Transcendence in a scientific world

In my previous posts I discussed popular distortions of Christianity that create barriers that make it difficult for us to communicate our faith to many people. There is another pervasive aspect of modern culture that has the same effect, not by distorting our faith but by leaving no room for it. We are all aware of how our society has become increasingly secular over the last 200 years, but the problem I want to discuss is more specific: it is the loss of the sense of the transcendent--the sense of the sacred, the sense of awe, the sense that there are forces outside of and greater than the physical world that we inhabit. That sense, it seems to me, is the foundation of any religious experience; without it there is nothing for Christianity or any other religion to do that secular forces cannot do as well.

I have always experienced the transcendent most forcefully while close to the natural world, hiking and camping in places where I feel in close contact with creation itself. With the author of Psalm 8, I look at the heavens and am overwhelmed with the immensity and beauty of what God has done. Yet I also know what the Psalmist could not have known--that there is a solid scientific explanation of how our universe and its inhabitants developed into what we see today. The mountain crags that thrill me, after all, are the results of uplift and erosion that have occurred over millions of years and are still occurring, and their very stones consist of vast numbers of infinitesimally small electrical charges organized in complex but explicable ways. This ability to explain the physical world scientifically can destroy all sense of transcendence.

I have a friend, a militant scientific atheist, who as a college student attended a memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr., immediately after his assassination. During the service he felt a sense that his life would be well spent if he personally remained obscure but, as a result, King's goals of justice were achieved. The sense came to him almost as a call. Since then he has explained that feeling as simply the strange workings of his brain; I would say that for a short period he let himself be open to the transcendent but that his defense mechanisms were strong enough to overcome it. I suspect that many people have had similar experiences and have similarly learned to ignore them.

How then, can we explain a sense of the transcendent to a scientific world? I find the answer in the story of Moses and the burning bush. When God sought to call Moses, He appeared to him in a bush that burned but was not consumed--that is, a bush that could burn eternally. God let Moses know that the place where that bush burned was sacred ground; through it Moses was in touch with eternity, not the time and space in which he lived and in which we live. The bush was outside Moses' existence and our existence, just as God is outside Moses' existence and our existence. The God of the bush does not exist as we think of existence--and as the currently popular militant atheists want us to think of it--because God created existence itself. God is eternal; this universe, no matter how long it has existed or may exist, is transitory. God was God before the universe existed and will be God after it is no more. There can be no scientific proof or disproof of God's existence because what science studies is the world that God created, not that world's creator.

When God comes to us it is as the eternal breaking into our time and space, not as another being in time and space. For Christians that eternity broke into time and space most completely in the form of Jesus the Christ--Jesus, a man who had all the limitations of human existence but whom we also identify with the Christ, one aspect of the triune God. The sense of transcendence that I experience in the natural world, and that others may experience in very different ways, is the sense that makes us sensitive to those times when the eternal attempts to break into our lives. We need to cherish it in ourselves and others. Most importantly, we need to learn how to develop it--a connection with the eternal God, not some vague mushy spirituality--in those with whom we come in contact and who might join with us in our churches.