In Honor of Laudato Si!!! John Haught and "God After Einstein"

This morning I was sent a video used at a prayer service in honor of Laudato Si. It was beautiful but unfortunately, I can't post it here. Still, the link is as follows: John Rutter. 

As I watched it, I was led to think of one of the most interesting books I am reading currently reading: viz., John Haught's God After Einstein: What's really Going on in the Universe? The basic idea is something Haught has raised before in several books, namely, that our universe is unfinished (no surprise there but, man (!), the theology that needs rethinking in light of this is huge!!); that universe is also coming to awareness in us as part of the evolutionary process. In this drama, the meaning of everything is only gradually revealed (just as in any drama). Haught accounts for the order in the universe, but also immense amounts of time, and chance --- elements of all good dramas --- and he counters scientists who reiterate affirmations of the meaninglessness of the universe or of human life. This book, like others he has written is rooted in hope as we look with anticipation towards an absolute future we know as God. 

Haught's most sustained effort at recasting theology in light of what science has established as an unfinished universe is his book Resting on the Future: Catholic Theology for an Unfinished Universe. Here Haught treats God as absolute future (cf. Ted Peters, God the World's Future). In all of these works Haught understands God creating by summoning reality out of nonbeing and chaos into existence and then into greater and greater coherence and fullness of being. It is not the case, Haught understands, that creation was perfect and that human beings messed that up somehow, but rather, that stories like those of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in Genesis tell us about a reality which is up ahead of us, not in our past. This is consonant with the theology of others who are rethinking approaches to original sin which honor both the complexity of an evolving universe and the way in which human beings ratify estrangement from a God who can only be received as gift in our lives. (In other words, we each and every one of us** mess things up, but the story is more complex than Genesis may, even in its mythic narrative power and depth, have allowed or been capable of allowing for.)

Haught really praises Laudato Si and the sophistication Pope Francis' theology holds in regard to nature so it seemed to me that during this week, where some are celebrating Laudato Si  with videos like the one linked above, it was a good time to remind folks about the kind of work theologians are doing with regard to nature, and especially re: the new cosmology. Haught writes in God Beyond Einstein, [[The Laudato Si encyclical of Pope Francis is one among many encouraging signs that Christians are beginning to experience a new relationship with the natural world. Our caring for nature is not simply a matter of saving ourselves and other living beings, or of ensuring fertility of life, or of practicing faithful stewardship in obedience to God. All of these are good reasons to care, of course, and Christian theologians are right to keep looking into the Scriptures in search of a doctrinal foundation for supporting the ecological movement. But is that enough?

. . .After Einstein, however, we have a whole new way of looking at our ecological predicament --- an unprecedented cosmological point of view. . . . This new perspective gives us, I believe, a fresh set of incentives with which to approach the present crisis. What is at stake is not just the well-being of life on our planet but, in a way, the future of the universe. If the universe is a drama of awakening, as I have proposed, then the existence and flourishing of life and other emergent outcomes on planet Earth are not just a sideshow. The future of life is a cosmic, not just a terrestrial, concern.]]

I'll just say if you are intrigued, please get the book!!! Haught writes in direct opposition to the scientists who say matter is all there is and a meaningless universe is all we have (scientific materialism) --- much as he argues against this and scientism in Is Nature Enough? Moreover, for "Christians" who believe the world is dispensable because, "we are going to heaven, so what does it matter," Haught's work is far more in line with St Paul, the Gospel proclamation of a New Creation in Christ, and the book of Revelation's new heaven and new earth in which God will be all in all.

** I am not including Jesus in this, nor Mary, so please don't write me objecting about that!!!

John Haught, the Future, and Advent

As a result of a panel discussion I listened to yesterday or the day before, I was reading God After Darwin again and came to an interesting passage on time and the idea of a metaphysics of future. In this book John F Haught tries to reorient both theology and science from an over dependence on (or bondage to) the past and turn them to a notion of future which is very different than the notion we are so used to. He is convinced this new perspective is (literally) the hope of both theology and science. For me personally his ideas imply a shift in the way I think of "the present moment" or the way I celebrate Advent or look to the Feast of Christ's Nativity.

Haught begins this section by describing faith as the state of being grasped (a la Tillich!) by "that which is to come." He then speaks of the future as having some kind of "efficacy" --- hard as this is to conceive of. He goes on to refer to a famous passage by Tillich in which he refers to being grasped by the "coming order." [[ The coming order is always coming, shaking this order, fighting with it, conquering it and conquered by it. The coming order is always at hand. But one can never say, "It is here. It is there!" One can never grasp it, but one can be grasped by it.]] (Shaking of the Foundations, p 27)

We are so very used to thinking of the future as that which is not here yet (because it has not yet been built out of the building blocks of the past and present), and the past as that which has been completed and gone (scattered building blocks, mostly turned to dust). We think of the present (the building blocks we can pick up and work with) as the only really real. But the situation is more complex and also more exciting than this. What we call present is the eternally-coming-to-be-and-also-passing (the eternally vanishing and ephemeral). It cannot really be fixed or pointed to, for the moment we identify it, it is gone and a new present has come into play (and gone again too). Meanwhile it is the future that takes hold of us and calls us to be. Haught writes:

[[In the experience of faith, it is the "future" that comes to meet us, takes hold of us, and makes us new. We may call this future, at least in what Rahner calls its "absolute" depth, by the name "God". In Biblical circles the very heart of authentic faith consists in the total orientation of consciousness toward the coming of God, the ultimately real. Beyond all our provisional or relative futures there lies an "Absolute future." And since our own experience cannot be separated artificially from the natural world to which we are tied by evolution, we are permitted to also surmise that "being grasped" by the absolute future pertains not just to ourselves but to the whole cosmic process in which we are sited. Theology can claim legitimately, along with St Paul (Rom 8:22), that the entire universe is always being drawn by the power of a divinely renewing future. The "power of the future" is the ultimate metaphysical explanation of evolution.]]

Later Haught explains: "by a metaphysics of the future, I mean quite simply the philosophical expression of the intuition --- admittedly religious in origin --- that all things receive their being from out of an inexhaustibly resourceful "future" that we may call "God" this intuition also entails the notion that the cosmic past and present are in some sense given their own status by the always arriving but also always unavailable future. . . . It should not be too hard for us to appreciate, therefore, why a religion that encourages its devotees to wait in patient hope for the fulfillment of life and history will interpret ultimate reality, or God, as coming toward the present, and continually creating the world from the sphere of the future "not-yet". . . .The past and present may seem to have more "being," in the sense of fixed reality, than does the future, which apparently has the character of not-yet-being. . . . In fact many of us think intuitively of the future as quite "unreal," since it has not yet arrived fully. [Haught notes this is a difficult and confusing idea at first, then says,] . . .perhaps this confusion is the result of our having been bewitched by a metaphysics either of the past or the eternal present. . . .]]

It seems to me that Advent is the perfect time to ask ourselves if we have been so bewitched, and to what degree we are really believers in the summoning call, promise, and power of the future which dwells within us and summons us from all sides as well. To what degree are our own lives an expression of the hope this future provides? (I would note that nothing unreal has this same kind or degree of power.) How truly attuned to the future are we? How truly capable of waiting, not in the grim sense of being stuck in the past, but in terms of orienting all we are and know TOWARDS the future that IS in God and is breaking in on us at every moment?

Contemplatives often speak of living in the present moment or attending to the present moment and sometimes we have the sense that the present moment is a kind of static reality of some breadth and length. We may also think that this kind of spirituality locks away the past and blocks us from looking towards the future. But really, the contemplative "present moment" is precisely what Haught is speaking of here: the powerful and continual grasping of our lives by the power of futurity -- a futurity grounded and realized in the living God. To truly dwell in the present moment is to give oneself over to this absolute future, this God who creates by summoning us forth from death and the despair of the past-only into the hope and freedom of the dawning-future we call present. This I think is preeminently the spirituality of Advent.

Our own approaches to Advent will differ one to the next, but we should ask ourselves to what degree have we become bewitched by another metaphysics than the one Haught describes, a metaphysics of the past or of a static eternal present, for instance rather than a metaphysics of future. For some that may mean spending some time rethinking our own ideas of the nature of time. We must at least, I think, begin to get our minds around this idea that the future is more real than we have allowed thus far in our conventional wisdom re time, and that IT is the reason there is a present (or really, anything at all). We, our world, the whole of the cosmos is not SIMPLY the consequence of a series of past causal events. Instead we are the result of God summoning the real out of the unreal, the more perfect out of the less perfect, the more complex out of the less complex, etc. We are here because the future opens the way for us to grow to fulfillment, not as a void into which we might merely move or expand as the weight of the past pushes us onward, but as an effective reality which empowers and summons to encounter and surrender. For me this is a really new way of thinking or seeing --- something, despite my reading of Haught, Moltmann, et al, I had not really "gotten" before now in doing theology. And so, the prospect of exploring this is new and exciting. Personally, I love beginnings and the excitement linked to them! That is what Advent (and the power of future) are all about! Apparently that is also what remaining in the present moment is all about as well!!

P.S., for those looking for a challenging and very exciting read, check out John Haught's, God After Darwin, A Theology of Evolution. If you are not up to the whole thing (and I personally am not myself right now) at least read chapter 6, "A God for Evolution." Of all of Haught's books the one I have liked best to this point is Is Nature Enough?. Great ideas, central themes, but readable. There you might want to look at the chapter on "Emergence" or the last short chapter on "Anticipation".