Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series. You may access the first installment here.

You may recall, Tom Boogaart ended last week’s article wondering “Can I, like David, find intimacy in the midst of immensity? Can I find comfort that I belong?”

A Third Way

In the first part of this essay, I said that I was reluctant to gaze at an immense universe, contemplate its meaning, and adjust my theology accordingly. I feared that the new wine of scientific discovery would burst the old theological wineskins. At the same time, I suggested that the Reformed tradition had the resources to produce new wineskins. It celebrated two books of revelation, one the word of God manifest in the world and the other the word of God contained in the scriptures, and affirmed that the truths in one book enhanced those in the other. At its best, the Reformed tradition honored the dedication of both scientists and theologians and trusted that their work would complement each other.

Honoring the work of both scientists and theologians is a challenge in the current cultural moment. The spectacular advances in understanding the workings of the cosmos from the time of Galileo onward have left believers bewildered and have divided them into two basic, often warring, camps. One camp holds the biblical cosmology as factually accurate in its entirety, fearing that admitting any errors will undermine the authority of the scriptures. The other camp jettisons the biblical cosmology as primitive, arguing that the scriptures offer theological truth, not scientific truth.

Both camps in different ways have been influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment and assert that knowledge and truth are primarily accessed through intellect and logic rather than through sensory experience or emotion. Emphasizing human reason at the expense of human emotion, the head at the expense of the heart, believers in both camps have ironically undermined the authority of the scriptures. They have had little to say about how the Spirit indwells the heart and inspires the reading of the scriptures and indwells the cosmos and engenders life. They have been woefully inadequate in marshalling the resources of both the sciences and the scriptures to address the looming environmental collapse. 

The Reformed belief in the complementarity of the books of revelation offers a third way. It invites believers to open their hearts and search for the correspondence between the biblical and scientific cosmologies with the hope that the Spirit will superintend such a search and inspire a theology for these difficult times, one that will help believers experience a present and caring God in an immense cosmos and faltering planet and empower them to act accordingly.

The Scientific Story of the Universe

One of the pivotal scientific discoveries of the last 150 years is the connection between matter and energy, the connection between the realm of the visible and the invisible. The millennial-long search for the fundamental building block of matter has led not to an indivisible, physical substance but to something more elusive and mysterious: energy. The universe began in a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature, an incomprehensible concentration of energy.

For reasons not yet known, this singularity flared forth and expanded in what is commonly imaged as a “big bang.” As this energy expanded, it cooled, congealed, and coalesced. Energy manifested itself in the four currently known forces–strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational–and these forces bound the flow of energy in ever larger and more complex systems over a period of 14 billion years: the myriad subatomic particles, the elements now cataloged on the periodic table, the stars, and the galaxies.  

These same systems created a unique climate on planet Earth in which the flow of energy produced living organisms and ever more complex life forms over 4 billion years. In some of Earth’s life forms, there emerged perhaps the most complex system of all, consciousness, and in human beings there emerged a level of consciousness so extraordinary that it gave humans the capacity to reflect on their own emergence, to ask religious questions, and, tragically, to destroy the Earth that conceived and birthed them.

This story of the universe tells us that it is immense; it is measured in units of space and time that we cannot comprehend with our limited minds. Yet the story also tells us that the universe is intimate; all its elements and natural systems have a common origin in an energetic singularity, and at the deepest level all these systems are interconnected. Immensity and intimacy are both expressions of the universe.

Human beings are a manifestation of this intimacy. We carry in our bodies elements produced at specific times in the universe’s billion-year history. Six of them–carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur–are the building blocks of the DNA, proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids that make our lives possible. Our bodies are expressions of the body of the universe. 

Last week I quoted Paul Simon. This week, it’s Joni Mitchell:

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion-year old-carbon

In addition to being formed from the “dust” of the universe, we humans are intimately connected to the natural systems of Earth whose gifts of air, water, and food uphold every moment of our lives. The scientific story of the universe makes clear that we can draw no line between ourselves and our world. We are contingent, interconnected beings. We are not autonomous, eternal souls floating above our bodies, and Earth is not an infinite source of raw material for our consumption. The fact that we act as if we are autonomous and are currently devouring our life-bearing planet is evidence of how scientifically illiterate we have become and how we are committed to values that are neither scientific nor biblical.

The Biblical Story of the Universe

This scientific story of the universe has intriguing similarities with the biblical one. Our scriptures tell the story of a “big bang’” and an expanding universe. Our spiritual ancestors witnessed that God was the singular source from which the created order emerged. The language of their witness was metaphorical. They imaged God as Spirit/breath, and they understood the Spirit of God to be the invisible and inexhaustible energy that radiated from God and gave life to the world. The people of Israel and the early church called the radiation of this inexhaustible energy: “glory,” and they called its life-giving power “love.” They confessed frequently: the earth is full of the glory of God and the earth is full of the steadfast love of God.

Our spiritual ancestors offered many images of God’s glory and love filling the earth. They sometimes depicted this filling as the sun shining, a bush burning but not consumed, a spring or fountain watering an oasis, a seed growing and branching into a tree. Their primary image, however, was that of a king whose words proceeded from his mouth and established the kingdom.

Throughout the scriptures, our ancestors depicted God as a king sitting in the throne room in the house of God. The tabernacle and later the temple were replicas on earth of the house in heaven. With his beloved son at his right hand, the king deliberated with the angels and sometimes the prophets (cf. Jeremiah 23:21-22) over the affairs of the kingdom. After deliberation, his word went forth and was broadcast throughout the kingdom by his messengers, the angels and the prophets.

The word of the king was an articulation of his Spirit-breath, and his breath was the energy that created and sustained the kingdom. The king said, “Let there be, let there be, let there be,” and it was so. John began his gospel with this royal image, a reiteration of Genesis 1:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:1-4).

In the Book of Hebrews, we find the same image of creation. Jesus is the Son through whom God created all the worlds and by whose words all things are sustained (Hebrew 1:1-4). Paul also employs this image when he explains the cosmic significance of Jesus Christ, saying that all things were created and held together by him (Colossians 1:15ff.)

Our ancestors referenced this image when they depicted the formation of humankind. God took the dust of the ground, formed a body, and breathed life into it, the breath of God ordering the minerals in the dust into biological systems that would sustain living beings. Yet these human beings were contingent and utterly dependent on the breath of God. The breath-process that created living beings could also be reversed:    

If he should take back his spirit to himself,

  and gather to himself his breath,

all flesh would perish together,

  and all mortals return to dust (Job 34:14-15).

When you hide your face,

  [all creatures] are dismayed;

When you take away their breath,

  they die and return to the dust.

When you send forth your breath

  they are created;

And you renew

  the face of the ground (Psalm 104:29-30).

Joni Mitchell again:

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

A Sacramental Universe

The scientific and biblical stories of the universe are similar in many ways. Both depict energy flaring forth from a singularity and congealing into a world. Both present the universe as being interconnected at the deepest level. Both portray the universe as being immense and intimate.

Yet they differ in their understanding of the nature of energy. As I understand it, scientists do not speculate about the nature of energy, what it is in itself. They define it in terms of its effect: a physical action or movement that does work or causes change. The effect of energy can be observed and tested; its essential nature cannot. Scientists leave speculation about this to those who are religiously inclined. Some might go so far as to claim with A. E. Housman that nature is heartless and witless, that nature neither knows nor cares about the fate of humankind (“Tell me not here, it needs not saying”), but, of course, the hypothesis of an indifferent nature cannot be empirically tested.

Our spiritual ancestors spoke of the effect of energy but concentrated mainly on its nature. As I have tried to describe in this essay, they viewed the relationship between the creator/king and the creation/kingdom as a continuum, beginning with the king’s Spirit manifested as breath, continuing with his breath articulated as words, and ending with his words congealed as world.  The reality of this continuum inspired them to affirm that the world was full of the glory and love of God.

The biblical story of the universe, supported in part by the scientific story, depicts an intimate connection between the creator, the created order, and human life. Our spiritual ancestors saw the universe as immense–although not as immense as we today know it to be–and they saw humans as vulnerable, contingent beings who were deeply embedded and reliant on the natural systems of planet Earth. The air they breathed, the water they drank, the food they ate, the children they bore, and the shelter that the planet afforded were gifts of God’s love. Every drawn breath, raised glass, prepared table, established family, and canopy was a sacrament, that is to say, an impartation of divine energy that sustained them moment to moment.

Glimmerings in a Cosmic Wilderness 

The scriptures are replete with stories of believers wandering in the wilderness, and these wilderness stories all have the same plot. Hagar, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and Elijah wander in the wilderness, experience trials, lose control of their lives, and realize the utter contingency of their existence. Yet, losing their lives in the wilderness, they suddenly find them. They all have visions of God’s presence and experiences of God’s provision: a spring of water, an angelic visitation, a ladder connecting heaven and earth, an eternal flame, and a still small voice. These visions energize them to become agents of God in the world.

I wish that I could say that my wandering in the immensity of the cosmos has ended with some vision of God’s presence and renewed energy to carry on. I wish that I could experience the act of breathing air, drinking water, eating food, and sheltering as sacraments, impartations of divine energy. I have no grand vision but only glimmerings of God.

I have spent my life steeped in the word of the scriptures and sojourning in the world of the scriptures. I have observed its sacramental cosmology and have worked hard to describe it and make it accessible to others. Yet a description, no matter how well-formulated, does not lead me out of the cosmic wilderness and into the presence of God. Head knowledge and heart knowledge are two very different things.

 A number of years ago, a team from Western Theological Seminary developed an interactive Hebrew curriculum in which, among other exercises, we taught the students traditional Hebrew prayers.  In this endeavor, I became more familiar with the Siddur, the Jewish prayer book. In the Siddur, believers bless God for the many gifts of life: bread, wine, vines, trees, vegetables, pastries, new clothes, hearing thunder, seeing a rainbow, religious scholars, washing hands, various bodily functions…and many other daily aspects of life. These prayers help believers acknowledge the presence of God and live into the reality of a world full of the glory and love of God.

When praying these Jewish prayers, something in me awakened. I began to have glimmerings of God’s presence in my life. I began to realize how disconnected my religious life had been from my life in the world. If I hoped to find intimacy with God in the immensity of the universe, I needed not only a theology that made God’s presence in the created order plausible but also religious practices that reconnected me to the created order. I needed a Reformed Siddur to help me acknowledge the presence of God in my daily life. I needed to come often to the Lord’s Table and ponder the mystery of the Spirit infusing ordinary bread and wine with life-giving power.

We do not think our way to God; we eat and drink our way into the presence of the Holy One. We feel small and irrelevant when contemplating the immensity of the universe. Our telescopes scour the heavens and we have not seen God. Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong place. It is in small acts, beautiful acts, sacrificial and sacramental acts, that we discover goodness, love, mercy, and, ultimately, God.

The Siddur recognizes this. We recognize it when we pray that the bread we break and cup we drink may be to us the body and blood of Christ. The ladder does extend between heaven and earth, and God is found in the still, small voice. Here and there, now and then, I catch glimmerings of God. I wish they were more frequent and came more easily. That seems to be the case for some people, but it isn’t for me. For me, it’s hard. Yet I still go forward and take the bread and wine. I can do no other.