Follow here as we read Bishop Knisely's "Lent is Not Rocket Science: An Exploration of God, Creation and the Cosmos"

From Bishop Knisely's new book published by Forward Movement. You can read the first week's meditations here, and download the ebook for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or iTunes at a discounted $1.99 price to follow along as we discuss this book the rest of Lent.

Intro: An Invitation to View Lent from a New Perspective

For a long time Christians understood that there were two ways to learn about God. One was by studying the revelations that God made through the writings collected into Holy Scripture. The other was by applying our senses to the world around, the creation that God made and then declared “very good” (Genesis 1:31) This second way of learning about God and God’s intentions for humankind is called Natural Theology. The word theology literally means “words about God,” so Natural Theology means “Nature’s words about God.” 

During the Reformation in the sixteenth century, theologians began to become increasingly wary of humanity’s ability to use reason properly. During the medieval period, the “scholastic” movement within theology had worked to apply the best of classical philosophical thought, primarily that of Aristotle, to reasoning about God. This way of thinking reasoned that the Earth was the center of the universe, that the lights in the sky revolved around it, and that planets moved because of the angels who propelled them with their wings. But as scientific observations about the nature of the solar system and gravity began to overthrow these ideas, theologians reacted by giving more importance to the revelation of Holy Scripture than that of Natural Theology. Today the situation has gotten so extreme in parts of the church that special courses taught in schools and universities focus on “Christian Science” and hold that anything that is seen to contradict the literal and plain meaning of Holy Scripture must be considered wrong and be dismissed. This leads some Christians to be suspicious of the study of evolution, cosmology, and geology. 

During this Lent, I invite you to return to an earlier understanding of Natural Theology. I invite you to see it as a channel of revelation about the nature of God that is not absolute in itself, but is an equal partner in conversation with Holy Scriptures and the traditions of the church. Paying attention to the world around us—to the intricate structures of nature, to the mind-bending reality of the cosmic and microscopic realms—will invite us to recognize that the God we worship, and with whom we have an ongoing relationship, is present in the raging storm, the fiery whirlwind of the surface of a star, and the deep silence of intergalactic space. 

I invite you to open all of your senses to seek God’s presence in nature. God is not nature, nor is God bounded by nature, but God is most certainly nature’s author—and nature’s “words” can point us onward to that which is beyond its bounds. In the coming days and weeks of Lent, I invite you to journey from the largest scale of the created order inward to the very smallest scale we can speak about. Some of the images will be familiar, some of them will require a bit of meditation and imagination to understand, but all will hopefully lead us to new insights about God’s relationship with us.

W. Nicholas Knisely

XIII Bishop of Rhode Island 

Providence, Rhode Island 

Lent 2014
_____

"Lent is Not rocket Science" was published by Forward Movement, a ministry of the Episcopal Church which publishes accessible low cost resources on discipleship written by the laity, clergy, and bishops of the church largely on a pro bono basis.