Thursday After Ash Wednesday - Lent is not Rocket Science

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.

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Joseph Butler and the Analogies

My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”— The Song of Solomon 2:10 

How should science and religion speak to each other? It’s not clear. Science is built on a ladder of deductions and observations. Religion, particularly in the case of Christianity, is built on revelation and experience. Given that the two disciplines are different at this fundamental level, finding a common language has always been difficult. 

In the earliest days of the church, there was no divide between natural philosophy and theology. One led directly to the other, and people studied natural philosophy—what we typically call “science” today—on the way to their work in theology. But during the Renaissance of Western thought, when pre-Christian thinkers were being rediscovered and studied, a gulf began to grow between the two disciplines. The way scientists and theologians did their work became an increasing barrier to the conversation many expected them to have. The problem became more acute as time went by. 

Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham in the mid-eighteenth century, wrote a book that was primarily a response to the new thinking that Isaac Newton’s work had begun. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation allowed the natural philosophers of his day to make predictions that were a revelation to their time. Things we take for granted today—like predicting the exact date of an eclipse, describing the flight of a canon ball, or understanding how a barrel of water drains from a spigot—became commonplace for the first time as a result of Newton’s work. The universe was no longer viewed as a living entity with the Holy Spirit as its core, but as a machine, a mechanism that was understandable and predictable. A new view of God began to emerge—the clock-maker God who, having set the universe in motion, had left the scene and was no longer in constant relationship with it. 

Butler’s work, titled Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature but commonly known as the Analogy, was considered a tour de force in his day. He undertook to show how the best scientific thinking of his day was not opposed at all to the theology of the church. Rather, he said, all of nature pointed toward the deeper revelation of God. He began by describing the butterfly that emerges from the cocoon transformed with a new and more glorious body as an analogy of what God intended for each of us—and the whole of creation—in the coming kingdom. Butler’s work became the talk of northern Europe, and for a while it was one of the most popular books in print. 

But then scientific thought moved on. The French and German schools began to move beyond Newton’s mechanical models for the universe and toward a view based on the behavior of energy in all its various forms. Butler’s book was now having a conversation with a partner who was no longer speaking with him. Christianity, based on the full revelation of God in the person of Jesus, speaks of eternal truths that must be at the heart of all theological conversations no matter the era in which they occur. Science is constantly moving forward, discarding older ideas that are no longer viewed as adequate explanations and taking up new ones that promise to do a better job of explaining what is observed. It’s not that the two conversation partners have a different language; they are each speaking in ways that the other has trouble detecting. 

And yet we need to have the conversation. And so we struggle to hear each other’s voice. There can be no reconciliation, which is the core of the church’s mission, unless there is conversation. It has always seemed to me that learning to speak to each other, learning to understand how another person thinks, is both the key to empathy and compassion but also a primary gate to be entered as we come into the kingdom of God. 

What conversations have you been neglecting because they are difficult to have? 

Who in your life do you have trouble identifying with or understanding? 

What can you do today to move a little closer to those persons, to take the conversation a few steps further along? Doing that is doing the work of reconciliation. 
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"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.