science, Christianity and … Islam?

various medieval Islamic figures and scholars

I’ve been trying to get behind the popular account of the rise of modern science — in which science is said either to have emerged as it shook off the dogmatic slumber of faith or to be fundamentally indebted to the recovery of explicitly Christian beliefs (especially belief in the world as God’s creation).

Colin Gunton’s Triune Creator has been massively helpful. Especially in underscoring the story’s many complexities. But it’s been The Copernican Revolution, Thomas Kuhn’s landmark intellectual history of astronomy, that I’ve found most compelling.

Kuhn’s discussion of the role of Islam has particularly piqued my curiosity. In Chapter 4, Kuhn charts the changing way the Aristotelian framework was inherited over the course of thirteen centuries. And he makes the following points about Islam:

• The Islamic invasion of Mediterranean in the seventh century contributed to the decline (or hibernation) of Western learning that marked the ‘Dark Ages’. It did so by shifting Europe’s intellectual centre of gravity northward. And, crucially, it resulted in many important documents and manuscripts being ‘lost’ to the West.
• However, the very same geopolitical shifts resulted in the new Islam empire appropriating the intellectual heritage of the West. This allowed for the preservation and proliferation — through translation and commentary — of ancient texts and learning, as well as providing invaluable stimulus to Arabic scholars in making significant scientific advances all of their own.
• The transmission of the deposit of ancient learning from medieval Islamic to European scholars began (in the late Middle Ages) affected its form. Generations of debate were telescoped in their reception into one, more or less coherent body of timeless wisdom. Modern science developed within this context — and partly in reaction to its newly visible tensions and fissures.

How’s that for complicating the story!

conversation and the rhythms of friendship

Over the past few weeks Natalie and I have been blessed to spend lots of time with some old friends: first we had a week in Sydney, then my brother and his wife stayed with us last weekend, and most recently a bunch of friends visited Melbourne and stayed with us. It’s been a blast. But it’s also led me to dwell on the great privilege of friendship and the gift of conversation.

We’ve had some terrific conversations. You know the ones — personal, illuminating, sprawling (in terms of the time it takes for them to follow their winding and ever-interruptible course as well as in terms of their expansiveness), full of good humour and tantalising glimpses of new possibilities for thinking, feeling and acting…

The Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris is perfectly equipped for conversation

What’s been especially lovely about our conversations has been how they’ve resonated with what Ben Myers recently had to say about silence, conversation and friendship:

Silence is not the phenomenon that ensues when language reaches its limit, much less some primordial pre-linguistic abyss from which language subsequently emerges. In the company of a close friend, I sometimes find myself reduced to silence. Not because the relationship is wordless (nothing is more verbose than friendship), but because in friendship one can never say enough; the real goal of friendship is to talk your way into silence.

This might help further characterise the unique — and uniquely humanising — ‘rhythm’ of friendship in an age of economics, which philosopher Todd May points out in his online opinion piece for The New York Times.

According to May, this rhythm marks off genuine friendship from both consumer relationships (which are all about pleasure in the moment) and entrepreneurial relationships (which are about investing for the future). At its heart this rhythm has everything to do with the way friendships are past-referring instead of looking towards what the relationship can do for us now or in the future. And yet they’re never simply past-referring. Genuine friendships always ‘live’ for us, generating — and promising to keep generating — meaning in all sorts of unanticipated ways.

This, I think, is why I’ve found recent conversations with our dear friends so delightful. Deeply rooted in shared experience, they’ve continually opened up new vistas of possibility. What a precious gift!

I promise this isn’t a Morbid Fascination With Death thing…

…but you have to check out this quote. It’s Colin Gunton commenting on how the goodness of our given/natural mortal constitution becomes that menacing predator, Death:

There is … a distinction to be drawn between death as the proper limit of our days on earth, and the death that breaks in to make them deadly; that which is the creator’s gift of limits to our days on earth, and that which turns that finitude into a threat of nothingness. Sin is that which causes the one to be the other, so that without Christ’s bearing of death upon the cross and the promise of resurrection, death as the cessation of all relationships, above all that with God, would be the final fact narrated of us, and so the final nullifying of God’s purposes in creation. (The Triune Creator, p 173)

There’s gold buried in them there sub-clauses!

a mystery that unlocks all others

It seems that the doctrine of the Trinity is something many Christians would rather keep out of sight (since it feels almost nonsensical to say that God is both one and three). It certainly wouldn’t be the leading foot in most gospel presentations. At best, it’s be something we learn a few ‘apologetic’ moves for — as a matter of damage control.

But I’m convinced this is fundamentally backwards and inside out. The Trinity may be hard to wrap your head around. But it’s a mystery that unlocks all other mysteries: explaining, for example, why we feel that relationships are the most real thing in the universe.

This, at least, is what I hope to convince people of in my Monday Night Training course in the first part of next semester. I’ve put together the following outline for the course:

1. Biblical foundations — How must Old Testament monotheism be adjusted in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ? And why should the doctrine of the Trinity motivate world mission?
2. The overlooked member of the Trinity? — Although the Spirit doesn’t often get big billing, the New Testament makes a big deal of the Spirit when it comes to how we enter into and progress in relationship with God.
3. The forgotten Father? — Putting Jesus at the centre doesn’t detract from the worship of the Father but actually establishes it. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, points us to the revelation of the Fatherhood as the goal of history.
4. Two early attempts to speak of God the Father, Son and Spirit — the early church fathers, Origen and Tertullian both tried to speak adequately of the Trinity; although their formulations proved disastrous when taken to their logical conclusions.
5. Getting the Trinity right (1) — In the Fourth Century, Athanasius (among others) helped us sort out how to preserve the gospel truth of Christ’s oneness with the Father by enlisting and reshaping Greek philosophical language about ‘being’.
6. Getting the Trinity right (2) — After Athanasius, the so-called Cappadocian fathers (e.g., Gregory Nazianzen) pushed the limits of human language to express the threeness of Father, Son and Spirit alongside their oneness.

Love to hear your thoughts.

disciplined creativity

It is a view familiar to most of us from kindergarten: creativity is a mysterious capacity that lies in each of us and merely needs to be “unleashed”. Creativity is what happens when people are liberated from the constraints of conventionality… The truth, of course, is that creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra).

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft, p51 (emphasis original).

A dress made for the delightful Elissa

I’m kind of glad my parents didn’t decide what activity I was going to ‘do’ as a kid, but let me try my hand at all sorts of sports and hobbies. I got to try my hand at stacks of different things: touch football, netball, waterpolo, dance, sewing, cooking, trombone, F Horn…

I had lots of fun and wasn’t pressured in an unhelpful way; I was a child of a generation in Australia raised to believe “keeping your options open” is the most  valuable state to be in.

The only thing my dad ever insisted I discipline myself to master was mathematics (perhaps this was because I was less willing at this particular endeavour than all the rest!). As I approach 30, there’s a little part of me that’s a bit sad I’m OK at lots of stuff, but not the master of any particular skill.

I really feel Crawford’s point when I’m in the kitchen or sitting at a sewing machine. I know my creativity is curtailed by my lack of mastery; I feel the latent, unrealised possibility. And so, I’m disappointed that this realisation so rarely drives me to submit myself to the discipline I need to learn.

where do I get my crackpot ideas about Genesis?

I think it might be about time to come clean on this — and admit that as whacky as they sound, my ideas about Genesis aren’t even particularly original. Check this out:

[T]he emphasis of Genesis 1.31 that what was made was “very good” reminds us that creation perfectly corresponded to the divine intention. This need not mean an absolutely perfect world stemmed from the actions of Genesis 1. It is possible that the world outside the garden setting of chapter 2 … needed to be brought completely under human control, since it may have contained all the difficulties which we experience in our natural world today. This suggestion raises difficulties, but the direction of biblical eschatology as well as the facts of human experience point to a consummation of history that is more than a mere return to the beginning.

Know who wrote this? Former Moore College Old Testament doyen, Bill Dumbrell — in The Faith of Israel (Second Edition, p 17).

He’s dead on. Even though the details of Genesis 1-2 provide the springboard, the decisive factor has got to be eschatology. If anything, it’s where the whole story God tells about his grace towards the world is headed that should push us in the sort of direction I’ve been exploring (although a few cameo appearances by ‘the facts of human experience’ won’t go astray either).

more on our creaturely limitations

I’m still working on my seminars for the La Trobe Christian Union mid-year Summit. I keep returning to the theme of our creaturely limitations (hence all the posting about death). In particular, this pesky little detail from Genesis 2 continues to goad me:

the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. (vv 7-8)

Blink and you miss it. Yet from what I can see, it’s fraught with meaning.

To begin with, the fact that God created Adam outside the Garden, and only subsequently placed him in it, seems to hint at the non-naturalness of the life our first parents enjoyed with God in the beginning. That is, existing within Garden context of life, order and harmony isn’t a basic human right, springing from something inherent and inalienable in us. Rather, it’s a gift of God’s grace.

One inference I want to draw from this concerns the naturalness of our creaturely limitations — and along with them our mortality.

That’s what I’m tempted to say. But as I’ve discussed this with the La Trobe staff team, I’ve been helped to see that this needs to be nuanced. You see, insisting on the naturalness of our mortality (without qualification) can start to sound like God’s original intention for humanity wasn’t actually for us to enjoy life in fellowship with him, the loving author and source of life.

Not only can this begin to make God appear like a mad scientist — creating human beings merely to toy with us, capriciously granting or withdrawing the gift of life on a whim. But it also risks suggesting that we’re not built for relationship with God. That what’s natural and right for us is something other than knowing and enjoying God forever.

Perhaps the way forward is to emphasise how we’re built for loving relationships (with God and each another). Although we’re not inherently immortal, in the context God intended us to inhabit, life — in humble dependence on God — is natural. Conversely, outside the context of loving relationships, we can’t possibly hope to enjoy life, let alone eternal life!

To borrow an illustration that’s famous around La Trobe Christian Union, we’re a bit like goldfish. Our natural habitat — the environment that makes for our life and flourishing — is the ‘water’ of loving relationships. Take us out of this context and, like a fish out of water, things go haywire because of the very same creaturely limitations that make for life in our natural habitat.