Chap 6 Excerpt -- Immanuel

Excerpts so far from God with Ten Words:

• Mystery
• Love
• Power (excerpt 1)
• Power (excerpt 2)
• Knowledge (excerpt 1)
• Knowledge (excerpt 2)
• Presence

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We are now halfway through the ten words with which we are trying to get a small glimpse of what God is like. But something very crucial is missing. More than one religion understands God to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present. The fact that mystery and holiness surround God would again be a common understanding. But from a Christian perspective, no sense of God could be complete without knowing that God came to earth as Jesus Christ. "The Word became flesh and tented among us" (John 1:14).

The 1600s saw the rise of the scientific revolution. That century saw the foundations of modern science laid in physics with great thinkers like Isaac Newton and Galileo. A shift had taken place toward seeing the world as something like a machine that operated according to certain rules or "laws" that God had built into the machine. Rather than see a thunderstorm as God or a demon trying to get me, these thinkers looked for patterns and laws in nature that God had put there--laws that we could discover with our human minds.

There is nothing wrong with this perspective. The inventions and technological developments of the last few centuries are obvious, including this laptop that I am typing on. Laws were discovered. As I write this chapter, the first space launch entirely made up of non-astronauts has gone into space. The achievements of science are astounding and undeniable, and they follow directly upon a shift of thinking that sees the world as something God has created to run to some extent "on its own." [1]

There is also a danger here, and that danger also reared its head in the 1600s. The danger is Deism...

[1] We can debate whether it really runs "on its own" or whether God is just pulling consistent and predictable levers on a deeper level.