God and Spirituality — Page 1

GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 1 God and Spirituality GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 2 Hindsfoot Foundation Series on Spirituality and Theology GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 3 God and Spirituality Philosophical Essays Glenn F. Chesnut GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 4 GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 5 Table of Contents Preface 1. The X-Factor in Conversion 2. Mount Sinai and the Burning Bush 3. The Taste of Pineapple: Words and Meaning 4. The Realm of the Sacred 5. The Mysterium Tremendum 6. The Ground of Being 7. The Sense of the Infinite 8. The Spirituality of an Impersonal Ground 9. The Cosmological and Epistemological Grounds 10. Paul Tillich: An Impersonal Ground of Being 11. Tillich and Einstein 12. The God-bearers and the Analogy of Being 13. Modern Personalist Philosophies of God 14. The Three Primal Hypostases 15. A Personal God: Love and Energy 16. A Personal God: Meaning and Logos 17. A Personal God: Will and the Arbitrary 18. The Turing Test: Discovering a Personal God 19. The Nature of Grace 20. Why the Future Cannot Be Totally Predicted 21. Self-Transcendence 22. The Faith of a Nomad 23. The Journey of Faith: the Railroad Man 24. The Chariot of the Soul Appendix: Time, Eternity, God’s Temporality, Love, and Immortality Notes Bibliography GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 6 Preface As a child, I came to believe that the natural sciences could provide the answers to the basic questions about life and the universe. I started reading everything I could about physics, electron- ics, and astronomy from the time I was twelve years old. I concen- trated on chemistry and nuclear physics when I did my undergrad- uate degree at the University of Louisville, and then went on to do half of the course work for a doctorate in physical chemistry with a subsidiary concentration in nuclear physics at Iowa State Universi- ty. I decided to go to seminary at that point, at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, but not because of any fundamental unhappiness with all the important truths which the physicists in particular had taught me about the universe. It was rather that I had begun to see that my very deepest concerns lay in a different area: that dimension of reality where human be- ings encounter overwhelming beauty, the dark tragedy of human evil, the judgment of God, and a vision of life lived as a vehicle of the divine love. God was pointing me in a different direction from the one in which I had been going. My four years at seminary, followed by doctoral work in theology at Oxford University, gave me my basic training in ancient Hebrew thought, the literature of the classical Greek period, and the world of the Roman empire: Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and pagan. After I returned to the United States, both the University of Virginia and Indiana University asked me on occasion to teach courses which dealt with the middle ages, which broadened my experience yet further and enabled me to learn some of the things about medieval theology and philosophy which I have written about in the following pages. GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 7 Several years after I retired from university teaching, the vari- ous chapters of this book were composed and put into something close to finished shape. The major part of this work was carried out over a period of a year and a half or so, between the summer of 2006 and the beginning of 2008. At that point, copies of the whole work were run off, and ten of us met every Thursday evening in Milford, Indiana, for a number of months to read through the entire text, paragraph by paragraph. My friends of many years, William E. Correll, Frank Nyikos, John Stark, and Karen Zurawski, were there every week, and Elizabeth Ann Downs-Lewis, Patsy A. Doty, Alisa Pratt, Jerry Smith, and Jere A. Wendt joined in to help out too. Many of us had to drive more than an hour each way over narrow country roads running across the Indiana prairies, sometimes through driving rain or knee-deep snow, trying to keep from running off the road, dodging (or sometimes failing to dodge) an errant deer, or slowing down to avoid a wandering prairie wolf. One evening several of us were startled by a mountain lion dashing across the road in front of us. But we showed up every week, read the book, debated it, and discussed it, sentence by sentence. My copy ended up full of hundreds of changes and revisions. What you hold in your hands now is the product of all those discussions. I hope you will find something in this volume which is useful to you. May God bless you. Grace and peace, Glenn F. Chesnut March 1, 2010 GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 8 Chapter 1 The X-factor in Conversion St. Augustine in the garden One of the most famous conversion stories from the ancient world was the account which Augustine, the great African saint, gave of his own conversion experience in his Confessions. It was August of the year 386, and he was in a garden, he tells us, lashed with internal torment, when suddenly he heard, coming from the other side of the garden wall, a small child singing over and over the same two words: Tolle, lege (“pick it up, read it”). Augustine went to a copy of the Apostle Paul’s New Testament epistles, opened it at random, and read the passage at Romans 13:13-14. “In an instant,” Augustine said, “as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” From this point on, he was a devoted Christian.1 Augustine abandoned his career at the imperial court and ended up as bishop of Hippo Regius, a small city on the coast of Afri- ca, where he wrote numerous books on philosophy and theology during the years which followed. At the end of his life, the Roman empire in the western end of the Mediterranean began to collapse under the weight of barbarian invasions from the north. One Ger- man tribe, the Vandals, carved a path of destruction through France and Spain and then crossed the straits of Gibraltar and began con- quering their way across North Africa. As Augustine lay on his GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 9 death bed, these savage German tribesmen were attacking the very city in which he lay dying. Augustine’s books survived however, and during the long Dark Age which followed, his writings became the basis of all Roman Catholic theology. The Protestant Reformers in the six- teenth century saw themselves, not as innovators, but as conserva- tives who were putting western European theology back on its tra- ditional Augustinian basis. In the modern period, anyone who knows Augustine well, who reads the first 164 pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, can see an almost pure Augustin- ian spirituality forming its underlying structure: a doctrine of sin and salvation in which pride and the human attempt to play God are portrayed as the root cause of all human misery. Augustine has been for centuries the most influential Christian thinker outside of the New Testament itself. The first time I read Augustine’s story of his conversion in the garden after he had turned to Romans 13:13-14, I went to my own bible and read that entire section of the epistle to the Romans, searching for something that might make sense of such a dramatic change of heart, and turned away feeling completely disappointed. It is true that, particularly if we read verses eleven and twelve as well, it is a call to changing one’s life totally. And some of the specifics in there certainly applied to Augustine, who had been a great Latin lover, who could not stay away from the ladies, and knew that he would never be able to be faithful to a wife: And you know that this is the crucial moment, because it is already the hour for you to wake from sleep. For our salvation is very near .... the night is almost gone and day is at hand. So let us put aside the works of darkness and clothe ourselves in the armor of light. Let us walk about in the daylight like decent people, not partying and getting drunk, GLENN F. CHESNUT — GOD AND SPIRITUALITY — PAGE 10 not sleeping around without sexual restraint, not quarreling and fighting. Instead, clothe yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not plan your deeds to satisfy the desires of your flesh. But Augustine had read any number of biblical passages like this one before, and had also had his mother Monica preaching the same kinds of things at him for years. I could not see any way that this particular passage could have conveyed any fresh new insight. It was not a revelation of any kind of new or profound idea, which could have perhaps opened someone’s eyes and given that person a whole different perspective. In the almost forty years since, I have read and heard any number of attempts at a psychological explanation for this decisive crisis in Augustine’s life, and the nature of its resolution. Alt- hough the best of these add a measure of depth to our understand- ing of the psychological pressures that must have been present in his mind,2 none of them would “explain” conclusively why his conversion took place at that precise moment, and in the direction it did — unless we assume, as some of these explainers unfortu- nately do, that Augustine was an extremely dull-witted and simple- minded person with little or no insight into either his own or anyone else’s motivations and inner thoughts and desires.

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