The Divine Universe

 

The word ‘God’ in our English Old Testament translates the Hebrew word Elohim, and we should notice that, ending in ‘im’, it is a plural noun. Christianity is what is called a monotheistic religion. We believe in one God, but that does not necessarily mean that the Christian God is what philosophers call a monad, a totally homogeneous entity. The Christian God is the same God that the Jews call Elohim. God has inner complexity. One could say that God is a community, a family even.

We speak in the Nicene Creed of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit is sometimes represented as a bird, from Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism where the Spirit descends on Jesus “like a dove”. But we do not believe that God is literally an oldish man, a young man and a bird. In recent times we have referred to the Trinity as “Creator, Redeemer and Spirit of life.”

Calling God ‘Father’ unfortunately suggests that “He” is male. God is not an animal and does not have a gender. However, we should not dump the metaphorical word ‘Father’. God did not create the universe like a craftsman might create a work of art or a piece of machinery. It is more appropriate to think of God as procreating, giving birth to the universe as a living organism: his offspring. The universe is the fruit of God’s overflowing love.

 

Of course, when Jesus spoke of his ‘Father’ he did not mean one person of the Trinity. Jesus knew nothing of such a doctrine. He referred to the whole of God, Elohim, or the other Hebrew word for God, the enigmatic and unspeakable name revealed to Moses, represented by four consonants, YHWH. In the Jewish Bible (the Old Testament) YHWH is, with a very few exceptions, rendered by the word Adoni, which we translate as Lord.

 

So let’s think about God the Creator, God the Redeemer and God the Holy Spirit. All three notions of God appear in the Old and New Testaments, though the word Trinity does not. That first appears in the 2^nd century but was not precisely defined until AD352, when the Nicene Creed was composed.

 

We can think of God as creator in terms of the two creation myths at the beginning of Genesis, which are not particularly anthropomorphic, though he speaks in human language, or we can think of him in terms of Big Bang theory. You will probably be less familiar with the latter so let me say a bit about that. Big Bang theory actually follows approximately the order of events in Genesis Chapter 1, which is a poetic narrative about an imaginary seven-day period in primordial time.

In primordial time, before chronological time where we exist, there was the chaotic void, without form as Genesis says. Physicists call this the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum occupies the whole of space and time but it transcends it. It is boundless. Space and time were created in the Big Bang. The universe came into being in the quantum vacuum.

Christians and, in fact almost all religious traditions, hold that the universe has a divine or supernatural origin. Science has no idea what caused the Big Bang or what causes the universe to develop and evolve as it is doing. A Christian scientist would hold that God was the initiating force; that God, as it were, ‘breathed’ on the quantum vacuum and there emerged what physicists call the ‘Singularity’ which inflated and expanded from the ‘Big Bang’ to become what we know as the universe today. This expansion, the Big Bang, is still going on.

To go back to the Bible: St Paul and St John refer to the divine Christ as the one “in whom and through whom all things come into being”. The universe is therefore not only divine in origin, but also divine in nature. Christ is not simply the individual whose life is described in the gospels, but a cosmic being. The American theologian, Professor Sallie McFague, refers to the universe as the Body of God in a book of that name, the embodiment of God, the cosmic Christ. In the Nicene Creed we call him the Son, “begotten, not made”. As I said: the universe is the fruit of love, not the product of divine craftsmanship.

At the same time, the Church teaches that God is pure Spirit, without parts or passions. That may seem inconsistent with the doctrine of the Trinity, but bear in mind that the three Persons are not distinct parts of God they are all fully and completely divine and they merge completely.

Scientists have studied the universe exclusively as a physical entity – that is their field. But many philosophers and even some physicists believe that the universe has a non-material dimension– that the universe is not only a material entity but a spiritual one as well.

 

Einstein discovered that matter is not something separate from energy; matter is made of energy – concentrated, complex formations of pure energy. The universe is ultimately made of energy. When we say that God is pure spirit, we might also say that God is pure energy. The universe, the cosmic Christ, is filled with the energy of God. And it is informed by the Mind of God, evolving towards some future and mysterious perfection.

 

Some philosophers and scientists like the late Alfred North Whitehead and the living Australian physicist, Charles Birch, have proposed that the universe is not only a living organism but also has mind. The universe thinks. It has its own psyche, but, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, the cosmic mind is being drawn into conformity with the divine mind.

When we preach about the Holy Spirit, we generally focus on Isaiah’s seven gifts and Paul’s seven fruits of the Holy Spirit. That is quite proper, but it rather suggests that we humans are what the cosmos is all about. The Holy Spirit is not just an exclusive gift to devout Christians; he is a gift to the universe. St John wrote that God loves the world. The Greek word there is cosmos, which we usually translate as universe. So he refers not just to human beings or even just the planet Earth but the whole universe. The Holy Spirit, the active agent of God’s love, is a universal, indeed a transcendent being.

One cannot be long-winded in a blog so this is only a brief reflection on the central dogma of Christianity; but there is a rich store of scholarly literature written by learned scholars.