Not so long ago I had an argument with a born-again Christian. He had
been educated a Catholic, lapsed while pursuing a successful career, then found
Christ again in a charismatic second conversion. When I talked to him of the
exciting new discoveries of science, he reacted with impatience and irritation.
“What? How can you waste your time on those things! As a priest of God you should be interested in what pertains to God’s Kingdom! God has given us the fullness of revelation in Jesus Christ. That is all we need to know for salvation. Everything else belongs to this world and distracts from our main objective. As a priest you should focus all your attention on the New Testament and on preaching Christ. Everything else is unnecessary and a waste. It is of the devil!”
When I probed a little further, I found that he cherished the conviction that Christians know everything that is to be known, and that there is no further need for searching or questioning about God or the universe in which we live.
The incident reminded me vividly of another one of an entirely different nature. On that occasion I was talking to a scientist who did not profess allegiance to any particular church. Yet I found that she was deeply involved in basic religious questions. She believed in God, she said, and devoted some time to prayer every day She was very much interested in the ultimate purpose of the universe. She considered life a continuous, exciting search with new discoveries disclosing aspects of our existence day after day.
“One of the reasons why I cannot become a Christian, I feel, is that enclosing myself within such a rigid, boxed-in mentality would kill me spiritually. The Christians I know are unimaginative people who seem to think they know the answers to everything. Their doctrine is plainly boring. I could not possibly tie myself down and deny the inquisitiveness of my mind and the wider longings of my heart.”
Comparing the two approaches I have been wondering whether we could find some guidance in scripture as to the right attitude. Is it true that all questions have been answered for good? Is Christianity a closed set of doctrines? Is it true that being a Christian means closing our minds to further searching and questioning? Does accepting Jesus force us to the boring and predictable existence implied by the practice and beliefs of certain Christians?
The first, overall impression which Sacred Scripture gives us, both in the Old and New Testaments, is that the people held out as examples to us were living personalities, not automatons captured in a closed system. They were outward-looking people, not inward-looking. The “we-know-everything" Christian clings to a doctrine summed up in a catechism, to a liturgical worship with fixed rules, to ethical practices along well established lines, to the framework of a highly organized community. No scriptural hero defends such values, nor is this kind of faith ever held out to us as a model in the Old or the New Testament. On the contrary, faith is always an exciting journey, a moving into unknown territory with unsuspected adventures ahead.
Among the many Old Testament characters worthy of study in this regard, the Queen of Sheba merits special attention. She had come to Jerusalem “to test Solomon with difficult questions." After speaking to him, she was full of wonder and praise.
“What I heard in my own country about you and your wisdom is true! But I couldn’t believe it until I had come and seen it all for myself. But I didn’t hear even half of it; your wisdom and wealth are much greater than what I was told” (1 Kgs 10:6-7).
What kind of questions did she ask? Perhaps we have an indication in Proverbs where we find reported the words of another non-Jew, Agur son of Jakeh:
“I have never learned any wisdom,
and I know nothing at all about God.
Who has ever mastered heavenly knowledge?
Who has ever caught the wind in his hand?
Or wrapped up water in a piece of cloth?
Or fixed the boundaries of the earth?
Who is he, if you know? Who is his son?” (Prv 30:3-4).
The Queen of Sheba’s questions must have been fundamental ones like those of Agur.
The interesting thing is that the Queen of Sheba is held out to us an an example by Jesus himself. The Pharisees and scribes in Jesus’ time were certainly well-grounded in basic religious teaching. Yet the Queen of Sheba was better than they were; she was the kind of person who seeks God, while they imagined themselves to have the fullness of truth already.
“On the Judgment Day the Queen of Sheba will stand up and accuse you, because she travelled all the way from her country to listen to King Solomon’s wise teaching; and I assure you that there is something here greater than Solomon!" (Mt 12:42).
It is as if Jesus says: Knowing a few more truths is not what matters. What is important is the disposition to learn, to seek God, to be open to new discoveries and new revelations. The Queen of Sheba is, therefore, a model of a true believer because she was very anxious to find out about the truth.
But the Queen of Sheba’s interest did not go out only to religious questions. She must have wanted to benefit also from Solomon’s newly established secular science. Of course, in Solomon’s days, as in our own, secular science and religion could not be easily kept apart. But there is no doubt about the fact that Solomon made special efforts to increase knowledge about the world in which he lived. He had begun to catalogue and study nature. He observed things no one had seen before. This was recognized as a special new form of wisdom, granted to him as a gift by God.
God gave Solomon unusual wisdom and insight, and knowledge too great to be measured. Solomon was wiser .: than the wise men of the East or the wise men of Egypt....He composed three thousand proverbs and more than a thousand songs. He spoke of trees and plants, from the Lebanon cedars to the hyssop that grows on walls; he talked about animals, birds, reptiles, and fish. Kings all over the world heard of his wisdom and sent people to listen to him (1 Kgs 4:29-30,32-34).
The Queen of Sheba surely enquired about all these things, mixing such questions with the more fundamental ones of human existence. In fact, if we analyze the questions mentioned in Agur’s sayings, we find there, too, the same connection between observing the powers of nature and finding out about God.
It is not difficult to see in all this a close and immediate parallel to the search of modern science. Never before has the advance of scientific knowledge been as terrific as in the past 30 years! We can now look into the universe and observe things that happened five billion years ago, in regions so vastly distant from ours that they baffle the imagination. We have analyzed the component elements of even the subatomic particles, revealing a microscopic world of such delicacy and immense power that we cannot even think of it without being overcome with awe. As never before, we understand some of the more complicated organizations of different forms of life. In all these fields it is exciting just to be a human person, to be allowed to reflect on the implications and marvel at the greatness of creation!
Take for example, the air we breathe. On the molecular level, it is full of continuous vibrations we are not even aware of. Every molecule of air is thrown backward and forward through impact with other molecules about five billion times per second! There are a billion times a billion molecules in a cubic centimeter of air under normal conditions. Their movement and numbers transcend the powers of our imagination! Then think of the origin of the nitrogen and oxygen in the air. Current theories suggest that about fifteen billion years ago these atoms were formed when matter condensed in stars. Through gravitation the matter collapsed into itself forming a furnace which made the star burn. It was those nuclear processes that forged these fundamental atoms. Again, we know that in the early stages of the formation of our earth, there was no atmosphere. In other words, there was no shell of air enveloping the world as it does now. Our atmosphere was created by one-celled organisms who lived in the oceans and who produced oxygen as a by-product in their food cycle. They were the so-called prokaryotic cyano-bacteria who populated the oceans 2.2 - 1.5 billion years before Christ. Through the oxygen released by these small livings beings, the atmosphere was built up around the crust of the earth so that new forms of life could arise that were based on oxygen.
We all take air for granted, but what new horizons do we discover when, in this way, we speculate more about its nature! Does it not move us deeply when we realize that through the air we may be linked to burning stars that existed fifteen billion years ago? And to these miniature organisms of the ocean that produced the first air? Does it not make us feel one with the whole of nature that surrounds us when we realize that in an ordinary lifetime a person consumes about 10 million cubic feet of oxygen? la this kind of knowledge not exciting for us, precisely because we too, as Christians, are constantly wanting to find out more about God and his creation?
We should notice that scientific discoveries also affect our religion and our spirituality. Obviously they do not change our basic convictions: the truths revealed to us about God and about salvation in Jesus Christ. But new questions arise which demand further search and new theological reflection. For example, the theory of evolution forced Christian theologians to rethink the teaching of scripture on creation. Many other questions remain to be answered. How were religion and morality born in the dawning of human intelligence, in that period of millions of years during which humanity’s intellectual powers developed? Were these generations of hominids also covered by the history of salvation? What exactly is the relation between Our body and what we have traditionally referred to as the soul? Since science has shown it to be possible that intelligent life also evolved on planets elsewhere in the universe, how does our economy of salvation relate to theirs? Has the incarnation consequences for them also? These are not questions to be dismissed as irrelevant; they will be of the greatest importance for the credibility and integrity of future Christian faith.
The theologians of the Middle Ages, though some were great saints and scholars in their own time, cannot supply us with the thinking that is required today. St. Thomas Aquinas lived in a small world compared to ours. Like his contemporaries, he believed that creation had taken place four-thousand years before Christ. He was convinced the earth was a flat disk extending not far beyond the Mediterranean domain. He thought each star had its angel to guide it along a path traced on the sky. But even within that small world, Thomas eagerly extended the theology of his day by incorporating insights and findings of Arab scholars and philosophers. He would be the first to demand a fresh look at the whole of our present-day theology in the light of recent scientific discoveries. “The more we seem to know about God, the more we realize we know nothing,” he used to say. Finding out what we now know about the universe, he would certainly have seen that slogan verified!
I want to be clear that what I am suggesting is not a cosmetic operation in which the new scientific discoveries are inserted into Christian theology as an afterthought. No, it is my belief that Christian theology should have the courage to examine its whole structure in the face of newly acquired knowledge. Being true to its nature as theology, it will, of course, take its point of departure from the sources of revelation. It will also gratefully acknowledge the contributions made to Christian life and devotion by the theology of previous centuries. But at the same time it should boldly face the challenges offered by our new understanding of the universe and interpret the data of revelation within the context of this greatly expanded worldview. If Christian theology does not have the courage to do this in our age, it will seriously fail in its task.
Here again scripture may be helpful to show us how theology can function. What can be more fundamental to theology than the concept of God? But in scripture we can witness a transformation of that concept according to the people’s awareness of their world. In the 10th century before Christ, Israel was a rural culture that lived on cattle breeding and farming. The people experienced the presence of God in rain for their crops and help for their livestock. They still believed in many divine powers, minor divinities that ruled the forces of nature and guided nations. Yahweh was believed to be the most powerful. He had chosen Israel to be his own people.
“The Most High assigned nations their lands;
he determined where peoples should live.
He assigned to each nation a heavenly being,
but Jacob’s descendants he chose for himself" (Dt 32:8-9).
Six-hundred years later Israel’s world had completely changed. It had become a state, and it had the administration, business and military apparatus belonging to such a new organization It had also experienced crushing defeats at the hands of the Babylonian and Assyrian armies. By then social and political developments had begun to overshadow the annual cycle of drought and rain. God too was seen in a new light. He was not first and foremost the God of nature, but the master of history. Yahweh could prove to be the only God, because he alone directed the course of history.
The LORD, who rules and protects Israel,
the LORD Almighty, has this to say:
“I am the first, the last, the only God;
there is no other God but me.
Could anyone else have done what I did?
Who could have predicted all that would happen
from the very beginning to the end of time?...
Is there any other God?
Is there some powerful God I never heard of?” (Is 44:6-8).
Again, two centuries later, the Jewish community at Alexandria was exposed to the influence of Greek culture and philosophy. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle had penetrated into people’s thinking. God was now approached not through experience but through reflection and argumentation. Interest shifted away from God as director of history to his nature and inner attributes. We read in the book of Wisdom:
Anyone who does not know God is simply foolish. Such people look at the good things around them and still fail to see the living God. They have studied the things he made, but they have not recognized the one who made them....People were so delighted with the beauty of these things that they thought they must be gods, but they should have realized that these things have a master and that he is much greater than all of them, for he is the creator of beauty, and he created them (Wis 13:1,3).
From early times Israel had recognized the hand of God in creation; now attention is focused on God as architect, artist and model of all beauty. Since being and motion are hailed as the fundamental realities, God is worshipped as he who has Being and he who is the Prime Mover. He is associated with abstract qualities such as incorruptibility, eternity and immortality. In short, he has become more transcendent and more philosophical.
We need not be surprised that the authors of the books of Wisdom always took Solomon to be their model. They realized that they were seekers of wisdom as he had been. It is through God’s wisdom, they saw, that one can understand the universe. It is clear that, far from being satisfied with the knowledge and understanding we have, we should be anxious to learn more and widen our horizons.
When we turn to the New Testament we find in Jesus’ teaching the theme of “seeking.” Only those who seek will find the kingdom, like the merchant who was looking for fine pearls.
“Be concerned above everything else with what he requires of you” (Mt 6:33).
“Seek, and you will find” (Mt 7:7).
“Do your best to go in through the narrow door” (Lk 13:24).
In all these cases Jesus is speaking about seeking the kingdom, that is, God’s new order or salvation. Jesus commends such religious seeking, seeking that gives priority to spiritual values. And though he is not speaking of a general inquisitiveness of mind, he does mean a true seeking. Also, when striving to serve the kingdom, we should always remain seekers. It is only by remaining open to new developments and by being prepared to learn new things that we will find the fullness of God’s working in our lives.
In St. Matthew’s gospel the theme of seeking is further brought out by incidents narrated by the evangelist. In Chapters 8 and 9 Matthew enumerated the persons who benefitted from Jesus’ teaching and healing; namely, those who go out to seek him: the leper, the Roman officer, the paralyzed man who is carried to Jesus by his friends, the Jewish of ficial, the woman with a hemorrhage and the two blind men. Moreover, Matthew begins the gospel with the elaborate story of the wise men who came from the East looking for the newborn king. These obviously represent the seekers from all the nations. It is not the Jewish leaders, but these seekers who will find Jesus! And what they offer will not be traditional Jewish sacrificial gifts, but their own riches: gold, frankincense and myrrh. The disciples too are sent out as seekers. They are to go out to all the nations and seek disciples for the kingdom of God. It is a search that will continue to the end of time. And it is also a search for a more adequate theology, a more meaningful and adapted liturgy, a more effective pastoral approach, an ever deepening spirituality. It is only when we seek that we shall find!