University—at least while I was a student there—was an intellectually and religiously liberating environment. It was there that I began to supplement my interest in Teilhard with the theology of hope articulated by Protestant theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg along with that of Catholic theologians Karl Rahner, Edward Schillelbeeckx, Yves Congar, and many others who had helped shape Vatican II. My scholarly interests became increasingly ecumenical and my doctoral dissertation reflects how Protestant theology helped me to address the question of how to translate the ancient eschatological thinking of the Bible into relevant contemporary terms compatible with science. To deal with the ancient biblical language of promise and hope, however, I had to study hermeneutics, the art and science of the interpretation of texts, on which I wrote my doctoral dissertation. As I look back on my life in theology, I observe that my constant concern to include the whole cosmos within a sweeping biblical vision of promise and redemption was already beginning to blossom in my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation.
Developing a hopeful sense of the cosmic future and of a purposeful universe has continued to be the main preoccupation of my theology. I have maintained, with Teilhard and “process thought,” that, in light of geology, evolutionary biology, and contemporary post-Einsteinian cosmology, theology henceforth needs to start out with the observation that the cosmos remains a work in progress. If the cosmos is still coming into being, we need to entertain the thought that something of great importance may be aborning up ahead and that human technology and morally chastened engineering will be increasingly essential to the shaping of the cosmic future, perhaps even in ways that we cannot yet imagine. I have long viewed the cosmos as a drama of awakening and I have continued to argue that the flourishing of a scientifically informed religious faith is essential to sustaining its momentum.
Concern for the cosmic future and for what’s really going on in the universe has not been a major theme of Western theology until after the emergence of evolutionary science and cosmology. Classical Christianity and its theologies first came to expression at a time when people took for granted that the universe is fundamentally fixed and unchanging. Their otherworldly spiritual instincts reflected a static, vertical, and hierarchical understanding of the cosmos. Today, however, especially because of developments in the natural sciences, we understand that the whole universe, not just life and human history, is still in the process of becoming. My writings reflect the belief that if we take seriously the fact that the universe is unfinished, we need to think new thoughts about the meaning of all the traditional theological topics, including God, faith, and the moral life. I have previously outlined the theological implications of an unfinished universe, especially in my recent book Resting on the Future (2015). There, as well as in my latest book The New Cosmic Story (2017), I have argued that the universe is best understood according to the metaphor of drama rather than that of design. This means that the most important question in science and theology today is not whether “intelligent design” points to a deity or even how God acts in nature but rather whether the cosmic drama carries a hidden but imperishable meaning.
I am quite aware, however, that this sense of the universe as a still unfinished drama has yet to settle deeply into Christian theological awareness in particular and most religious thought everywhere. Most of the devotional life of religious people on our planet still presupposes an essentially immobile universe. Some of our schools of theology still pay scarcely any attention to science. Christian thought and instruction even at non-fundamentalist schools still tend to nurture nostalgia for a lost Eden or look skyward toward a final heavenly communion with God, apart from natural history and the cosmic future. Emphasis on the need to restore a putatively idyllic past, together with a longing to escape from Earth into eternity, still leads theologians to ignore the Abrahamic spirit of adventurous hope which, in my opinion, must once again become the foundation of any truthful and honest Christian worldview.
Meanwhile, intellectual life, philosophy of science, and the assumptions of popular culture remain immersed in a deadening materialist pessimism that unnecessarily undermines all hopes that the cosmos can somehow be saved from absolute death. Like traditional otherworldly theology, contemporary intellectual life is badly in need of revision. Many of the readings in this book, therefore, reflect my conviction that contemporary scientific naturalism is not only spiritually but also intellectually problematic. I argue that, since our universe is still on the move, we may find—at least in principle, without any conflict with science—reasons to anticipate the future transformation of the whole universe into something unimaginably beautiful, as Teilhard has done in many of his works and as Pope Francis recently encouraged us to do in his encyclical, Laudato si.6
Christian religious hope, along with the religious aspirations of other traditions, needs to be channeled into a common human concern for the cosmic future (“a great hope held in common,” as Teilhard puts it) and not just as a training ground to prepare our souls for personal immortality.7 I am convinced, moreover, that a concern for cosmic destiny will simultaneously include, enrich, and expand our understandable hopes for personal salvation. Moreover, the widening of human hope to include the cosmic future should be ecologically invigorating. Were theology to take seriously the evolutionary understanding of life and the new cosmological sense of an unfinished universe, the natural setting of human aspirations and religious hope would be expansive enough to give new significance to discussions of the relationship between science and faith.
The readings in this book all take for granted that our new sense of the universe as a drama of awakening is spiritually much more consequential than most scientists and religious believers have noticed. The freedom, redemption, and healing that people of faith look for has not yet fully come to pass since the cosmic story that gave birth to them is still far from finished. This means, as Teilhard has rightly indicated, that all religions and all theological speculation are unfinished and, like the universe, they have a dark side, but, since “the universe is still aborning,” they may also have a fresh future.8
Any religious expectation that is aware of nature’s leaning toward the future hopes not only for personal conscious survival after death but also for the fulfillment of the whole cosmos, as Pope Francis urges in his recent encyclical. The promising God of Abraham, who arrives from out of the future when it seems that everything has reached a dead end, may now be sought by looking in the direction of a new future—not only for individual souls but also for the whole universe. Abrahamic faith in the age of science anticipates not only human and personal redemption but also indeed a transfiguration of the whole cosmos into a scene of wondrous beauty. Without setting out to do so, the natural sciences depicting an unfinished cosmos allow room for a new and beautiful future, not just for humanity and for the earth but also for the whole universe. Science’s fresh picture of the cosmos as a drama rather than a design gives a new zest and scope to the ancient Abrahamic expectations. Both science and faith direct us, accordingly, to look for the advent of an Indestructible Rightness and Brightness that is drawing the whole scheme of things into the unity of new being from out of the future. A destiny that comprises anything less than the whole cosmic story—and perhaps a multiverse as well—cannot be fully liberating for any living being.
My Approach to Issues in Science and Theology
The objective of most of my recent writing has been to acclimatize faith to the newly discovered story of a cosmos that started fourteen billion years ago and is still in process. At the same time, however, my teaching, speaking, and writing during the last half-century have attempted not only to make room for faith in the age of science but also to fortify faith by exposing it continually to new scientific discoveries. A major obstacle to the realizing of this objective has been the persistence of biblical literalism in the minds of both believers and scientific skeptics. I have found that most scientists who profess hostility to theology have little if any familiarity with modern biblical criticism. As a result, they carry the same literalist assumptions in their reading of ancient holy books as do anti-Darwinian biblical creationists. Nowadays, in the age of science, literalism often takes the form of an unconscious expectation
