Today, Good Friday, I experienced the confluence of two theological streams – one philosophical and the other devotional. I started with the philosophical on the bus to the United Nations this morning, on my way to participate in “The Way of the Cross, the Way of Peace” which would trace its way down 42nd Street and end up in Times Square. I was reading a piece by John Caputo in the recent issue of Tikkun whose featured topic was “God and the 21st Century.”
Caputo, ever the devoted theologian of postmodernity, described eloquently and engagingly, as he always does, the only God he (and I) can believe in – a God who is thoroughly, intimately, and dangerously part of the ongoing and always messy process of life: “God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet.” This promise can be kept only if we work with it. The divine “promiser” and the finite “promise-ees” are in this together.
And on this basis, we have an entirely different take on the much ridiculed “God of the gaps” – the God we resort to in order to fill in the holes or gaps of our knowledge or inadequacies, only to find that science keeps filling in the blanks and pushing out God. The way Caputo puts it can well serve as a zinger for all our “new atheists”: “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens.”
God is that power, that presence, or that something that keeps opening, surprisingly, new gaps, new questions, new possibilities.
Caputo’s philosophical proddings were stirring in my mind as we started the “First Station” of the Way of the Cross in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN. I was waiting for the usual prayer, traditional to Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgies and used in the “Way of the Cross, Way of Justice” that I used to attend in Cincinnati: “We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee, because by thy holy cross, thou hast redeemed the world.” Instead, this is what we read and prayed from the printed program: “We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you. BY THE POWER OF YOUR HOLY CROSS, HELP US TO CHANGE THE WORLD.”
The difference between those two formulations is the difference between two very different soteriologies – or ways of understanding how Jesus’ death on the cross saves us. In the first, the cross redeems us by changing God – that is by satisfying God’s demand for reparation or atonement for humanity’s sin. In the second, the cross redeems us by enabling US to change the world.
The cross doesn’t pay off God. Rather, what we see and learn from the cross changes our hearts so that we can change the world.
And here is where I reconnected with Caputo’s understanding of the God who opens gaps. The cross and the death of Jesus represent the primary gap or new possibility that Christianity offers the world: on the cross, we see a man who was filled with the Spirit of God and who challenged the powers that be (mainly the Roman Empire) to the point that they decided he had to be “disappeared” and executed.
But rather than respond to the violent hatred of his executioners with hatred, he responded with non-violent love. He forgave them.
That’s the new gap – the new possibility opened up for humanity: in order to save or really change this messed up world of hatred, injustice, and greed, we have to confront the powers that have caused this mess. But when they respond and come after us, we can’t hate them; we have to confront them with the power of love and non-violence.
It may cost us our lives. But if we die like this – if we confront evil but do not hate the evil-doers even though they kill us – we can change the world.
This gap, this possibility, this way of living cannot be proven to bring the birth or resurrection of a new world. But given the example of Jesus – as well as so many others like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Archbishop Romer, the Dalai Lama – we can bet our lives on it.
God of the gaps
I will begin this article with two postulates: 1) God has created this universe, 2) He has brought man in this universe with some purpose.
I am not claiming here that these two postulates are true, or that I can prove them to be true. But I want to show here that if these two postulates are true, then God will always be the God of the gaps. Anyone who will be reading this article should not forget that there is an “if” clause in the last sentence.
Now I will begin with the supposition that God has created this universe. If God has created this universe, then He could have created it in four different ways: 1) He created it in such a way that there was no necessity for Him to intervene in it after creation, 2) After creation He intervened in it, but these interventions were a bare minimum, that is, He intervened only when these were absolutely necessary. In order to clarify my point here, I will say that He intervened only when He found that without His intervention the universe would come to a standstill, 3) He created the universe in such a way that in order to keep it going He had to make very frequent interventions in it, 4) God’s total intervention after creation.
If it was the purpose of God to keep mankind crippled in every possible way, then He would have adopted either the third or the fourth way while creating the universe. This is because in these two cases man, in spite of his having sufficient intelligence and reasoning power, will fail to unveil the secrets of nature, because in almost every phenomenon of nature that he will decide to study he will ultimately find that there always remains an unknown factor, for which he will have no explanation. For him the book of nature will thus remain closed forever. But if it were God’s purpose that man be master of His creation, then it is quite natural for Him that He would try to keep the book of nature as much open to him as possible, so that with the little intelligence he has been endowed with man will be able to decipher the language of nature, and with that acquired knowledge he will also be able to improve the material conditions of his life. In that case God will try to adopt the policy of maximum withdrawal from His creation. He will create the universe in such a way that without His intervention the created world will be able to unfold itself. However that does not mean that He will never intervene. He will definitely intervene when without His intervention the created world would become stagnant. In such a scenario man will be able to give an explanation of almost all physical events in scientific language. But in those cases where God has actually intervened, he will fail to do so.
So I think there is no reason for us to be ashamed of the “God of the gaps” hypothesis. Yes, if God has created the universe, and if God’s purpose was that man be master of His creation, then He would try to keep as little gap in His creation as possible. But the minimum gap that would be ultimately left can never be bridged by any sort of scientific explanation. God will also reside in that gap. Why should we be ashamed of that?
The whole matter can be seen from another angle. Those who strongly believe that God has created this universe also believe that He has created it alone. Now is it believable that a God, who is capable of creating such a vast universe alone, is not capable enough to keep a proof of His existence in the created world? So I think it is more reasonable to believe that while creating the universe God has also kept a proof of His existence in something created. This proof is open to us all, but we have not found it, because we have not searched for it. So even if it is the case that God has never intervened in the created world after its creation, still then there will be a gap in this natural world, purposefully left by God, for which science will find no explanation. This will be the ultimate gap that can only be filled up by invoking God.
Therefore, I can conclude this article in this way: If God created this universe, and if God wanted man to be the master of His creation, then God would willingly choose to be “God of the gaps”.
A theistic God will always prefer to be the God of the gaps.