Last month my wife (Patty), our son (Jeremy), and I flew down to San Francisco for the Annual Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. While our primary purpose for being there was to be a cheering section for our daughter, Christy Riley, who presented a paper at an SBL session, it also gave Patty and me an opportunity to indulge in a couple days of nostalgia. That's because 34 years ago, as employees of Scholars Press (a joint venture of the AAR and SBL and others), we helped organize and run the same meetings in the same city. (My main job was to make sure the requested AV equipment was set up, which back then meant overhead and slide projectors.)
Besides Christy's session, I was also able to sit in on a presentation called "The Entangled Universe: Physical Explications, Theological Complications" by Dr. Catherine Keller, who just happens to be a teacher at Drew University, where Christy is earning her Ph.D.
While Dr. Keller's AAR presentation was suitably dense for a scholarly audience, fortunately for the rest of us, she shared many of the same ideas in an interview with Beatrice Marovich for Religion Dispatches magazine.
R.E. Slater, in his Relevancy22 blog, reproduces the RD article and adds some useful contextual material, including a discussion of apophatic vs. cataphatic theology. That's a distinction I wish I'd been more mindful of as I was writing Quantum Christianity, to be honest. Maybe I'll have to produce that second edition sooner than I'd hoped.
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About Me
- Jim Groves
- I am a former Presbyterian minister (and hence a holder of a Master of Divinity degree) and presently a technical writer for a Very Large Software Company (yes, you guessed right). My academic background is in things religious, but I have just enough interest in things scientific to support the delusion that I can write about them. In other words, I am a veritable salt shaker of dubious propositions.
For a few years now I've been fascinated with quantum physics. I feel like it's God giving us a peep hole view into his very nature. What that's propelled me to do is go back through the bible and look for evidence of QP in operation. What a wild ride! Dogmatic christians would probably be horrified but I think it's time for creative theology.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I'm thinking that often when the bible talks about a person lifting up his head, it's pointing to a shift from one parallel universe to another. I think the gates terminology, as in gates of the city, ancient gates, even when Samson lifted the gates on his shoulders, points to the same. When Moses' face glowed, might that have been his brain (quantum that it is) becoming entangled with God's mind? And on and on it goes. Someone needs to come out with a bible translation called the Scientific Bible that has footnotes pointing to all such QP-likely events. I think we're hopelessly entrenched in Newtonian thinking and we refuse to come out into the light of the 21st century, simply because we struggle to understand it.
Sorry I've been so neglectful in reading and responding to your reply. I suffer greatly from the eighth deadly sin: procrastination.
DeleteI'm especially intrigued by your association with Moses' glow with the mind of God. I think any quantum-based reading of the Bible should start with an examination of the role that light plays in revealing the nature and presence of God, from Moses' shining face, to the brilliance of Jesus on the mount of Transfiguration, to John's "in him was life, and the life was the light of humanity." My Hebrew and OT exegesis are so poor that I wouldn't dream of trying to undertake such a study in the Old Testament, but I confess that I am tempted to take a stab at the New Testament's use of imagery surrounding light and other forms of energy.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Let me add a PS:
ReplyDeleteI think there are enough "tools" out there now, QP being one, to enable the curious bible student to start "filling in the gaps." For too long christians have been in the dark, often resorting to quoting empty phrases they don't really understand. And then we wonder why the church is as disorganized and powerless as they seem these days? The bible is a supernatural document containing layer upon layer of truths deeper than the 2-dimensional pages (altho' even those 2D pages could very well represent a holographic world)! Don't get me started!