When I was of early elementary-school age, my parents, as part of their valuing the importance of education, bought our family a 20-volume encyclopedia..... Beginning at the first volume’s front endpaper, and continuing through the books to the final volume’s back endpaper, there were depicted in chronological order scenes of scientific and technological discoveries down through history.
I also have a childhood memory of some other types of pictures in books. Those were the colored pictures of Jesus, Moses, and other Biblical figures that were interspersed through the pages of some editions of the Bible I encountered as part of my growing up within a mainline Protestant denomination.
Fortunately, I was part of a family and a church where people believed we need not make a choice between science and religion. But what strikes me now about those two different recollections is how much the two spheres came to me—and were presented to me—as being two separate spheres of learning: Science here. Religion there.
And yet it is one world we live in.
.... In my undergraduate studies [in college], under the tutelage of the religion department, one of the issues most discussed was the viability of religious language and thought in our scientific age. And so, it was inevitable that my religious studies occasionally touched upon some scientific matters beyond the human sphere, science today providing us so much knowledge about the non-human world. Nevertheless, it was another matter that has motivated me over the past few decades to focus more heavily on the relationship between spirituality and the non-human realm.... I became intensely aware of how far too often the focus of modern Western religion has become narrowed down to just the human sphere....
Here’s one example: If a pastor today is preaching on the Biblical story of Jesus and his frightened disciples out in a boat in a storm [Matthew 8:23-27], the customary application will be about the human fearfulness of the disciples (and ourselves), and about our need to trust God as known through Jesus. What is usually overlooked is the Bible’s theme of the sometimes chaotic character of the non-human world, even though the creative force of God has brought substantial order out of what could have been total chaos. Today’s common narrowed focus on the humans confines our engagement with the Biblical text. It also confines our spiritual ability to engage with the non-human world. The narrowed focus thereby also restricts our ability to relate religion to science, which today provides much of our understanding of the natural world (even though science is not our sole source of knowledge about the world).
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© Bruce Yaeger at https://spiritedbodies.blogspot.com
