It was an earth-shattering moment when Nicolaus Copernicus presented the Christian (western) world with a heliocentric understanding of our solar system, To no longer find ourselves on a flat earth at the center of creation, with the vault of the heavens revolving around us and the infernal depths below us was not only dislocating where we were but also where God was in the scope of things and, more importantly, what our place in this emerging understanding of the universe is. When something that was held as fact for over a thousand years becomes a farce, everything associated with that farce is open to question.
In the multitude of discoveries that have dwarfed Copernicus' discovery in the centuries that followed, we find ourselves in a universe that has no center to speak of. A center can be anywhere, everywhere, or nowhere, which brings us back to Paul's use of the Greek poem to Zeus that defines God as that Being in which we live and move and have our being in Act 17. God is everywhere, but no one can point a finger and say this is the precise location where God dwells.
Was Paul just being clever by beating the Athenians at their own game in order to protect himself from being convicted of introducing a new religion within Athena's city or did Paul truly view God as a being we are part of? One can't be certain, but what is certain is that Paul entered that particular definition of God and us into the biblical record and it has become increasingly prevalent in today's understanding of who we are and who/what God is. In a universe that has no discernible center, Paul's definition of God as Being in which all beings exist is truly mind-bending and ahead of its time. Suddenly, we find ourselves connected to and proceeding from something beyond comprehension; something that exceeds the limits or limitlessness of the universe itself.
What Copernicus unintentionally accomplished was to reveal a crack in the theological certitude regarding the inerrancy scripture. Church authorities were stricken with justified fears that if people could no longer be certain about the inerrancy of scripture (i.e. that God could cause the Sun and Moon to stand still in Joshua 10) would they be certain about the Church's doctrines and dogmas derived from them and would it ultimately lead to questioning the authority of the Church's leadership? While there was some comfort for them in the fact that the vast majority of the people attending worship services remained illiterate, the handwriting was literally on the wall with the invention of the printing press and the ability to widely distribute information throughout Europe.
I think it safe to say that this fear remains to some extent intact today, and while science is more readily accepted, the crack that began with Copernicus' discovery has been widening into a canyon. While the inerrancy of scripture has been largely dismissed by most mainline denominations, the doctrines derived from an inerrant perspective of them remains largely unquestioned and untouched.
The bridge used to spanned the theological crack opened by Copernicus' discovery has been and continues to be ecclesial traditions; particularly, in liturgical churches, but as the gap widens that bridge is increasingly stretched beyond sustainability as long-held traditions in mainline churches devolve into traditionalism or concretized beliefs in the inerrancy of scripture in pentecostal or fundamentalist denominations as the last bastion against to fend off the findings of science and the intellectual advances in biblical research.
Our scriptures are sacred to the extent that they are our stories that speak of our relationship to each other within the context of the creation we live in and of the creative force which brought it into being, the source of being we call God. The Abrahamic scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, along with the scriptures of other religions are vital to understanding our story, the human story, and the meaning they give to our existence in the expansive and expanding universe we find ourselves in. They embody the core and foundational beliefs of who we are and what we are part of and belong to.
There is a need to orient our understanding of these ancient scriptures in the light of science and our contemporary life experiences. We need to look at them with fresh eyes that are not tethered to long-held traditional beliefs that insist on understanding and interpreting our scriptures in a particular ideological or theological way. While within these scriptures there is found a human theologic about who we are and who God is, there is a need to freely explore scripture objectively apart from it. The value such theologies within scripture contain is not in the concretized truth religious authorities assign to them, but rather that they exemplify the ever-evolving story of our endeavor to seek the truth and understand ourselves in light of our relational experience to each other, the world we live in, and the kenotic force that brought us into being, God.
Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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