This Advent, do not assume a spherical Jesus
Spherical Cow, from Abstruse Goose via The Last Word on Nothing. Creative commons 3.0. You know, I thought I had just coined the phrase, “spherical Jesus.” But no.
UPDATED 12/7 I woke up this morning and realized this post, as it was, made no sense. So I dropped the Harold Camping business and added Jesus. This is Jesus season, after all, and Camping’s got enough to deal with these days.
It still may not make sense, but I’m not messing with it anymore.
If you’re a physicist, the joke is pretty funny. Here’s the Wikipedia version:
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer “I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.”
The point is, physicists — and other scientists — often idealize problems in order to make calculations possible. Most often this does not amount to evasion or, as the case of the spherical cow, to silliness. Instead, it serves to extract underlying realities that could not be discovered by dealing with the actual concrete problem.
You don’t have to look far to find even famous examples: Think of Galileo dropping stones from the tower in Pisa, which he probably didn’t really do, sorry. Tower of Pisa or no, however, he did find that bodies fall at the same rate regardless of weight.
Yet this is not what he witnessed. If you read Galileo’s description of such an experiment in his Two New Sciences, you find that Galileo says that heavier objects actually do land first. Not by much, only a few finger-widths, but there it is. Galileo’s physics — and all physics ever since — is not about what happens, but is about abstractions from what happens. What Galileo said is that all bodies fall at the same rate in the absence of air friction — an unrealized state of affairs (until 1971, at least).
This reliance on idealized conditions runs all through physics (and, to some degree, other sciences also). Physics is shot through with approximations. They are very often close approximations, but, like Galileo’s finger-widths, there they are. The clarity of the mathematics one encounters in books on cosmology or quantum mechanics is made possible by pushing some realities out of the way: in the case of cosmology it may be the clumping of galactic superclusters that is ignored; in quantum mechanics it may be the tiny gravitational attraction between an atomic nucleus and its attendant electrons.
The power of physics is located in the fact that these realities are not pushed aside in order to avoid truths about the world, but to expose them.
For whatever reason, our notions of the divine do not work this way. With theology, God in God’s self — and not just our idea of God — has to remain concrete or everything gets silly. In theology, simplification is almost always oversimplification.
Take Jesus, for example.
There is a wonderful term for the abstracted, idealized Jesus, the Jesus that is somehow more than human, somehow magic, somehow superpowered: Hovercraft Jesus. Hovercraft Jesus can fly! Hovercraft Jesus can see into the future! Hovercraft Jesus can read minds! Hovercraft Jesus can apply the Schrödinger equation to the entire universe and find a closed-form solution! In less than five minutes!
Hovercraft Jesus is found in many incarnations (harhar). In the Gospel of John we find the exemplar of this Jesus. In John, Jesus talks rationally form the cross: “Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother.” We find in John no cries of anguish, no expression of God’s abandoning him, just the calm, collected summary: “It is finished.” In popular theology Hovercraft Jesus shows up mostly in an emphasis on his miracles and his factual knowledge of the past and future, as in, “Jesus was thinking of you as he was hanging on the cross.” That kind of thing.
In theo-nerdspeak, this is called high Christology. Here at psnt.net we get the divine part of Jesus but at the end of the day we just can’t relate to it, sorry. But we are commanded to love God, and that means to love Jesus too. And I just can’t love Hovercraft Jesus. Hovercraft Jesus is Big Spherical Magic Jesus. Which makes for neat tricks and stoic suffering but who can love someone who feels no pain? Who is idealized, oversimplified, and chilled on the cross?
Here’s the clip-and-save Advent message: Jesus is not abstract. Jesus is God with us, and absolutely human. I think it’s a mistake to forget that. Jesus, if he is to be found at all, will always be found to be utterly concrete: here, now.
It is always a mistake to assume a spherical Jesus.
A big Thank You goes out to Alert Reader Keith Pierce, who pointed us to the cow cartoon. As for everyone else, keep on sending us interesting pieces when you find them; the Internets are huge, and we here at psnt.net are oh so tiny.
There are 4 Comments to "This Advent, do not assume a spherical Jesus"
Paul, I think this is an interesting analysis, but I’m not sure I can agree with it. I readily agree that scientiic theory deals with abstractions that never really quite make it into the “real world,” but are only approximations. But, as you indicate, I think, there is a place for that, because the better we get with the abstractions, the closer we come to “reaching” the real. And the better we can “relate” to the real (through inventions, etc.).
However, I would dispute that there is no place for this “abstraction analysis” when it comes to theology. God is “real,” as the world is real, but we can only reach the reality of God partially, and our efforts at abstractions are far more difficult than with science in the purely “physical realm” per se beause of the extreme difference of subject matter. God is far harder, indeed ultimately impossible, to “get a hold of,” because he his characteristics are far more variegated and extensive (and indeed, in at least some aspects, infinite in extent, beyond even space and time as we know it, which is something we definitely cannot currently grasp). But this does not mean that theological “abstractions” are useless, any more than with “physical science.” We CAN get SOMEWHERE with theology, as opposed to simply asserting that God is unknowable and untouchable (which, indeed, is still attempting to say something quite substantial about God, and which may be something quite farther away from the “truth” of the matter, even more so than “classical” efforts at theology).
It is neither absurd nor demented nor doomed to failure to consider the Bible as part of the “abstraction” process. To say that God qua God could not communicate in such a fashion is quite a bold assertion to make. It presumes to know a great deal about God to say he is of such a nature that he cannot communicate. Whereas, traditional theology rather asserts that he can and has done so. As Francis Schaeffer said, “He is There, and He Is Not Silent.” Surely you might give some respect to those who have devoted themselves to theology (the study of God), just as you ask others of us to do to “scientists” based on their study of the “natural realm.”
Did God choose to communicate by verbal words which were written down by those who heard him? Again, it is somewhat arrogant to rule this possibility out a priori, IMO. I think it was Peter who said that the scriptures were written by holy men of God as they were moved to do so by the Holy Spirit. I am sure such “moving” was done in various ways at different times, just as God is varied himself. Apparently God did speak directly to Moses, but to others in dreams, visions, and “dark sayings.” Other times people simply wrote “out of their own head,” as Luke and Paul seemed to do on occasions, but subsequent readers concluded that such writings were so consistent with the nature of God, as “revealed” elsewhere, as to be attributed to what God chose to communicate.
So, when we reach such abstractions as “God is love, ” or “God is holy,” or God is various other things, we don’t fully “reach” God, but we are “moving in the right direction,” just as scientists do with physical nature. IMO. And such efforts are likewise “helpful.”
……..im wondering if the elaborate Theology of Mary (mariology) developed by Catholic and Orthodox Theologians over the centuries might be a good example of Theological abstraction based more or less on inference……
[...] Chewbacca Sings Silent NightAssuming a Spherical BibleDec 10th, 2011 by James F. McGrath TweetThe blog psnt.net had a post on not assuming a spherical Jesus, which inspired me to explore the same analogy with the Bible, leading me to draw this cartoon.The [...]
Dad (Paul),
I think that the theological base of this article is good, but I, unlike Tom Harkins, simply cannot agree more. I understand (and agree) with the fact that the scientific analysis is presumably that Jesus is spherical. Or at least, that’s what people think of him as half the time. Advent is a time of joy and revving up for Christmas. We have many un-theological ways of explaining Jesus, but the way he was born even a non-churchgoer can explain in most likely full detail.
This article is a powerful one.
Love,
Julia