by Donivan Bessinger
For each of us, there is some tension between the intellectual demands of our Christian faith, and the emotional expression of it. Each of us has achieved a different balance.
After years of cultivating a surgeon's poker face, and of trying to objectivize feelings and circumstances, I feel shy about talking publicly about something as personal as faith. But I also know the value of sharing faith in the fellowship of believers. For that reason, you should look upon your invitation to me as your witness to me, rather than mine to you. I really appreciate the opportunity to unload some thoughts that have been buzzing to get out!
Let me make a few short comments about the meaning of faith for me as I have tried to sort out the tension between "science and religion." In this new Information or Computer age, there is a great deal written about the changes being wrought in a technological society based on science. There is also a lot of talk about the need for more people who are more well-trained in mathematics and science, to lead in this new society.
I am caught up in this because medicine is a scientific endeavor, and that is just as true for the daily practitioner as for the new student of medicine. We rely on the skills, or Art, of medicine, but we are "called" - our Vocation is - to validate all of our knowledge and skills against tests of Reason. Properly understood, Faith affirms Reason.
Through Faith, I affirm that I am born anew as a believer in the God of creation, revealed in Christ. Through Reason, I attempt to relate all knowledge to one Truth. To me, it is an immanently reasonable activity. Yet there is such a lot of nonsense proclaimed in the name of religion, that the thoughtful unbeliever would be hard put to expect a coherent faith-reason synthesis.
My most thrilling insights have been those which are related to improving my understanding of how God's truths of the spirit harmonize with God's truths of his physical universe. I am a Creationist who sees God still evolving his work of creation. He still separates the seas and raises the dry land (as at the volcanic island of Surtsey). He is still re-doing his mountains, as at Mt. Saint Helens and at Kiluea. He is still doing much more. As we'll see, he is re-creating us.
Thus, in my daily approach to science, I see science not in conflict with religion, but in conflict with irrationality. For example, faced with the /uncertainty principle/ in which states of matter may be unpredictable and apparently randomly ordered, I can not reject either the observations themselves or the idea of a divinely determined order.
Rather, I must seek to enlarge my perspective in hopes of seeing a larger pattern in which both are true. Faith says, Remember that very close-up photos of a cloth may show an apparently random sequence of threads, while one wide angle shot may show the clear picture contained within the tapestry.
Faith also demands that we trust God as creator, and be prepared to accept revealed truth. If God's creation is not finished, then neither is His revelation. We in the Church have some important work to do in making God's truth credible in an increasingly technological world. We must make ourselves known, and understood. If we are truly faithful, we must communicate the insights of personal faith to a cynical, secular, technological, scientific world, and especially to those who are going to be learning the math and the sciences for the next generation.
Well, so much for some general background.
All of us have our favorite scriptures -- the particular passages that we would want to have survive with us if, for instance, the nuclear worst were to come. I think mine is the prologue of John's Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God;
all things were made through him,
and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was Life, and the life was the light of men.
I'm interested in computers. It's fascinating that everything in the computer's world can be reduced to minute pulses -bits- of current. These bits compose bytes, sometimes translated words, and so on. I'm also interested in the world of energy and matter, in which everything seems reducible to minute pulses of energy or the minute particles which compose all matter. It's also fascinating that all the information on which biological process is based can be reduced to genes.
So in view of all of this reductionism, it's a particularly wonderful thing for our generation that John has pointed out that Christ is the centrality in creation, that He is the Word which is the Information source of all that is -matter, energy- and all that we know, or can ever know.
But how do we ever really relate personally to that? Our telescopes seem to be able to look into the sky without finding the heaven. Whenever I would ask my parents a real poser -- an unanswerable question -- they would always say that I guess we won't really know until we get to heaven. So for me, I never was much impressed with the idea of golden streets. Heaven was where the answers were.
There are a lot of cynics out there in the "scientific" world who tend to say in effect, that since the telescopes can't find heaven, that it's not there. There's another mistake among believers that seems to relate science or the material world to the test of the Scripture -- If it's not in the Book, it "ain't so."
Another favorite scripture, that I really stumbled on relatively recently relates directly to that point. At least it does the way I interpret it. It's one of those footnoted passages, that seems to have different meanings in different source texts. But this interpretation for me fits best with everything that I know. It comes from the physician's gospel -- the Gospel of Luke, chapter 17. The pharisees were testing Jesus again, and asking when the Kingdom of God will come. He said something like, (and this is rather free) --
Well, you can't really forecast that.
You can't tell by observation (by science) when the Kingdom of God will come.
You can't look at signs and say "There it is!" or "Here it
is!."
For the Kingdom of God is within you.
If we look through telescopes, or send up weather satellites to try to find it or forecast it, we will be disappointed. When Nicodemus, the learned man of his day, spoke up for all of us and asked Jesus "How can these things be?", Jesus seems to have taunted him a bit: "You don't know, even though you are a teacher of Israel?" Our generation is skeptical too.
In the Luke passage, I hear Jesus himself telling us that His truth, though it is in the bits and the quarks too, is found in another dimension, in the inner dimension. We can look for it there, and find it, fully consistent with all else that is.
That knowledge is our Faith. It is our strength and our inspiration. It was Bach's, too. (I sometimes think of Bach as the fifth gospel!) He wrote the marvelous music to which we sing this passage:
Jesu, joy of man's desiring,
Holy wisdom, Love most bright,
Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring
Soar to uncreated light.
In Him was Life, and that Life was the Light of
men.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
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A talk given at a men's breakfast meeting, First Presbyterian Church, Greenville SC, September 22, 1983.
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