Skip to main content

An evolving God


Wholeness. For me, that was the theme of Ilia Delio’s talk at the St Boniface Hospital in September 2016. The scientist and theologian religious sister was talking about evolution and Christianity, but the themes that resonated – from what I had encountered before and after – were wholeness and Holy Spirit.

“We’ve become so Jesus-centred, we ignore the Holy Spirit,” she said. That same challenge was posed on a CT podcast where the speaker pointed out that evangelicals fancy they’d love Jesus as their perfect pastor (in reality, we’d quickly look to fire him for his nonconforming behaviour, baffling preaching, and far-too-perceptive, honest critiques), but Jesus actually said he needed to leave so his followers could get something better – the Holy Spirit – to guide them every moment.

It’s a jarring thought for a Christo-centre Mennonite, but one that does not seem amiss on further reflection, especially as Delio continued to speak about wholeness in ways that affirmed and stretched my Anabaptist thoughts on shalom and community

Delio talked of God in terms of expansion, union and diversity. “We are strands in a web of life; our actions are not private; our actions are not individual.”

And the God who is simultaneously wholeness and diversity – as creator, truth and spirit – made his creatures prone to entanglement with each other. In the universe Delio paints of expansion, newness out of oldness, movement and forces of attraction and unification (always as diversity, not uniformity or conformity), it makes sense that we are always in a dance with each other. [Contra dancer aside: does that make the Spirit the caller, the musician or a meddling disruptive partner-less dancer mixing it up?]

This inclusive message is appealing in the current climate. Even in the Old Testament climate of exclusion, hospitality was a high virtue and God commanded the alien and stranger be taken care of. In the didacts of Paul’s writing in the New Testament, he preaches a freedom amid his principles and regulations. This is the shalom we believe God is drawing us to live: reconciliation with God, with each other and with our environment.

As for those who would argue “Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever,” perhaps “the same” doesn’t necessarily mean change-less or beyond the development of new understandings. Should we expect anything less than evolution from an all-powerful God intent on wholeness in a universe full of competing and self-guided forces?

Amid the wholeness, however, I missed the holiness which I believe is also central to who God is, and that which makes him other than us. For is it not holiness and truth that make shalom not just a positive feeling of happiness but an energy force of both justice and grace?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Living stones in the holy land

I met Jesus in Israel-Palestine a few years ago. I found him not in the rocky, desert ground he trod, nor in the ancient stones of the towns and cities he visited; not in the subterranean grotto in the Church of the Nativity, nor in the mammoth Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encompassing the traditional site of his death and resurrection. No, I met him in the lives of Palestinians who incarnate his spirit, in humble, passionate people who are convinced that love is the only way. I met Jesus in people who spoke like this: “We need to be soaked in the love of Christ. Love is not a hug and a kiss. Love is to seek the life of the other that the cost of one’s own.” --Labib Madanat, coordinator of the Palestinian and Israeli Bible Societies “Love is not an opportunity to overlook justice. Love is an opportunity to pursue justice…. [But] we want to resist any form of evil with the heart and mind of Jesus Christ.… There is no love without justice. And there is no true justice without lov...
2 comments
Read more

Electioneering again

Climate anxiety has entered the lexicon. For the last few years, it’s been talked about more and more in news articles, science discussions and even in spiritual care contexts. I shrugged it off as overly sensitive people, but the shoe has dropped for me now too. Extreme weather or one sort another everywhere all at once for the past few years has brought home what I always acknowledged intellectually but didn’t really synthesized emotionally: climate change is actually coming and it will be bad. I feel so angry and impotent in the face of these massive systems working against my small efforts to reduce waste and burn less carbon. So I went to the climate forum for this provincial election. It felt really important just to be in the room to declare “this subject matters!” The room had a remarkable number of grey hairs in it. This brought up terribly mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, good of them to continue to care about these issues, even as they can anticipate it won’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stand up for Canadian Health Care (such as it is)

Canadian health care is far from perfect — it has never achieved all Tommy Douglas dreamed for it: from tip to toe (teeth are still missing, as are a lot of drugs) — but unleashing unfettered two-tier is the opposite of fixing it.  So I joined with the Canadian Medical Association in pleading for the Canadian government to grow a spine and stop unhinged Smith's attempt to violate our own rules within her province.  As someone on Bluesky observed, if Stephen Harper tried to do this, we'd be at the gate with pitchforks. Where is the outrage. Daddy Warbucks Carney’s latest just-barely satisfactory performance in trade negotiations should not blind us to his failure to prevent this from happening.  The letter to the health minister, CC my MP and the shadow ministers: The Canadian Medical Association says the Canadian government must stand up for Albertans and all Canadians to ensure Alberta's new legislation doesn’t create a new normal of health care haves and have-no...
Post a Comment
Read more