Genesis 1:1-2; 26-28, NRSV
Matthew 3:13-17, NRSV
John 1:1-5, 14, NRSV
Reflections
Science does an excellent job of telling me why I don’t have a tail, but it can’t explain why I find that interesting.
Science shines when dealing with parts and pieces, but it doesn’t do all that well with soul.
It can do a brilliant job of explaining how we and other species have adapted and evolved, but it falls short when it comes to where the reverence humming within us comes from.
When I’m talking about God, I’m talking about the grenzbegriff kind of faith that sees science and faith as the dance partners they’ve always been, each guiding and informing the other, bringing much-needed information and insight to their respective levels of hierarchy. To see them at odds with each other is to confuse the levels of hierarchy, resulting in all sorts of needless debates, misunderstandings, and terrible bumper stickers.
I say all of this about science and faith because when I’m talking about God, I’m talking about the source of all truth, whatever labels it wears, whoever says it, and wherever it’s found—from a lab to a cathedral to a pub to Mars.
This is important, because for many in our world, somewhere along the way reality got divided up into the secular and the sacred, the religious and the regular, the holy and the common — the understanding being that you’re talking about either one or the other but not both at the same time.
This dis-integrated understanding of reality — the one that puts God on one side and not the other, the one that divides the world up into two realms – it’s lethal, and it cuts us off from the depths and separates us from the source.
Because sometimes you need a biologist, and sometimes you need a poet.
Sometimes you need a scientist, and sometimes you need a song.— Rob Bell
What We Talk About When We Talk About God
- Expectations of getting answers, but we get meaning
- There is more than literate truth
