PREFACE Does God Have a Big Toe? (Pages 1 - 13)

PREFACE Does God have a Big TOE? We are called to be in the world. Not of it. But not out of it, either.1 This book holds the mirror to a single paradox: We must live the historical moment we are in without letting that moment explain us. Christianity must bring to every culture an indigenous faith that is true to its heritage without Christianity’s becoming a culture faith. If every book has one idea, this is it for the one you are reading. The cardinal sin for modernity has been antiintellectualism, a dissenting spirit against celebrating the powers of the mind that has gripped large segments of the Christian church. The sin governing much of the church today may be ahistoricalism or antihistoricalism. Large segments of the Christian community, finding the intellectual and social company of modernism more congenial than that of postmodernism, are in retreat, having disconnected from the unprecedented, restructuring changes taking place all around them. The Christian mind is failing to comprehend the times, our times. The New Light apologetic chronicled in this book is devoted to enfranchising and energizing Christians to connect their faith with the indigenous historical place in which God has chosen them to live. It aims to jolt Christians into a sense of their own time, out of their fashionable out-of-itness. For the God who exists beyond time is the God who lives, moves, and has being in this time. The ultimate hospitality is, then, an entertainment of divine mystery in human life. Benedictine/biblical scholar Demetrius R. Dumm This book also hopes to provide a prefacing sketch of what a sixth alternative to ethicist/theologian H. Richard Niebuhr’s fivefold typology of what the relationship of Christian faith to human culture would look like : a Johannine paradoxical model of Christ in-but-not-of culturc.2 Missiologists have become quite sophisticated in the task of Paul’s missionary mandate to “be all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22). The gospel has been inculturated into the thousands of indigenous cultures around the world through the latest in Bible translation, theological analogy and homology, 1 and spiritual disciplines respectful of the local traditions and customs of the native inhabitants. But missiology must also be defined to extend ethnographically in time as well as in space. It will not do to have a multicultural but monochronological church. The missionary expansion of the gospel today is as much generational and chronological as it is geographical. In the same way Jesus entered into the culture of his day in complex ways; in the same way Paul in front of Areopagus presented the gospel to the Athenians by quoting two of their own poets (Epimenides and Aratus of Crete): so the church is to be a dialoguing fellow traveler with culture, exhibiting a critical but not unfriendly relationship to history.3 The body of Christ must be in conversation with the body of knowledge of every day. Out of context, divorced from indigenous space and time, spirituality is but another word for a sauna. This radical opening to God in trust; this constant process of historical incontextualization; this acceptance of the strange, the new, even the unwanted: these are the essences of the Gospel of John’s interactive, paradoxical in-but-not-of model. The New Light apologetic, like Abraham in Genesis 18, greets all historical guests, even the unwanted ones, cheerfully and expansively, open to the God who is already at work in the world, the God who will not be without a witness. From this position of hospitality, faith addresses the wider public culture, the world beyond the church. In fact, our world of historical and intellectual experience becomes a primary arena for the church’s own search for truth and faithfulness.4 The church must be able to exist in both temporal and eternal time, to function at once historically and transcendentally. The challenge of an in-but-not-of faith is knowing when to stand, timeless and transcendent as a rock, and when to surrender and let go, releasing oneself to be swept along by the relevant currents. A believer can become postmodern, or modern, or anything else because in one’s innermost core of being a believer is neither postmodern, nor modern, nor anything else. The deep sense of being in the world is matched only by an even deeper sense of not being at one with the world. That the title may not deceive: this book is rife with science, but science it most definitely is not. Neither “quantum” nor “spirituality” are words I use easily or comfortably. Biochemist/information theorist Jeffrey S. Wicken, in calling for theology and science to enter into dialogue, admits that “I feel diffident about commenting on theological treatises. I know little about theology, and much of my commentary will reflect that fact. This disdainer having been made, I put aside the diffidence.”5 Switch the words “theology” and “science,” and Wicken’s statement expresses my uneasiness exactly. My presentation of scientific ideas is sketchy, often willfully so. If your interest is in extended treatments of particular scientific fields and discoveries, or if you are naysayers to the quest for integration and synthesis, you should be warned to please look elsewhere. This book will be found in breach of 2 contract. Similarly, if you are looking for a conventional, calculated treatment of topics related to spirituality, please pick up any number of good books racked together with this one on library stacks. “If you are going to understand anything as strange as quantum mechanics,” looking-glass physicist/philosopher David Bohm has remarked, “you have to be ready to consider some strange ideas.”6 The late physicist/mountain climber Heinz R. Pagels calls the current state of reality “quantum weirdness.”7 The modern mind will find in this book some weird notions and nervy possibilities. Even the logic is sometimes less linear than cousinly. If our senses were fine enough, we would experience the slumbering cliff as a dancing chaos. Moralist/philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Nor is this a historian’s accounting of scientific trends and developments as they impinge on theological and ethical issues. While I can discriminate between good and bad theology, or good and bad history, I confess to being virtually defenseless against scientific books, and one of the most defenseless against studies in math and physics. More a wide-eyed admirer than a squinting scholar of science, the reader will soon discover that I enjoy the company of the mathematicians and scientists insofar as I can follow them. which too many times is not very far. My learning curve gets left far behind far too quickly and far too often. Besides, whole South American rain forests have been felled in pursuit of the religious and philosophical implications of quantum physics. True, this fat bibliography has almost all been produced by physicists or students of physics: Nathan Aviezer, Ian G. Barbour, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Freeman J. Dyson, Arthur Stanley Eddington, John L. Hitchcock, Henry Margenau, Denis Postle, Robert John Russell, Rustum Roy, Brian Swimme, Stephen Toulmin, Danah Zohar, Gary Zukav. Unfortunately, little of this literature is known or celebrated in the religious community, although British theologians are more and more bringing together the new queen of the sciences, biophysics, and the queen mother, theology, as symbolized in the physicist-turned- Anglican-priest John C. Polkinghorne, the physicist/ mathematician-turned-Methodist-lay preacher Charles A. Coulron, the nuclear physicist-turned-Episcopal priest William G. Pollard, and the physical biochemist-turned-Anglican-priest Arthur R. Peacocke. Designed to be read and appreciated on many levels, Quantum Spirituality is a hybrid work. After the fashion of that “deconstructive angel of contemporary thought,”8 Jacques Derrida, it is written in a genre that is oddly mixed. Part intellectual curiosity, part synthetic bridging, part guided tour through a vast bibliography, part theological rumination, part “preach- 3 ing it round,” it is fundamentally a roundabout apologetic exercise i standing inside history and “getting looped”--upping the ante of theology to enter wholesale worlds like that of the quantum, the realm most scientists believe to be the most fundamental level of reality. I risk the criticisms come to all who combine genres, who mix metaphors, who cross disciplines, who refuse to be confined to the questions addressed by a single metaphor of mind or discipline of inquiry because I have been inspired by historian/ literary critic Richard E. Brantley. His key insight into the secret of the theology that fueled the eighteenth-century New Light movement known a~ the Evangelical Revival is this: It brought together into shared space the Enlightenment project (the scientific method and rational empiricism) witL natural and revealed religion.9 I think scientists and theologians have a lot more to say to each other in talking about the sources of the religious drive and the hunger for religious thought. Sociobiologist/sometime Southern Baptist Edward O. Wilson Unfortunately, the church is still under the scientific spell of old teachings that science itself has long since repudiated. By its own modernist standards, the church is not intellectually respectable. Too many theologians and pastors seem almost proud that they can’t address the religious significance of t = 0 and have never heard of thermodynamics. I am not so much sticking my bead into the wisps and vapors of

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