Garrett Green - Imagining Theology: Encounters with God in Scripture, Interpretation, and Aesthetics

T heologians have long been occupied with the question of how human beings can know God. Since the European Enlightenment, however, this question has assumed a new and more urgent form. For the Enlightenment inaugurated a radical change of worldview, beginning in seventeenth-century Europe and spreading eventually to the entire world. The factors leading to this change are many and complex, with the earth at its center, had dominated classical and Christian thought for two millennia. It is no accident that the opening battle in the modern war between science and religion was provoked by Galileos work. And the controversy has continued to this day: questions about science and religion still occasion widespread interest and heated debates among believers, skeptics, and the general public.

The worldview of the new science truly came of age with the epochal achievement of Isaac Newton (16421727), whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1687. According to Newtons system, the universe consists of an infinite expanse of space containing material bodies that move in accordance with universal laws that can be described in the language of mathematics, the lingua franca of modern science. This view of the world, unlike the one it replaced, is in principle fully accessible to the natural capabilities of human reason. The theological implication of this new worldview is epitomized in an exchange (perhaps apocryphal) between Napoleon and his former teacher, the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. The emperor, having been told that Laplaces book contained no mention of the Creator, asked him, Where is God in your system of the universe? Laplace is said to have answered, Sire, we have no need for that hypothesis. The scientific account, by offering an explanation of the world devoid of theological grounding, thereby called into question not only the authority of the church but the truth of Christianity itself.

The antithesis of science and religion runs like a scarlet thread through the history of modern thought from its origins in the new science of seventeenth-century Europe to the global secularism of the twenty-first century. It has captured the imagination of most of the technologically advanced societies of today and seems poised to overwhelm the remaining traditional backwaters that continue to resist its advance. The scare quotes around the two central terms call attention to the way in which our notions of both science and religion, especially in their perceived incompatibility, have been shapedand distortedby the very forces that drive the advance of modern culture. If Christian theology is to escape this intellectual and cultural deluge, it will be necessary to deconstruct and demystify the mythical story of how science has displaced religion as the privileged key to understanding the world today. Only as we are able to see how the advocates of each side have misunderstood both themselves and one another can we regain our cultural bearings and form a truer picture of how modernity has shaped our world. And only then can theology begin to correct the misperceptions of the past and chart a better path forward.