Getting the Universe Right

Doctor David Pence on the Realism Necessary to Better Proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ

“Every account of a higher power that I've seen described, of all religions that I've seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.” 

(Astrophysicist and TV scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, answering if he believed in a higher power)

                                     

Those of us who allow our spiritual intellects to be enlightened by the Holy Spirit and instructed by Divine Revelation should be able to help the materialist scientist in answering his honest question about the place of the physical universe in the larger realm of spiritual reality.

If you tell someone that on a daily basis you are soaring above the village, they might ask you to describe a few things about the village which they can’t see from the neighborhood alley. The Fathers of the early Church with their new-found spiritual understanding of time, space, and man confidently adapted much of the best cosmology of their day as a fitting landscape to present the cosmic dimensions of the Incarnation.

In this discussion we propose five salient truths about the Earth’s place in the Universe, which we have learned in the last century that must be accounted for in a Christian rendering of reality:

1) The material universe has a beginning.

2) Most of the matter in the expanding Universe is dissipating and headed into cold isolation. There is a "casting out" which continues to be acted upon by a powerful force.

3) While the physical properties of certain elements made in stars billions of years ago allow the molecular and cellular forms necessary for life, the Universe as a whole, its physical laws, and almost all of its temperature-pressure environments are hostile to life.

If the Universe just obeys its own physical laws, life on earth will be destroyed by some event: a meteorite or a super-volcano, or the certain expansion of the Sun in a few billion years causing a heating of the earth incompatible with life.

A materialist can correctly say, "The laws lead to death; to speak of ultimate purpose or human destiny is absurd." The Christian response: "We need to be saved to achieve our destiny."

4) The earth is not the center of the universe nor the fruitful culmination of the whole process. It is much better described as a set-aside place, an elected "just right" environment where an interaction between a Spiritual form of life and physical matter has shaped a Garden where physical life forms could be planted.

5) While some living forms are being drawn into the Body of Christ, most matter is headed out into oblivion and is not returning. The world will not end with a return of all matter to a single point (Omega Point of Chardin, the Apocatastasis of Origen, the cosmic harmony of pantheists, the Big Crunch of the oscillating universe.) The world will end with a separation of almost all matter outward in an isolative expansionary arc, while an in-gathering of much less matter and living forms will be drawn into a communal form of eternal life.

The physical universe is a sacrament of spiritual reality. But spiritual reality is not Communion alone. Purgation, Illumination, and Communion -- they go together. Spiritual reality, like the material universe, is both Communion and Contest.

The astrophysicist wants to know why the Universe seems so hostile. We owe him a simple explanation that while God really is beneficent, we are born on a battlefield. Telling the whole Christian narrative -- particularly that embarrassing part about the Rebellion before the Fall by powerful angelic beings -- is essential to properly interpret the frightening realities of outer space.
The wisdom of ancient cosmology did not silence the Church Fathers from telling the Good News against the backdrop of celestial spheres thought to be perfect.

Modern cosmology should not frighten us, though it is frightening.  We have gone to outer space and we found ourselves not in the dreamy world of perfect stars, but swimming in a deadly milieu of terrifying floodwaters. Spatially, there appears to be much more of the deadly floodwaters than the saving Ark—but there is an Ark.

                             

                                   

"Election"

Pence argues that we need to open our eyes to the centrality of election (setting aside) -- and of "casting out" -- in both Holy Scripture and the physical universe. They are related, in that human history occurs within a central action of God casting out the rebellious Lucifer.

The fallen angel has dominion over the physical world. The first appearance of matter and energy 13.7 billion years ago in a event known as the Big Bang is described by many physicists as the unraveling of the four basic forces in nature. From the time of this explosive event -- the universe continuing to expand and to dissipate, to grow colder -- this stark emptiness is the dominant fact of physical creation.  The accretions of matter which are hot burning stars are all going in the same direction -- toward colder, more dissipative states.  This is called the arrow of time.

The setting aside of the earth and the creation of life was a drawing inward of matter in the midst of chaos...

All things are liturgical. Sacrifice has three components: a setting aside, a sacred killing, and communion.

The earth was "set aside" from the universe.  Then God set aside life nearly four billion years ago in the form of an individual cell with tremendous potential for growth, division, and transformation of forms. The setting aside of the biosphere -- the particular configuration of the earth within our solar system for life, and the in-drawing of matter into the extremely complicated life form which worked toward its own end -- these are countering acts of setting aside amidst a universe being cast out.

Contra the ideas of Father Pierre de Chardin (d. 1955), almost all of matter is being separated out. He underplayed the importance of election and overplayed the notion of convergence.

Progressive Christians ask the Church to be the place of the smothering "vast embrace": open door, open arms, universal salvation.  All space is sacred, all time is sacred, and all 'truths' are subjectively authentic.

The liturgical idea of setting aside sacred space for a killing and communion is a very different notion.

                                   

[painting by Raphael]

"Like precious oil running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robes"

                               
  

Russian priests are the ones that seem closest in appearance to the patriarchs who served the temple altar of ancient Israel.
                             

In the fullness of time, the modern world will witness the churchmen of the East -- acquiescing to the commands of the Holy Spirit -- accept the proffered hand of their Western counterparts. And the latter will acquire a depth and a seriousness of manly purpose that they lacked.

                                     

               

By becoming the actors of history that the King of Eternal Glory intended, the sons of Adam will truly show (in the words of Saint Peter) that they are "partakers of divine nature."

                                   

Sacred Scripture "cuts all the way through, to where soul and spirit meet"

In Miss Stowe's 1852 classic, Tom is being driven in a wagon to be re-sold at auction. The slave trader is congratulating himself on his merciful nature in limiting the fetters to Tom's feet.
           

"As to Tom, he was thinking over some words of an unfashionable old book, which kept running through his head, again and again, as follows: 'We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come; wherefore God himself is not ashamed to be called our God; for he hath prepared for us a city.'  These words of an ancient volume, got up principally by 'ignorant and unlearned men,' have, through all time, kept up, somehow, a strange sort of power over the minds of poor, simple fellows like Tom. They stir up the soul from its depths, and rouse, as with trumpet call, courage, energy, and enthusiasm, where before was only the blackness of despair."



UPDATE:  Corrie ten Boom was a survivor of Ravensbruck -- a German concentration camp north of Berlin. Her sister, Betsie, died there in 1944. (Another woman who lived to tell of her experience at Ravensbruck was Fiorello LaGuardia's sister Gemma).

Corrie ten Boom writes:

"As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God... 'Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.'
"... It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute -- poor, hated, hungry... Not 'we shall be.' We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
"Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry."

RUSSIA, CRIMEA, AND THE U.S. -- Dithering à la Hamlet while declaiming like Lear

With this map from the 'Washington Post' anchoring us, it's time to decide which experts have best cut to the quick regarding how Americans should view the developments in Ukraine.

Dmitri Simes provides a good perspective on the U.S. government's response to the crisis: speaking loudly and carrying a small stick.

The best five-minute explanation of the ramifications is given here by Professor Stephen Cohen.

Check out these maps at CNN.

And David Brooks, pulled by a troika of Russian philosophers from a century ago, sets forth some of the ideas now animating the new Russia.

"The world is even smaller today, though… across the gulfs and barriers that now divide us, we must remember that there are no permanent enemies. Hostility today is a fact, but it is not a ruling law. The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God..."
  (President Kennedy during his visit to Ireland)