Not only do I claim that the proper study of mankind is Creation; I also claim that the priority in that study for Christians in this mortal realm is the Body of Christ as it is developing in this mortal realm.
This doesn’t mean that every human being should be a philosopher or physicist. It does mean we all have the duty to respond to objective reality in our own callings, the entirety of our lives.
I’m driven to remind myself of this because I’ve recently found myself reading comments on the Internet or engaging in conversations in which pious Christians have set out their all-too subjective concerns with Christianity as a human enterprise or with the Catholic Church as a set of human institutions. Acknowledging that things aren’t going so well with our faith in this year of 2011, all of their solutions had to do with human institutional arrangements. Allow married priests in the Catholic Church. Allow women in the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Allow homosexual ministers in XXX denomination of Protestant Christianity. Feed the poor in Africa or build new, mildew-free houses for those in New Orleans who’ve still not recovered from Hurricane Katrina.
Some of the suggestions had some serious weight behind them as if dealing with duties which Christians have been neglecting. Some are the same old tired issues. The most viable suggestions, in my opinion, have to do with Christians trying to reign in their war-criminal leaders or showing themselves willing to pay a price to follow their Lord instead of always suggesting that the moral tone of society be improved by others giving up sins that don’t tempt most mainstream Christians.
Rarely do I hear anyone discuss the possibility which is so close to the heart of my efforts. Maybe we’ve lost touch with God’s story which is this world? We do know something important about God’s ultimate purposes as revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, maybe we should put in an effort to understand what God’s doing in this mortal realm of His Creation? Maybe we should try to see what His purposes are for us and for the development of the Body of Christ in this vale of tears? Maybe we should be trying to perceive the thoughts God manifested in this universe?
This is close to the driving theme of the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. God was nurturing some pagans that they might come to dominance in the region of Israel and Judea. Rather than trying to be excessively clever, let alone trying to stand up militarily to peoples of growing powers, it was time for the Judeans and Israelites to recognize their situation and to cooperate with God, not collaborate with violent barbarians but also not to stand in the way of powerful trends which were part of God’s story.
Though wars rage throughout the world, I’m not really thinking of those particular aspects of mortal life in this context. I’m thinking, for example, of the general inability of Christians to address the nature of sin in light of biblical revelation and of Darwinian empirical knowledge. It seems that some tried only to lose their faith. I’m thinking of our lack of response to new understandings of time and space and matter which should lead to great enrichments of our understanding of the possibilities of resurrection and to radically new understandings of the sacramental nature of physical reality and of the Sacraments themselves — baptism and so forth. Maybe if we could present a plausible Christ-centered story which is compatible with this new knowledge of Creation, maybe, maybe we could preach Christ so that all of His children would stop and listen and maybe try to become a willing part of the story God is telling?
Perhaps we should work towards a better understanding of our own nature as developing creatures, members of a species which has evolved over an immense amount of time. Maybe we could then come to understand our problems and imperfections in ways that will help us deal with them a little better instead of babbling about free-will and a fall from a state of grace only to take our children and our friends to psychiatrists to deal with the imbalances in their brain chemicals.
See my prior article Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason for my response to a speech in which Pope Benedict expressed his awareness of this same situation. In particular, he told us, “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.” I would add to this that we need to gain a similarly more exact understanding of the foundational aspects of the world in which we find ourselves, a more exact understanding of time and space and matter and of all the extraordinary relationships which exist between various sorts of entities in this world. I think we can learn some important thoughts of God by studying not only those bones dug out of the sands of Africa but also planets and gas clouds and those longfar-agoway objects such as quasars and giant, first-generation stars.
Maybe then we could have something intelligent to say about the resurrection or the Body of Christ, however tentative our first ideas might be in this new adventure of the mind and spirit.