Commentary: Christmas peace in postmodernity's conflicts
Friday, 15 December 2000 18:29 (ET)
Commentary: Christmas peace in postmodernity's conflicts
By TED PETERS
Christ and postmodernity (3)
Christmas peace in postmodernity's conflicts
(Editor's note: This is the third installment of the UPI series, "Christ
and postmodernity," where authors propose theological solutions for this
era's most daunting problem: the profusion of subjective "truths." Prof. Ted
Peters of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley looks
at this from a cosmological perspective).
BERKELEY, Dec. 15 (UPI) -- One of the marks of postmodernity is
intellectual chaos. To a theologian dabbling in cosmology, this poses as set
of questions: Can there be a world-ordering mind of God?
Is there a world order of any type that the human mind can understand? At
Christmas time, we look at the baby in the Bethlehem manger and wonder: Does
it make sense to say: "this is the incarnation of the divine logos, that
aspect of God through whom all things were made" (John 1:4)?
Two types of post-modern cosmology are fighting for our allegiance, the
deconstructionist and the holistic. The former is the child of Martin
Heidegger's philosophy and literary criticism.
Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher between the world wars of
the 20th century. He said he wanted to "rethink being" as we inherited it
from Plato (428-348 BC). Being isn't what it used to be, so it seems.
Literary criticism for nearly three centuries has been treating the Bible
as if it is one piece of literature among others, looking at the human
perspective rather than claims that this book is divine or absolute.
With Heidegger's philosophy and with literary criticism as its parents,
postmodernity considers claims about ultimate reality as a text to be
analyzed. For this purpose the text is to be reduced to the author's
perspective.
This is what we call relativism, and it is relativism with a vengeance. No
longer can we rely upon reason to connect us with reality. No longer are
claims to understand ultimate or universal reality self-evident.
Deconstructionism dismisses each scientific or metaphysical claim about
nature as just one more social construction. It reinterprets all rational
claims about our cosmic home -- whether scientific or religious -- as mere
ideological projections of our need to protect the social dominance of one
class over another.
Holistic postmodernism, in contrast, perceives an underlying unity to all
things, a semi-mystical glue that binds it all together. Everything in this
glorious cosmos from soul to stars is interrelated, connected, shared.
Both science and spirituality lift up this awareness, and this is
empowering to the human spirit.
Curiously, Heidegger's philosophy is a grandparent here too, because it
emphasizes that human meaning is defined by connectedness and relatedness.
Heidegger's thought mates here with New Age mysticism to produce a holistic
child with an ecological vision of unity between body and spirit, mind and
world, humanity and nature.
What we have here is a postmodern intellectual war. And into this war the
Christmas voice of the Gospel of John whispers: "the Word is made flesh."
The Word here is the Word of God. It is the same Word we heard back in
Genesis where God speaks, and then out of nothing all of reality springs
into being.
This is the same Word we find in the Ten Commandments and in our mother's
warning to "be careful" crossing the street. This is the same Word by which
the cosmos is ordered according to the divine mind and the divine will.
Over the centuries we learned of this Word by reading two books. The first
book is the Book of Nature, read by scientific experimentation. In this the
divine mind is displayed in the amazing configuration of mathematical laws
that govern our physical universe. Plato read the human mind and discovered
the numbers that make for harmony in nature as well as music.
Plato's student, Aristotle (384-322 AD), read the plants and animals and
discovered the organization of life. Galileo read the moons of Jupiter
through his telescope. Sir Isaac Newton (1647-1727) followed by reading the
laws of motion that kept those moons of Jupiter in orbit. Albert Einstein
(1879-1955) read the relationship between matter and energy, and did the
math remarking, "God does not play dice with the universe."
I once spoke with a Hindu physicist about this. I asked him whether he
tended toward a more personal or impersonal understanding of the divine
Brahman, the creator in Hinduism's trinity. "Oh, I believe I need to think
of God as personal, " he said.
Then he went on: "When I view the awesome glory of those 50 billion
galaxies strewn throughout this magnificent cosmos, when I look in the cloud
chambers at the paths of those unpredictable electrons, and when I see how
mathematical laws unite such an otherwise unfathomable array of natural
phenomena with such elegance and beauty, I just want to say 'thank you' to
someone."
The second book tells us whom to thank. This is the Book of Revelation,
not just the last book of the Bible but the whole Bible, wherein God's
promise for the future new creation is delivered to human ears ready to hear
it.
This promise is found in the prophets who look forward to a time when the
lion will lie down with the lamb. The promise is found in visions of the new
Jerusalem, wherein the river of life we left back in the Garden of Eden in
Genesis now runs through the downtown park of the heavenly city.
All this symbolic language directs our gaze toward a reality that is
promised, but not yet here. It points to the reality that became flesh for
the period of a single lifetime in ancient Israel, a fleshly reality which
the world could not tolerate; so it resorted to crucifixion.
God confirmed this reality when he raised the crucified one from the dead
on the first Easter, and promised that the whole cosmos would in the future
get its Easter too.
The idea of the Two Books leads us to treat nature as a text almost like
we treat the Bible as a text. In both cases we're looking for the author's
point of view, the author's social location.
Now, just who is the author? The scribes who took quill in hand and placed
ink on vellum? Yes, but that's not all. God is speaking in, with, and under
what is human and ideological and gives a perspective in the biblical text.
The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) used to say that the Bible is
the divine Word in human words. Something parallel happens when we treat
nature as a book. It takes place when we ask our scientific researchers to
help us understand the language of nature so we in turn can ask about its
transcendent author -- the one who utters the divine Word.
When this Word becomes flesh in that Bethlehem manger, the Prince of Peace
has come for a visit. The order of God is finally the order of peace. The
promise of new creation embodied in the Prince of Peace is the divine
promise that the laws of nature are aiming toward peace in the cosmos.
And the promise of cosmic peace translates into our mandate to realize
that peace on our planet, to bring peace on earth. The present creation
strains after the new creation, where we will find peace even between
deconstructionist and holist postmodernists. |
