Transcript
Thank you, Mark, for your kindly welcome. I think this is about the fourth time in recent years I've been asked to give a talk to Princeton's article seminary on the subject bearing on the resurrection. That seems to imply a great need here, but the resurrection, as both Calvin and John Knox said, is the principal article of the Christian faith, and as the resurrection goes, then everything goes with it. Some of my friends, my account friends,
world-renowned scientists, Michael Polanyi, the resurrection was one of the great themes of his life. The last letter I had from him was just in Easter 1975 after he and his wife Magda had been to celebrate Easter at Guilford Cathedral. I shall never forget the ecstatic letter in faith in the resurrection. I see John Polkinghorne, who's coming shortly, has been here before, world-renowned mathematical quantum theorist, makes the resurrection his chief article of faith. I just mentioned
that. I know many others like that, but it points to centrality. I'm not going to say very much about the resurrection today, but the title you've given me, Science, Theology, and the Resurrection, is broad enough because I want to discuss some of the problems that people have in coming to faith in the resurrection. First let me tell you about some experiences I had in California in 1971. One day I was taken by some friends to the
Los Angeles Art Center, which is a rather remarkable collection of art. I don't know any other that is organized in the same way. When you go into the ground floor, you come across classical art of Greece and Rome, and it's mostly sculpture. When you go down below, it's called primitive art, but you get very great art, mainly African art and Pacific art. Then when you go a floor above classical art, you come to the Renaissance, and
there they have collected some of the great paintings of the world. I think only Americans are wealthy enough to do that in a short time, because it hadn't long been open when I went there. Then you move one floor up from the Renaissance, and you come to the period of Impressionism, and then you go to Expressionism and Modern Art, and the top story there is half of the floor devoted to post-1940 art. Now when I
saw what was going on, I started running up and down the different floors, comparing what went, what was going on there, and this is what I found. When you move from Renaissance art to Impressionist art, you have art in which the phenomenal surface has been torn away from the geometric framework. Say, take a painting like Leonardo, where it was a very long geometrical framework, so that Renaissance art, a good deal, but it is certainly the beginning
of Romantic art, say compared to Byzantine art, but when you move into period of Impressionism, you've got the surface pulled away, and then everything begins to get fuzzy. It loses its objective ontological control, and as it gets fuzzy, it begins to break up, and then the problem of what is the meaning of this, so it turned into Expressionism, so the meaning is given from the center of the self, and the artist, and the interpreter, but then
it begins to break up further, and then we have the period where all kinds of abstract patterns are brought in to piece together what has been fragmented, and through one kind of abstract art, and another brought in, and another and another, all the time the pictorial substance is diminishing and diminishing, and at the end, in the top story, there's one room with a mural, if you can call it that, it's ochre in color, and near the
middle there's one dot. That's the reductio absurdum of the whole process. Now I say to myself, that is the story of the historical Jesus. I'll come back to that later. A few days after that, I was lecturing in Bakersville, and staying with Professor Spanish, and he said to me, now in the morning at six o'clock, the central heating system comes on, it's rather noisy, but don't you bother about that, but about ten to six noise
came on, and I thought, my, that is a noisy central heating system, but then my bed started to move about the room, and I knew it was an earthquake. Now just before, in fact, a few days before I'd come over to California, I had seen a film on British television, I think it was from the Open University, in which they talked about the great San Andreas Fault, and they told us how many buildings had actually been
built over the surface of that fault, and I could remember them saying that they wouldn't dare show that film in California, otherwise they would call it panning. Now as I lay in bed and then got up, I was wondering what happened to, what was happening away down there in the foundations of California, and the next day I had to fly to Los Angeles, and they had to fly it back, no, they had to fly to San
Francisco, and they flew me to Los Angeles and back again, and the pilot explained, as far as he could, what was going on. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as it might have been, but what happened was this, away deep down in the foundations, there'd come a deep shift in the fault, so that the surface patterns and structures fell apart, and I said to myself, now that deep fissure is exactly what we have in our Western civilization,
and that is what lies behind what I've seen in Los Angeles Art Center, the abstraction of the phenomenal form from the geometric framework. Well, it's the same thing as what I thought of in Bakersfield, deep in the foundations of our human life and thought in Europe, there's a great fissure, a cleft, and when that shifts, then everything on top of it begins to break up. Now look at that as a history, now when I came to
Princeton then, and shortly after that, one day in the youth store I picked up a book which you should all try and get, unfortunately it's out of print, it was by a former professor here, Eric Kaler, called The Disintegration of Forms in the Arts. Now he described magnificently exactly what I had found in Los Angeles Art Center, what I'd been thinking about over that earthquake, but he showed that this disintegration of form applies not only to
art, but all different forms of art, to literature, and to music, and to philosophy as well, and I said to myself, now this is even truer, applies to the historical Jesus, but let's look at history of philosophy for the moment. Take European philosophy which took a new turn with Galileo's distinction between primary and secondary qualities, with Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant, what do we have there? We have an abstraction all the way through of
the phenomenal surface of the appearances from their objective frame, and so we have the disintegration of form into phenomenal as particulars, and then different forms of abstract philosophy come to find some coherent frame in which to hold the particulars together, and one after the other is found and ending up with of course the linguistic philosophy, and they all fail, and the real substance, the metaphysical substance of philosophy has just disappeared. Now we can see that in
history of thought, for example after the death of Aristotle, that's what happened in the new academy in Athens, when they wouldn't think of anything positively, it's all flung out, everything was just in upheaval, everything was just thrown into doubt, skeptical questions were asked, and the same thing happened at the end of the Middle Ages, when after Occamism, Terminism came in, which was the form of the linguistic analysis that came up in those days, and philosophical thought
just disintegrated into verbiage, into language, with no substance to it, and of course that's what we had certainly in Britain in the breakup of the so-called British empiricist philosophy, which was largely phenomenalist, and it ends up in the arid linguistic analysis, which now of course is a dead duck, although apparently the dead duck is a bit alive over here yet. Well now that, what I've been talking about, as I said earlier on, is the way
of describing what happened to the historical Jesus, because what happened in the research of historical Jesus was that the phenomenal surface, the appearances became abstracted from the real being of Christ in space and time, and so it's not surprising that Harnack, who certainly belonged to that era of abstraction, should speak about resurrection as reduced simply to the Easter faith of the early community, in which the Easter faith of the early community had no real contact with
the being of Jesus Christ. Now what lies behind all that? Is it not really what I've been saying that there is in the foundations of thought a great dualism, a great cleft, which in the end makes for fragmentation? The more we analyze historical Jesus, the more what we have breaks up in our hands. I sometimes have compared that to some of those astonishing paintings of Picasso, where he takes a bull or someone and some person and
he gives us your abstract drawings of them, and each one is less and less pictorial substance, and then it can end up something quite fantastic. Now that again is a picture of what happens in the existentialist attempt to rescue the fragmentation of the historical Jesus that has come from historical critical analysis. Now let me ask what historical critical method is. Now I am nothing against historical critical method itself if it's done rigorously and properly, but I
have two fundamental problems with it. My main problem is that historical critical method works with epistemological assumptions that control the method. I was astonished when I first read it and studying Bultmann's essays on Hermeneutic. He begins by saying of course we do not allow our presuppositions to control our results, and he makes a lot of that, and then he goes on to say of course we accept the closed continuum of cause and effect, but then that
assumption means for Bultmann there's no resurrection, no revelation, no incarnation at all, so that you see his main assumption had really taken away everything that is essential to the Christian gospel. The ontology of Christ, the space-time coordinates of Christ were removed from him, and that is scientific nonsense, scientific disaster, and yet so many people in the modern world have taken Bultmann as giving us a scientific approach. It's the exact opposite of the scientific approach. Let
me give you an illustration of that. Once I found myself for my sins on the same platform as Hans Kung at the first time that the concilium Congress under the Roman Catholic Church was open to Protestants. Now I didn't realize what happened, but they maneuvered me onto the platform with him, and we had to discuss the resurrection, and to my astonishment, I've known Hans since he was a young man in Basel. I'm very deeply influenced in
those days by Karl Barth. I found him giving an account of the resurrection which was really up in the air. It was quite pathetic and subjective, and I said to him, but how can you do that? He said, well, how can you speak about the resurrection of the body in the scientific world? I said, exact opposite. How can you speak about the resurrection unless there is a resurrection in body? Because a resurrection that doesn't have space
-time coordinates is nothing at all. It's quite meaningless. And after we discussed, the physicist jumped up to the back of the hall and supported me against Hans Kung, and he didn't know where to look. See, if we're going to be rigorously historical critical, we have to take space-time coordinates seriously and not push them out of our thoughts, relegate them away. Well then, let me tackle the problem of historical critical research, and first of all, let
me take the problem of history. What do people mean by history and historical? Well, this is something I've done some work on in the history of European thought, because when people like Hermann, Kehler, and Bultmann came up with a radical distinction between two kinds of history, Historia and Geschichte, then approaching Jesus along the lines of Historia, which works with causal connections and a close continuum of cause and effect, they rubbed out of the gospel everything that
had to do, as I said, with incarnation or revelation, and then they turned to the other kind of history, Geschichte, contrary to the real meaning of the German word, they interpreted Geschichte as what an event means for me, as they give it a subjective interpretation. And I tried to show my, well, behind that lies, I won't go into it all today, the thinking of Kant and not the Lessing, and you remember Lessing drew a sharp distinction
in the Enlightenment between eternal truths of reason, which are the truth we have in science, he held, and the accidental truth of history. Accidental, they could be translated contingent, but it's the German as Dufelig, and unfortunately, there's no real German word for contingent, unless you use the word contingent. But in a way, Lessing drew this sharp distinction that any scientific approach is concerned with eternal, necessary truth, and you cannot put the history into that form, but
history has to do merely with accidental things that you cannot really think of in any rationally scientific way. Now, it was that distinction in Lessing that lay behind the distinction between Bultmann's use of historian and Geschichte, but I've tried to show these people, behind that still lies the great Newtonian distinction between absolute mathematical time, which you can construe only in reversible logical causal relations, and relative apparent time, which you can only interpret in terms of appearances
and so on. Now, what Newton did was to clamp down upon relative apparent time, because it doesn't, from that point of view, doesn't have any interior rational organization. He clamped down upon it a whole framework of Euclidean geometry in order to make it sensible, but that meant casting history into a purely determinist and necessary framework, and of course, history vanishes. But now in our day, what's happened, now in our day, time has become, has found to
be inherent in the ongoing structures of the universe. So the all scientific truth is contingent. Every event in nature, every atom in nature, is bound up with time. For example, whether you have gold or lead or silver, it has a history to it when it was, matter was decoupled from radiation, from energy. So that time is embedded in nature. That's why people like Karl Friedrich von Weiziger, who gave lectures in Glasgow, on the history of nature.
So we no longer have that cleft between history and science. On the one hand, history is found to have a contingent order, basically the same as the scientists are concerned with. And the scientists don't operate with closed propositions, but a contingent truth that are true, but not necessary, not certain, which changes the whole structure of our thought. A number of years ago, a friend of mine here told me that he heard, I mentioned this the other
day to a group in New York, had Richard Feynman lecturing in Princeton. He was the great, he was a Princeton graduate, one of the most brilliant pupils of John Archibald Wheeler, physicist here, one of his pupils here in front of us, Dr. McKenna, now retired to Princeton. Well, Feynman is not a believer, he's a Jew, not even a Jewish believer. But he was trying to stress the radical change in the nature of physical law, which is
open and unbounded, and not necessary in the old sense. This is like the Einsteinian way of speaking. And in order to emphasize these points, he tried to say, you know, that would not be hostile even to Christian views of incarnation and resurrection. Now Feynman, of all people, would say that, because he didn't believe in incarnation and resurrection. But that was an indication, nevertheless, of the radical change in the very structure and open nature of scientific law
and theory and truth. Well, when we talk about historical critical research, our biblical scholars are really quite innocent of this fundamental change in the notion of history, and in the concept of the rationale of history, intelligibility of history. And so they're still operating with notions of history that are quite obsolete, we couldn't possibly work with in any rigorous science. Then apart from that point, apart from the point that time is now held, as we can see,
especially in the work of Prigogine and those concerned with non-equilibrium thermodynamics, that time is an interior operator in science. Apart from that, we work with space-time. But show me a single historian, secular or Christian, who operates with space-time? You know, that's not good enough. In this modern scientific world, you can't go on operating with notions of time that are not tied up with space. That's why when you abstract time from space, then your
notions of history become ultimately subjective. And it's the interrelation of space and time that gives you objectivity, real objectivity in history, not causal connections, because that's artificial in Newtonian sense. But I don't know any historian, let alone a biblical historian or biblical critic, that has really dared to face the revolution that must come in historical studies when you take space-time seriously. And yet I don't believe we can avoid that any longer. If we don't do
that, we're still utterly obscurantist. And I'm afraid that most of my contemporaries are in that sense, rather obscurantist. But now we talk about historical critical approach, what we mean by criticism. Now here I think we've got to do a lot more radical thinking. When you study the rocks or where you study plants or the human brain or whatever you are, you don't criticize the material you're studying. You ask radical questions in order to allow what you're
studying to disclose itself to you. And the one that is criticized is yourself. See, a really radical criticism is one that calls in question your own presuppositions, your own assumptions. Now there are people who have a marvelously childlike quality, like Einstein, who could approach matters with almost an utter innocence of presuppositions in order to allow the reality to disclose itself. But most of us are so tied up with presuppositions and epistemological frameworks, we're enslaved to them
and we need to be delivered from them. Now the way to be delivered from them is to pursue your rigorous questioning. Now if you ask rigorous questions, you ask a question in science, you allow nature to disclose itself to you. And in the light of what is disclosed, you reframe your question and you put it again, and nature becomes more further disclosed. And again, in the light of that, you rephrase your question. But what happens? Because
your questions cannot be separated from you. And so the more rigorously your questions are asked and the more thoroughly they are re-questioned, you yourself come under question. Now that is what critical method really means. But you see, that's the opposite of what goes on in historical critical method normally. Now for example, one of my colleagues came to Edinburgh to teach the New Testament a number of years ago. Quite a distinguished man and he was cold
because he was very interested in Semitic languages as well as Greek and we thought he would follow William Manson in that great tradition. And I asked him after a few days, what were his notions of epistemology? Oh, I paid no attention to that. I said, you don't ask questions about epistemology in your biblical, haven't you? No, no, no, no. I said, well, do you know that really, you can't avoid it, you know. I said to him,
that means that you are unconsciously working with little bits of stuff that you've picked up here and there and they control your exegesis. And I said, that's not good enough. I said, well, that man I found didn't believe in the resurrection, didn't even believe in any life after death. See, these assumptions, which we should not be prepared to criticize, had wiped out that kind of possibility. Now, what I'm calling for, therefore, is rigorous historical critical method
at which we are concerned to turn upside down our assumptions in such a way that we really tackle the New Testament and interpret the New Testament in the same kind of rigor and openness that a scientist will interrogate any sphere of nature and let it disclose itself to him in terms of its own interior organization. Now, what do we do with this kind of cleavage in our Western thinking that gives rise to these problems and which
throws people back upon themselves? Now, let me give a couple of examples of what has been done. These are two examples that I've studied greatly and which influenced me a great deal. Now, one of my standard examples is that of James Clark Maxwell, who attempted again and again and again to give a Newtonian mechanistic interpretation of the behavior of radiation, of light, of electromagnetism, and failed. Light did not behave in a mechanistic way, so he could
not give a Newtonian interpretation. He inherited the Newtonian concept of the field as a contiguous field of particles that were external to one and neighbourly to one another. What he did was to rethink the whole matter in such a way that he thought of the particles as interlocked with one another so that their interrelations were part of what they were. Now, that interlocking of relations with one another set aside the kind of Newtonian determinism and revealed
that nature has an inner organization which cannot be interpreted in merely external causeless ways. And of course, in doing so, he determined the speed of light and laid the foundations upon which Einstein came along and built his whole theory. And according to Einstein, discovery of that continuous dynamic field was affected the greatest change in the history of science and in the logical structure of our understanding of nature. Well, along came Einstein. Now, one of the points
that influenced me very much about him is this. You see, Newton, as I said before, had the great dualism of absolute mathematical time on the one hand and relative apparent time on the other. And it's that dualism that has been built into the whole framework of enlightenment science and enlightenment culture. It's that dualism, all the splits in our culture go back. So here, dualism meant that the empirical and the theoretical, the observational and hypothesis are externally
related to one another. And here, what happens is the scientist tries to determine his observational data. And having done that, as he thinks on a purely empirical basis, then he tries through logic to analyze it and to derive from a scientific theory. Einstein showed that not even Newton did that, although he said he did. You cannot think, no real science has ever arisen in that kind of a way. That's been a nonsense in scientific textbooks. And
the scientists themselves, I just tumble into it like many students tumble into the textbooks when they have to question them. Well, what Einstein did was to link the two together. He had to link the two together in the way that Clark Maxwell had. So for Einstein, this is really the epistemological revolution and general relativity theory. The empirical and the theoretical are always together at every level in reality, at every level in our knowledge of it. Now,
when you tie the empirical and theoretical together, then that is the biggest epistemological revolution, not only in physics, but all knowledge is affected by that revolution. Now again, this is a profound revolution, which the modern world hasn't really begun to enter into. The scientists have. Whole areas of science have. But the other areas of our research have not really entered into this. Now, this is an area, I believe, that we have to enter into particularly seriously
when we interpret the New Testament. I've said that due to the theathos, the cleft, the dualism, and the bottom of our thinking, we tend to tear apart the observational and the theoretical, the phenomenal surface from the geometric or ontological frame. Now, if we're going to interpret the New Testament adequately, we must try and overcome that. Now, the outstanding person in the New Testament, who had written on the New Testament, who had tried to do that, is
the late Hans Frey. Now, if you get a hold of his book, The Identity of Jesus, the hermeneutical basis of dogmatic theology, you'll find what he has tried to do there is to interpret Jesus in such a way that the image and the reality are never separated, and that the identity of Christ confronts you through the unity of those two. Now, I've given this book to my New Testament friends. You know, I haven't had one that
really says he understands it. He says, I can't understand it. Now why? And the reason is they're not prepared. They try to interpret in terms of an unaltered framework of thought. And to understand Hans Frey, you have to get behind all that radical dualism and rethink with him what he's saying about Jesus. Now, in order to illustrate the problem, what goes on, let me say something about what I think I said here last year or two
years ago. When I was here last year, I had just come from visiting the University of Wichita in Kansas. And there I remembered that years ago, a number of scholars there had performed a remarkable experiment. It's also been performed elsewhere in Austria, in which they clapped on people inverting spectacles that make people see what is on the left, on the right, on the right, on the left. What is up there down there, what is down there
up there. I think if you put those on, how could you move about? Your whole world would be disoriented. Now, it takes eight days of painful experience before you can then move about with these inverted spectacles. Now what happened there? When you put on the inverted spectacles, it tears apart the conceptual image from the visual image. No you're in disarray. And only when in a new way, the conceptual image and the visual image come together again,
can you behave like a rational human being. Can you walk about and not bump into things? Can you behave objectively in terms of what is there? So that objective knowledge involves the profound integration of the visual and the conceptual. Now, that's what we need in understanding Jesus. That's what Hans Frey was trying to get at. We need to bind together or link together again, integrate together the conceptual approach and the observational historical approach. And only when
they are linked together can you really understand the gospel. Now, let me give you a different example from that. Something that I've been involved in recently over some criticism some people made from my father's researches in West China. Rigorous anthropologists, let me give you two, Evans Pritchard and Clyde Kluckholm. Now, Evans Pritchard spent quite a time investigating the Isandi peoples in Africa and found that he could not really understand them until somehow he had absorbed their
inner conceptual framework, what you Americans call the mindset of these people. When he got his own mind into their way of thinking, then he could see things that they see and he could actually report in a much more objective and rigorously scientific way their behavior. Until he did that, he couldn't understand them. Or the other examples over here of Clyde Kluckholm, who spent a long time working with the Navajo Indians. And the first period he conducted
his research among them, he tried to be as scientifically accurate and careful as he could. But when he presented himself to Navajo, they said, oh no, that's not us at all. So he wondered what was wrong. And he found that he was organizing the observations he made, accurate they were, in a different way from the way in which they were organized in the mind of the Navajo themselves. So he went back and lived among them until
he absorbed their conceptual framework. And then he found he had to reconstruct and make much more accurate his observations under the control of the concepts of Navajos. And they said, yes, that's right. Now you see, that's what we've got to do in the New Testament. We've got to live and indwell the New Testament in such a way that the historical and the theological come together. And only when they do come together can we understand properly the
theological. Now, let me give you some examples of the problem here. Take, for example, the words you get in St. Matthew 11, where our Lord says, no one knows the Son but the Father, no one knows the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him. Or take the end of Matthew, where we have the institution of baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, there's no
textual evidence against these passages, although they were late additions. But what does the biblical scholar tend to do? He says, oh, that's theological. It couldn't have come from Jesus. It must have been imported from the community. It's a confessional statement, imported back from the community. Now, what's going on here? See, they're still working with the obsolete scientific method and where the scientist, first of all, tries to determine the observational data set apart from everything else. And
then he theorizes on them through logical induction, and he produces his scientific theories, and they're two apart. But that's exactly the whole method that's been destroyed in modern science, and yet the biblical scholar is still at it. God forgive him. Now, I believe here we can learn particularly from Michael Plenty's doctrine in dwelling. We indwell the material, indwell any area of thought, indwell the New Testament, until you allow its intrinsic truth to be imprinted upon your
mind, and your mind starts thinking in accordance with what is inherently the case there. And when you do that, then you can appreciate and understand it much better. And then you find you do have the material fragmenting in front of you into phenomenal particulars, which then you've got to tie together in some kind of fancy way. But now let me also indicate four more points which we can learn from modern scientific activity to help us in
our interpretation of the New Testament understanding of the resurrection. And one is what I was lecturing on the other day, the concept of singularity. Now, I mentioned blessing. I talked about eternal truth of reason and accidental truth of history. Now, according to that notion of science, what science does is to understand particulars in so far as they can become cases of something that is universally true. And that old notion of scientific law was the universalization into
what is timelessly and necessarily true of this particular or that particular tree found in nature. And so that kind of science had a horror of singularity, horror of the particular, the concretely real, which it could not universalize, it could not put into a universal class. And so to set aside, that's not what science works with. But today, you see, something quite different has happened. Today we have all kinds of, different kinds of singularities. One that interests
me particularly is the very specific singularity of the finite speed of light. Now, that governs everything we know in nature. Everything we know of the stars or the subatomic world comes from light signals. And we have to decipher these light signals, but light is not in a class with anything else. It's absolutely singular and unique in what it is. Or take the most startling singularity, the black hole. Now, when scientists came up against the black hole,
they can't put that into a universal class, although they've been trying to do it again and again in order to avoid the singularity. The latest attempt is Stephen Hawking, who has turned the whole universe into a kind of vast mervious strip that has no beginning and no end and therefore no singularity. But then the very basis of a modern science, understanding expansion of the universe in relation to the finite speed of light, beginning and end, that
goes. But what I'm after is this, that singularity has now become central to our science. And that is why today many scientists are now open and ready and eager to understand the absolute singularity of Jesus, the incarnation and the resurrection. You can't explain that in any other way than out of itself. And so the second point I want to come to, which the early fathers dealt with a great deal, and that is what is utterly new,
the novel. You cannot understand what is utterly new, the novel, except out of itself. You have to allow your mind to fall under its power and allow the novel to create in you the capacity to appreciate it. And only then can you really understand the novel. Now everywhere in science today, we'll be breaking frontiers of knowledge. We're up against the novel, where nature can only be understood in a startlingly novel way out of itself. And we
have to develop modes of appreciation and modes of interpretation governed by it and strictly in accordance with it. Now the third point, of course, that's exactly what we have to do with the Lord Jesus. He's the great singularity. There's only one Lord Jesus, and we can only understand him out of himself. Now the next point I wish to speak about is the problem of lenses. How we think through, I can't help but think through lenses. Now
I'm using lenses, they're not very good, I'm using new ones. But most of us look at nature or one another through particular lenses. Now for example, for many years I worked with George Florovsky, who was here and bishop, what was his name now, the bishop of Lund, others, Negray and many others, on a commission in Christ and his church. And again and again Florovsky would say, but the interpretive passage of the New Testament, I would say,
doesn't say that, it says so and so. Then we looked up the Greek together, bless me, he was right. I was looking at the Presbyterian spectacle, and when I really allowed the Greek to force itself upon me, I saw it meant something different than what I had thought it meant. And that's how we interpret the Bible, in terms of what we think it means, or what we want it to mean. Now one of our main problems
here is the fact that we tend to read the Bible and try to interpret Jesus in the light of Western culture, spectacles that are lenses that are governed by Western culture. And that's why the historical Jesus that we produce is plastered over by a Western culture. And really to understand Jesus, we've got to take away that Western face from him, that cultural distortion of him, and try to understand him out himself. Now this is a point
I've learned, particularly from my Jewish friends. Recently, Edmunds, we persuaded them to publish a book by the son of the great Ernst Casera, H. Hans W. Casera, who was a professor of philosophy in Glasgow and Oxford. He was one of the refugees from Germany and one of the great philosophers of our time. And in Oxford, he struggled with the problem of ethics and morals. He couldn't get any help for his own life out of Kantian morality.
He lectured on the Second Critique and translated it, I think, three different times, wrestled with it, as anyone has, and yet got no help. Then he decided to read the New Testament. And he was absolutely bowled over by St. Paul, because Paul had exactly the same problem. And lo and behold, Hans Casera went through a conversion staggeringly like that of St. Paul. And he now published a book, which Edmunds published, called Paul, Kant, and the Prophet.
It's unfinished. Just as Paul's conversion was unfinished. So here you see a Jew, Jewish philosopher, a great philosopher, who became a Christian and gained quite a new understanding of the Gospel. And now he has translated the New Testament again for us, called the New Covenant. When I read that in manuscript, I said, it doesn't say that. I looked again, of course it says that. But you see, I've been looking at Gentile eyes, and he was looking
with Jewish eyes, with Jewish Christian eyes. And that is really a startling translation, because again and again, we can learn from that. Now, what I'm saying is this, that we have to be very careful the way we read the New Testament. Criticize ourselves in case we're looking at through distorting lenses. Now, I think that a lot of stuff that's going on today, for example, in Germany and elsewhere, America and Oxford, some of them, who almost now
interpret Jesus just as a rabbi. Now, that is not really integrating the theological with empirical, the observational with the theoretic. But nevertheless, I believe we desperately need to re-understand, reinterpret Jesus in the light of Israel, in the light of the Old Testament, in the light of the Hebrew way of life. And this is a particular part, I think, of special theological importance. I've been impressed by the fact that you can put in almost a handful
of cases the great scientists who have made epochs making changes since 1900 or 1904 or five, who have not been Jews. Now, why is that? Now, I think part of the reason is this, that we who come from the Latin Greek tradition think with our eyes. This is what Martin Buber used to accuse us of, optical thinking. We think with our eyes. And if you take the Greek words for idea, there's nothing you see. Greeks think
in terms of form, and we tend to think in terms of visually, whereas the Hebrew thinks in terms of the ear, so to speak. You remember? Second commandment. Jews were not allowed to form any kind of image of God. Let's say, not just physical images, but any kind of ideational plastic image. Now, a Jew, therefore, is able to think without images. Now, that is something of immense importance in modern science because, you see, with the discovery
of light, the fact that light gives us, light signals are laden with information, and we can only understand nature in terms of light. And light is invisible. You can't see light. You only see what is lit up by light. So that in science, we explain the visible in terms of what is the inherently invisible. Now, we get into lots of problems. We talk about particles and fields, and these are images in them. But, you know, they
do not really describe what is in nature. We haven't any way, really, of describing in our visual language what's there. We can produce mathematical equations that help us, but even the mathematical equations are not adequate. But what I'm after is this, that the Jew has a way of thinking in terms of image-less ways, image-less ways of thinking, which are immensely important. Now, a great deal of our modern problems, for example, in the feminist movement,
is due partly to the fact that we think in images, and we project creaturely images, creaturely gender into deity, and then we mythologize God of what we think to be a male gender, and then we mythologize him by projecting female images into deeds. Now, all that is scientific nonsense, because you can't really think of the invisible in terms of images. Now, in science, we have to build self-correcting devices. You can't have your mathematics except in,
along with a language, Greek or English or German or French, whatever, or Hebrew, and all these languages are full of images. But when you have your symbolic language and your word language go together, we see to it that the images and the word language are not projected into reality. So here, the scientists have learned to think without images. If you want to see how that is done, read the autobiography of this point of incredible. But that's
the way that we operate. Now, that is surely the way we are taught in the Bible to think about God. Hebrew is more full of dramatic images than any other language, but here we're not allowed to project creaturely images into deity. That is really a form of identity, thinking of God in terms of the idolatry, the opposite of what the Bible has. And in the heart of the Nicene Creed, in the heart of Nicene theology, we
have not only the consubstantiality of the sun, but we also speak of the consubstantiality of the spirit. It's not actually in the Creed, but how they understood it. And if we think of those together, that because God is spiritual, God is spirit, then we can only think of them in a highly spiritual way without images. Now, at this point, I believe that dialogue between science and theology can help purge theology, modern theology, of a lot of
nonsense. But you know, it's an arduous task. It's extremely difficult for us Latins, let's say people brought up the Greek-Latin tradition, to think without images. Much easier, as I said, for a Hebrew. And perhaps along with our friends, the Jews, we can learn to think again in this imageless way, or along with our scientist friends, that they have to do the same in their truth. Now, there's only one other point I want to mention. And
this takes me back again to the resurrection. And that is, well, let me come back again to the problem of light signals. Because in light signals, they come to us laden with mathematical properties. And what we have to do is to decipher the mathematical properties. And we do that by using language and word. So to understand the information that light signals bring us, we have to correlate number with word. Now, the scientists are not concerned so
much with the word, except to help them understand the number. He's concerned primarily with the number, the information it gives us, nature. But he cannot do that without the interrelation between number and word, and therefore has to be, so to speak, on two levels. Now in theology, we are concerned with the incarnation, in which the word became flesh, God became man in space and time. And so here we are concerned with the interrelation of the word
of God to number, number giving us space-time coordinates. And we cannot understand that word if we cut off from it, number. We can't understand the incarnation if we cut off from that space-time coordinate. No more than the scientists can understand number if you cut off from it. It's word through which we decipher it. Whereas the scientist lays emphasis upon number, we have laid emphasis upon word. But here there is a profound intersection, interrelation, in
which we can help one another. Now, as I said, here this works out in terms of levels of thinking. This is one of the points we have learned, many of us in modern world, from Michael Polanyi, how the whole universe is a multi-level structure. Now, and also this is what was given here by Kurt Gödel just before he came from Vienna to the Institute of Science, in which he showed that we can only think in
terms of levels that are open and understandable only by reference to a higher level. Because if you try to understand one level of thought in itself, it doesn't make any sense. It only makes sense if it is incomplete and completed from beyond itself and that level also. Now, it's in that way we can think of the relation between God's action in space and time and the levels of space and time. Now, the resurrection has to be
understood in that way. It is God's action in space and time. Therefore, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ in body. But you can't understand the resurrection merely in terms of body. That would be a kind of resuscitation of a corpse. What we have here is God acting in space and time, transforming and resurrecting the body of Jesus so that here we have a two-level way of thinking. And you can't interpret the lower level simply,
the higher level simply in terms of the lower level. The lower level can only be understood adequately in a matter of relation to the higher level. Now, this has been a long way around, but I've tried to show you something of the way in which our modern scientific thinking has been developing and which if we use it shrewdly and properly in accordance with the nature of our own investigation, we shall find ourselves emancipated from a lot
of bogus theology and false ideas which we've picked up and are posing upon the Bible. When we do that, we shall find the Bible beginning to live again in a new way because in the New Testament it is the living risen Christ that confronts us across the pages. And in the light of the resurrection that all the Gospels have been written, it's in the light of the conceptual transformation of the minds of the evangelist apostles that
finally the observational data have been cast in the Gospels. And only when you put them together can you really hear its message. And as you do that, you find it's much more than just a conceptual empirical coming together because here you have God himself acting with us in our space-time context in exactly the same way in which he acted in the resurrection of Jesus. Thank you.