of how God set about accomplishing that, and how the human disciples struggled to decide for God's action, begins in Acts 10 with the conversion of Cornelius. The narrative from Acts 10 builds toward the decision that is finally reached and announced in chapter 15. I cannot interpret the many exquisite details of Luke's narrative (truly one of the masterpieces of biblical storytelling), but I would like to point out some of the salient elements. Before starting, though, it is critical to recognize that Luke's narrative can function as a theological model for us precisely as a narrative it is the process he describes that has exemplary value.

I would ask you to remember how quietly it all begins: with the prayer experience of two individuals. The first is that of a Gentile, Cornelius. He has a vision in prayer that he should send for Simon

(10:1-6).He calls trusted associates, tells them what has happened, and sends them to seek Simon (10:7-8). Notice how experience starts to become communal through narrative: they hear the story, believe it, and act on it. At the same time Peter has his famous lunch-time vision of the sheet descending filled with all sorts of beasts and the voice telling him to "kill and eat" (10:10-17) . Although the vision is twice repeated, we note that its meaning remains uncertain. Was it because Peter was hungry that he had such a dream? Was it a temptation? At this point Luke tells us that Peter was "puzzling" over the vision. He cannot figure out what the message "Do not call common what God has made clean" might mean.

Two people have what we could call classic "religious experiences." Like so many such experiences, however, their significance remains unclear. Luke draws the two experiences together by narrative: the messengers arrive, Peter receives them, they tell Peter of Cornelius's vision (now slightly and tellingly amplified), and Peter "without doubting" or "discriminating" decides to go with them to Cornelius's house (10:29). Peter allows Cornelius's experience to interpret his own, and follows that lead to enter into a communal experience.

When Peter arrives at Cornelius's house, his insight has already advanced to the point where he knows that God was not telling him about food but people: he has come to recognize that God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation those who fear God are acceptable to him (10:34). What a remarkable distance to have traveled in a day, not from Joppa to Caesarea, but from a smaller to a larger vision of God! We know what happens: Peter proclaims Jesus to Cornelius's household (10:34-43), and God acts again by pouring out the Holy Spirit on all present (10:44). Peter and the Jewish Christians he had taken along with him now decide in favor of God's activity. If God has shown his acceptance of these people through the Holy Spirit, should not the church accept them by baptism (10:47)? The experience of God's activity has moved from private prayer to a meeting to a public display of power in the presence of both Gentiles and Jews.

Peter must next defend this decision before the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, who call into question his associating with Gentiles (11:1-18). This gives Luke the chance to tell the story again, suitably amplified to show the growth in Peter's understanding. In 10:47 he recognized that the Gentiles had received the same gift as had the original disciples. He repeats this in 11:15, but now he interprets it in light of a saying of Jesus concerning the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. New experience gives Peter deeper insight into the meaning of Jesus's words, and into the fact that God is at work in these experiences: "If God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us . . . who am I that I could withstand God" ( 11:17 ) . The incident shows the role of narrative in decision making. Peter does not argue or plead. He simply tells the story "in sequence," and it has a convincing quality. The Jerusalem leadership agrees that "to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life" (11:18). So Gentiles are accepted into the restored people in principle. What has not been decided, however, is on what grounds they are to be accepted.

In a piece of brilliant narrative construction, Luke then shows us how the Gentile mission became general through the commissioning of Paul and Barnabas by the Antiochean church and their first missionary journey during which the message was repeatedly rejected by diaspora Jews but eagerly accepted by Gentiles (13:1-23). When Paul and Barnabas returned to Antioch, they "gathered all the church together, and declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles" (14:27). What a few months previously would have been unthinkable has now become a massive reality. God is indeed pressing upon the church through experience. Now the church as Church needs to decide.

We are all familiar with the account of the apostolic council in Acts 15. The council determined not to burden the Gentiles and issued the so-called "apostolic decree." We note that Luke is neither ashamed nor embarrassed by controversy and debate. It is necessary for the process of decision making in such matters of great moment. The opposition posed by the Pharisees, as I have pointed out earlier, was neither silly nor trivial: if God was faithful to God's promises to this people, then surely it made sense that Gentiles should become part of this people by circumcision. It is the position of Paul and Barnabas that is radical and dangerous, a position that seems to go against Torah. The question of table-fellowship is scarcely minor. Gentiles lose nothing by eating with Jews, but pious Jews lose their identity by eating with Gentiles. Here, indeed, is a case of multi-culturalism with a vengeance: how can Jews assent to a universality that ends up canceling their identity? The compromise position reached by the council (that Gentiles avoid idolatry and things connected with it) was not a compromise of principle, but rather a concession to those Jews who had everything to lose by open table-fellowship with Gentiles. The decision did not place a burden on Gentiles, and it lifted a burden from messianic Jews.

Our interest here, however, is less in product than in process. We see how local churches gather into a larger assembly, how the assembly as a whole is present for much of the debate, and how the leaders of the movement themselves testify rather than simply preside or dictate. Notice also the role of the narratives of faith. Paul and Barnabas relate what God has done. Simon Peter tells once more how God "looked favorably on the Gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name" (15:14). Peter's insight now, however, has gone even deeper: he sees that "we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will" (15:11). In other words, his new experience of God's work among the Gentiles leads him to a new perception of the very grounds of salvation even for Jews! It is on the basis of these narratives that James, spokesperson for the Jerusalem church, reinterprets the scripture. He finds in the Septuagint text of Amos 9: 1 1-12 a reading that supports the inclusion of the Gentiles as an extension of the restored Israel but we should note precisely how Luke has him introduce the citation. He does not say, "This agrees with the words of the prophets" (as the NRSV incorrectly translates it), as though scripture by itself set the framework for God's activity; rather, he says, "With this the words of the prophets agree," implying that God's activity is itself the thing that generates new readings and understandings of the text of scripture ( 15 :15 ) .

There is much more that could be said about this powerful passage, not least concerning the way in which the decision is promulgated and ratified by local communities through the ministry of prophets. I have mainly, however, wanted to indicate the way in which Luke's narrative can be read as providing a narrative exemplar for the understanding of decision making as a theological process. I have tried to show how faith is a response to God's action in human lives, how human experience moves from the private realm to the public through the telling and hearing of narratives, how these narratives progressively encompass more of the church through a process of further testing and experience, how there is the necessity of disagreement and debate, how formal decision is required when something new forces the reinterpretation of previous understandings of God's work or the community's identity, and how the experience of God communicated through narratives generates new interpretations of scripture. What I have left implicit here is, however, the role of discernment, and yet discernment is the essential component within each of these stages. Discernment is at work in the perception of experience as an encounter with God, in the articulation of faith in narrative, in the hearing of narratives by the assembly, in deliberation over conflicting theological positions, and in the act of interpreting scripture and tradition. Discernment will, therefore, require our more careful attention in the following papers.

[Luke Timothy Johnson's papers were presented at the DuBose Lectures in Sewanee on October 10-11,1995. So far as is possible the papers seek to preserve the informal style of the original presentations.]

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Is Science Enough?

[This paper is from a series papers published in the Sewanee Theological Review based on three lectures given at The University of the South on September 19 and 20, 1994, sponsored by All Saints' Chapel. So far as possible, the articles seek to preserve the informal style of the original presentations]

The question I want to ask is, "Is science enough?" I have spent most of my adult life working as a physicist. I enjoyed that work very much. I did not leave it because I was disillusioned; I left it because I felt that I had done my little bit for physics and the time had come to do something else. I want, therefore, to take science absolutely seriously. I believe that we learn from science many things of great significance about the structure and history of the physical world in which we live, but I could never say that science by itself is enough.

Why do people do science? You will sometimes hear it suggested that people do science in order to be able to manipulate the world to get things done. "Getting things done" is not, however, a description of science but of technology. Technology is important for us and has brought us many benefits, as well as some problems. Nonetheless, people who work at fundamental science do not do it to manipulate the world. They do it to understand the world. Let me illustrate that by telling you a parable.

A black box was delivered to a certain meteorological office. With the black box came an instructional manual that said, "Feed in through slot 'a' the details of today's weather, turn the handle, and out of slot 'b' will come an accurate prediction of the weather next week." Well, the promise seemed pretty unlikely to be fulfilled, but they were open-minded people in this particular meteorological office, so they decided to try it. They fed in the information, they received the prediction, and they waited to see what would happen next week. It worked! They did this many times, and it worked every time. With total success, it predicted the weather. (As I shall explain later, this is actually impossible; but let us suppose for the sake of the story that it could happen and did.) What happened? Do you think that the scientists at the meteorological office just went home? Not a bit of it! Their technological function, weather prediction, was totally fulfilled but that was not enough. These people were scientists, which meant that they also wanted to understand how the earth's weather arises from the interaction between the seas, the atmosphere, and the land masses. Within a few weeks, I promise you, they were tampering with the seal on that black box and taking it to pieces. They were trying to find out just how it was able to model the earth's weather system accurately.

.True scientists are essentially people who want to understand the world in which we live, not merely to make it work for us.

The main point I wish to make in this lecture, however, is that this thirst for understanding that is so natural to scientists can never be quenched by science alone. Science can tell us a great deal about the world, but it cannot tell us enough.

First, science cannot tell us enough because, although it is immensely successful within certain areas, it is successful chiefly because of the modesty of its ambition. True science limits itself as to the type of questions it is prepared to ask and answer about the world, and it limits itself as to the type of experience it is prepared to put on its agenda. Science trawls experience with a very coarse grained net. Many things slip through those wide meshes which are very significant if we are really to understand the world in which we live. Science asks the question, "How do things happen? By what process do things come about?" and this is an important question to ask. But asking it by no means precludes the possibility of asking further questions, such as, "Why are things happening? Is there a meaning and purpose at work in the world?" and these are essentially, of course, religious questions.

I do not have to choose which of these questions I am going to ask and answer. "Why is the kettle boiling?" "The kettle is boiling because the burning gas heats the water." True. "The kettle is boiling because I want to make a cup of tea and would you like to have a cup with me?" True. There is no conflict between those two answers; they are in fact complementary. In an exactly similar way I don't have to choose between science and religion. "The universe sprang into being about fifteen billion years ago through the fiery explosion of the big bang." That is true, but it does not preclude my also saying, "The universe came into being and remains in being because of the Word of a Creator whose mind and purpose are behind all of the scientific truths that we perceive."

Science looks at only one type of experience, namely, impersonal experience. In other words, science treats the world as an object, an "it." That is why science is able to pursue its investigations using its great secret weapon, which is the weapon of experiment. I was myself a theoretical physicist working, so to speak, with paper and pencil but I gladly acknowledge the indispensable role that my experimental colleagues play in the advancement of our subject. Now the point is, so long as we are treating things as objects, as "its," we can kick them around and pull them apart and put them to the experimental test. However, we all know that there is another aspect of reality, the "I and thou" aspect of reality, the personal aspect of reality, in which testing has to give way to trusting. If we are to know each other we must take the risk of a trusting encounter. If I am always setting little traps for you to see if you are really my friend, I shall in time destroy the possibility of friendship between us. It is not only the Lord our God whom we must not to put to the test. We can, in fact, only know each other on the basis of trusting, not testing.

There are forms of knowledge which are clearly non-scientific in character, and which are yet, I think, possessed by us as certainly as we possess any form of knowledge. I believe that I know as surely as I know anything that torturing children is wrong. I do not think that this idea is merely a social convention produced through a cultural process. I think that to understand that torturing children is wrong is to possess an actual insight into the nature of reality. I know that torturing children is wrong. That is a form of moral knowledge. There also is a form of aesthetic knowledge coming from our encounter with beauty, and there are other kinds of knowledge but they all slip through the coarse mesh of the scientific method.

So, the first reason why science is not enough is that there is just more to the world than that with which science can cope. Science is a very limited way of looking at reality.

Second, and more interestingly, there are some questions that arise directly from our scientific experience, but which science cannot answer questions not themselves scientific in character, but nevertheless meaningful questions, questions to which we need to seek answers. Let me make myself perfectly clear. I believe very strongly that all questions that can be stated in scientific terms must, in principle, be answerable in scientific terms. We may not, for one reason or another, be able to find a particular answer to a particular question, but if it is a scientific question then we know what kind of an answer it would be, and we should know if we had found it. I think we have learned not to play the card of the so-called "God of the gaps" using "God" as an explanation of last resort when we cannot quite succeed in figuring something out scientifically.

There are, however, certain other kinds of questions that arise in science and from science, yet by their nature go beyond science. These are the kinds of questions that I am talking about, and these, too, I believe, are questions we must try to address if we are serious about seeking to understand the world. Let me give you two examples of these meta-questions (that is, questions going beyond science).

The first meta-question centers around a fact about our physical world that is extremely familiar to us, and that we take for granted most of the time. It is the fact that makes science possible, and it is this: The physical universe is transparent to our inquiry. Not only is it transparent, but it is mathematics that turns the key to unlock its secrets. I worked in elementary particle physics, and it is an actual technique in fundamental physics of any kind to seek equations which in their mathematical character have about them the unmistakable characteristic of mathematical beauty. Not all of you perhaps will know about mathematical beauty, but, believe me, it is something that those of us who happen to speak that language can recognize and agree upon; and we have found time and again in the history of physics that a theory expressed in terms of beautiful mathematics turns out to be the theory that best describes the world in which we live. So it is an actual technique of investigation to look for beautiful equations.

One of the greatest theorists whom I have known personally was Paul Dirac. He was at Cambridge many years and was one of the founding fathers of quantum theory. Dirac spent his life in a very fruitful search for useful equations, and he once said that it is more important to have beauty in your equations than to have them fit the experiments!

Now that was, of course, a slightly odd thing to say. Naturally he did not mean that it did not matter whether your theory fitted the experiment no physicist could possibly say that but he did mean that if, on first examination, your equation did not fit the experiment, then there were possible explanations for that. You must solve equations, and maybe in this case your solution was wrong. Usually you have to solve them approximately, and maybe in this case you made the wrong approximation. Maybe the experiment itself was wrong. We have known that to happen more than once in the history of physics. So what Dirac was saying was that if your equations did not fit the experiment, but were beautiful, there was some hope for you; but if your equations were ugly, there was no hope for you at all.

Eugene Wigner, another great theoretical physicist (who was, as it happens, Dirac's brother-in-law), describes all this as the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." Why is mathematics the key to unlocking the secrets of the physical universe? What, after all, is mathematics? Our mathematics is the free exploration of the human mind. Mathematical friends sit in their studies and out of their heads they dream up the beautiful patterns of pure mathematics. If mathematics by any chance is not your subject, just think of it being a pattern-creating and pattern-analyzing subject. What I am saying to you is that many of the most beautiful patterns that mathematicians can conceive are then found to occur are realized deep in the structures of the physical universe that is around us. There is a deep-seated relationship between the reason within us that is, the mathematical explorations of our minds and the reason outside us that is, the rationally beautiful and rationally transparent order of the physical world in which we live.

Why should this be so? You can always, of course, shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that is just the way it happens to be: a bit of good luck for you chaps who are good at mathematics!" but my instinct as a scientist, my instinct as someone who wants to understand things, is not to be so intellectually lazy as that. I should like to know why mathematics is so unreasonably effective. Einstein was puzzled by it. He said once, "The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

"Well then," you might say, "surely evolutionary biology would explain it? If our minds didn't fit the world around us, we would hardly have survived in the struggle for existence." Now that, of course, is absolutely right, but it is only right up to a point. If we could not make generalizations such as, "It is a bad idea to walk off a high cliff," then obviously we would not have been able to survive very long. However, it by no means follows from this that our minds should go on, as Isaac Newton's mind went on, to discern that the force that makes it unwise to step off a high cliff is the same force that holds the moon in its orbit around the earth and the earth in its orbit around the sun, or as Albert Einstein's mind went on generalizing and extending Newton's theory of gravity to explain gravity in terms of the curvature of space itself, and hence to construct a theory that describes not merely the solar system but the whole universe. Einstein discovered the general theory of relativity as the result of a seven-year search for a beautiful equation. That was how he found it. The point is this: Newton's and Einstein's ability to penetrate the deep secrets of the physical world surely far exceeded anything that could be explained purely in terms of survival value or evolution.

Now there is no knock-down, step-by-step, demonstrably and undeniably correct answer to the question, "Why is the world so rationally beautiful and so intellectually coherent?" There is, however, an answer that is coherent and intellectually satisfying, and it is the answer that says, "The world is intelligible precisely because there is a Creator whose mind is behind that world." You could summarize what I have been trying to say about the rational beauty of the universe by saying that the science of physics discerns a physical world shot through with signs of mind, and it is a coherent possibility that it is the rational mind of the Creator that is being discerned in that way. People like Stephen Hawking who like to talk about "the mind of God"' partly as literary device and partly, I think, as a wistful engagement with the possibility of there being a God such people are speaking, perhaps, rather better than they know.

Science is possible, I believe, because the physical world is a creation and because we are creatures made in the image of our Creator. As I say, that is not an irrefutable statement. I cannot say, "Mathematics works, and therefore God exists," but it is a satisfying insight. It provides, I believe, a deeper answer and a fuller understanding of the meta-question "Why is the world so open to our scientific inquiry ?1 than is offered by the suggestion that it is all merely a result of survival needs or evolutionary necessity. That is my first example of a meta-question, which needs answering and which religion can answer.

My second example of a meta- question is related to a more detailed property of the physical world in which we live something scientists have discovered in the last thirty or forty years and that they find very surprising. You all know, of course, that according to our best observations it now appears that the physical universe as we know it started in the fiery explosion that we call "the big bang" about fifteen billion years ago. Now, the very early universe was an extremely simple physical system. One reason why cosmologists speak with great boldness about the early universe is because it was so simple. It was an expanding, virtually-uniform, ball of energy, and you really cannot get a physical system much simpler than that.

Yet the universe that started by being so simple has after fifteen billion years become immensely rich and complicated with you and me, actually, as the most rich and complicated results of that history known to us. Holmes Rolston, an American writer, has said that an astronomer peering through a telescope at some distant galaxy should remember that the most interesting and complex physical system in the whole universe is just six inches this side of the eye piece.2 Now that in itself is an interesting thought that the world has such a fruitful history, and of course it has had that fulfill history through a series of those evolutionary processes. I wish to talk more about evolutionary processes later on.

One of the things we have learned which is surprising, however, is that in explaining the fulfill history of the universe, evolution whether we are talking about the evolution of life here on earth, or the evolution of stars and galaxies, or the wider scene in the universe as a whole evolution by itself cannot explain the fruitfulness and complexity of the world. It is only a very particular, a very special, a very "finely-tuned" sort of universe in its given physical fabric which is capable of evolving into complex systems like ourselves. It would not happen in just any old universe. That is a very surprising discovery. As you may know, it is called the anthropic principle: that a universe capable of producing anthropoi not necessarily literally humankind, but at any rate creatures of a like complexity is a very special universe indeed.

Let me try to explain why we think that. When I speak of the "given physical fabric of the universe," I mean the specification of what the universe is going to be like in terms of its fundamental physical laws. Imagine then that God has lent you a universe creating machine. As you approached this (no doubt) very impressive piece of equipment, you would find that there were certain knobs that you could adjust in order to specify the kind of universe you would like to create.

For example, there would be one knob that would control gravity. Do you want to have gravity in your universe ? If so, how strong would you like it to be ? It may surprise you to learn that in our universe gravity is a very weak force indeed, given the scale on which we measure these things. I admit that, if you have ever walked out of an upstairs window, you might be rather surprised at that statement. The reason for that is that there was nothing canceling gravity out, but the fact remains that gravity, in itself, is in our universe a very weak force indeed. So, you have this knob on the universe-creating machine and you can adjust it: you can set it to zero and have no gravity at all, you can set it to something like the very weak gravity that we have, or you could have a world with stronger gravity just as you like. You specify that aspect of the physical universe that you want to create.

There are on the machine a whole row of these knobs that correspond to what we call "the forces of nature." Another force of nature is electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. It holds together the chair on which you are sitting, and, in fact, it holds you together. It is a much, much stronger force than gravity. Very well what do you want the level of electromagnetism to be in your universe ? Again you adjust the knob. And so on through the forces of nature.

There will also be some knobs that will be marked according to what we might call "circumstance." As you know, we live in a very large universe. Our sun is just an ordinary star among the hundred thousand million stars of our galaxy, which is the Milky Way. The Milky Way itself is nothing particularly remarkable among the hundred thousand million galaxies of the entire universe. We live in a universe that is dauntingly big unimaginably big. Maybe you would prefer to create a more cozy, domestic-sized universe. Very well. You set the knobs accordingly. All of these adjustments will be the way in which you specify the given physical fabric of the world that you want to create. You then pull the handle, and out comes the universe that you have created. You then have to be

a tiny bit patient you have to wait billions of years, in fact but you watch to see what happens in your universe.

Now, what scientists have discovered is that unless in specifying the physical fabric of your universe you have chosen to be close very, very close to the settings that specify our universe, your universe is going to have a rather boring history. It will not evolve into anything of interest or complexity certainly nothing comparable to ourselves. That is a very surprising thought. Let me give you three examples of why we think, nonetheless, that it is correct.

Let me first try setting the knobs exactly the same as for our universe, except for the gravity knob. I am going to turn the gravity knob up a bit. I am going to have a stronger gravity in my universe. Otherwise it is going to be exactly the same as this universe. Well, I might have supposed that a universe like that would have a fruitful history, evolving something interesting, such as a form of living being. Of course, it would not produce human beings exactly like us, but perhaps little green people (little because of the gravity being stronger and it being harder to grow tall). That is what I would guess and I would be absolutely and totally wrong. The reason I would be wrong is this: it is very tricky arranging for life to be able to evolve.

One of the things you absolutely must do if there is to be life in your universe is to have the right sort of stars. Stars have two essential roles to play in a fruitful universe. The first role they play is that they are the reliable, steadily burning energy sources that enable life to develop. Our sun has been burning pretty steadily for about five billion years, and will bum pretty steadily for about another five billion years before it explodes into a red giant and burns everything to a frazzle. Life took something like three and a half billion years to evolve on earth that is the natural time scale for life so you have to have these reliable, long-time energy sources around to supply the energy that it needs. We understand very well what it is that makes stars burn in such a reliable way. It depends on a balance between gravity on the one hand and electromagnetism on the other. If I turned the knob so as to make the gravity a bit stronger than in our universe, then the stars will burn much more brightly and much more quickly. They will not live for billions of years but only for millions of years, and that simply will not be long enough for the evolution of life. As a result, there will be no little green people: in fact, there will be no people, and no life at all. That is one very simple example of what goes wrong if you change the setting of one of the knobs. There are lots of pitfalls in designing a fruitful universe!

Another indispensable role that stars have to play in a fruitful universe is that they have to make the raw materials of life. As I have said, the early universe is very simple, and so only very simple things go on in it. In fact, it only makes

the two simplest chemical elements, hydrogen and helium. These do not have a rich enough chemistry to sustain the growth of life. For life you need, for example, carbon with its amazing ability to form those long, complicated molecules that are the basis of life. Now you cannot make carbon in the early universe. In fact, it appears that the only place where you can make carbon is in the nuclear furnaces of the stars. Every atom of carbon inside your body was once inside a star. We are all made from the ashes of dead stars. Now the process by which elements are made inside stars is extremely subtle and extremely interesting and, incidentally, unraveling it has been one of the great scientific triumphs of the twentieth century.

So, how then do you make carbon? You do so if you can get three helium nuclei to stick together. It is, however, very difficult to make three nuclei stick together. In fact, it is only possible at all because there is a particular enhancing effect scientists call it a "resonance" producing just the right energy in just the right place to make those three helium nuclei stick together to make carbon. That was discovered by Fred Hoyle. As a matter of fact, no one knew about this resonance in carbon, but Fred Hoyle predicted that it had to be there since he just could not see how the element could have been made without it. Then the nuclear experimentalists went out and did some actual measurements and found lo and behold ! there it was. ( It was, of course, a very great triumph to make this prediction. At this point Hoyle, who had always been antagonistic to religion,3 began to get worried. He began to feel that perhaps something more than he had supposed was going on in such a very precise process!)

Very well you need this "resonance" in the right place if you are to make carbon. But even then, if you want to create life as we know it, you cannot rest on your laurels. You need some more elements. You need oxygen, for example. How do you make oxygen ? You take some carbon, and you stick another helium nucleus onto the carbon, and that changes carbon 12 into oxygen 16. To produce life in our universe we need a situation in which such a change is possible but not too possible because if it were too possible we should end up with all the carbon changing into oxygen, and then of course we should have lost the carbon.

So we need a universe that will produce a very delicate chain of nuclear reactions that will just succeed in making acceptable amounts of the elements that we need for life up to and including iron. Iron is the most stable of the nuclear species, and you cannot get beyond iron inside of the stars.

So you have two problems left. You have made some (potentially) useful elements, but they will not be useful unless they get out and about and become available for life. It is no good leaving them locked up and useless in the cooling core of a dying star. So you have to make sure that some of your stars as they come to the end of their lives will explode into supernovae, and these will scatter abroad the elements they have made so that when a second generation of stars and planets condenses there will be the right chemical environment for life to be possible. If we are all made of star dust, then there must be some dust from stars around, which means there must be some supernova explosions.

If you are very clever, you also will be able to arrange the forces of nature in your universe so that the two nuclear forces, weak and strong, that are relevant are such that those explosions will also make the elements beyond iron (such as iodine and zinc) that you could not make inside a star. These are also necessary for the development of life.

Now, I hope you can see from all this that there is an amazingly complex and very beautiful chain of reactions running from nuclear processes inside the stars to stellar explosions and the results of those explosions. This chain of reactions just succeeds in making the raw materials of life, and it depends very precisely on the fine tuning of the nuclear forces to bring it about. One cannot fail to be impressed when one notes these remarkable and fruitful coincidences.

Let me give you one more example of how careful we have to be in designing our universe if it is to produce life. It has to do with size. What would be wrong with choosing to have a domestic, small-sized universe, perhaps about as big as our Milky Way, rather than the big universe that we actually have? The flaw would be that there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts. A universe only the size of the Milky Way simply will not last long enough for life to be possible. The natural time scale for the evolution of life requires fifteen billion years or so, and if a universe is to last fifteen billion years, it has to be as big as the one in which we live. So when at night you look up into the sky and see all of those trillions and trillions of stars, do not be upset or daunted by them. The fact is, if they were not there, you would not be here to be upset by the thought of them!

So you see, if we are going to produce life, we require a very complicated and delicately-balanced universe. Just any old universe will not do. Only a one-in a-trillion universe will really do the trick. What does that mean? Again, you could shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, here we all are! It just happens to have worked out that way, and there's nothing more to be said about it." But that does not seem to me to be a very sensible attitude to take.

Let me illustrate what I mean by stealing a story from a philosopher, John Leslie, who is at Guelph University in Canada, and has written what seems to me to be by far the best book available about the anthropic principle.4 He is an unusual philosopher for two reasons. First, he gets the science right which is fairly unusual among philosophers and, second, he does his philosophy and gets his points across by telling stories, and that is very nice for those of us who are not philosophically trained. This is a paraphrase of one of his stories:

You are about to executed. You are tied to a stake and your eyes are blindfolded. Ten highly-trained marksmen all level their rifles at your chest. The officer gives the order: "Fire ! " The shots ring out and you find you have survived! Now what do you do? You are hardly likely just to shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, here we are. That was a close one, but here we are!" No. Your survival is so remarkable that it demands an explanation, and there are only two rational explanations available. One possible explanation is that many, many, many executions are taking place today, every marksman misses sometimes, and this just happens to be the particular execution when they all missed. The other possibility is, of course, that more was going on than you realized. Perhaps the sharpshooters were on your side and chose to miss you. They missed by design.5

Now you can see how that parable applies when you are thinking about our finely-tuned, fruitful universe. First of all, some explanation seems to be necessary. It hardly seems enough just to say, "Oh, well, here we all are!" Leslie is suggesting and I think he is right that there are, basically, only two possible explanations, both of them metaphysical, both of them conjectural.

One is that maybe there are many, many, many different universes, separate from each other and each with their own given laws and circumstances. And if there are enough of them, then it is perfectly likely that one of them will be just within that narrow band in which life will be likely to evolve. That, of course, is the universe in which you and I live because we could not possibly have appeared in the history of any other. That is a perfectly logical explanation and, of course, parallels the "many-executions" explanation for the person who survived the firing squad.

The alternative explanation, paralleling the "sharpshooters-were-really-on our-side" explanation, is that there is only one universe, but more is going on in its fruitful history than we have realized. This is just not any old universe; this is in fact a creation, and it has been deliberately endowed by its creator with those finely-tuned laws that enable its history to be fruitful.

Leslie says, in relation to understanding the anthropic principle, that there really is not a lot to choose between the two explanations. Either explanation, "many universes" or "a designed creation," is equally probable. Both explanations are conjectural and metaphysical. The "many-universes" idea is, incidentally, quite often presented as if it were in some way more "scientific' than the alternative, but if we analyze it we find that it, too, is in the final analysis a metaphysical guess. We only have scientific evidence about the one actual universe of our experience.

I think if that were the whole story, then one would have to say, in weighing the relative possibilities of the "many-universes" or the "designed-creation" explanations being correct, that in fact they were about equally possible given we had nothing else to go on. Of course, if you think that there are other reasons for believing that there is a divine mind and a purpose behind the universe, then the anthropic considerations become part of a cumulative case and simply offer additional support for the other considerations that might push you in that direction.

This, then, is my second example of a question arising from science but going beyond science's power to answer. It arises from the fact that science assumes the given physical fabric of the world. Ever explanatory discipline and every form of human knowledge, needless to say has to have something assumed and unexplained on which it bases itself. Nothing comes from nothing, and of course that statement includes science, just as it includes theology. For science the basis of its explanations are the physical laws of the universe; science describes and seeks to understand the processes of the world and the history of the world in terms of those laws.

The essential meta-question is this: "Is simply taking the physical laws of the universe as a brute fact sufficiently intellectually satisfying?" Some, like David Hume, have thought that it was. Hume recommended that we simply take brute matter as the starting point of our explanations.6 However, in view of the remarkable specific properties of brute matter that are necessary for a fruitful universe, do we really feel comfortable in saying that it requires no further explanation, or rather does not a universe possessing such qualities seem to point beyond itself? In my view it does point beyond itself, and the will of an agent appears to me to be the more satisfying ground of explanation for these properties than the brute fact of physical law itself.

So, the search for understanding drives us to look beyond science, and in particular to look beyond science with regard to these two questions the intelligibility of the world and its finely-tuned fruitfulness. Both are questions that receive coherent and intellectually-satisfying (even if not logically inevitable) answers in terms of theological response. It is not just pious scientists like me who ate impressed by that. There ate many scientists, mainly physical scientists, who are not engaged with conventional religious belief but who are nevertheless struck by the rational beauty and fruitfulness of the universe, and feel that these are signs that more is going on in it than meets the scientific eye. Some of you, I am sure, will be aware of the writings of Paul Davies, notably God and the New Physics,7a book that had considerable success about ten years ago. Davies has no time for conventional religion, and not, in my view, much understanding of it. He says, notoriously, "It may seem bizarre to say so, but I believe science is a surest road to God than religion."8 I think it is indeed bizarre to say that, but there is a revival of natural theology taking place today, not just among the pious and not particularly, I have to say, among theologians but certainly among scientists.

Today's natural theology is, however, not only revived but also revised. If we compare it with the two great flowerings of Christian natural theology in previous centuries, in the later middle ages with Anselm and Aquinas9 and then at the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth century with Paleyl0 and others, we see that the new natural theology is different in at least two important ways.

First, the new natural theology is more modest. It does not talk about proofs of God. It offers not demonstration but insight. It does not say that atheists are stupid,l1 but it does say they explain less than those who are theistic believers. I think that is right. I think that we have learned actually that "proof" is a rather limited category for investigating reality. You cannot actually "prove" even the consistency of mathematics a fact, I dare say, that is unlikely to keep many people awake at night worrying! My point, however, is that an act of faith is required even to do mathematics, and if you cannot do mathematics without an act of faith, it seems very unlikely that you could prove or in the nature of things expect to prove the existence of God. So, in the new natural theology, these ideas are generally presented not as demonstrations but as intellectually satisfying insights, and that, I believe, is a the right way to think about them.

Second, the new natural theologians do not point to specific events in the physical world and say, "Those prove there is a God." They do not, for example, say, "Only the direct invention of God could produce life coming out of inanimate matter." In actual fact we do not understand the biochemical pathways by which life developed, but we have no reason to think that this question, which can be stated in scientific terms, will not eventually receive an answer that can be stated in scientific terms.

So the new natural theology is not rivaling science on its own ground by bringing in the "God of the gaps" as an explanation of last resort. It is not looking to explain the occurrences of the world, which is science's job. Rather, it is looking to reflect on the laws that underlie those occurrences, and that underlie the possibility of any occurrence, and it is pointing out that those laws in themselves are not so self-explanatory that we can treat them as just a brute fact without seeking an explanation beyond them. Hume's criticism of eighteenth-century natural theology was that it made God too anthropomorphic: it presented a God who made the universe as carpenters made a ship. The new natural theology, however, is looking to the given physical fabric of the world as the basis for its reflections, and that has no human analogy. In Hebrew terms it really is bara' (create) and not 'asah (make) that is being talked about here.

So I think that we are living in the start of a new period of natural theology in this revived and revised form, and I hope that theologians will soon come on board to help us with it. I regard this as part of the proper interaction between science and theology, and, moreover, as a gift from theology to science. Theology humbly accepts the insights of science, but deepens those insights, making them more profoundly intelligible, and sets them in a wider complex of meaning than science itself can provide.

Finally, I want to talk about a gift that science offers to theology. The gift that science offers to theology is, I think, the insight that we live in an evolutionary universe a universe that has been making itself, as is to be seen not just in the familiar story of the biological evolution of life here on earth, but also in the story of the evolution of the universe as a whole as it condenses into stars and galaxies. And then those stars and galaxies developed as cosmic history continued. We live in an evolutionary universe, and theology can accept that because theologically it is not difficult to understand an evolutionary universe as a universe allowed by its Creator to make itself within certain limits, no doubt.

That is a very important insight for theology because Christian theology has always tried to steer a course between two unacceptable theological extremes: namely, absolute free will and absolute determinism. In fact, all parents face a practical form of this problem. The parents of little Susan and little Johnny want to keep them safe, which means exercising a measure of control, and they also want to give the children some independence. So they will not allow John and Susan to ride their bicycles in the traffic until they have taught them to ride well, and also seen that the children know something of the rules of the road. On the other hand, these parents also know very well that at some point after the children have learned to ride their bicycles, they will have to be allowed to go out into the dangerous traffic on their own. One cannot retain an unrelenting grip, and yet give the loving gift of life.

In the same way God is not (as the deists thought) simply an indifferent or impotent spectator merely watching the history of the world. God interacts with the world but does not overrule it (and I wish to say more about this interaction in the next lecture). The point I wish to make now, however, is that an evolutionary world is a world theologically understood as given by its Creator a degree of independence whereby it is allowed to make itself to explore and realize the fruitfulness with which its Creator has endowed it.

The most important consequence of that insight is that it affords us help with what is the most perplexing theological problem of all which is, of course, the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a creation that is alleged to be expressing the will of a benevolent Creator. An evolutionary world cannot help being a world in which there are malfunctions and blind alleys. The exploratory process cannot be guaranteed to be one-hundred percent successful every time. The biochemists tell us that the cellular processes that enable some cells to mutate and by their mutation to create new forms of life in other words, the very biochemical engine of the fruitful evolutionary process these are exactly the same biochemical processes that allow other cells to mutate and become malignant. You cannot, it seems, have a fruitful world that is free from cancer. That is a hard message, but I think it is a true message.

I am not suggesting for a minute that one can comfort someone facing a terrible disease or disaster in their life or in their family simply by saying, "Well, it was an evolutionary necessity." That would be incredibly insensitive. What I am saying is simply that and of course the problems of evil go much deeper than that and ultimately, I believe, only find their answer in the cross of Christ, who was with us a fellow participator in the sufferings of the world at this cerebral level we can see that physical evil is not gratuitous, nor is it necessarily a result of callousness, carelessness, or oversight on the part of the Creator. Physical evil is a necessary part of a world allowed to explore and realize its own potentiality. I find that helpful, in a limited way.

Austin Farrer once put the question, "What was God's will in the Lisbon earthquake?"12 referring to what happened in Lisbon on All Saints' Day in 1755 when everyone was in church and a great earthquake killed fifty thousand people in one day, a massive natural disaster that reverberated through the rest of the eighteenth century. "What was God's will in the Lisbon earthquake?" asked Farrer. His answer was hard, but I thin it was broadly correct. Farrer's answer was, "God's will in the Lisbon earthquake was that the elements of the earth's crust should behave in accordance with their nature. They are allowed to be. We are allowed to be." I believe God does not will the act of a murderer, but God allows it to be.

I have been talking about a certain aspect of the relationship between science and theology. What I have been trying to illustrate is that each has things to say to the other, that there are ways in which each can be helpful to the other. Theology can take the insights of science and provide a wider and deeper context for them. Science can make the process and character of the physical world more intelligible and, by that, help theology to have a truer thought about the creation and the will of the Creator.

I stand before you as someone who is a physicist and a priest, and I wish to hold those two aspects of myself together. Not, of course, without leaving myself with some puzzles, but also without dividing my life into compartments. I do not want to be a priest on Sunday and a physicist on Monday. I want to be a priest and a physicist all the time, and I believe that I can do that with honesty, and even find that the two parts of myself can interact with a degree of mutual help and enhancement. I believe that is possible precisely because theology and physics have in common the search for truth about the very rich and many-layered reality in which we live.

So, is science enough? Certainly not. It is a part of the story, but only, actually, quite a small part.

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1Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York / London Bantam Press, 1988), passim. [return to text]

2Holmes Rolston , Science and Religion ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987 , 66. [return to text]

3 See, for example, Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (New York: Harper, 1950), especially 115-8. [return to text]

4John Leslie, Universes (London Routledge, 1989). [return to text]

5 Leslie, Universes, 13-4. [return to text]

6See, for example, David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Book I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896). [return to text]

7Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). [return to text]

8Davies, God and the New Physics, ix. [return to text]

9For example, Anselm, Proslogion 2-4; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theological 1, Q.l., A. 1 -3. [return to text]

10William Paley, View of the Evidences of Christianity (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1850), Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature(Philadelphia: Printed for John Morgan by H. Maxwell, 1802). [return to text]

11"Dixitinsipiens in corde suo non est Deus": "The fool has said in his heart there is no God" (cited from the Vulgate by Anselm's Proslogion 1.101.5). It should be noted, however, that Anselm speaks about God while addressing God (Prosl. 1.101.3-4). In other words, he is clear that the knowledge his "proof" seeks to impart is the kind of knowledge that is peculiar to faith. [return to text]

12Austin Farrer, A Science of God? (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), 87. [return to text]
 
 

Biblical Preaching as a Subversive and Public Spirited Activity

The mandate for biblical preaching is old news, but one that takes particular urgency in the contemporary context. The mandate is this:

we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake . For it is the God who said, "let light shine out of darkness" who has shone in our hearts to give the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4:5-6)

This meditation on these words of St. Paul falls under three headings:

One. The church authorizes the preacher to speak to people. This authority is both more delicate and more urgent in this age of Christian disestablishment. (That is the context.)

Two. The authority of the ordained to preach biblically derives from the call of the church to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ as it comes to us through scripture. (That is the old news.) There may be other types of preaching, but these are not our focus here.

Three. The challenge to the preacher is to invite the faithful into scripturally-authorized life with God. (That is an ascetical task.)
 
 

The Content

The first point about the context has two subpoints. The first is that preaching in the context of sacramental worship is as important now as ever because it remains the chief opportunity to speak to people. That is, it is perhaps the last authorized opportunity for edification remaining in our society. As a disestablished voluntary organization, the church competes with other authorities for the hearts and minds of those who pass through its doors. Some people wander in and wander out again, and we must be concerned with why they leave. Others will stay and allow themselves to be Christianized, even if they would not quite put it that way, saying instead that they like the music, the social outreach, or the wholesome friendships available at church. Still, they present themselves before the power of the preached word of God and the sacraments. Personally, my uninformed hunch is that some people are growing more willing to entertain a third possibility: intentional life with God. They are more open to engaging with the Word of God than was the case in the 1950s or 1960s. This third group will come and stay-or return after sojourns elsewhere-because the Christian life is intellectually, socially, and morally superior to other possibilities. The first subpoint, therefore, is a reminder that the ascetical function of preaching remains as important as ever for all three groups.

The second subpoint is that preaching is more important than ever because, in addition to being an instrument of Christian formation, it is the sole corporate mechanism for human formation based on Christian precepts. Formation of public values and mores rests in the hands of political handlers, the advertising and entertainment industries, political interest groups, and the news industry. That means that preachers are not only Christian catechists, they are also-so to speak-human catechists; they articulate norms of civility in a society that confusedly tells the young that guidance from any source but the self is wimpy, while at the same time subliminally forming their minds with images of Madonna and Michael Jackson.1 Amid this confusion the preacher who speaks with the authority of the church articulates an alternative, authorized by God: conformation to the image of Jesus Christ.

Even with slightly older people, we can no longer safely assume that the home, school, or workplace build up the moral integrity and intellectual dignity of those to whom we preach. Just the opposite may be happening. Home, school, and work- not to mention television, the mall, and the streets-not only do not form but may, in fact, deform, deny, or destroy the moral and intellectual integrity of the mind and heart. This means that speaking to people in the act of preaching is simultaneously a work of Christian catechesis and of human formation, even if subversively so. In fact, preaching has always served both of these functions, but now we must recognize the civilizing function more self-consciously than has generally been the case in the past when other societal institutions contributed to human civility. How do we go about the delicate task of speaking to people in an age when simply being addressed is frequently considered an invasion of privacy of the sovereign self?

At the same time let us not presuppose that there is an easy relationship between Christian and general human formation. Needless to say, the Christian life-grounded as it is in God's self-humbling and self-sacrifice for our sake undertaken in the death of Jesus, and in our exaltation to a transformed and unending life in God-are not exactly the American way. Hence, preaching in the context of sacramental worship is a pastoral activity because it is the primary catechetical means of forming human persons as Christian persons; it is a subversive pedagogy because at significant points it must educate against the culture. At the same time it is a public-spirited pedagogy because it lifts the mind to the highest intellectual and moral integrity that Western civilization can offer, connecting the faithful to enduring patterns of thought and behaviors that foster social harmony and true civility.

Let me register a second caveat here, lest this sound like a fresh wave of Christian imperialism. We should surely note that the church has played its part in denying and distorting the moral dignity and intellectual integrity of women and racial minorities even among its own. What has been termed "Christian malpractice" has damaged many, including white males. To prevent further hurt we must do what we can to redress genuine grievances and repair or replace unhealthy language. One should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water because-unless Christians still claim that to know Christ and the crucifixion is medicine for the world-they have nothing distinctive to add to the plethora of spiritual counsels filling the public square.

In sum, preaching as simultaneously subversive and public-spirited catechesis uplifts and dignifies the mind and heart by recalling that we have been taken into the very life and body of God; we take his body and blood into ourselves regularly in order to feed that realization. The marketplace manipulates individuals as instruments of financial gain; the church dignifies the baptized as the children of God. A life dedicated to the knowledge and love of God is a life that is both Christian and deeply human.

Preaching Jesus Christ is once more a rescue operation, as it was in the Patristic period when the church rescued people from paganism one at a time. Life with Christ is an alternative, not a complement, to other so-called "lifestyles." The Christian life demands amendment of life precisely because it incorporates people into God's life, first gaining their trust through the forgiveness of sin.

The Old News

Surrender to God is as threatening now as ever, and people are understandably ambivalent at the prospect. This leads to the second point-that the church is called to preach the gospel. On one hand, the moral and social confusion of our day may be for many people a preparation for release through the gospel. On the other, these same people find some traditional doctrinal formulations incoherent and the Christian scriptures incredible. How do these two situations obtain simultaneously?

Some of the reasons behind the psychological readiness and vulnerability to the gospel have already been identified: satiation with materialism, unease with cultural relativism, ethical perplexity. Perhaps we will soon see the beginnings of a recognition that issues of gender, race, class, and sexual identity are penultimate and inherently divisive too. All this contributes to a climate more hospitable to preaching the gospel. The intellectual underpinnings of this hospitality come from an intellectual openness associated with what is being called post-modernism.

Post-modernism (perhaps an already-overused term) rests on the very Kantian-and therefore quintessentially modern-realization that there is no such thing as unconstructed reality. In the post-modern view myth is not a dirty word. We recognize that democracy, communism, capitalism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, and the other "isms" are all cultural construals of reality (i.e., myt