I like to visit my local Half-Price Bookstore every week, as it is most likely to have a wide variety of books, many new to the store, letting me discover books which I otherwise did not know existed. Also, I find their clearance section to be unavoidable, as I often find books placed in it which either I did not know they had, or books which I am willing to buy when they are not so costly. Just recently, I found Books One and Two of Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women. Medieval Religious Women. Volume III in the clearance section; they were both texts I had been looking at for some time, thinking about buying, but once they were given extreme discounts, costing only three dollars a book, I could not pass them up. It was also in the clearance section that I found a copy of Ilia Delio’s The Emergent Christ; I bought it, despite many of the problems I’ve had with what I have read coming from her (or about her), because when a scholarly book by an author I disagree with is reasonably priced, and on an issue which I find interesting, such as the way Christian theology should engage modern science, I sometimes buy it, hoping to learn something from it while being challenged by a different perspective.
Delio thinks our notion of God needs to radically change as a result of what science has revealed to us about the cosmos. I believe she has made a categorical mistake, because God and God’s being is not bound by what can be discerned by empirical sciences. While I would not exactly say she engages a full-fledged scientism, there appears to be an element of it directing her thought, which is why I think she might not be able to perceive the questions one would have with her theological methodology. To be sure, I fully agree that theology needs to take science seriously, but it needs to do so acknowledging the boundaries of empirical science, recognizing that once those boundaries are transcended (i.e., metaphysics and metaphysical questions), empirical science produces gibberish (similar, perhaps, to the way some video games have what has become known as a minus world, where the ordinary realm of game play is transcended, and it starts producing all kinds of weird results because the code begins to glitch).
Science is especially good in relating what is found in the “material order” of being. What it has discovered about the empirical order of being should affect our understanding of creation, an understanding which, to be sure, has been changing alongside the history and development of science. Evolution, which Delio holds as being fundamental, helps us understand better the way all forms of life are related and how their interactions affect the development of future forms of life. It should give us a better understanding and appreciation of non-human life, and the potentiality involved in them in ways which Christians have often denied them (such as the potential animals have for the use of reason). But the claim she (and many like her) makes, that is, that all the ancients believed the world was completely static, and how she (like many others) try to implicate Platonism for this perspective, shows an extreme misunderstanding of Platonism (and ancient thought, as clearly there were many who saw the world in flux, like Heraclitus or Lucretius ). Platonism, to be sure, discerns an unchanging reality, the realm of the forms, but it does not equate that reality with the temporal (sensible) order; they saw the temporal order to be in flux (the kind of flux, perhaps, they would question and debate amongst themselves) and this is why Platonism traditionally would not equate what happened in the sensible order of being with “the truth,” because the truth would be unchanging. Plato engaged Heraclitus to show the constant change happening around us, but he did so while also connecting with Parmenides, and the way Parmenides pointed to the transcendent, eternal, unchanging truth from which the realm of change emerged and interacted. That is, Plato showed that there was a way to hold both the world around us as being in flux, with the truth itself being unchanging, showing that there would be a way to see the two interact with each other while not having the changeable world around us causing change to the truth itself. Plato certainly did not look to the sensible world and suggest it was static.
This fundamental mischaracterization of ancient thought and its understanding of the sensible world serves as a major mistake in Delio’s argument. She seems to argue that our knowledge and understanding of God should come from the empirical world (the “book of nature“). She says that when we viewed the created order as static, we would then produce an understanding of God which is unchanging. But, as we now see the sensible world as always changing, indeed, evolving, God must be evolving as well. This is based upon the false notion that those who saw God was changeless believed the world was likewise static, which is far from the truth. While I agree with her that we can learn about God through the “book of nature,” we must also learn how to read that book appropriately. Just as we have to read Scripture without falling into the trap of a fundamentalistic literalism, we must read the book of nature with the proper hermeneutic, that is, to see how God is represented by creation via analogy. Contemplating nature, we can discern pointers which suggest qualities we can attribute to God, but we must appreciate God’s fundamental transcendence to those qualities or attributes (which is one of the points behind the thinking of Palamas and his distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies, a point which I think is invaluable and would serve theology a great deal when dealing with modern science).
Because Delio is unable to appreciate those who can see the world around them being in flux, but also accept some transcendent reality which is eternal and unchanging, she is incapable of appreciating the transcendence of God, and so turns God into something like the rest of creation. This is why she views God as constantly changing, indeed, evolving. While she might try to do otherwise, she ends up following the same mistake about God which Feuerbach says humanity generally makes, which is make God in our own image.
Yes, science is important. Yes, science tells us about the sensible, empirical world. Yes, we should take seriously what science discovers, and through such insight, transform not only our cosmology, but also, recognize how such insight can and should affect other categories of thought, like morality. However, we must not assume that if the empirical world can be shown to be ever changing and evolving, God must be changing and evolving. Science, in and of itself, and what it learns about the material, sensible world, cannot tell us necessary truths about God, because God’s existence and nature is spiritual and not physical. Theologians and philosophers have long shown us good reasons, fundamental reasons, as to why we should say God does not change, reasons which are based upon metaphysical, not empirical, principles. To be sure, this does not mean God will not appear to change; because we are changing, we are constantly engaging God differently, and each new engagement will have us apprehend various new qualities (energies) of God; as a result, it often will seem God changes alongside us. If Delio and others want to discuss that point, that throughout history, God will constantly appear to change, using Scripture to show how God appears to change (including, giving us the appearance that God’s mind or will can change), that is acceptable, indeed, it is an important point to make, because it will help us discern the way our notions about God have changed or evolved throughout human history. But we must always remember we are dealing with the appearance of change, which is not the same thing as actual change; problems emerge when we confuse the appearance of change with actual change. To be sure, with the appearance of change, there is some kind of change going on, but we must discern where that change is, and once we find out it is in ourselves, we will then be able to approach God with a better hermeneutic.
I’m still reading The Emergent Christ. I have read two-thirds of the book, and will soon finish it. While it looked interesting when I skimmed it, as many of the themes, and some of the sources being mentioned, are ones I like to explore, my reaction to Delio remain as it was before reading her book. There are, of course, good things in the book, if one is looking for general discussions of what science has learned during the last century, but her interpretation and use of that science is where I find her to be in gravely mistaken.
*Personal Reflections And Speculations
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