Missions and the Multiverse
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. ~1 John 4:2-8
“God won’t give you more than you can handle.”
“Love the sin but hate the sinner.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“When God closes a door, a window opens.”
I hear these phrases all the time. People tell me they are in the Bible. I don’t think they are. They sound so good, as if they have wisdom and authority. They sound good, but the theology is bad. When I think about what it means to be a Christian, I think there are a lot of good ideas with bad theology. Let’s think about three ideas that have crept into Christian thought and practice … three ideas that sound good, but are bad theology: Determinism, Mechanism and Reductionism. They sound academic, so let’s break the ideas down. Buckle up.
Determinism means everything in the universe is pre-determined by God. God maps out each moment and every second of our lives. God plans everything, down to the tiniest decision. Some of my Evangelical sisters and brothers put it this way: “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” If God knows all and sees all, then God must plan all. It sounds so good. I really want to believe it. But it’s bad theology. Why? Because God never shares the entire plan with us, so we are left trying to figure God’s pre-determined plan on the fly. If we stumble upon the right move, we get blessed. If we stray from the pre-determined design of our lives, we get labeled as sinners and face God’s wrath and punishment until we get back on the path, even though we don’t really know where the path is, or how we got onto this side path in the first place. Determinism is bad theology because it doesn't consider our free will and creativity.
I think it’s better theology to say God has aims for the world. Don’t worry about falling out of step with God’s exact plan. Instead, build God’s reign of wholeness and peace. Invite and welcome all to take part in God’s banquet. Defy evil structures with self-giving love. How you do this involves freedom, risk, failure, prayer, and action. We all do it differently, but work towards to same common aims.
Here’s another good idea but bad theology: it’s called Mechanism. It means God brings order out of chaos. To prove this, people will quote a verse from 1 Corinthians, “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (14:33). Sounds good, doesn’t it? But that proof text is only half the verse and taken out of context. No matter. I’m told God wants to make the word predictable, like a machine. If something breaks, we can find a replacement part and get it back running again. This is bad science. There are too many things going on in the universe to make it orderly and predictable. Predictions only work if there are ideal circumstances, but it turns out there are no ideals. For example, let’s assume space is empty. Nope, can’t do that. There are little bits of virtual particles flying all over the place. So, let’s just assume we have particles. Wait, we can’t do that. Those aren’t really particles after all. They are waves. So, let’s assume we have waves. Yeah waves. Nope! The waves are acting like particles, except when you want then to act like particles, and then they look like waves.
Uugh! Can we skip this and just talk about the weather? Sure, but the weather might be the single greatest example of unpredictability, especially due to climate change. There are far too many variables for scientists to predict anything more than 3-5 days out with any real accuracy.
The idea of a God who created a mechanized world just is not true. God is wildly unpredictable. We say God is love. We want some order and predictability to our lives, and then these unpredictable attacks happen, and then we want to know why a loving God allows bad things to happen. Growing up, well-meaning church folk taught me that the reason for human suffering is sin. Humans looked at God and said, “I don’t need You, God. I can build my world without You.” God said, “If you take that position, you will suffer and die.” Humanity took that position anyway and began to suffer, and we’ve been dying ever since. I was taught that active rebellion against God is the reason that we have so much pain. All of it – hurricanes, mass shootings, tyrannical public leaders – all of it is a consequence of human sin. It sounds so good because it’s so tidy and predictable. Now we have someone to blame. We can label a group of people as defective and then blame them for bringing misfortune upon themselves. We never have to lift a finger to help relieve the world’s pain when we can just blame victims. Good idea? Maybe not good, but convenient. It’s also bad theology.
To think God is going to tame the chaos of violence with a predictable set of rules might be a good idea, but it’s not good theology because God is not a machine. Here is the best theology for why chaos happens in a world where we want order: “I don’t know.” God is not a machine. God is love and machines do not love. I want to know the mind of God. I want to know how God is going to bring some order and meaning into my story. But it’s not my story. It’s not your story. It’s God’s story and we are not God.
The third good idea with bad theology is called Reductionism. Reductionism means taking a complex idea and boiling it down to one over-simplified statement. We hear reductionism when someone says, “We are more similar than we are different. At the end of the day, we are one big human family.” That’s true. We are a big human family … that speaks 6900 distinct languages, organizes into over 10,000 distinct religions coming from more than 5000 ethnic groups. That’s actually a lot of diversity.
Sometimes we try to boil down complex ideas about God into a simplified set of steps. Have you ever heard of the plan of salvation? Some people called it the Four Spiritual Laws. In four steps, you can know for sure that your soul will be right and you will be in heaven with God when you die. If you repent of your sin and say a quick prayer to accept Jesus into your heart, you are good with God and off the hook for eternal punishment. It sounds so good, but it’s a thin and counter-productive heresy. Reductionism can lead to fanaticism and narrowness of vision.
There is a hypothesis making its way around the halls of physics called the multiverse. Some physicists speculate that there exist an enormous, possibly infinite, number of universes like ours, each of which has slightly different values for the constants that appear fine-tuned in our own universe. In this vast ensemble of universes, some universes will have a range of conditions that permit life to flourish. Others will not. We have no know way of seeing any of these universes. We can only observe a universe if we are alive in it, so we find ourselves living in this life-permitting universe rather than one of the life-prohibiting ones. Even so, we are told, elegant mathematical equations can predict the existence of two, twenty, or a trillion other whole universes.
For fun, let’s assume the multiverse hypothesis is true. Life just got even more complex, not simpler. In a complex universe of universes, what can we claim as true? What if God is a network of networks? What if God is a multiverse always influencing and being influenced? I affirm that God is active in every moment of life, gently guiding the universe of universes toward the possibility of greater complexity and beauty. That long before the emergence of humankind, God formed the interplay of creative wisdom and creaturely decision-making. That God always calls us toward creative transformation. That as inheritors of grace, we can grow in wisdom, embrace our whole selves, flaws and all, and contribute to the flourishing of our world by healing our communities and the planet.
What if God is a network of networks, always influencing and being influenced? In this way of thinking, God is so complex, there can be no one single mission that controls God’s actions. Instead, God’s missions, God’s actions, are controlled by God’s values and vision. When we say, “God is love,” love becomes the connective tissue that holds an infinitely complex set of systems together. Everything is in process; nothing ever stays the same; all things are interconnected; no human is an island; things are present in one another even as they have their autonomy.
The same can be true for an organization like CCC. For a medium sized church, we are complex. What we do here takes a lot of volunteer time and resources. Sometimes when we feel disorganized, I wonder if it’s because we are trying to define ourselves with one mission when we really have many missions. We are supposed to have succinct mission statement that says what we do. We follow this with a larger vision statement that describes how we will do it. It sounds good. We want a pre-determined plan, rational predictability and simple answers. It sounds good, but what if it’s bad theology? I’m just asking the question. What if we are so focused on the what and how, we forget to ask, “Who are we?” What if, instead of trying to make ourselves orderly and predictable, we recognize we are a community of creativity, paradox, competing resources, and complexity? Ok, I know I just sent all of the Myers-Briggs “Js” into orbit right now. Bear with me.
We are facing some difficult decisions as a church. What do we do with our retreat house? How do we face status quo budgets and membership? How to we pass our legacy of faith and activism on to the next generation? Can we prime ourselves for meaningful outreach in the community? Experts will tell us that we must focus on our mission and make sure our programs express our overall purpose. I hear people at CCC will say, “We don’t have a mission.” They are probably right. Because we have missions. So I’m wondering out loud, instead of a mission statement, is there something else that holds us together at CCC, something that can sustain our multiverse of missions, some values like love, compassion, inclusion, radical hospitality, and spiritual activism?
What happens when we make key decisions based on our values? I want us to try this over the next few weeks. When difficult conversations come up, let’s ask, “What are our values?” Not, “What do we hold to be true?” Not, “What are we going to do?” First, let’s ask, “Who are we?” We keep asking the values question until we reach consensus, or acceptance. Values guide behavior.
Unless we take time to explore the values that are important and meaningful to us, there won’t be a shared sense of understanding, trust, and candor. It’s not enough to simply parrot the published values of the church. We need the courage of continued dialog that explores, uncovers, and articulates values, and also areas of mistrust or fear. Only then can we begin to sort out our missions and decide what to do and how we act.
Sources:
Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed by Bruce G. Epperly
http://augustinecollective.org/string-theory-multiverse-god/
http://blog.valerisys.com/tlt/do-values-influence-strategic-decision-making/
https://hbr.org/2010/05/making-decisions-on-values-not-1.html
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