Jesus Creed: Good News—God Cannot be Contained

An excellent Christmas meditation from the Jesus Creed blog. See what you think.

Hortus_Deliciarum_Die_Geburt_Christi-300x180Many today try to put religion in its place, controlled and contained, tolerated as long as it doesn’t impinge on fact or science.

Stephen Jay Gould gave as the first commandment of NOMA “Thou shalt not mix magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science.” Michael Ruse allows that scientists can be Christian as long as Christianity can be made compatible with unbreakable natural law. “Even the supreme miracle of the resurrection requires no law-breaking return from the dead. One can think of Jesus in a trance, or more likely that he really was physically dead but that on the third day a group of people, hitherto downcast, were filled with great joy and hope.” Alan Lightman refers to this overarching naturalism as the Central Doctrine of Science. “All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws are true at every time and place in the universe.”

A simple deism, with God well contained, can possibly be compatible with science … or more accurately with natural materialism as a worldview.

This won’t do, of course. Christianity is a religion which – if true – cannot be contained. The supreme miracle of the resurrection requires law-breaking. But the biggest miracle is not resurrection but incarnation. There is a God and he is intimately involved in his creation in relationship with his creature.

Read it all.