“The gospel of John," biologist Charles Birch writes, presents: “a picture of everything being alive with Life from the very beginning. Such is this particular biblical interpretation of the creative process. It was personal from the beginning, but that only becomes fully evident in the light of its manifestation in human persons. Always it was transcendent to the world. Always it was involved with the world, drawing the world to itself, brooding over the face of the earth.”
“This light flickered uncertainly within the church as it wavered from commitment to a view of the total involvement of God in the world to one restricted to humans alone. In the process both humanity and nature lost out, for neither nature, humanity nor God can be understood alone.”
“To love is to be the recipient of love and to return love. Is the God of love an exception to this principle? On the contrary, God’s love must be responsive, or it is not love at all. Indeed, a God whose influence is divorced form responsiveness and sensitivity is irresponsible. Without that aspect of God’s nature nothing is saved after the world comes to its end in a fiery furnace of the sun or in a frozen waste.”
“The divine passion is God’s feeling of the world as the world is created. As every entity ‘feels’ the lure of God and responds to that lure then God becomes concretely real in a way God was not concretely real before. And that new reality makes a difference to God. God is the one who cherishes all: ‘unto whom all hearts are open,’ says the collect. With each creative advance, be it in cosmic evolution or in an individual life, God becomes different. Every individual experience has its consequence in the life of God.”
As the cosmos evolves: “God as divine Eros, transcendent to the universe, becomes immanent within the new creation. This is God’s presence in the world. In addition, the world is present in God as the divine Passion responds to each new creation and each existing one. This is not the image of the world as a contrivance and God as the artificer working from a pre-planned blueprint of the future. It is an image of the world as organically related to God who provides the purposes and values of creation moment by moment yet leaves the creation with its degree of freedom and self-determination. In this sense the future is not determined. It is open-ended. The possibilities of creativity are immense, but not all possibilities are relevant at any particular stage of the evolving cosmos. We are caught in the web of history. Yet our future is still open-ended within the realm of possibilities relevant to that history.”
“In the worlds of the Jewish scholar Abraham J. Heschel, ‘God is waiting for us to redeem the world.’ For us to fail to respond to the forward call of life is not just a personal failure. It is a cosmic tragedy.”
“The whole organizes and even creates the parts. The lower levels of organization are to be interpreted in terms of the higher. This principle is recognized in recent developments in quantum physics. It has validity over the whole spectrum of individuals from protons to people. The basic principle is this: we understand what is not ourselves by analogy with what we know ourselves to be.”
"The heavenly city of the Enlightenment has not arrived. We still have with us ‘children of darkness’ who are evil because they know no law beyond self. Their wisdom is that they understand the power of self-interest. The ‘children of light’ are wise because they believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law."
What is this higher law? It is not the authority of any individual, group or institution. It is not any created good at all. These all tend to become idols. It is the source of all good, the source of all creativity. The moral and spiritual resources for a just, peaceful and sustainable global society are pressing daily upon us, seeking entry into life and blocked only by self-interest. There is a way through. Repentance is still possible.”
Charles Birch, The Purpose in Everything: Religion in a Postmodern Worldview (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).
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