[This essay, slightly revised, appeared in the March 2004 issue of The Seinan Theological Review (Vol. 61) of Seinan Gakuin University, where I served as a full-time professor from September 1968 until September 2004.]
Around the time of my sixtieth birthday, I compiled a list of ten modern theologians and philosophers who have most influenced my theological thinking, listing them chronologically in the order of their birth. During the last three years I have not only re-read much written by but also much written about the first three thinkers on this list. In the two previous issues of this journal, I have written review essays on the first two, namely, Blaise Pascal[1] and Søren Kierkegaard.[2]
The third thinker on my list is the German theologian, Karl Heim. I was first introduced to Heim and his book Christian Faith and Natural Science when I was a college student. Later, during my undergraduate days in seminary, I was introduced more fully to Heim’s significant philosophical and theological thinking by Dr. Eric C. Rust, who later became my major professor in graduate school. Dr. Rust, who studied science in the Royal College of Science in London before studying theology, was quite fond of Karl Heim’s work on science and religion, and I came to appreciate the thought of both.[3]
A few years after joining the faculty at Seinan Gakuin University in 1968, one of my first writing projects was a lengthy essay, in Japanese, on what I called Karl Heim’s apologetic philosophy. Although written in English rather than Japanese, this review essay seeks to augment that three-part essay I wrote in the 1970s by summarizing three of Heim’s books that were not dealt with there. In the second part of this essay, I review some of the books written by one of Heim’s admirers, Professor Hans Schwarz, who remains as probably the leading “Heimian” in the world today, as well as a book by one of Schwarz’s students, Mark William Worthing, who has continued the Heimian emphasis to a certain degree. In the final part of this essay, I critique books by three contemporary thinkers who deal with the same problem that Heim dealt with most earnestly, that is, the relationship of the Christian faith to contemporary thought, especially contemporary thought as seen in the world of the natural sciences.
The Main Writings of Karl Heim
Karl Heim was born in Germany in 1874. He received his doctorate in theology at Tübingen in 1905, and he was Professor of Systematic Theology in Tübingen from 1920 until his retirement in 1939. Heim died in 1958, leaving a rich legacy of theological work, much of it done in dialogue with the natural sciences.
Heim’s magnum opus was his six-volume Der evangelische Glaube und das Denken der Gegenwart (Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought). The titles of these six volumes in German and in English translation and the years of their publication are as follows: Glaube und Denken (1931, 1934, 1937) [God Transcendent (1935)], Jesus der Herr (1935, 1938, 1955) [Jesus the Lord (1959)], Jesus der Weltvollender (1937) [Jesus the World’s Perfecter (1959)], Der christlichen Gottesglaube und die Naturwissenschaft (1949) [Christian Faith and Natural Science (1953)], Die Wandlung im naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild (1951) [The Transformation of the Scientific World View (1953)], and Weltschöpfung und Weltende (1952, 1958) [The World: Its Creation and Consummation (1962)]. In the conclusion of the latter volume, Heim states the underlying purpose of this six-volume work:
The aim of the whole work from the beginning was to proclaim the Gospel of the redeeming power of Christ to a world which to a large extent rejects and contests this Gospel” (p. 151).
As my three-part essay in the 1970s was largely based on the first, fourth, and fifth of Heim’s six-volume series, this review essay will focus mostly on the other three volumes. However, some reference needs to be made to Heim’s first volume, for it forms the basis for all of the subsequent works. He wrote at the conclusion of his sixth volume, “The whole of the first volume was primarily an attempt to give the Gospel of Christ a universally intelligible foundation” (The World, p. 151).
In the author’s preface to the third edition of Glaube und Denken (1934), he states clearly that the focus of this book is upon “the question which in our time needs more than any other to be made clear: What is the truth about the transcendence of God, and how is this transcendence different from any transcendence within the sphere of this world” (God Transcendent, p. xviii).[4]
The basis of Heim’s “apologetic philosophy” lies in his utilization of the analogy of dimension to describe the relationships in which we humans are all involved. In this connection he employs a new concept of space, using some of the key ideas developed by his contemporary, Martin Buber (1878~1965). By developing the idea of I-Thou space and I-It space, Heim seeks to elucidate what is meant by transcendence in general and the transcendence of God in particular.
In this work, Heim contends that “the concept of polarity is quite clear and recognizable to us at every moment.” But he also suggests that there could be “another sort of space which does not have this polar structure,” and he calls that supra-polar space. He avers: “If there is supra-polar space, though, this cannot be objected to by our intellect, which is limited to polar space. Further, the only way there can be contact between different forms of space is by some form of revelation” (The World, p. 154).[5]
The last chapter of Heim’s seminal book is entitled, “The Transcendence of God,” and here he argues that “whatever we may say regarding His nature, God stands over against the whole ‘I-Thou-It’ world which has hitherto confronted us, an indivisible unity, as something Wholly Other” (p. 187). As the Wholly Other, God is “not only the Creator, but also the Lord” (p. 208). This is Heim’s confession of faith which forms the basis for his subsequent books, especially the three introduced below.
Jesus the Lord
In 1935, the year after the third edition of Glaube und Denken was published—as well as two years after Hitler’s rise to power— the first edition of Jesus der Herr was published in Germany. On the last page of the earlier book, Heim states: “We stand before One Who is not to be reached directly by any inference from given reality. We stand before the ‘Unknown God’” (p. 226). It is not surprising, then, that the first part of Jesus the Lord is called “The ‘Unknown God,’ the Negative Condition for an Understanding of the Sovereign Authority of Christ.” Jesus’ sovereign authority is the central theme of this book, whose subtitle is The Sovereign Authority of Jesus and God’s Revelation in Christ.
Heim makes no explicit reference to Kierkegaard, but the first section of his book, and seen in the preface before that, is quite Kierkegaardian. In the preface, the German theologian talks about the decisive either-or: the human necessity of “either having to entrust our whole life to Him [Jesus Christ] or passionately having to reject Him” (p. v).
One of the key ideas of God Transcendent is that of polarity, and Heim develops that theme in this second volume of his six-part series. He refers to “the law of polarity” (p. 11)[6] and “the universal principle of polarity” (p. 19). Then, in the third chapter, he distinguishes between thought that comes from humans and thought that comes to humans, emphasizing that “our thought cannot arrive at this second possibility unless something happens that puts our whole polar way of thinking out of joint” (p. 23). This sounds very much like Kierkegaard’s understanding of paradox. And it is in this connection that Heim introduces God as “non-polar Reality” (ibid.). Or, stating the matter differently, “God is beyond all polarity” (p. 24).[7]
In explaining the meaning of the supra-polarity of God, Heim avers: “Between the Creator and the creature there is an infinite qualitative distinction” (p. 26)—but there is no reference to Kierkegaard, although the latter phrase is one the Danish philosopher often used. Further, as Kierkegaard did in other words, Heim also emphasizes that in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, there is “the meeting between time and eternity, between the supra-polar space of God and the polar world in which we live” (The World, p. 155).
“Part Two” is entitled, “The Sovereign Authority of Christ,” and in these forty pages Heim talks about the meaning of the confession, “Jesus is Lord.” Heim’s own confession is that “in Christ the hidden meaning of creation is revealed to us” (p. 50). Here again Heim presents the reader with an either/or:
When Jesus is witnessed to as ‘the Lord,’ then there are only two possibilities as regards this testimony. Either it rests on a mistake. . . .
Or the claim of Jesus rests on truth (p. 60).
Heim talks of Jesus as Leader—and this is in contrast to the “misleader” of Nazi Germany (p. 59).[8] The need for a leader also comes from the breakdown of German Idealism. These ideas lead into the third part of this book: “Original Sin as the Deepest Reason Why We Need a Leader.”
In this section of the book, Heim also insists that “God is out of reach of our polar perception, imagination and thought. He can never become the object of our thinking” (p. 89). That is why we have to have a Leader, and Jesus is the Leader we need, according to Heim. And he goes on to assert that the whole life of Jesus “is a war with God’s mortal enemy, Satan” (p. 90).
The last section of this book is called, “God’s Revelation in Christ,” and Heim first writes about the “incomprehensible fact” that “God has given us a Leader to whom we can cleave in the ultimate question of life” (p. 139). Heim goes on to assert again that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God, and in the 21st chapter he writes about “our contemporariness with Christ”—another Kierkegaardian theme, although there is no explicit reference to Kierkegaard in the chapter.[9] He ends this book by saying that what the “thou” relationship “to the Leader given to us in the Kyrios means to the belief in the reconciliation and the consummation of the world” will be discussed in the third volume of the series.
Jesus the World’s Perfecter
The subtitle of this third volume of Heim’s Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought is The Atonement and the Renewal of the World, and the first part is mainly about human guilt. “Part Two” is about “the Redeemer” and there Heim contends that the passion story of Jesus is “not a contest between two limited powers measuring their strength on the level of the polar world” (p. 100); rather, “in the contest between God and Satan two supra-polar powers meet one another, each of whom can exist only by claiming the whole of Reality for himself” (p. 101). However, the Gospel of the
supra-human and incomprehensible power of the love of the Father who so loved the world that he gave His Son for it, while in satanic hatred of God it wanted to destroy Him, that is the message which God’s Church has to bring to the world. That is the precious, inalienable treasure of the Church (p. 119).
This message of good news, moreover, is directly related to the idea that Jesus is also “the world’s perfecter,” the title of the third and longest section of this book. Jesus’ perfecting of the world is the result of his resurrection and “the public seizure of power by Christ,” which is the title of the 20th chapter. Then in the final chapter of “Part Three, “with the perfecting of the world by Christ,” Heim contends that all I-Thou relationships are fulfilled. Thus, “If God is to be all in all then this whole pilgrimage is a pilgrimage to God. All things come to rest in Him. The polarity of the movement of time ceases in Him” (p. 199).
The final part of this book is about “the Church of Christ,” which Heim sees as a “unique new organism which forms the beginning of the coming perfection of the world” (p. 227). And so, this book ends with far more theological reflection upon the Christian faith than upon the relationship of that faith to contemporary thought. While this is a fine theology book, of the six books in the Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought series, it is the one that is least related to the central theme expressed in the title of this essay.
The World: Its Creation and Consummation
Following these two books which set forth some of the central content of the Christian faith, Heim’s next two books are particularly about contemporary thought as found in the natural sciences. In these volumes, Heim continues to talk about the importance of recognizing the reality of a supra-polar space. Then the final book of the six-part series, whose subtitle is The End of the Present and The Future of the World in The Light of the Resurrection, was first published in 1952 when Heim was 78 years old. While writing the second edition of this work, from which the English translation comes, Heim was suffering from heart disease and could only work propped up at his desk, and for only an hour a day, but it is a meritorious volume and a satisfactory completion of his life’s work[10]
“Part One” of this rather slim volume is entitled, “The Origin of the World,” and the first chapter is about “The Scientific View of the Origin of the World.” Heim here argues that the universe is not infinite; rather it is “a unified whole. It is no shoreless sea, but something self-contained, with a definite weight and a measurable size” (p. 8). He also asserts: “The bold dream of the philosophers that the world is eternal seems to have become improbable today” (p. 24). Thus, he talks about the fact that the universe is expanding and that it may have been produced “by a primitive explosion” (p. 25), and he says that as we look at the evolutionary process, “we can trace the footprints of the Creator” (p. 32).
In this important first chapter, Heim also contends that the history of life on this earth is “not just a chaos, a confused and aimless criss-cross of conflicting tendencies. Rather it is controlled as a whole by a great plan and a uniform system” (pp. 34-5). Moreover, it is “a plan designed by a creative spirit” (p. 35). At the end of the chapter, he again asserts that “the family tree of organic life . . . constitutes not a chaos of aimless and confused developments, but a planned ascent” (p. 56).
The second chapter of “Part One” is “The Creation of the World According to the Bible.” Using the ideas developed in the first volume of this series, Heim here says that the world of polarity was a result of the creativity of God, “who exists in a supra-temporal and so in a supra-polar way.” Thus, God’s creation is “an implantation from the supra-polar space into the space of polarity, or to put it more simply, an implanting from eternity into time (p. 58).
This book has only two parts, plus a nine-page summary of the six-volume work, and the second part is entitled, “The Future of the World.” Similar to Part One, the first chapter in this section is “The Future of the World as Foreseen by Natural Science.” Here, Heim writes about the importance of the second principle of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy. He concludes that the whole world “is faced with the fate of total annihilation. . . . the entropy of the universe increases relentlessly all the time” (p. 100). This is the basis for the development of what has been called scientific eschatology.
The second chapter in Part Two is “The Future of the World in the Light of the Gospel of the Resurrection.” Here the world is depicted as “God’s fallen creation.” In this state, nature and the world of humankind are “affected through and through by a discordance. Heim describes this discordance by referring to “the universal law of polarity” (p. 101).
Heim contends that the Christian hope is that the whole of creation will be liberated from “the bondage of corruption.” This hope envisions a move from the polar state of the present world into the supra-polar state in which God is “all in all.” In this realm, “the whole of reality exists in a way very different from its existence in the realm of world time. For in God there is neither before nor after. In God everything . . . is an eternal moment” (pp. 117-8).
In summary, Heim asserts that
we are faced with a final option between two possibilities which now alone are left. The first is the radical hopelessness of nihilism, for which the whole course of the present world is merely an episode, which appears out of nothingness and disappears again into nothingness, leaving not a trace behind. The second possibility is the universal faith of Easter, brought into the world by the Early Church and still living today on its witness. According to this Easter faith, the course of this world is not a mere episode, but the prelude or prologue to the new state of the world, which alone gives a final eternal meaning to our personal life and also to the life of the nations (p. 149).
So, at the end of his series on Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought, Heim concludes with a strong appeal for his readers to consider the either/or presented by Christian faith. He has sought, admirably, through the six volumes of this series to show how Christian faith can dialogue with contemporary thought, especially contemporary scientific thought, without forfeiting either the content of that faith or intellectual honesty. In this way, having been exposed to such significant ideas as a college student, and then as a seminarian, I was led to believe, as I still earnestly do, that it is entirely possible both to have faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and to be intellectually honest in the contemporary world.
Karl Heim and the Work of Hans Schwarz
The German theologian Hans Schwarz seems to have done more than any other contemporary theologian to keep the theological legacy of Karl Heim alive. Schwarz (b. 1939) earned the Dr. theol. degree from Erlangen University in 1963 and was ordained into the Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in 1966. From 1967 to 1981 he was on the faculty of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, and since 1981 Schwarz has been Professor/Professor Emeritus of Theology (Systematic Theology and Contemporary Issues) at Regensburg University, Germany. He has also served as Director of the Institute of Protestant Theology at the same university during this time. In addition, Schwarz has been an active member in the Karl Heim Gesellschaft (Karl Heim Society), serving as president of that organization from 1988 to 2002, and editing the Society’s yearbook, Glaube und Denken (Faith and Thought), which was first published in 1988.[11]
Many of Schwarz’s books have been published in English—some written in English and others translated from the German. In addition to the books reviewed in this section, his numerous works include: Our Cosmic Journey (1977), Beyond the Gates of Death (1981), The Christian Church (1982), Responsible Faith: Christian Theology in the Light of 20th-Century Questions (1986), What Christians Believe (1987), Method and Context as Problems for Contemporary Theology (1991), Evil (1995), True Faith in the True God (1996), Christology (1998), and Creation (2002).
On the Way to the Future
This is Schwarz’s first book to be published in English, and it is an excellent book. The subtitle of this work, which was published in 1972, is A Christian View of Eschatology in the Light of Current Trends in Religion, Philosophy, and Science. Thus, in seeking to relate the Christian faith to contemporary thought, Schwarz deals with more than natural science in this work.
Part I is mainly a summary of the Old and New Testament views of eschatology, and then the third chapter, the first of Part II, summarizes the “Present Discussion of Eschatology,” from Albert Schweitzer to the positions of Jürgen Moltmann, Johannes Metz, and others who were writing on this theme in the 1960s. Most of the material in this book is also included in Eschatology (2000), one of Schwarz’s more recent books, but in the fourth chapter, “Eschatology and Science,” which does not appear in Eschatology, he discusses “the evolutionary approach of Teilhard de Chardin” and then “the dimensional approach of Karl Heim” (pp. 119~123).[12] In this latter section, Schwarz asserts that “Heim is the only Protestant theologian of stature who chose as his task to bridge the chasm between theology and natural science” (pp. 119-120).[13]
“What Can We Hope For?” is the title of Part III, and in the sixth chapter, which is entitled, “Death and Beyond,” Heim is referred to a couple of times. The more important of those references appears in the subsection entitled, “The eternity of God as fulfillment of time.” There Schwarz states:
If time is on its way toward perfection, we can neither envision eternity as endless, infinite time, nor as the end of time in the sense of continuous rest or quiescence. Eternity is rather the fulfillment of time in perfection. This means that all the life-impairing effects of time will be overcome. Transition, suffering, decay, and death are all inextricably connected with temporality and change (p. 188).
And then in a footnote Schwarz adds: “This has been pointed out especially well by Karl Heim in his book The World: Its Creation and Consummation” (p. 199, fn. 78).[14]
“The New World to Come” is the name of the last chapter, and in it Heim is referred to on one page as well as in a footnote on the following page—and the same references are found in Eschatology (pp. 388-9). In the former, which is in a short section about the “consummation of the world,” Schwarz points out that “the final heat death through an equilibrium of all energy levels, to which Karl Heim alluded, would not lead to the consummation of the world, but only to the end of life within it” (p. 214). But then he goes on to talk about the “new world,” and he asserts that a foretaste of this new world “is already given to us in the witnesses of those who encountered the resurrected Christ”—and this is the point at which he makes the footnote reference to Heim’s Jesus the World’s Perfecter.
Thus, while there are not extensive references to Heim in this book by Schwarz, the contemporary German theologian, much of the content is in accord with Heim’s ideas, and the influence Heim has had on Schwarz seems evident.
The Search for God
The full title of Schwarz’s second major book in English, published in 1975, is The Search for God: Christianity—Atheism—Secularism—World Religions. The first part of this book is entitled, “God or No God?” and is about modern atheism; about the non- religious solution as seen in Barth’s fight against religion, in Bonhoeffer’s non-religious interpretation and in the “death of God” theologians, and in the proponents of secularization, Friedrich Gogarten and Harvey Cox; and about the traditional arguments for the existence of God, process theology, and the theological ideas of Wolfhart Pannenberg. There are a couple of footnote references to Heim in this section, the first (on p. 20) being to Glaube und Leben (1926), a book written before the first volume of Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought,[15] and the second being on page 27 where Schwarz introduces the first law of thermodynamics and then makes reference to The World, pages 85ff. Schwarz comments that there Heim “points out the ideological implications that can be drawn from Mayer’s law of the conservation of energy” (p. 210).
In Part II, entitled “A Search for Ultimates,” one subsection in the third chapter is entitled, “Man’s yearning for a new dimension,” and Schwarz contends that the “why?” questions such as “why am I here? and: why should I go this way and not another way?” threaten human existence (p. 88). At this point he has a footnote reference to Heim’s Christian Faith and Natural Science, and in that footnote Schwarz comments that Heim “has emphasized more than anyone else the inescapable and bewildering nature of these why-questions” (p. 226).
The third and final part of this book contains two chapters on the theme “God’s Self-Disclosure in the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” and there is no reference to Heim in this section. At the end, though, there is a brief summary of the whole book, and in a Heimian (and Kierkegaardian) mode Schwarz there emphasizes: “. . . we have investigated the attempts to prove God’s existence and realized in each instance that at best we can arrive at an either-or, God is or is not” (p. 204). And then in the last paragraph he concludes with the following statement that sounds Heimian at first—but then goes beyond Heim’s emphases. Schwarz asserts that
true humanity always implies the God question, the search for true humanity also calls for the unashamed witness to God who disclosed himself in Jesus Christ as the origin and the goal of history, a history that without him is dark and ultimately without meaning. Yet in a secular and pluralistic world, apologetics and proclamation dare not be the only expression of Christian faith. The most important contact is often first made through action. People will rightly lose curiosity in the presence of the Christian witness if the believing community shows no regard for the world as it is and if it does not move in the world in a way congruent with its profession. Our profession as a Christian community, however, is to respond to God’s great and continuous invitation in a faith made active in love. Such response will not remain unheard.[16]
God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics
This book is not by Hans Schwarz, but by Mark William Worthing, one of Schwarz’s students and the translator of some of his books.[17] Worthing (b. 1962) is currently Dean of Theology at Tabor College, Adelaide, Australia. Schwarz was his Doktorvater for his doctoral studies,[18] and Worthing has continued the quest for understanding the relationship of Christian faith to contemporary thought. His book was published in 1995, and it was one of the winners of the Templeton Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences.[19]
Worthing understands God as “the transcendent, triune God of Christian theism whom the Christian faith confesses to be the God who created and preserves the physical universe, who was involved personally in human history through Jesus Christ, and whose hands hold the final destiny of the universe” (p. 4). From this rather traditional theological stance, and because of his conviction that “both science and theology are relevant for the other and must learn from each other” (p. 31), Worthing enters directly into a dialogue with contemporary physics.
Worthing recognizes from his dialogue with modern science that in place of transcendence there is “so much emphasis on the exclusive immanence of God within the confines of the physical universe, even among theologians, that various forms of pantheism and panentheism have become increasingly popular.” He contends, though, that such conceptions of God are “in no way necessitated by an objective reading of the results of modern physics” (p. 72).
The fifth chapter of Worthing’s book is entitled, “Can God Survive the Consummation of the Universe?” and it is mainly in this chapter that he refers to Karl Heim. Worthing especially cites Heim’s The World: Its Creation and Consummation, and he credits Heim with introducing the term scientific eschatology. Further, at the end of this fifth chapter, Worthing shows his agreement with Heim’s central concept of God’s transcendence:
Concerning God as active consummator and redeemer of the cosmos, we have seen once again, as was the case in preceding chapters, the importance of maintaining God’s transcendence. Only in this way can Christian theology speak credibly of a God who is the unconsummated Consummator of creation. And only in this way can the ‘wholly other’ quality of God’s eternity be preserved not only from, but essentially for, a finite universe and its mortal inhabitants (p. 198).
In the sixth and final chapter of his book, Worthing presents five ways that modern physics and cosmology have impacted the theological discussion of God. In the second of those summary statements, Worthing states that “contemporary physics is forcing theology more and more either to emphasize the transcendence of God with renewed vigor and clarity or to abandon the doctrine altogether” (p. 202). In my opinion, and Worthing would likely agree, Karl Heim’s book God Transcendent, even though first published 70 years ago, is still a valuable resource for developing a viable understanding of how the transcendence of God can be grasped and maintained with intellectual honesty.
Related Writings by Other Scholars
There are a number of other distinguished scholars who have done much to bridge the gap between Christian faith and contemporary science, including Ian Barbour[20] and Arthur R. Peacocke,[21] both of whom have made outstanding contributions to this field. In this final section, however, we will consider only three authors: John Polkinghorne, John Haught, and Diarmuid O’Murchu.
John Polkinghorne
John C. Polkinghorne (b. 1930) worked for many years as a theoretical elementary particle physicist. From 1968 to 1979 he was Professor of Mathematical Physics in the University of Cambridge, but he resigned from that prestigious position to train for the ministry of the Church of England, becoming a priest in 1982. After serving two years as a parish priest and another two years as vicar, he returned to Cambridge to serve as Dean of Trinity Hall and after three years he was appointed President of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, retiring in 1996. The following year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for distinguished service to science, religion, learning, and medical ethics. In 2002 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.[22]
Polkinghorne is a prolific writer and the author of many books about science and religion, including Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (1988), Science and Theology: An Introduction (1988), Reason and Reality: The Relationship Between Science and Theology (1991), The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994),[23] Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion (1994), Scientists as Theologians (1996), Beyond Science (1996), Science and Theology: An Introduction (1998), Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998), Traffic in Truth: Exchanges between Science and Theology (2002), in addition to the book briefly reviewed here.
For three years, an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars met under the auspices of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton University. The results of this consultation were made available in a volume of essays edited by Polkinghorne and Michael Welker of the University of Heidelberg. The first part of that book, entitled The End of the World and the Ends of God (2000), is about “Eschatology and the Natural Sciences,” and it is introduced by Polkinghorne, who has also written the chapter entitled, “Eschatology: Some Questions and Some Insights from Science.”
The God of Hope and the End of the World (2002) is the title of a book in which Polkinghorne reflects upon the work of the Center of Theological Inquiry Eschatology Project at Princeton and upon the book they produced. In that small but excellent book, Polkinghorne writes that he seeks “to present the motivations for Christian eschatological hope and to show that this hope is one that is intelligible and defensible in the twenty-first century” (p. xviii).
Polkinghorne’s reflections consist of three parts, which are entitled “Scientific and Cultural Prologue,” “Biblical Resources,” and “Theological Approaches.” In the first part the author states that from the standpoint of natural science, eventually life-ending and earth-ending catastrophes are certain (pp. 8-9). So he contends that “theology’s real concern must be able to embrace the whole of created reality and the totality of cosmic history” (p. 10), and he goes on to declare:
As far as science is right in describing the future as the extrapolation of the past and present, the world will certainly not end in the attainment of some climactic Ω point, but in the whimper of cold decay or the bang of fiery collapse” (pp. 11-12).
But then he goes on to declare: “. . . theology claims that what is ultimate is not the physical process but the will and purpose of God the Creator” (p. 12). So here, and throughout this book as well as his other works, Polkinghorne writes primarily as a theologian and only secondarily as a scientist.
In the second chapter, the author contends that “the deep intelligibility and rational beauty” that the universe expresses can be seen as “providing the basis for a revived and insightful kind of natural theology. A world shot through with such signs of mind may well be thought to reflect the Mind of its Creator” (pp. 19-20). This view is considerably different from Heim’s refusal to posit a natural theology—and from the view of John Haught, the scholar introduced in the next section.
At the end of the second chapter, Polkinghorne declares:
From its own unaided resources, natural science can no more than present us with the contrast of a finely tuned and fruitful universe which is condemned to ultimate futility. If that paradox is to receive a resolution, it will be beyond the reach of science on its own. We shall have to explore whether theology can take us further by being both humble enough to learn what it can from science and also bold enough to hold firm to its own sources of insight and understanding (p. 27).
The fourth chapter ends with the same sort of negative evaluation of science, as Polkinghorne believes that it would be a “grave mistake” to suppose “that the whole of reality can be caught in the wide meshes of the scientific net” (pp. 44-45).
Throughout this book, one of Polkinghorne’s main emphases is the expected continuity between the present world and the world to come. This leads to some interesting conclusions. For example, the tenth chapter is entitled, “The New Creation,” and the author states that the “necessary continuity between the old and new creations lies in the fact that the latter is the redeemed transform of the former” (p. 116). Accordingly, he posits that there will be “time” in the world to come, suggesting that the “new creation will not be a timeless world of ‘eternity,’ but a temporal world whose character is everlasting” (p. 117).
The eleventh chapter is about “the four last things,” namely, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But here Polkinghorne writes only about what Christian faith says about these matters and makes no attempt to relate those “things” to contemporary thought. Then in the twelfth and final chapter, the author deals with “the significance of the end,” and he begins the chapter by emphasizing again one of the central themes of the book:
The reason that eschatology is such an indispensable element in theological thinking is that it responds to the question of the total meaningfulness of the present creation, a meaning that can only finally be found beyond science’s extrapolation of contemporary history” (p. 140).
In that final chapter, the author contrasts “mainstream systematic theologians” and “scientist-theologians” such as himself, saying, among other things, that the latter tend to see things over a wider span of time; that is, systematic theologians tend not to think about cosmic history continuing for billions of years and that “before its foreseeable end, humanity and all forms of carbon-based life will have vanished from the universe” (p. 140-1). But in spite of his scientific bent, Polkinghorne remains a theologian, and thus he concludes his book with these words:
Christian belief must not lose its nerve about eschatological hope. A credible theology depends upon it and, in turn, a Trinitarian and incarnational theology can assure us of its credibility (p. 149).
Although Polkinghorne does not refer to the writings of Karl Heim, and although he forwards a natural theology in a way that Heim did not, there is a strong affinity between these two scholars in their understanding of Christian faith and its relationship to contemporary thought.[24]
John Haught
John F. Haught (b. 1942) is currently Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology and Director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. His area of specialization is systematic theology, with a particular interest in issues pertaining to science, cosmology, ecology, and religion. He is the author of a number of books on the general theme of Christian faith and contemporary (scientific) thought. These books include The Promise of Nature: Ecology and Cosmic Purpose (1993), Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (1995), God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (2000), Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution (2001), and Deeper Than Darwin: Evolution and the Question of God (2003).
In God After Darwin, Haught makes a valiant attempt to affirm an evolutionary, scientific worldview as well as an honest faith in God. He contends that “any beliefs we may hold about the universe . . . cannot expect to draw serious attention today unless we can at least display their consonance with evolutionary science” (p. 106). Thus, he accepts and affirms contemporary scientific views of the universe, while rejecting the ideological views of those thinkers who believe that contemporary science means that it is impossible to have an honest faith in God.
In particular, Haught refutes the charges directed toward faith in God made by such people as the prolific American philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (1995), and the well-known British zoologist Richard Dawkins, whose views are found in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and some of his later books.
On the other hand, Haught also criticizes the emphasis of some Christian thinkers who forward the idea of “intelligent design.”[25] He charges:
Because of the enormity of . . . suffering in nature, it seems to me that recent efforts to confront the challenge of evolution simply by restating or revising arguments for ‘intelligent design’ are both apologetically ineffective and theologically inconsequential (p. 46).
Throughout his book, Haught makes many references to Teilhard de Chardin (1881~1955), contending that probably no modern thinker “has been more persistent than Teilhard in seeking to transform our theological sensibilities in a way that takes evolution seriously” (p. 81). He also often refers to process theology and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861~1947), to which process theology is significantly related. In a subsection entitled, “A Process Perspective” (pp. 126~132), Haught contends that process theology provides an excellent way of interpreting the world theologically in a manner that harmonizes with evolutionary science. In addition, Haught highly evaluates kenotic theology; for example, he says that “the decisive self-emptying or kenosis of God” is the image to which Christian theology “must always repair whenever it thinks about God’s relationship to the world and its evolution” (pp. 110-111).
Haught’s own contribution to the theology of evolution is especially seen in his emphasis on promise. The ninth chapter of his book is entitled, “Evolution, Ecology, and the Promise of Nature,” and here he avers: “The notion of nature as promise brings together into a coherent vision the three domains of ecology, evolution, and eschatology” (p. 150). Promise is also the theme of the six-page conclusion of Haught’s significant book, which ends with this pregnant paragraph:
A world in evolution does not follow a strict plan but is nonetheless given its being, value, and meaning by God’s vision for it. The God of evolution does not fix things in advance, nor hoard selfishly the joy of creating. Instead God shares with all creatures their own openness to an indeterminate future. Such an interpretation does not destroy the cosmic hierarchy but by its openness to new being brings special significance to every epoch of nature’s unfolding, including humanity’s unique history in a still unfinished universe (p. 191).
The emphasis on promise is also found often in Haught’s newer book, Deeper Than Darwin. For example, when he calls for “a deeper theology” in chapter twelve of that book, he asserts: “In its depths, nature is promise” (p. 170). So Haught’s “theology of evolution” results in a “theology of promise.” In the developing of his understanding of the Christian faith, he has looked unflinchingly at the claims of contemporary evolutionary biologists and other natural scientists who have criticized and rejected that faith, and he has proceeded to develop an approach that most admirably goes beyond the reductionism and materialism of the latter to a deeper, much more satisfactory understanding of reality—and a view that is filled with hope and promise.
Diarmuid O’Murchu
The third and last thinker to be considered in this essay is Diarmuid O’Murchu (b. 1952), an Irish born and educated Catholic priest and social psychologist whose work and activities are now based in London. He is the author of such challenging books as Quantum Theology (1997) and Our World in Transition (2000), but here we will look only at his most recent book, Evolutionary Faith: Rediscovering God in Our Great Story (2002).
In his attempt to relate Christian faith to contemporary thought, especially contemporary scientific thought about evolution, O’Murchu, as well as John Haught, holds a much broader view of evolution than is usually true of those who write about Darwinianism. Thus, he asserts it is time to outgrow “the narrowly defined, competitively driven understanding of evolution” as seen in Darwinian biology, contending that it is time to embrace
the grandeur, complexity, and paradox that characterize evolution at every stage, a story that continues to unfold under the mysterious wisdom of our cocreative God, whose strategies always have, and always will, outwit our human and religious desire for neat, predictable outcomes (p. 23).
“Evolutionary Theology: Meaning from the Future” is the title of the second chapter of O’Murchu’s book,” and here he states that evolutionary theology “works with one major assumption: the Originating and Sustaining Mystery,” a phrase he uses for God, “has been totally involved in the unfolding process of creation from the very beginning” (p. 33). He posits that the “same prodigiously creative God is ahead of us in the future, which beckons us forth” (p. 35). Thus, what “drives evolution more than anything else is the allurement of an open-ended future” (p. 26), a future “endowed with hope and promise” (p. 37).
At the end of each of the thirteen chapters in O’Murchu’s stimulating book, there is a brief statement about what it is “time to outgrow” followed by a similarly succinct statement about what it is “time to embrace.” For example, he asserts that it is time to outgrow such things as “the fear-filled grip of mechanistic consciousness, rigidly clinging to the notion that creation is little more than dead, inert matter in a hostile, brutal, and flawed universe” (p. 73); “the crippling and stultifying dominance of Western imperialism that attributes ultimate truth to the rational, religiously validated rule of power” (p. 166); and “our dysfunctional relationship with creation whereby we pursue a ruthless and relentless exploitation of creation’s resources to the detriment of the fragile earth itself and all the vulnerable creatures who inhabit it” (pp. 195-196).
On the other hand, according to O’Murchu, it is time to embrace such things as “our entire evolutionary story of over four million years, and to take seriously the explosive and at times paradoxical creativity of the divine at every moment of that evolving process” (p. 150); “a universe exuding vitality and wisdom, consciously manifesting its innate power in the variety and the diversity of all life-forms” (p 181); and “the cosmic and planetary context within which our life story and the story of all life unfolds” (p. 206).
There is a decidedly Teilhardian flavor to the feast of ideas served so attractively in O’Murchu’s book. So it is no surprise that the author relates the Christian faith not only to the contemporary thought of natural scientists, but also to “New Age” thinkers such as Ken Wilber.[26] In the past, it was the natural sciences that provided the main challenges to the Christian faith, but now there are many other challenges as well—such as New Age thought that does not so much reject that faith in the way many scientists, and those enamored by the so-called scientific spirit, have done, but rather relegates Christian faith to a secondary status by forwarding a much broader, multi-layered, and universalistic worldview than is found in most expressions of Christianity. Thus the work of O’Murchu is of great interest and value for Christians living and witnessing in this first decade of the twenty-first century.
This review essay was spawned by the writer’s interest in Karl Heim, and the title is taken from the theme of Heim’s six-part series, Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought. Unfortunately, there are not many books written about Heim now,[27] so after dealing with three of Heim’s books in the first part of this essay, books by Hans Schwarz and Mark Worthing, contemporary scholars who stand in the Heimian tradition, were reviewed in the second part. Then the concluding part of this paper introduced books by three current thinkers who are on the cutting edge in the attempt to relate Christian faith to contemporary scientific thought in a satisfactory manner. The insights of all these superlative scholars provide rich resources to thoughtful Christians who seek to maintain complete intellectual honesty while standing firm and unfaltering in their faith.
WORKS CITED
Haught, John F.
2000 God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Westview Press.
2003 Deeper Than Darwin: Evolution and the Question of God. Westview Press.
Heim, Karl
1935 God Transcendent: Foundation for a Christian Metaphysic. Translated by Edgar Primrose Dickie. Nisbet and Co., Ltd. (This is a translation of the third German edition of Glaube und Denken, published by Furche-Verlag in 1934.)
1961 Jesus the Lord: The Sovereign Authority of Jesus and God’s Revelation in Christ. Translated by D. H. van Daalen. Muhlenberg Press. (This is a translation of the fourth German edition of Jesus der Herr: Die Herrscher-vollmacht Jesu und die Gottesoffenbarung in Christus, published by Furche-Verlag in 1955.)
1961 Jesus the World’s Perfecter: The Atonement and the Renewal of the World. Translated by D. H. van Daalen. Muhlenberg Press. (This is a translation of the third German edition of Jesus der Welt-vollender: Der Glaube an die Versöhnung und Weltverwandlung published by Furche-Verlag in 1952.)
1962 The World: Its Creation and Consummation: The End of the Present Age and the Future of the World in the Light of the Resurrection. Translated by Robert Smith. Muhlenberg Press. (This is a translation of the second German edition of Weltschöpfung und Weltende, published by Furche-Verlag in 1958.)
Michalson, Carl
1953 “The Task of Apologetics in the Future: Karl Heim’s Theology after Fifty Years,” Scottish Journal of Theology VI:4, pages 362~378.
1963 Review of Karl Heim, The World: Its Creation and Consummation in Theology Today XIX:4, pages 556-7.
O’Murchu, Diarmuid
2002 Evolutionary Faith: Rediscovering God in Our Great Story. Orbis Books.
Patterson, Robert E., editor
1979 Science, Faith, and Revelation: An Approach to Christian Philosophy. Broadman Press.
Polkinghorne, John
2002 The God of Hope and the End of the World. Yale University Press.
Polkinghorne, John, and Michael Welker, editors
2000 The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology. Trinity Press International.
Rust, Eric C.
1967 Science and Faith: Towards a Theological Understanding of Nature. Oxford University Press.
Schwarz, Hans
1972 On the Way to the Future: A Christian View of Eschatology in the Light of Current Trends in Religion. Augsburg Publishing House.
1975 The Search for God: Christianity, Atheism, Secularism, World Religions. Augsburg Publishing House.
1997 “Karl Heim and John Polkinghorne: Theology and Natural Sciences in Dialogue,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, IX:1/2, pp. 105~119.
2000 Eschatology. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Seat, Leroy
2002 “Reasons of the Heart: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 59 (2002), pp. 63~81.
2003 “Faith Beyond Reason: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 60 (2003), pp. 37~58.
Worthing, Mark William
1995 God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics. Fortress Press.
2002 “God, Process and Cosmos: Is God Simply Going Along for the Ride?” in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cosmology and Biological Evolution, edited by Hilary D. Regan and Mark Wm. Worthing. Australian Theological Forum. Pages 153~171.
ENDNOTES
[1] “Reasons of the Heart: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 59 (2002), pp. 63~81.
[2] “Faith Beyond Reason: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 60 (2003), pp. 37~58.
[3] One of Dr. Rust’s major books is Science and Religion: Towards a Theological Understanding of Nature, and Heim is most prominently introduced on pages 133~5.
[4] This emphasis on transcendence led to the selection of a title for the English translation that was quite different from the German title.
[5] There is a remarkable similarity between the heart of Heim’s thought, as summarized here, and that of Kierkegaard as interpreted by C. Stephen Evans and critiqued in my previous review essay, “Faith Beyond Reason.”
[6] With his first mention of polarity, Heim has a footnote reference to pages 50~76 in God Transcendent.
[7] Similar assertions are found in other places: for example: “God is outside and beyond all polarities” (p. 28), and God is “beyond all polar relations” (p. 31).
[8] The German word Führer is translated as Leader, but the German word contains far more significance than the English does, for that was the title, of course, which was regularly used for Hitler in the 1930s, and it was very courageous of Heim to refer to Jesus as Führer. This emphasis is also seen in the German subtitle, Die Führervollmacht Jesu und die Gottesoffenbarung in Christus, which appears clearly on the cover of the third edition of Jesus der Herr which was published in Berlin in 1938.
[9] These several references to Kierkegaard are made partly because my previous essay was about Kierkegaard, and partly to indicate that there is considerable similarity between these two thinkers by whom I have been greatly influenced.
[10] See the review of The World by Carl Michalson in Theology Today, Vol. 19, p. 557. Michalson (1915~65) is also the author of “The Task of Apologetics in the Future: Karl Heim’s Theology after Fifty Years,” which appeared in the Scottish Journal of Theology in 1953.
[11] The Karl Heim Gesellschaft (Karl Heim Society) was founded in 1974, the centennial year of Heim’s birth, and this organization, which in 2004 had around 80 members and 550 supporting friends, “preserves the legacy of Karl Heim and attempts to provide a Christian orientation within a scientific-technological world through publications, seminars, and lectures” (Schwarz, 2002:120). The Society publishes a journal, Evangelium and Wissenschaft (Gospel and Science) and also maintains the Karl Heim Archives, which are housed in the Bengel House in Tübingen.
[12] In the Fall 1972 issue of Review and Expositor, David L. Mueller of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has a very positive review of this book by Hans Schwarz. In reference to the fourth chapter, Mueller refers to Schwarz’s introduction of Heim, and he, Mueller, says that Heim is a “theologian whose dimensional approach is not sufficiently appreciated today” (p. 536).
Heim and Teilhard are also juxtaposed in the second chapter of Science, Faith, and Revelation: An Approach to Christian Philosophy, a volume written as a Festschrift for Dr. Rust, whom I mentioned on the first page of this essay. That chapter by Doran McCarty, one of Dr. Rust’s students, is entitled, “Karl Heim and Teilhard de Chardin: Christian and Scientific Responses to the Problem of Transcendence.” For this same book, which was edited by Robert E. Patterson who was a professor at Baylor University for many years, I had the privilege of writing the 18th chapter: “Scientific Knowledge as Personal Knowledge.” That chapter deals primarily with the thought of Michael Polanyi (1891~1976), the fifth on my list of the ten theologians and philosophers by whom I have been most influenced.
[13] There have been several theologians in the last forty years who have sought to bridge that chasm, but Heim is notable because he was, as Schwarz contends, one of the first to do so.
[14] Almost exactly the same words both in the text and in the footnote appear in Eschatology on pages 294-5.
[15] The reference here to the idea of twofold truth developed by Muslim philosophers is mentioned again on page 123, and there is at that point also a footnote reference to the same part of Heim’s Glaube und Leben.
[16] I agree wholeheartedly with the important point Schwarz is making here; in fact, I have long wanted to write an essay on “Apology by Life.” Apologetics has long been one of my strongest interests, but long ago I realized that the best apologetics may well be done by loving action rather than by words.
[17] More recently, Schwarz has supervised a dissertation completed by Thomas Kothmann in 2001 with the title Apologetik und Mission. Die missionarische Theologie Karl Heims als Beitrag für eine Missionstheologie der Gegenwart.
[18] Worthing’s first doctoral dissertation, completed in 1992 at the University of Regensburg, was written under Schwarz’ supervision and entitled “The Relevance of Contemporary Theoretical Physics for a Christian Doctrine of God.”
[19] Worthing is also the editor of the Australian Theological Forum Science and Theology Series and co-editor of the second volume in that series: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cosmology and Biological Evolution (2002). His chapter in that volume is entitled, “God, Process and Cosmos: Is God Simply Going Along for the Ride?”
Although he is from Australia and did his graduate studies in Germany, Worthing completed his M.Div. degree at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and took a course by Dr. Rust. In an e-mail message, Dr. Worthing wrote that he was “very impressed” with Dr. Rust, who “was one of the first people that opened my mind to other possibilities for relating theology and science other than the warfare model.”
[20] Barbour (b. 1923) is a noted American physicist, theologian, author, and winner of the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. His book Issues in Science and Religion (1965) was highly influential in initiating the contemporary academic field of science and religion. He delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1989~91, and his book Religion in an Age of Science (1997) is based upon those lectures.
[21] Peacocke (b. 1924) is a prominent English biochemist and Anglican priest. He was awarded the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Peacocke, who holds doctorates in both science and theology, is the founder of the Society of Ordained Scientists, an international ecumenical organization that aims to bridge the gap between science and religion and to foster spirituality among scientists.
[22] In September 2001, I had the privilege of hearing Polkinghorne lecture and of conversing with him personally. On that occasion I was impressed not only with the lucidity of his thought but also with the warmth and seeming depth of his faith.
[23] This book is based on Polkinghorne’s 1993-94 Gifford Lectures.
[24] In an essay entitled “Karl Heim and John Polkinghorne: Theology and Natural Sciences in Dialogue,” (Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies IX [1997], Hans Schwarz points out the differences between these two scholars, especially regarding natural theology. But in the end he contends they are united by this common conviction: “There is no future, in an ultimate sense, for anything within our universe. True future and true fulfillment of individual and corporate life can only come through the grace of God and God’s own action” (p. 116).
[25] Haught does not mention William A. Dembski in this book, but Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University and one of the leaders among scientists forwarding the idea of “intelligent design.” He is the author, for example, of Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (1999). Dembski’s emphasis on intelligent design caused considerable controversy on the campus of Baylor university, and in 2000 he was demoted from his position as the director of the university’s Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design. That Center was subsequently closed.
In Haught’s later book, Deeper Than Darwin, his seventh chapter is entitled, “Deeper than Design,” and there he refers to the work of Dembski and others, especially Michael Behe, who advocate Intelligent Design Theory (IDT). At the conclusion of this important chapter, Haught reiterates: “Life is too rich and mysterious to be captured by the notion of ‘intelligent design’” (p. 102).
[26] Wilber, whom O’Murchu refers to as a “transpersonal psychologist, has been called “the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times.” He is the author of such books as The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), A Brief History of Everything (1996), and A Theory of Everything (2000). His religious viewpoint is basically Buddhistic, and a great deal of the Enlightenment.com website revolves around Wilber.
[27] There are two good, fairly recent doctoral dissertations in English on the thought of Heim: the first is by Ingemar Holmstrand and is entitled Karl Heim on Philosophy, Science and the Transcendence of God; it was completed at Uppsala University in 1980. The second is Time and Polarity: The Dimensional Thinking of Karl Heim by Atso Eerikäinen and completed at the University of Helsinki in 2000. The latter was published in 2003 by Peter Lang Publishing under the title Two Dimensions of Time: The Dimensional Theory of Karl Heim: An Ontological Solution to the Problems of Science, Philosophy, and Theology.
In explaining the meaning of the supra-polarity of God, Heim avers: “Between the Creator and the
creature there is an infinite qualitative distinction” (p. 26)—but there is no reference to Kierkegaard,
although the latter phrase is one the Danish philosopher often used. Further, as Kierkegaard did in other
words, Heim also emphasizes that in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, there is “the meeting between
time and eternity, between the supra-polar space of God and the polar world in which we live” (The World,
p. 155).
“Part Two” is entitled, “The Sovereign Authority of Christ,” and in these forty pages Heim talks about
and the Renewal of the World, and the first part is mainly about human guilt. “Part Two” is about “the
Redeemer” and there Heim contends that the passion story of Jesus is “not a contest between
11 The Karl Heim Gesellschaft (Karl Heim Society) was founded in 1974, the centennial year of Heim’s birth, and this 6
Many of Schwarz’s books have been published in English—some written in English and others
traay toward perfection, we can neither envision eternity as endless, infinite time,
n
After serving two years as a parish priest and another two years as vicar, he returned to Cambridge to serve
as Dean of Trinity Hall and after three years he was appointed President of Queens’ College at the University
of Cambridge, retiring in 1996. The following year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for distinguished
service to science, religion, learning, and medical ethics. In 2002 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for
Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.22
Polkinghorne is a prolific writer and the author of many books about science and religion, including
Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (1988), Science and Theology: An Introduction (1988),
Reason and Reality: The Relationship Between Science and Theology (1991), The Faith of a Physicist:
Around the time of my sixtieth birthday, I compiled a list of ten modern theologians and philosophers who have most influenced my theological thinking, listing them chronologically in the order of their birth. During the last three years I have not only re-read much written by but also much written about the first three thinkers on this list. In the two previous issues of this journal, I have written review essays on the first two, namely, Blaise Pascal[1] and Søren Kierkegaard.[2]
The third thinker on my list is the German theologian, Karl Heim. I was first introduced to Heim and his book Christian Faith and Natural Science when I was a college student. Later, during my undergraduate days in seminary, I was introduced more fully to Heim’s significant philosophical and theological thinking by Dr. Eric C. Rust, who later became my major professor in graduate school. Dr. Rust, who studied science in the Royal College of Science in London before studying theology, was quite fond of Karl Heim’s work on science and religion, and I came to appreciate the thought of both.[3]
A few years after joining the faculty at Seinan Gakuin University in 1968, one of my first writing projects was a lengthy essay, in Japanese, on what I called Karl Heim’s apologetic philosophy. Although written in English rather than Japanese, this review essay seeks to augment that three-part essay I wrote in the 1970s by summarizing three of Heim’s books that were not dealt with there. In the second part of this essay, I review some of the books written by one of Heim’s admirers, Professor Hans Schwarz, who remains as probably the leading “Heimian” in the world today, as well as a book by one of Schwarz’s students, Mark William Worthing, who has continued the Heimian emphasis to a certain degree. In the final part of this essay, I critique books by three contemporary thinkers who deal with the same problem that Heim dealt with most earnestly, that is, the relationship of the Christian faith to contemporary thought, especially contemporary thought as seen in the world of the natural sciences.
The Main Writings of Karl Heim
Karl Heim was born in Germany in 1874. He received his doctorate in theology at Tübingen in 1905, and he was Professor of Systematic Theology in Tübingen from 1920 until his retirement in 1939. Heim died in 1958, leaving a rich legacy of theological work, much of it done in dialogue with the natural sciences.
Heim’s magnum opus was his six-volume Der evangelische Glaube und das Denken der Gegenwart (Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought). The titles of these six volumes in German and in English translation and the years of their publication are as follows: Glaube und Denken (1931, 1934, 1937) [God Transcendent (1935)], Jesus der Herr (1935, 1938, 1955) [Jesus the Lord (1959)], Jesus der Weltvollender (1937) [Jesus the World’s Perfecter (1959)], Der christlichen Gottesglaube und die Naturwissenschaft (1949) [Christian Faith and Natural Science (1953)], Die Wandlung im naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild (1951) [The Transformation of the Scientific World View (1953)], and Weltschöpfung und Weltende (1952, 1958) [The World: Its Creation and Consummation (1962)]. In the conclusion of the latter volume, Heim states the underlying purpose of this six-volume work:
The aim of the whole work from the beginning was to proclaim the Gospel of the redeeming power of Christ to a world which to a large extent rejects and contests this Gospel” (p. 151).
As my three-part essay in the 1970s was largely based on the first, fourth, and fifth of Heim’s six-volume series, this review essay will focus mostly on the other three volumes. However, some reference needs to be made to Heim’s first volume, for it forms the basis for all of the subsequent works. He wrote at the conclusion of his sixth volume, “The whole of the first volume was primarily an attempt to give the Gospel of Christ a universally intelligible foundation” (The World, p. 151).
In the author’s preface to the third edition of Glaube und Denken (1934), he states clearly that the focus of this book is upon “the question which in our time needs more than any other to be made clear: What is the truth about the transcendence of God, and how is this transcendence different from any transcendence within the sphere of this world” (God Transcendent, p. xviii).[4]
The basis of Heim’s “apologetic philosophy” lies in his utilization of the analogy of dimension to describe the relationships in which we humans are all involved. In this connection he employs a new concept of space, using some of the key ideas developed by his contemporary, Martin Buber (1878~1965). By developing the idea of I-Thou space and I-It space, Heim seeks to elucidate what is meant by transcendence in general and the transcendence of God in particular.
In this work, Heim contends that “the concept of polarity is quite clear and recognizable to us at every moment.” But he also suggests that there could be “another sort of space which does not have this polar structure,” and he calls that supra-polar space. He avers: “If there is supra-polar space, though, this cannot be objected to by our intellect, which is limited to polar space. Further, the only way there can be contact between different forms of space is by some form of revelation” (The World, p. 154).[5]
The last chapter of Heim’s seminal book is entitled, “The Transcendence of God,” and here he argues that “whatever we may say regarding His nature, God stands over against the whole ‘I-Thou-It’ world which has hitherto confronted us, an indivisible unity, as something Wholly Other” (p. 187). As the Wholly Other, God is “not only the Creator, but also the Lord” (p. 208). This is Heim’s confession of faith which forms the basis for his subsequent books, especially the three introduced below.
Jesus the Lord
In 1935, the year after the third edition of Glaube und Denken was published—as well as two years after Hitler’s rise to power— the first edition of Jesus der Herr was published in Germany. On the last page of the earlier book, Heim states: “We stand before One Who is not to be reached directly by any inference from given reality. We stand before the ‘Unknown God’” (p. 226). It is not surprising, then, that the first part of Jesus the Lord is called “The ‘Unknown God,’ the Negative Condition for an Understanding of the Sovereign Authority of Christ.” Jesus’ sovereign authority is the central theme of this book, whose subtitle is The Sovereign Authority of Jesus and God’s Revelation in Christ.
Heim makes no explicit reference to Kierkegaard, but the first section of his book, and seen in the preface before that, is quite Kierkegaardian. In the preface, the German theologian talks about the decisive either-or: the human necessity of “either having to entrust our whole life to Him [Jesus Christ] or passionately having to reject Him” (p. v).
One of the key ideas of God Transcendent is that of polarity, and Heim develops that theme in this second volume of his six-part series. He refers to “the law of polarity” (p. 11)[6] and “the universal principle of polarity” (p. 19). Then, in the third chapter, he distinguishes between thought that comes from humans and thought that comes to humans, emphasizing that “our thought cannot arrive at this second possibility unless something happens that puts our whole polar way of thinking out of joint” (p. 23). This sounds very much like Kierkegaard’s understanding of paradox. And it is in this connection that Heim introduces God as “non-polar Reality” (ibid.). Or, stating the matter differently, “God is beyond all polarity” (p. 24).[7]
In explaining the meaning of the supra-polarity of God, Heim avers: “Between the Creator and the creature there is an infinite qualitative distinction” (p. 26)—but there is no reference to Kierkegaard, although the latter phrase is one the Danish philosopher often used. Further, as Kierkegaard did in other words, Heim also emphasizes that in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, there is “the meeting between time and eternity, between the supra-polar space of God and the polar world in which we live” (The World, p. 155).
“Part Two” is entitled, “The Sovereign Authority of Christ,” and in these forty pages Heim talks about the meaning of the confession, “Jesus is Lord.” Heim’s own confession is that “in Christ the hidden meaning of creation is revealed to us” (p. 50). Here again Heim presents the reader with an either/or:
When Jesus is witnessed to as ‘the Lord,’ then there are only two possibilities as regards this testimony. Either it rests on a mistake. . . .
Or the claim of Jesus rests on truth (p. 60).
Heim talks of Jesus as Leader—and this is in contrast to the “misleader” of Nazi Germany (p. 59).[8] The need for a leader also comes from the breakdown of German Idealism. These ideas lead into the third part of this book: “Original Sin as the Deepest Reason Why We Need a Leader.”
In this section of the book, Heim also insists that “God is out of reach of our polar perception, imagination and thought. He can never become the object of our thinking” (p. 89). That is why we have to have a Leader, and Jesus is the Leader we need, according to Heim. And he goes on to assert that the whole life of Jesus “is a war with God’s mortal enemy, Satan” (p. 90).
The last section of this book is called, “God’s Revelation in Christ,” and Heim first writes about the “incomprehensible fact” that “God has given us a Leader to whom we can cleave in the ultimate question of life” (p. 139). Heim goes on to assert again that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God, and in the 21st chapter he writes about “our contemporariness with Christ”—another Kierkegaardian theme, although there is no explicit reference to Kierkegaard in the chapter.[9] He ends this book by saying that what the “thou” relationship “to the Leader given to us in the Kyrios means to the belief in the reconciliation and the consummation of the world” will be discussed in the third volume of the series.
Jesus the World’s Perfecter
The subtitle of this third volume of Heim’s Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought is The Atonement and the Renewal of the World, and the first part is mainly about human guilt. “Part Two” is about “the Redeemer” and there Heim contends that the passion story of Jesus is “not a contest between two limited powers measuring their strength on the level of the polar world” (p. 100); rather, “in the contest between God and Satan two supra-polar powers meet one another, each of whom can exist only by claiming the whole of Reality for himself” (p. 101). However, the Gospel of the
supra-human and incomprehensible power of the love of the Father who so loved the world that he gave His Son for it, while in satanic hatred of God it wanted to destroy Him, that is the message which God’s Church has to bring to the world. That is the precious, inalienable treasure of the Church (p. 119).
This message of good news, moreover, is directly related to the idea that Jesus is also “the world’s perfecter,” the title of the third and longest section of this book. Jesus’ perfecting of the world is the result of his resurrection and “the public seizure of power by Christ,” which is the title of the 20th chapter. Then in the final chapter of “Part Three, “with the perfecting of the world by Christ,” Heim contends that all I-Thou relationships are fulfilled. Thus, “If God is to be all in all then this whole pilgrimage is a pilgrimage to God. All things come to rest in Him. The polarity of the movement of time ceases in Him” (p. 199).
The final part of this book is about “the Church of Christ,” which Heim sees as a “unique new organism which forms the beginning of the coming perfection of the world” (p. 227). And so, this book ends with far more theological reflection upon the Christian faith than upon the relationship of that faith to contemporary thought. While this is a fine theology book, of the six books in the Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought series, it is the one that is least related to the central theme expressed in the title of this essay.
The World: Its Creation and Consummation
Following these two books which set forth some of the central content of the Christian faith, Heim’s next two books are particularly about contemporary thought as found in the natural sciences. In these volumes, Heim continues to talk about the importance of recognizing the reality of a supra-polar space. Then the final book of the six-part series, whose subtitle is The End of the Present and The Future of the World in The Light of the Resurrection, was first published in 1952 when Heim was 78 years old. While writing the second edition of this work, from which the English translation comes, Heim was suffering from heart disease and could only work propped up at his desk, and for only an hour a day, but it is a meritorious volume and a satisfactory completion of his life’s work[10]
“Part One” of this rather slim volume is entitled, “The Origin of the World,” and the first chapter is about “The Scientific View of the Origin of the World.” Heim here argues that the universe is not infinite; rather it is “a unified whole. It is no shoreless sea, but something self-contained, with a definite weight and a measurable size” (p. 8). He also asserts: “The bold dream of the philosophers that the world is eternal seems to have become improbable today” (p. 24). Thus, he talks about the fact that the universe is expanding and that it may have been produced “by a primitive explosion” (p. 25), and he says that as we look at the evolutionary process, “we can trace the footprints of the Creator” (p. 32).
In this important first chapter, Heim also contends that the history of life on this earth is “not just a chaos, a confused and aimless criss-cross of conflicting tendencies. Rather it is controlled as a whole by a great plan and a uniform system” (pp. 34-5). Moreover, it is “a plan designed by a creative spirit” (p. 35). At the end of the chapter, he again asserts that “the family tree of organic life . . . constitutes not a chaos of aimless and confused developments, but a planned ascent” (p. 56).
The second chapter of “Part One” is “The Creation of the World According to the Bible.” Using the ideas developed in the first volume of this series, Heim here says that the world of polarity was a result of the creativity of God, “who exists in a supra-temporal and so in a supra-polar way.” Thus, God’s creation is “an implantation from the supra-polar space into the space of polarity, or to put it more simply, an implanting from eternity into time (p. 58).
This book has only two parts, plus a nine-page summary of the six-volume work, and the second part is entitled, “The Future of the World.” Similar to Part One, the first chapter in this section is “The Future of the World as Foreseen by Natural Science.” Here, Heim writes about the importance of the second principle of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy. He concludes that the whole world “is faced with the fate of total annihilation. . . . the entropy of the universe increases relentlessly all the time” (p. 100). This is the basis for the development of what has been called scientific eschatology.
The second chapter in Part Two is “The Future of the World in the Light of the Gospel of the Resurrection.” Here the world is depicted as “God’s fallen creation.” In this state, nature and the world of humankind are “affected through and through by a discordance. Heim describes this discordance by referring to “the universal law of polarity” (p. 101).
Heim contends that the Christian hope is that the whole of creation will be liberated from “the bondage of corruption.” This hope envisions a move from the polar state of the present world into the supra-polar state in which God is “all in all.” In this realm, “the whole of reality exists in a way very different from its existence in the realm of world time. For in God there is neither before nor after. In God everything . . . is an eternal moment” (pp. 117-8).
In summary, Heim asserts that
we are faced with a final option between two possibilities which now alone are left. The first is the radical hopelessness of nihilism, for which the whole course of the present world is merely an episode, which appears out of nothingness and disappears again into nothingness, leaving not a trace behind. The second possibility is the universal faith of Easter, brought into the world by the Early Church and still living today on its witness. According to this Easter faith, the course of this world is not a mere episode, but the prelude or prologue to the new state of the world, which alone gives a final eternal meaning to our personal life and also to the life of the nations (p. 149).
So, at the end of his series on Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought, Heim concludes with a strong appeal for his readers to consider the either/or presented by Christian faith. He has sought, admirably, through the six volumes of this series to show how Christian faith can dialogue with contemporary thought, especially contemporary scientific thought, without forfeiting either the content of that faith or intellectual honesty. In this way, having been exposed to such significant ideas as a college student, and then as a seminarian, I was led to believe, as I still earnestly do, that it is entirely possible both to have faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and to be intellectually honest in the contemporary world.
Karl Heim and the Work of Hans Schwarz
The German theologian Hans Schwarz seems to have done more than any other contemporary theologian to keep the theological legacy of Karl Heim alive. Schwarz (b. 1939) earned the Dr. theol. degree from Erlangen University in 1963 and was ordained into the Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in 1966. From 1967 to 1981 he was on the faculty of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, and since 1981 Schwarz has been Professor/Professor Emeritus of Theology (Systematic Theology and Contemporary Issues) at Regensburg University, Germany. He has also served as Director of the Institute of Protestant Theology at the same university during this time. In addition, Schwarz has been an active member in the Karl Heim Gesellschaft (Karl Heim Society), serving as president of that organization from 1988 to 2002, and editing the Society’s yearbook, Glaube und Denken (Faith and Thought), which was first published in 1988.[11]
Many of Schwarz’s books have been published in English—some written in English and others translated from the German. In addition to the books reviewed in this section, his numerous works include: Our Cosmic Journey (1977), Beyond the Gates of Death (1981), The Christian Church (1982), Responsible Faith: Christian Theology in the Light of 20th-Century Questions (1986), What Christians Believe (1987), Method and Context as Problems for Contemporary Theology (1991), Evil (1995), True Faith in the True God (1996), Christology (1998), and Creation (2002).
On the Way to the Future
This is Schwarz’s first book to be published in English, and it is an excellent book. The subtitle of this work, which was published in 1972, is A Christian View of Eschatology in the Light of Current Trends in Religion, Philosophy, and Science. Thus, in seeking to relate the Christian faith to contemporary thought, Schwarz deals with more than natural science in this work.
Part I is mainly a summary of the Old and New Testament views of eschatology, and then the third chapter, the first of Part II, summarizes the “Present Discussion of Eschatology,” from Albert Schweitzer to the positions of Jürgen Moltmann, Johannes Metz, and others who were writing on this theme in the 1960s. Most of the material in this book is also included in Eschatology (2000), one of Schwarz’s more recent books, but in the fourth chapter, “Eschatology and Science,” which does not appear in Eschatology, he discusses “the evolutionary approach of Teilhard de Chardin” and then “the dimensional approach of Karl Heim” (pp. 119~123).[12] In this latter section, Schwarz asserts that “Heim is the only Protestant theologian of stature who chose as his task to bridge the chasm between theology and natural science” (pp. 119-120).[13]
“What Can We Hope For?” is the title of Part III, and in the sixth chapter, which is entitled, “Death and Beyond,” Heim is referred to a couple of times. The more important of those references appears in the subsection entitled, “The eternity of God as fulfillment of time.” There Schwarz states:
If time is on its way toward perfection, we can neither envision eternity as endless, infinite time, nor as the end of time in the sense of continuous rest or quiescence. Eternity is rather the fulfillment of time in perfection. This means that all the life-impairing effects of time will be overcome. Transition, suffering, decay, and death are all inextricably connected with temporality and change (p. 188).
And then in a footnote Schwarz adds: “This has been pointed out especially well by Karl Heim in his book The World: Its Creation and Consummation” (p. 199, fn. 78).[14]
“The New World to Come” is the name of the last chapter, and in it Heim is referred to on one page as well as in a footnote on the following page—and the same references are found in Eschatology (pp. 388-9). In the former, which is in a short section about the “consummation of the world,” Schwarz points out that “the final heat death through an equilibrium of all energy levels, to which Karl Heim alluded, would not lead to the consummation of the world, but only to the end of life within it” (p. 214). But then he goes on to talk about the “new world,” and he asserts that a foretaste of this new world “is already given to us in the witnesses of those who encountered the resurrected Christ”—and this is the point at which he makes the footnote reference to Heim’s Jesus the World’s Perfecter.
Thus, while there are not extensive references to Heim in this book by Schwarz, the contemporary German theologian, much of the content is in accord with Heim’s ideas, and the influence Heim has had on Schwarz seems evident.
The Search for God
The full title of Schwarz’s second major book in English, published in 1975, is The Search for God: Christianity—Atheism—Secularism—World Religions. The first part of this book is entitled, “God or No God?” and is about modern atheism; about the non- religious solution as seen in Barth’s fight against religion, in Bonhoeffer’s non-religious interpretation and in the “death of God” theologians, and in the proponents of secularization, Friedrich Gogarten and Harvey Cox; and about the traditional arguments for the existence of God, process theology, and the theological ideas of Wolfhart Pannenberg. There are a couple of footnote references to Heim in this section, the first (on p. 20) being to Glaube und Leben (1926), a book written before the first volume of Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought,[15] and the second being on page 27 where Schwarz introduces the first law of thermodynamics and then makes reference to The World, pages 85ff. Schwarz comments that there Heim “points out the ideological implications that can be drawn from Mayer’s law of the conservation of energy” (p. 210).
In Part II, entitled “A Search for Ultimates,” one subsection in the third chapter is entitled, “Man’s yearning for a new dimension,” and Schwarz contends that the “why?” questions such as “why am I here? and: why should I go this way and not another way?” threaten human existence (p. 88). At this point he has a footnote reference to Heim’s Christian Faith and Natural Science, and in that footnote Schwarz comments that Heim “has emphasized more than anyone else the inescapable and bewildering nature of these why-questions” (p. 226).
The third and final part of this book contains two chapters on the theme “God’s Self-Disclosure in the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” and there is no reference to Heim in this section. At the end, though, there is a brief summary of the whole book, and in a Heimian (and Kierkegaardian) mode Schwarz there emphasizes: “. . . we have investigated the attempts to prove God’s existence and realized in each instance that at best we can arrive at an either-or, God is or is not” (p. 204). And then in the last paragraph he concludes with the following statement that sounds Heimian at first—but then goes beyond Heim’s emphases. Schwarz asserts that
true humanity always implies the God question, the search for true humanity also calls for the unashamed witness to God who disclosed himself in Jesus Christ as the origin and the goal of history, a history that without him is dark and ultimately without meaning. Yet in a secular and pluralistic world, apologetics and proclamation dare not be the only expression of Christian faith. The most important contact is often first made through action. People will rightly lose curiosity in the presence of the Christian witness if the believing community shows no regard for the world as it is and if it does not move in the world in a way congruent with its profession. Our profession as a Christian community, however, is to respond to God’s great and continuous invitation in a faith made active in love. Such response will not remain unheard.[16]
God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics
This book is not by Hans Schwarz, but by Mark William Worthing, one of Schwarz’s students and the translator of some of his books.[17] Worthing (b. 1962) is currently Dean of Theology at Tabor College, Adelaide, Australia. Schwarz was his Doktorvater for his doctoral studies,[18] and Worthing has continued the quest for understanding the relationship of Christian faith to contemporary thought. His book was published in 1995, and it was one of the winners of the Templeton Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences.[19]
Worthing understands God as “the transcendent, triune God of Christian theism whom the Christian faith confesses to be the God who created and preserves the physical universe, who was involved personally in human history through Jesus Christ, and whose hands hold the final destiny of the universe” (p. 4). From this rather traditional theological stance, and because of his conviction that “both science and theology are relevant for the other and must learn from each other” (p. 31), Worthing enters directly into a dialogue with contemporary physics.
Worthing recognizes from his dialogue with modern science that in place of transcendence there is “so much emphasis on the exclusive immanence of God within the confines of the physical universe, even among theologians, that various forms of pantheism and panentheism have become increasingly popular.” He contends, though, that such conceptions of God are “in no way necessitated by an objective reading of the results of modern physics” (p. 72).
The fifth chapter of Worthing’s book is entitled, “Can God Survive the Consummation of the Universe?” and it is mainly in this chapter that he refers to Karl Heim. Worthing especially cites Heim’s The World: Its Creation and Consummation, and he credits Heim with introducing the term scientific eschatology. Further, at the end of this fifth chapter, Worthing shows his agreement with Heim’s central concept of God’s transcendence:
Concerning God as active consummator and redeemer of the cosmos, we have seen once again, as was the case in preceding chapters, the importance of maintaining God’s transcendence. Only in this way can Christian theology speak credibly of a God who is the unconsummated Consummator of creation. And only in this way can the ‘wholly other’ quality of God’s eternity be preserved not only from, but essentially for, a finite universe and its mortal inhabitants (p. 198).
In the sixth and final chapter of his book, Worthing presents five ways that modern physics and cosmology have impacted the theological discussion of God. In the second of those summary statements, Worthing states that “contemporary physics is forcing theology more and more either to emphasize the transcendence of God with renewed vigor and clarity or to abandon the doctrine altogether” (p. 202). In my opinion, and Worthing would likely agree, Karl Heim’s book God Transcendent, even though first published 70 years ago, is still a valuable resource for developing a viable understanding of how the transcendence of God can be grasped and maintained with intellectual honesty.
Related Writings by Other Scholars
There are a number of other distinguished scholars who have done much to bridge the gap between Christian faith and contemporary science, including Ian Barbour[20] and Arthur R. Peacocke,[21] both of whom have made outstanding contributions to this field. In this final section, however, we will consider only three authors: John Polkinghorne, John Haught, and Diarmuid O’Murchu.
John Polkinghorne
John C. Polkinghorne (b. 1930) worked for many years as a theoretical elementary particle physicist. From 1968 to 1979 he was Professor of Mathematical Physics in the University of Cambridge, but he resigned from that prestigious position to train for the ministry of the Church of England, becoming a priest in 1982. After serving two years as a parish priest and another two years as vicar, he returned to Cambridge to serve as Dean of Trinity Hall and after three years he was appointed President of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, retiring in 1996. The following year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for distinguished service to science, religion, learning, and medical ethics. In 2002 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.[22]
Polkinghorne is a prolific writer and the author of many books about science and religion, including Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (1988), Science and Theology: An Introduction (1988), Reason and Reality: The Relationship Between Science and Theology (1991), The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994),[23] Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion (1994), Scientists as Theologians (1996), Beyond Science (1996), Science and Theology: An Introduction (1998), Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998), Traffic in Truth: Exchanges between Science and Theology (2002), in addition to the book briefly reviewed here.
For three years, an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars met under the auspices of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton University. The results of this consultation were made available in a volume of essays edited by Polkinghorne and Michael Welker of the University of Heidelberg. The first part of that book, entitled The End of the World and the Ends of God (2000), is about “Eschatology and the Natural Sciences,” and it is introduced by Polkinghorne, who has also written the chapter entitled, “Eschatology: Some Questions and Some Insights from Science.”
The God of Hope and the End of the World (2002) is the title of a book in which Polkinghorne reflects upon the work of the Center of Theological Inquiry Eschatology Project at Princeton and upon the book they produced. In that small but excellent book, Polkinghorne writes that he seeks “to present the motivations for Christian eschatological hope and to show that this hope is one that is intelligible and defensible in the twenty-first century” (p. xviii).
Polkinghorne’s reflections consist of three parts, which are entitled “Scientific and Cultural Prologue,” “Biblical Resources,” and “Theological Approaches.” In the first part the author states that from the standpoint of natural science, eventually life-ending and earth-ending catastrophes are certain (pp. 8-9). So he contends that “theology’s real concern must be able to embrace the whole of created reality and the totality of cosmic history” (p. 10), and he goes on to declare:
As far as science is right in describing the future as the extrapolation of the past and present, the world will certainly not end in the attainment of some climactic Ω point, but in the whimper of cold decay or the bang of fiery collapse” (pp. 11-12).
But then he goes on to declare: “. . . theology claims that what is ultimate is not the physical process but the will and purpose of God the Creator” (p. 12). So here, and throughout this book as well as his other works, Polkinghorne writes primarily as a theologian and only secondarily as a scientist.
In the second chapter, the author contends that “the deep intelligibility and rational beauty” that the universe expresses can be seen as “providing the basis for a revived and insightful kind of natural theology. A world shot through with such signs of mind may well be thought to reflect the Mind of its Creator” (pp. 19-20). This view is considerably different from Heim’s refusal to posit a natural theology—and from the view of John Haught, the scholar introduced in the next section.
At the end of the second chapter, Polkinghorne declares:
From its own unaided resources, natural science can no more than present us with the contrast of a finely tuned and fruitful universe which is condemned to ultimate futility. If that paradox is to receive a resolution, it will be beyond the reach of science on its own. We shall have to explore whether theology can take us further by being both humble enough to learn what it can from science and also bold enough to hold firm to its own sources of insight and understanding (p. 27).
The fourth chapter ends with the same sort of negative evaluation of science, as Polkinghorne believes that it would be a “grave mistake” to suppose “that the whole of reality can be caught in the wide meshes of the scientific net” (pp. 44-45).
Throughout this book, one of Polkinghorne’s main emphases is the expected continuity between the present world and the world to come. This leads to some interesting conclusions. For example, the tenth chapter is entitled, “The New Creation,” and the author states that the “necessary continuity between the old and new creations lies in the fact that the latter is the redeemed transform of the former” (p. 116). Accordingly, he posits that there will be “time” in the world to come, suggesting that the “new creation will not be a timeless world of ‘eternity,’ but a temporal world whose character is everlasting” (p. 117).
The eleventh chapter is about “the four last things,” namely, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But here Polkinghorne writes only about what Christian faith says about these matters and makes no attempt to relate those “things” to contemporary thought. Then in the twelfth and final chapter, the author deals with “the significance of the end,” and he begins the chapter by emphasizing again one of the central themes of the book:
The reason that eschatology is such an indispensable element in theological thinking is that it responds to the question of the total meaningfulness of the present creation, a meaning that can only finally be found beyond science’s extrapolation of contemporary history” (p. 140).
In that final chapter, the author contrasts “mainstream systematic theologians” and “scientist-theologians” such as himself, saying, among other things, that the latter tend to see things over a wider span of time; that is, systematic theologians tend not to think about cosmic history continuing for billions of years and that “before its foreseeable end, humanity and all forms of carbon-based life will have vanished from the universe” (p. 140-1). But in spite of his scientific bent, Polkinghorne remains a theologian, and thus he concludes his book with these words:
Christian belief must not lose its nerve about eschatological hope. A credible theology depends upon it and, in turn, a Trinitarian and incarnational theology can assure us of its credibility (p. 149).
Although Polkinghorne does not refer to the writings of Karl Heim, and although he forwards a natural theology in a way that Heim did not, there is a strong affinity between these two scholars in their understanding of Christian faith and its relationship to contemporary thought.[24]
John Haught
John F. Haught (b. 1942) is currently Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology and Director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. His area of specialization is systematic theology, with a particular interest in issues pertaining to science, cosmology, ecology, and religion. He is the author of a number of books on the general theme of Christian faith and contemporary (scientific) thought. These books include The Promise of Nature: Ecology and Cosmic Purpose (1993), Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (1995), God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (2000), Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution (2001), and Deeper Than Darwin: Evolution and the Question of God (2003).
In God After Darwin, Haught makes a valiant attempt to affirm an evolutionary, scientific worldview as well as an honest faith in God. He contends that “any beliefs we may hold about the universe . . . cannot expect to draw serious attention today unless we can at least display their consonance with evolutionary science” (p. 106). Thus, he accepts and affirms contemporary scientific views of the universe, while rejecting the ideological views of those thinkers who believe that contemporary science means that it is impossible to have an honest faith in God.
In particular, Haught refutes the charges directed toward faith in God made by such people as the prolific American philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (1995), and the well-known British zoologist Richard Dawkins, whose views are found in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and some of his later books.
On the other hand, Haught also criticizes the emphasis of some Christian thinkers who forward the idea of “intelligent design.”[25] He charges:
Because of the enormity of . . . suffering in nature, it seems to me that recent efforts to confront the challenge of evolution simply by restating or revising arguments for ‘intelligent design’ are both apologetically ineffective and theologically inconsequential (p. 46).
Throughout his book, Haught makes many references to Teilhard de Chardin (1881~1955), contending that probably no modern thinker “has been more persistent than Teilhard in seeking to transform our theological sensibilities in a way that takes evolution seriously” (p. 81). He also often refers to process theology and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861~1947), to which process theology is significantly related. In a subsection entitled, “A Process Perspective” (pp. 126~132), Haught contends that process theology provides an excellent way of interpreting the world theologically in a manner that harmonizes with evolutionary science. In addition, Haught highly evaluates kenotic theology; for example, he says that “the decisive self-emptying or kenosis of God” is the image to which Christian theology “must always repair whenever it thinks about God’s relationship to the world and its evolution” (pp. 110-111).
Haught’s own contribution to the theology of evolution is especially seen in his emphasis on promise. The ninth chapter of his book is entitled, “Evolution, Ecology, and the Promise of Nature,” and here he avers: “The notion of nature as promise brings together into a coherent vision the three domains of ecology, evolution, and eschatology” (p. 150). Promise is also the theme of the six-page conclusion of Haught’s significant book, which ends with this pregnant paragraph:
A world in evolution does not follow a strict plan but is nonetheless given its being, value, and meaning by God’s vision for it. The God of evolution does not fix things in advance, nor hoard selfishly the joy of creating. Instead God shares with all creatures their own openness to an indeterminate future. Such an interpretation does not destroy the cosmic hierarchy but by its openness to new being brings special significance to every epoch of nature’s unfolding, including humanity’s unique history in a still unfinished universe (p. 191).
The emphasis on promise is also found often in Haught’s newer book, Deeper Than Darwin. For example, when he calls for “a deeper theology” in chapter twelve of that book, he asserts: “In its depths, nature is promise” (p. 170). So Haught’s “theology of evolution” results in a “theology of promise.” In the developing of his understanding of the Christian faith, he has looked unflinchingly at the claims of contemporary evolutionary biologists and other natural scientists who have criticized and rejected that faith, and he has proceeded to develop an approach that most admirably goes beyond the reductionism and materialism of the latter to a deeper, much more satisfactory understanding of reality—and a view that is filled with hope and promise.
Diarmuid O’Murchu
The third and last thinker to be considered in this essay is Diarmuid O’Murchu (b. 1952), an Irish born and educated Catholic priest and social psychologist whose work and activities are now based in London. He is the author of such challenging books as Quantum Theology (1997) and Our World in Transition (2000), but here we will look only at his most recent book, Evolutionary Faith: Rediscovering God in Our Great Story (2002).
In his attempt to relate Christian faith to contemporary thought, especially contemporary scientific thought about evolution, O’Murchu, as well as John Haught, holds a much broader view of evolution than is usually true of those who write about Darwinianism. Thus, he asserts it is time to outgrow “the narrowly defined, competitively driven understanding of evolution” as seen in Darwinian biology, contending that it is time to embrace
the grandeur, complexity, and paradox that characterize evolution at every stage, a story that continues to unfold under the mysterious wisdom of our cocreative God, whose strategies always have, and always will, outwit our human and religious desire for neat, predictable outcomes (p. 23).
“Evolutionary Theology: Meaning from the Future” is the title of the second chapter of O’Murchu’s book,” and here he states that evolutionary theology “works with one major assumption: the Originating and Sustaining Mystery,” a phrase he uses for God, “has been totally involved in the unfolding process of creation from the very beginning” (p. 33). He posits that the “same prodigiously creative God is ahead of us in the future, which beckons us forth” (p. 35). Thus, what “drives evolution more than anything else is the allurement of an open-ended future” (p. 26), a future “endowed with hope and promise” (p. 37).
At the end of each of the thirteen chapters in O’Murchu’s stimulating book, there is a brief statement about what it is “time to outgrow” followed by a similarly succinct statement about what it is “time to embrace.” For example, he asserts that it is time to outgrow such things as “the fear-filled grip of mechanistic consciousness, rigidly clinging to the notion that creation is little more than dead, inert matter in a hostile, brutal, and flawed universe” (p. 73); “the crippling and stultifying dominance of Western imperialism that attributes ultimate truth to the rational, religiously validated rule of power” (p. 166); and “our dysfunctional relationship with creation whereby we pursue a ruthless and relentless exploitation of creation’s resources to the detriment of the fragile earth itself and all the vulnerable creatures who inhabit it” (pp. 195-196).
On the other hand, according to O’Murchu, it is time to embrace such things as “our entire evolutionary story of over four million years, and to take seriously the explosive and at times paradoxical creativity of the divine at every moment of that evolving process” (p. 150); “a universe exuding vitality and wisdom, consciously manifesting its innate power in the variety and the diversity of all life-forms” (p 181); and “the cosmic and planetary context within which our life story and the story of all life unfolds” (p. 206).
There is a decidedly Teilhardian flavor to the feast of ideas served so attractively in O’Murchu’s book. So it is no surprise that the author relates the Christian faith not only to the contemporary thought of natural scientists, but also to “New Age” thinkers such as Ken Wilber.[26] In the past, it was the natural sciences that provided the main challenges to the Christian faith, but now there are many other challenges as well—such as New Age thought that does not so much reject that faith in the way many scientists, and those enamored by the so-called scientific spirit, have done, but rather relegates Christian faith to a secondary status by forwarding a much broader, multi-layered, and universalistic worldview than is found in most expressions of Christianity. Thus the work of O’Murchu is of great interest and value for Christians living and witnessing in this first decade of the twenty-first century.
This review essay was spawned by the writer’s interest in Karl Heim, and the title is taken from the theme of Heim’s six-part series, Christian Faith and Contemporary Thought. Unfortunately, there are not many books written about Heim now,[27] so after dealing with three of Heim’s books in the first part of this essay, books by Hans Schwarz and Mark Worthing, contemporary scholars who stand in the Heimian tradition, were reviewed in the second part. Then the concluding part of this paper introduced books by three current thinkers who are on the cutting edge in the attempt to relate Christian faith to contemporary scientific thought in a satisfactory manner. The insights of all these superlative scholars provide rich resources to thoughtful Christians who seek to maintain complete intellectual honesty while standing firm and unfaltering in their faith.
WORKS CITED
Haught, John F.
2000 God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Westview Press.
2003 Deeper Than Darwin: Evolution and the Question of God. Westview Press.
Heim, Karl
1935 God Transcendent: Foundation for a Christian Metaphysic. Translated by Edgar Primrose Dickie. Nisbet and Co., Ltd. (This is a translation of the third German edition of Glaube und Denken, published by Furche-Verlag in 1934.)
1961 Jesus the Lord: The Sovereign Authority of Jesus and God’s Revelation in Christ. Translated by D. H. van Daalen. Muhlenberg Press. (This is a translation of the fourth German edition of Jesus der Herr: Die Herrscher-vollmacht Jesu und die Gottesoffenbarung in Christus, published by Furche-Verlag in 1955.)
1961 Jesus the World’s Perfecter: The Atonement and the Renewal of the World. Translated by D. H. van Daalen. Muhlenberg Press. (This is a translation of the third German edition of Jesus der Welt-vollender: Der Glaube an die Versöhnung und Weltverwandlung published by Furche-Verlag in 1952.)
1962 The World: Its Creation and Consummation: The End of the Present Age and the Future of the World in the Light of the Resurrection. Translated by Robert Smith. Muhlenberg Press. (This is a translation of the second German edition of Weltschöpfung und Weltende, published by Furche-Verlag in 1958.)
Michalson, Carl
1953 “The Task of Apologetics in the Future: Karl Heim’s Theology after Fifty Years,” Scottish Journal of Theology VI:4, pages 362~378.
1963 Review of Karl Heim, The World: Its Creation and Consummation in Theology Today XIX:4, pages 556-7.
O’Murchu, Diarmuid
2002 Evolutionary Faith: Rediscovering God in Our Great Story. Orbis Books.
Patterson, Robert E., editor
1979 Science, Faith, and Revelation: An Approach to Christian Philosophy. Broadman Press.
Polkinghorne, John
2002 The God of Hope and the End of the World. Yale University Press.
Polkinghorne, John, and Michael Welker, editors
2000 The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology. Trinity Press International.
Rust, Eric C.
1967 Science and Faith: Towards a Theological Understanding of Nature. Oxford University Press.
Schwarz, Hans
1972 On the Way to the Future: A Christian View of Eschatology in the Light of Current Trends in Religion. Augsburg Publishing House.
1975 The Search for God: Christianity, Atheism, Secularism, World Religions. Augsburg Publishing House.
1997 “Karl Heim and John Polkinghorne: Theology and Natural Sciences in Dialogue,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, IX:1/2, pp. 105~119.
2000 Eschatology. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Seat, Leroy
2002 “Reasons of the Heart: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 59 (2002), pp. 63~81.
2003 “Faith Beyond Reason: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 60 (2003), pp. 37~58.
Worthing, Mark William
1995 God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics. Fortress Press.
2002 “God, Process and Cosmos: Is God Simply Going Along for the Ride?” in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cosmology and Biological Evolution, edited by Hilary D. Regan and Mark Wm. Worthing. Australian Theological Forum. Pages 153~171.
ENDNOTES
[1] “Reasons of the Heart: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 59 (2002), pp. 63~81.
[2] “Faith Beyond Reason: A Review Essay,” The Seinan Theological Review 60 (2003), pp. 37~58.
[3] One of Dr. Rust’s major books is Science and Religion: Towards a Theological Understanding of Nature, and Heim is most prominently introduced on pages 133~5.
[4] This emphasis on transcendence led to the selection of a title for the English translation that was quite different from the German title.
[5] There is a remarkable similarity between the heart of Heim’s thought, as summarized here, and that of Kierkegaard as interpreted by C. Stephen Evans and critiqued in my previous review essay, “Faith Beyond Reason.”
[6] With his first mention of polarity, Heim has a footnote reference to pages 50~76 in God Transcendent.
[7] Similar assertions are found in other places: for example: “God is outside and beyond all polarities” (p. 28), and God is “beyond all polar relations” (p. 31).
[8] The German word Führer is translated as Leader, but the German word contains far more significance than the English does, for that was the title, of course, which was regularly used for Hitler in the 1930s, and it was very courageous of Heim to refer to Jesus as Führer. This emphasis is also seen in the German subtitle, Die Führervollmacht Jesu und die Gottesoffenbarung in Christus, which appears clearly on the cover of the third edition of Jesus der Herr which was published in Berlin in 1938.
[9] These several references to Kierkegaard are made partly because my previous essay was about Kierkegaard, and partly to indicate that there is considerable similarity between these two thinkers by whom I have been greatly influenced.
[10] See the review of The World by Carl Michalson in Theology Today, Vol. 19, p. 557. Michalson (1915~65) is also the author of “The Task of Apologetics in the Future: Karl Heim’s Theology after Fifty Years,” which appeared in the Scottish Journal of Theology in 1953.
[11] The Karl Heim Gesellschaft (Karl Heim Society) was founded in 1974, the centennial year of Heim’s birth, and this organization, which in 2004 had around 80 members and 550 supporting friends, “preserves the legacy of Karl Heim and attempts to provide a Christian orientation within a scientific-technological world through publications, seminars, and lectures” (Schwarz, 2002:120). The Society publishes a journal, Evangelium and Wissenschaft (Gospel and Science) and also maintains the Karl Heim Archives, which are housed in the Bengel House in Tübingen.
[12] In the Fall 1972 issue of Review and Expositor, David L. Mueller of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has a very positive review of this book by Hans Schwarz. In reference to the fourth chapter, Mueller refers to Schwarz’s introduction of Heim, and he, Mueller, says that Heim is a “theologian whose dimensional approach is not sufficiently appreciated today” (p. 536).
Heim and Teilhard are also juxtaposed in the second chapter of Science, Faith, and Revelation: An Approach to Christian Philosophy, a volume written as a Festschrift for Dr. Rust, whom I mentioned on the first page of this essay. That chapter by Doran McCarty, one of Dr. Rust’s students, is entitled, “Karl Heim and Teilhard de Chardin: Christian and Scientific Responses to the Problem of Transcendence.” For this same book, which was edited by Robert E. Patterson who was a professor at Baylor University for many years, I had the privilege of writing the 18th chapter: “Scientific Knowledge as Personal Knowledge.” That chapter deals primarily with the thought of Michael Polanyi (1891~1976), the fifth on my list of the ten theologians and philosophers by whom I have been most influenced.
[13] There have been several theologians in the last forty years who have sought to bridge that chasm, but Heim is notable because he was, as Schwarz contends, one of the first to do so.
[14] Almost exactly the same words both in the text and in the footnote appear in Eschatology on pages 294-5.
[15] The reference here to the idea of twofold truth developed by Muslim philosophers is mentioned again on page 123, and there is at that point also a footnote reference to the same part of Heim’s Glaube und Leben.
[16] I agree wholeheartedly with the important point Schwarz is making here; in fact, I have long wanted to write an essay on “Apology by Life.” Apologetics has long been one of my strongest interests, but long ago I realized that the best apologetics may well be done by loving action rather than by words.
[17] More recently, Schwarz has supervised a dissertation completed by Thomas Kothmann in 2001 with the title Apologetik und Mission. Die missionarische Theologie Karl Heims als Beitrag für eine Missionstheologie der Gegenwart.
[18] Worthing’s first doctoral dissertation, completed in 1992 at the University of Regensburg, was written under Schwarz’ supervision and entitled “The Relevance of Contemporary Theoretical Physics for a Christian Doctrine of God.”
[19] Worthing is also the editor of the Australian Theological Forum Science and Theology Series and co-editor of the second volume in that series: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cosmology and Biological Evolution (2002). His chapter in that volume is entitled, “God, Process and Cosmos: Is God Simply Going Along for the Ride?”
Although he is from Australia and did his graduate studies in Germany, Worthing completed his M.Div. degree at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and took a course by Dr. Rust. In an e-mail message, Dr. Worthing wrote that he was “very impressed” with Dr. Rust, who “was one of the first people that opened my mind to other possibilities for relating theology and science other than the warfare model.”
[20] Barbour (b. 1923) is a noted American physicist, theologian, author, and winner of the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. His book Issues in Science and Religion (1965) was highly influential in initiating the contemporary academic field of science and religion. He delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1989~91, and his book Religion in an Age of Science (1997) is based upon those lectures.
[21] Peacocke (b. 1924) is a prominent English biochemist and Anglican priest. He was awarded the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Peacocke, who holds doctorates in both science and theology, is the founder of the Society of Ordained Scientists, an international ecumenical organization that aims to bridge the gap between science and religion and to foster spirituality among scientists.
[22] In September 2001, I had the privilege of hearing Polkinghorne lecture and of conversing with him personally. On that occasion I was impressed not only with the lucidity of his thought but also with the warmth and seeming depth of his faith.
[23] This book is based on Polkinghorne’s 1993-94 Gifford Lectures.
[24] In an essay entitled “Karl Heim and John Polkinghorne: Theology and Natural Sciences in Dialogue,” (Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies IX [1997], Hans Schwarz points out the differences between these two scholars, especially regarding natural theology. But in the end he contends they are united by this common conviction: “There is no future, in an ultimate sense, for anything within our universe. True future and true fulfillment of individual and corporate life can only come through the grace of God and God’s own action” (p. 116).
[25] Haught does not mention William A. Dembski in this book, but Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University and one of the leaders among scientists forwarding the idea of “intelligent design.” He is the author, for example, of Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (1999). Dembski’s emphasis on intelligent design caused considerable controversy on the campus of Baylor university, and in 2000 he was demoted from his position as the director of the university’s Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design. That Center was subsequently closed.
The View from This Seat (supplementary blog) 