Note: This is a second of a two-part series of reflections on the relationship between science and religion. I recommend starting with Part 1.
Last week I mentioned that I had recently watched a meme go around comparing science and religion. Science, it claimed, is in a continual process of progressing, while religion seeks to freeze time in place. As someone with a keen interest in both religion and science, I found myself thinking a lot about this implied critique of religion. Does religion “advance”? Should it? Is there anything that makes religion different from science as a pursuit of truth that would justify a different orientation toward time or progress?
A few thoughts, building on the foundation I laid last week:
4. It is notable that almost all of those sharing this meme were people who feel burned by institutional religion and believe Christianity to be socially regressive. Their stories often raise significant concerns that deserve careful consideration.
It seems clear from the New Testament letters that early Christian communities, which operated in increasingly diverse cultural and social contexts, adopted a variety of practices in relation to government, gender roles, polity, and worship. These contextually-responsive adaptions were made without compromising Jesus’ authoritative revelation of God’s character and desires. They were faithful variations on a common theme.
Sometimes when people demand that religion evolve, what religion actually needs to do is adapt—apply universal truths and principles in a contextually-relevant way. This process of adaption is neither necessarily progressive (a step forward) nor a rigid freezing in place. It might be pictured instead as a kind of horizontal movement required to stay in step with the Spirit’s ongoing dance that always circles Jesus. A religious community that is unwilling to embrace the Spirit’s freedom in such horizontal movement will both experience and cause many kinds of unnecessary pain, generated by its own resistance.
5. I believe in the presence of God’s Spirit living in and among the Christian community and continuing to speak on behalf of Jesus (John 16:12-26). For this reason, it does seem possible for Christianity to learn new things over time.
Jesus himself recognized and affirmed God’s image in men and women both, in members of every tongue and tribe. Institutional Christianity has not, for most of its history, seen equally clearly. In fact, this recognition runs counter to the entrenched ‘common sense’ of most human cultures through history. More widespread awareness has come at a high cost over time as the Spirit of Jesus has struggled against human opposition and our determination to continually make—and radically devalue—new classes of enemies.
To take another example, the apocalyptic mindset of the early church—their sense, clearly visible in the New Testament letters, that time was very short—has been tempered by 2000 years of delayed expectation. Many centuries of walking with God has taught the church something real about God’s patience and long-suffering that would not have been equally apparent apart from the real historical experience of generations of faithful people.
In Acts 10, when God’s Spirit shows up visibly among the household of a Roman soldier, the church gains access to new evidence of God’s desires via experience. They test the quality of this evidence, and their interpretation of it, by measuring it against the biblical story and the immoveable foundation laid by Jesus himself. This is precisely the sort of process of engagement with the Spirit that Jesus seems to have led them to expect.
6. Advancement in science has generally come as we invent new tools that amplify what our senses perceive and allow us to access new kinds of data about reality—telescopes, microscopes, particle accelerators. When it comes to the pursuit of moral truth or the truth of divine wisdom and divine presence, our situation is distinctly different. Our instruments of investigation are minds, spirits, and bodies that both finely tuned for perception of spiritual realities and also easily distracted or mis-calibrated. Here we use the same tools our ancestors did. And there is nothing to suggest that time alone makes us better at using them.
In fact, the opposite might just as easily be the case. Modern people contend with more distractions, less silence, less clear skies, less inclination to learn from those before. There is a profound arrogance to assuming our spiritual intuitions are somehow more reliable simply because they come later in time. We often draw conclusions with a confidence that recklessly disregards how little they have been tested by time and diverse experience. Moral or religious insight can move backwards just as easily as forward, and in most places it is probably doing both at the same time.
The flawed and limited nature of our instruments is precisely why we need revelation—a source of insight that isn’t subject to the limitations of our usual tools. This is what Christians believe we have received in Jesus. Jesus is not an artifact of the distant past in which we remain stubbornly stuck. He is a living lens, a microscope, a telescope, that offers unprecedented vision of the deep structure and reality. Jesus—and specifically the cross of Jesus—is a window to perception we would get no other way. We look back to him so that we can look forward through him. This is the paradox of revelation. To stay centered on Jesus is not to stay stuck in the past. It’s to keep on facing the open window. It’s to keep looking, keep searching both heaven and earth, through our clearest and most powerful Lens.
