Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Feb. 3, 1996, issue of America with the title “Do We Live in a Post-Christian Age?”
These reflections on post-Christian/post-Christendom grow out of a recent discussion of this question and of its ample environs by a small group of faculty members and others at Saint Louis University. The frames of reference here are wide-ranging, including not only questions directly regarding the state of the church but also variously related questions such as the state of humankind itself in today’s world. Inevitably, the reflections engage such matters as the relationship of humankind to the evolving ecological system within which human beings were brought into existence and of which they still form an integral part, as well as the conceptual models of the universe common in the ancient milieu in which the church was first implanted and the revisionary models of the universe adopted later, down to our own day of post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian and digitized models.
The reflections here are just that: reflections, not profusely documented observations, much less final conclusions. They concern more or less urgent frames of reference that, often unconsciously, control the theological and other thinking of millions of individuals. They attend to matters that it appears Catholics and other Christians need to take into more explicit account in their sense of existence in a universe of which they form a more and more operational part.
Did You Say “Post-Christian”?
Everyone has heard the term “post-Christian” countless times. A quick check of just one university library catalogue shows 11 recent books with the term “post-Christian” expressly in their titles. How many times the term has been used also in the titles of articles and in the texts of books and articles and in conversation is beyond calculation. What is going on here? How can the world be “post-Christian” when there are far more Christians, and far more Catholics, in the world today than at any earlier time in human history?
The last century or so, right into the present, has been marked by the most successful evangelization work ever in the history of Christianity. According to the 1995 World Almanac, out of some 5.5 billion human beings in the world today, over 1.8 billion (just under one third) are Christians. The 1995 Catholic Almanac lists nearly one billion persons (958,382,000) as Catholic today. Nothing in any past age of Christianity could even approximate these figures. Where does talk of “post-Christian” and the willingness or predisposition to accommodate such talk come from?
What About ‘Post-Christendom’?
Upon inspection, references to a “post-Christian” age commonly turn out to be, in fact, references to a “post-Christendom” age. They identify Christianity with “Christendom,” which refers to the Eurocentric society that took form after Constantine in the Middle Ages. This society was made up almost entirely of professed Christians more or less intimately involved with political powers that possessed great military might largely because of their multifaceted advanced technological development.
This society had never been more than a fraction of the human race. It felt called to conquer the “backward” nations outside “Christendom.” These nations were made up of individuals who were normally viewed as “heathens” or “infidels,” all of whom were destined to be condemned forever unless they accepted Christianity, which Christendom pretty well identified in European terms and felt obliged to make known to all the world. Many persons today apparently still view this Christendom as quintessential Christianity, Christianity as it ought to be forever.
One hears a lot today about inculturation, which the spreading of the faith “must involve if the Gospel is to take flesh in each people’s culture,” as the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it (No. 854). Inculturation means the implanting of the Christian faith, of the Good News of Jesus and of his church, in a given culture in ways that are effectively built into that particular culture. The Christian faith had been inculturated in Europe, built into the social and political situations peculiar to Europe. Europeans brought this inculturated faith to the new lands. They knew no non-inculturated faith, nor could they. We are still trying to puzzle out what in their inculturated faith is essential to the faith and what is simply part of the European inculturation pattern.
The church, not Christendom, is God’s own radical instrument of evangelization. European Christendom, pretty generally unaware that what it felt as the faith was always an inculturated faith, nevertheless professed and had, by and large, a genuine interest in evangelization.
But that was not all Christendom was interested in. As we have become more aware since the 1992 quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage, many who were extending the borders of Christendom in order to propagate the faith were also interested in much else besides the faith: in conquest, in increasing their own personal and/or public wealth and land holdings and power over other peoples and in political influence of every sort possible.
The apotheosis of the Christendom mentality is found in the bumptious and now grossly distasteful proclamation of Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), his most quoted and, until recently, most generally relished saying: “The Church is Europe, and Europe is the Church.” Europe is not the church, and, far from being post-Christian, most of the world is still pre-Christian (which is not to say pre-Eurochristian) in the sense that it has not yet had Christian revelation effectively proclaimed to it, so that individuals in it have not ever been able to choose between being Christian or not.
The Church of the Ages (Mostly to Come).
Christians, generally speaking, have to get over thinking of the church as “old.” The church has been brought into being by the same God who has been and is creating the cosmos.
“Has been creating and is creating”—for in a radically evolving cosmos, creation cannot be an initial, now terminated, act. The all-but-infinitely complex evolution of the universe is itself part of the universe, not just a movement imparted from the outside to an initially and congenitally immobile something.
There never was an initially immobile something before the start of time. Evolution cannot be imaged as the putting into motion of an initially static mass. The universe is not created outside time and then set in motion. Time is intrinsically constitutive of the universe. The movement of the universe through time of course does not mean that God keeps the universe running through time from the start as a kind of outside engineer. The universe itself is an evolving actuality, and God’s creative act originating the evolutionary universe thus necessarily extends out with the universe through time, and thus through history, from beginning to end. Through the Incarnation the church itself is embedded in this evolving cosmos. The church exists and lives in time; time is not something added to the church’s existence.
We need to think of the real church in God’s real cosmos, as we know this cosmos to be. In this real cosmos, which has been developing for some 15 billion years, Homo sapiens appeared a long time ago. It is difficult to demarcate with an exact date the origin of the species as such, but all datings are lengthy and some 150,000 years ago, more or less, has been a common and likely figure, although further refinement of the dating is still being worked out. God the Son took to himself a human nature in matter that was some 15 billion years old and in a species likely enough some 150,000 years old.
In such real-time perspectives, a church founded only some 2,000 years ago can be only in its infancy. The church’s life would appear to lie mostly in the uncounted years ahead. Thinking of the church as “old” hardly synchronizes it with God’s ongoing creation.
The Substantiality of Time.
In thinking of the church in the real cosmos and in real time today, we need to be aware that time is not something like a neutral medium through which material being somehow floats or which flows around material being. In Platonic doctrine and in much or most Christian thought, so long dominated by Platonism, time appears as a kind of throwaway sliding wrap for God’s creation, as disposable waste, to be got rid of as soon as possible so that we can think and/or exist in timeless eternity where alone is found the good, the true and the beautiful.
Since Einstein, it has been apparent that time is not throwaway waste. Time is constituent of material being, as much as are length, breadth and thickness.
It is true that Christians are commonly aware that the Son of God became a human being in time, incarnate as Jesus Christ. This has long made Christians in some fundamental way respectful of time and even reverential toward it. In Hebrew thought, too, time has value, for in the Mosaic tradition, and in other traditions tangent to the Mosaic, God kept dealing in time with human beings who changed in time. The entire biblical tradition is a matter of revelation made progressively in time and thus, unlike many other major and minor religious traditions, is a matter not of cyclicism, endless repetition of everything—so that time is illusory or ineffectual—but of history, though not always of history in the diagrammatic way in which we commonly conceive of history today.
Yet, in a still common way of thinking, even among Christians, despite the reverence felt for God’s dealing salvifically with his human creatures and other creatures in forward-moving time, time itself is commonly still felt as cosmologically a virtual nothing, to be sloughed off for good when we enter eternity at the resurrection of the dead. But, from what we know of the state of Jesus’ resurrected body, the dimensions of length, breadth and thickness, it seems, remain somehow forever. Does time somehow remain forever? Even in eternity? Does Jesus’ resurrected body exist in some kind of eternal time?
Catholic acceptance of creation and of the Incarnation must be total, and until we build real time into our cosmology, our understanding of creation and of the Incarnation is seriously defective.
DNA/Life Is Aged Matter.
Situated in one of the billions of galaxies of the universe, the one we style the Milky Way, our own planet earth had taken definitive shape some 4 billion years ago, as earlier noted. DNA (or perhaps first RNA, followed by DNA) was first produced some half-billion years after the earth was formed, that is, some 3.5 billion years ago. Matter, it appears, which at the beginning was of unimaginably high temperature, needed some 11.5 billion years after its beginning to cool and otherwise get itself into shape on our planet earth so as to make DNA and RNA, and thereby life, possible.
So far as we can find, living beings cannot exist until the material out of which they are constituted is some 11.5 billion years old (as it was some 3.5 billion years ago). In other words, so far as we can determine, DNA appears on our planet earth as a form of time-filled matter some 11.5 billion years old or older. It would seem that you cannot have DNA, and consequently cannot have life as we know it, without the time component. We have no evidence that it was possible for our universe to produce DNA out of matter that had not undergone the time-structured evolution that made it ripe for life. With RNA, DNA is time-invested, time-filled matter.
Matter Is Not Quiescent, but Radically Active.
Since the postulated “big bang,” for the past 15 billion years matter has not lain around inert, inactive, passively occupying space. Matter from the very start is radically active in unimaginable complication and depth. In the first milliseconds of its existence and through subsequent billions of years, changes within matter have been incredibly immense and violent as well as incredibly tiny and delicate. In the generally accepted big bang view of cosmic origins, at the beginning of time and within a fraction of a second matter expanded to billions of times its original size and proceeded to differentiate itself into new particles and elements, generating within a few minutes of the big bang, all the elements we know today in the enormous expansion of the at first infinitesimally tiny universe, an expansion that has continued vigorously into our own day to the present outer regions of space.
Given the information of their times, this is not at all what Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas or any other persons before the last few decades thought “matter” in the universe to be. From elements and subatomic particles to the unimaginably huge stellar galaxies, the changes producing our present-day matter were shaped by the passage of time, “took time,” as we say, as a condition of their becoming what they now are and what they will become.
The expansion of the universe from its beginning created the billions of galaxies, including our Milky Way, and gave us our still expanding universe. Matter bears the trace or mark of time in each of the elements it now consists of—that is to say, at the subatomic-particle level and at the macrocosmic (e.g., galactic) level. What kind of elements matter can consist of depends on how old it is. Some elements are simply older of themselves than other elements. No lead anywhere in the universe is so old as the first helium. Time as time is a constituent of matter, helping define matter as of one kind or another, as much as do calculations based on length, breadth and thickness.
In modern physics and cosmology, time, because it is a constituent of matter, is often characterized as a “fourth dimension.” However, although it may be every bit as much folded into material being as are length, breadth and thickness, time simply is not a dimension in the sense that length, breadth and thickness are. No matter how small you imagine time units to be, you cannot have two bits of time present to one another at once, as you can have bits of extension (length, breadth, thickness) present to one another at once.
Although it is convenient, notably in time-measuring instruments such as watches and clocks and most urgently in computers, to imagine that time is made up of juxtaposed timeless units or “instants,” there is no such thing as an “instant” of time, an immobile bit or piece of time. To provide an “instant,” time would have to stand still. The purportedly timeless unit divisions marked on the face of a clock to separate seconds from one another are unreal; there simply are no little bits of non-time sectioning time into particles. Time never comes in discreet [sic] particles; it is always moving continuously—no interruptions. “Time marches on.”
Time, therefore, does not come in discrete fractions, in tiny jerks, such as those that can be indicated by digital devices on the faces of timepieces or the computer’s 0-1 calculations. In computers, the discrete particles 0-1 can be made to refer to fractions more and more infinitesimal until, for all practical purposes, they can be disregarded as irrelevant to human thinking— but the resulting segmented “time” is still only virtual time, not real time. Real time exists only when it is going out of existence. It has no breaks between any parts. Time cannot be diagrammed: you can only diagram analogues of time, to get virtual time.
Yet, although it cannot be stopped, time is real, in the entire universe and in the matter out of which our bodies are constituted. We have no evidence that it is possible to have “young” living matter; all the living matter we know of appears as all very ancient, transformed from the nonliving through uninterrupted time in the movement within which living matter is constituted.
Christian Theology Is Necessarily Ecological.
Given that time is constitutive of matter and thus an intrinsic element in the processes leading to the appearance of human beings on our planet, it appears obvious that theology necessarily involves ecology. For ecology entails study of the evolution through time of the earth’s organic world, not simply in its relation to its total environment on earth but also in its relation to the rest of the universe. Parts of the universe beyond our earth are fundamental parts of the earth’s ecology, since they in various ways constantly affect the earth—as the sun does in our 24-hour day and in the changing seasons of our year.
The wide diffusion of ecological concerns in the minds of many persons across the world today is patently a hallmark of our present state of consciousness, due to our vastly increased knowledge of the complex and always changing interrelationships of so much on earth and so much in the cosmos. Embodied human nature is constantly establishing and reestablishing its relation to its always changing environment and now is acutely aware of the opportunities and dangers of its interactions with its environment, terrestrial and cosmic.
These interactions are clearly of sacramental theological interest. The Incarnation took place and continues in a universe that has been long in progress and still is in the process of development in our own day. Much work of various sorts is being done on developing an ecological theology, but we can hardly say that such theology has as yet been very fully realized. The task ahead is enormous, and it is encouraging that this fact is widely recognized and that action is being taken by many persons in various ways. Sweeping, as it does, through the evolving history of the cosmos and of our planet earth, through all of human history, including the Incarnation, not just through selections from human history, ecological thinking can hardly be “post-Christian.”
We have today moved beyond the now evidently defective, assertively mechanistic, fixed, walled-in image of the universe. This development moved from thought consonant with that of Descartes and Newton, to thought developed since Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg and Bohr. The old mechanistic model has been displaced by a model incorporating the Heisenberg “uncertainty principle.” This principle makes it evident that in certain situations we inevitably know details of the physical universe with probability rather than with certainty. In the universe we now know, human decision and material actuality thus, often of necessity, interact unpredictably. Such interaction provides further warrant for an adaptable ecological model of the universe displacing the old, once taken-for-granted mechanistic, closed-in view. The ecological model is inevitably an evolutionary model.
Biblical Secularity.
Secularity, in the sense of an outlook placing positive value on time and temporal events as such, has been with the biblical tradition from the start. This is not to say that the biblical tradition endorses the secularization that, in recent generations, has contended against religion or even rejected it. It is to say that the Bible gives us history—sacred history, yes, but a sacred history that includes the secular, temporal world also as its point of reference.
Biblical history is not quite the same as our present-day secular history. It does not have the latter’s preoccupation with such things as always verifiable measurements. But the Bible is embedded in secular history in ways that are often measurable and yield to secular study, as, for example, in The Babylonian captivity of the Hebrew people or the dating of Jesus’ life and death. (As in other secular history, such dating often cannot be established exactly, but it often can be established as falling within ascertainable perimeters.) Hebrew and Christian revelation are not atemporal, not embedded in a cyclic mythological “once upon a time,” but belong with the secular time in which the world is clocked outside revelation, although, as in secular history, exact dates and other exact figures for all the events reported in the Bible cannot always be established and approximations often have to do.
Secular Plausibility.
In the secular world, the Catholic Church has far more plausibility today than it has had for centuries. This does not mean that the church is being secularized or that the faith of the church is completely accepted by all the secular world. It means rather that the secular world pays attention to the church and its beliefs and actions in ways it did not before.
Others in the secular world may not agree with us, but they now more commonly want to know what we think (even though they may construe our meaning their own way). One reason the Catholic Church has more secular plausibility is that, more commonly than before, we now couch our thinking in real time, where it in fact takes place, not in imaginary super-cosmic timelessness, and by the same token we speak with others besides Catholics in mind as listeners. Up to a few decades ago, we Catholics commonly spoke as though we were addressing only ourselves—that is, in effect, addressing the European-inculturated, presumably time-free Catholic ethos—as indeed we often were.
Ecumenical Theology.
In the real and full evolutionary universe, we can no longer get along with just a theology of Judeo-Christian revelation unrelated to other religious belief. For one thing, we know that elements in Hebrew (and thus in Christian) belief connect historically with earlier beliefs in cultures contiguous to the Hebrew, although Hebrew belief often radically alters earlier beliefs that it connects with.
We need a theology not simply of the Christian religion but a theology of religions—which, we can be thankful, is being worked on actively now. This does not mean the suppression, neglect or minimizing of Catholic or Christian doctrine or theology but awareness that in God’s creation views other than, and often supplementary to, explicit Hebrew and Christian teachings existed and exist, and that interaction with them can at least bring out further implications of Christianity not otherwise apparent. Christian theology is not a walled fortress, but, necessarily expressed in human language, it is necessarily open to dialogue with others.
Electronics and Creation.
How does the electronic digitization model of material and other actuality fit into the present picture? The digitization model in itself ends not in the real universe but in virtual reality. How is this “virtual” model of the universe to be interpreted? The question is not so simple as questions framed by the earlier mechanistic models of the universe. For these models referred chiefly to the past and present universe. But electronics, digitized and other, refers not only to the past and present but is racing us tangibly into the future, a future not only incorporating “virtual reality” but also relevant in its own way to greater cosmic reality as well.
Future cosmic reality is to some extent, although by no means completely, calculable. And the future of our planet earth can to some extent, although by no means at all completely, be programmed by existing human beings through our knowledge of physical laws, genetic structures and the like. We have to face more directly than ever not simply questions as to where the universe came from and what it is, but also questions as to where physically and psychologically it is going and what it is likely to be as it moves ever forward, and what our responsibilities for its future may be.
The Christendom mentality had links to mechanistic lines of thought from the past from which an ecological, evolutionary, time-filled cosmology breaks free. We can control the dimensions of length, breadth and thickness, but we cannot control time at all. We have to fit into it. We can plan, always tentatively, for future time, but we cannot contact it, much less master it. The future is present only to God.
But to say that we can break free from earlier models of the universe and in our thinking attend to time as such does not mean that our vision will present a future that will be all golden. Doubtless, the years ahead will not be free of great agony, any more than were the years of the past. However, it is to say that the future will always be different and that, whatever it will be, it will still be the future of the evolving cosmos being continuously created by God, in the sense explained earlier. Computers were to be a part of God’s creation just as much as dinosaurs were.
Fulfillment Lies Ahead.
In his parable of the kingdom of heaven as like leaven or yeast, Jesus presents the kingdom not in terms of conquest but in terms of organic growth. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of flour until the whole batch was leavened” (Mt. 13:33, echoed in Lk. 13:21). Leaven penetrates and changes the dough for the better. Add more unleavened dough, knead it in, and the new dough becomes leavened. The kingdom is expansive but not by way of conquest. The concept of Christendom does not work quite in this organic way—or, if you wish, ecological way—nor do the earlier mechanistic cosmologies that provided general background for the old Christendom concept.
The kingdom as presented in the parable of the leaven relates more readily to our post-Einsteinian (and post-Darwinian) world view of a time-structured and growing, evolving cosmos that God created, as we now (still imperfectly) know this cosmos to be. In this cosmology, human life appears at a critical point in the whole evolving, ecological system of our planet. Human consciousness is the point at which the universe becomes and remains self-conscious, aware of its own existence, in the consciousness of each individual human being, and thereby becomes capable of receiving the Good News of the gift of Jesus Christ as human beings’ Lord and brother and redeemer. In present-day cosmology, the church appears freer than ever to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ more credibly and effectively, so that it will grow into the 21st century and beyond.
All is not over, and all is not healed, by any means. There are certainly new agonies as well as new joys to come. Only God knows the finale of the act. And the past thinking that we must remedy as best we can is still to be honored, for it is part of us and has helped to make us what we are. We should not repudiate our past. But we must always be deeply aware that we are always moving ahead, never back.
Into this forward-moving, evolving universe, God in his love sent his divine Son, Jesus Christ, to reclaim God’s adopted human sons and daughters. We know that the fulfillment of God’s evolving universe in God’s mercy lies ahead of us, not in the reconstitution of an imaginary past. The good old days never were what they used to be. We need to think of things in God’s cosmos as, to the best of our present knowledge, they actually are—far more vast and more mysterious and more intertwined and more comprehensive than had earlier been commonly imagined.
