Instead of invoking mystery concerning God, the
world, and humanity, we make up a story. In good human primate fashion we long
for, even demand, clarity and explanation for life. Yet, even at the best of
times, this escapes us, so story telling becomes a vehicle for diversion and
catharsis, which appropriately takes the place of the frustration with the
unknown.
A bounded or unquestionable theology is fast losing, as it should, believability. Many Christians may be open to engaging with cultural and philosophical ideas, but when it comes to theology, they shut down. If this doesn’t change, people will turn away. Thus, it is now more important than ever to recall that theology is not static and has to be in dialogue with other informers, if it is to maintain credibility in our times. As new information hits the universities and the streets, including the monumental immensity of the universe and the possibility that there’s more than one; DNA developments that seem to indicate more strongly than ever that humans evolved; neuroscience discoveries concerning how the human brain functions and some of the implications of that for selfhood and religious belief, we’re eventually going to see the unavoidable impact, and rightly so, on how we view God. There is far, far, more to learn about who this God character is, not least in the vast related and distinct mega stories of the natural world and the biblical text.
The blows of counter theism expressed by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and others, while prolific and challenging, have not extinguished the light. And this is but one “sign of force” that continues to affirm the elasticity and resilience of the faith, which is able to absorb “counters” and to carry illumination to new levels.
When our faith in God configuration is rigid and brittle, we’re going to be in for significant problems. As new ideas surface and gain traction, particularly with respect to the natural world informer, an inflexible paradigm will produce fear rather than engagement. Unbending formulations of God, self, other, and world are unsustainable. They will be credibly forced to make a hasty retreat in due honesty, as protecting and deferring play the role of a meta-narrative – a totalizing story that explains everything – which suddenly or gradually collapses and is shown up to be what it always was: an illusion. Christians don’t want to embrace illusions, but a real world that makes sense, on the levels that we can understand it. Thus, a flexible, more elastic perspective for faith in God is the way forward, since it’s open to fresh data and to refiguring a life-view.
