More Will Be Revealed
by Shelley Curtis Weaver | 28 November 2023 |
If you haven’t visited the Pacific Northwest and the Columbia Gorge, you are missing a unique experience. I remind myself each time that I am making passage, enjoying river-crossings that daunted early explorers like Lewis and Clark.
The views are impressive. Basalt columns climb to the sky like dark cathedral pillars. Shoulders of seasonally golden grasses stretch high above. The freeway meanders between shadow and light, and on one straight stretch the pale pyramid of Mount Hood rises like a swan over the river.
My college geology course had a convenient laboratory in the gorge. In close proximity we could study the Cascade range and Columbia River basalt deposits. We flew a small plane inside Mt. Saint Helens’ crater. We explored towns still being exhumed four years past her eruption.
On another trip we analyzed the mineral content in pebbles and shards of rock at the roadside. Semi trucks blew past us, flapping our jackets and rocking the school van while we crouched over specimens, anointing them with chemicals from a glass dropper. Our professor pointed out the columnar-joining of the gorge’s basalt walls. The angled pillar shapes formed as lava from Cascade Range volcanoes cooled. We also studied spheroidal weathering where some minerals in the oldest and most exposed basalt surfaces decayed at different rates, yielding a distinct round shape.
While our professor shared the research on the length of this process, I pondered the imagination of science. Its theories and questions are anchored in the expectation that if we search, there will be answers.
Faith and friction
Christians sometimes mock the scientific world for having no capacity for faith. “Faith is the evidence of things not seen,” we quote. Yet science insists on seeing things—and testing them.
Some Christians have come to view the tension between our traditions and science as a necessary battle to protect the faith. Adventism, born of a search for answers, should be more comfortable with the scientific method—but we trip over creation. Might our aversion to anything besides an absolute six-thousand-year timeline show we’ve lost our courage? Do we insist on Genesis’s being a precise and literal description of a six-day creation because our faith is actually too small?
If Earth is actually millions—or billions—of years old, does this damage our expectation of Jesus’s soon return, or nullify a seventh-day Sabbath? Some prominent voices say so.
Perhaps, though, it’s not an either-or, an all-or-nothing, question. Maybe there’s something comforting, resilient, and even faithful in science and its hypothesis that more will be revealed.
Adventist identity may be part of the struggle. We’ve always considered ourselves the heroic last generation. Some have warped that hope into exclusivity that makes them fearful and self-focused.
In tandem with self-focus is sentiment. If the history of earth and humanity is longer than we thought, odds are we won’t be the ones to see Jesus return.
I get this loss. I feel sadness even writing the sentence. My entire Adventist childhood (even when traumatized at times by thoughts of flight and hiding and watching for warning signs), I was thrilled to imagine the small cloud in the east growing larger, and Jesus appearing there.
While I still hope I’ll see him appear, I no longer feel God’s reliability or love is based on a return soon enough to find me in the greeting party. I’m adjusting to the idea of being one of the billions whose molecules are gathered together with their identities, who open our eyes to see and know the one who made and knows us.
Does God erode under pressure?
The second reason we might reject a longer time period is that we fear that allowing for longer times somehow deletes God. At the very least, an evolving process over millions of years annihilates God’s personal connection and relationship with us.
We wonder: would God have bothered waiting for billions of years to introduce a self-aware animal species onto the planet? Would God stay near them, ready to relate and rescue them from their own choices and violence? Would God cross the universe not once, but twice, finally to gather them and reset the clock in a renewed world?
These fears reveal the small, finite, and human image we’ve made of God. We form a small God when we feel small. Our discomfort reveals that our theology hasn’t kept pace. Our investigations of the Bible, the physical world, and of God have been rigorous only in certain directions. As “knowledge increases,” we may find Christians grappling with what it yields.
While I fully embrace an omnipotent God, able to speak the universe into existence, perhaps it’s a bigger faith and a bigger God that allows for a longer timeline.
Ancient examples in earlier strata
The story of Job might provide a perspective. The story’s conflict centers on the daily tragedies we know so well. The thematic cry of “why?” in the face of suffering is central to our self-aware species. Oddly, God doesn’t tell Job the backstory of the enemy’s challenge in heaven.
Instead, God begins to describe the things on earth Job has not seen, and to question Job about the scope of his knowledge. God is frank in describing to Job his limitations. It’s a gentle and intimate caution about omnipotence.
Similarly, each scientific discovery only confirms how little we know.
This is the specific problem of making the Bible a definitive textbook instead of a spiritual guide. The spiritual value of the creation story is not to know how it was done, but to show a God big enough to use our physical days and nights to create sacred spiritual space for relationship.
The sane response is to cut God free from our limitations, and trust a Creator who eternally spins and generates untold atoms into matter, and yet abides with us.
That is why the Bible is written as a series of stories. This is the power of it: here’s the intimate description of God’s speaking elements and matter into existence, uttering the bedtime prayer that it is very good, and shutting out the lights for the night. It turns the incomprehensible miracle of building suns, planets, and life forms into a narrative that brings rest and peace.
Remaining limber and flexible
The questions that arise in objection are revealing ones: they are all limiting God, making God small enough for us. We are fond of quoting Ellen White’s claim that the study of God’s character will take all eternity—but in our theology we reveal that we don’t fully embrace what the concept of eternity implies.
But when we limit God, even bigger questions arise. Do we have a God big enough for eternity if we don’t have a God big enough for a 4.5 billion-year-old earth? If we don’t have a God big enough to intimately fashion a 4.5 billion-year-old earth, do we have a God big enough to personally connect with each of us on this invisible speck of a planet in the vastness of space?
I’m not claiming that 4.5 billion years is the actual age of the earth—and interestingly, neither do scientists with their careful word “estimate.” There’s something very faithful about the scientist’s expectation that more will be revealed. That’s appealing, because early Adventists also embraced the excitement of growth and discovery and a continuing revelation.
Some of our insights might have launched a dialogue with scientists: our belief in the human soul as body and life force inert at death, for instance, has more scientific vigor than body-soul dualism in mainstream Christian tradition.
But what about Sabbath?
As Adventist Protestants, we do not believe the communion bread is the actual body of Christ, even though Jesus said it was. This same symbolic embrace protects Sabbath sacredness. The spiritual act of remembering Jesus is evoked by physically consuming literal bread.
Similarly, God commands us to observe the seventh day of the week to remember creation. Wouldn’t that have meaning and authority even if God is using seven literal days to represent vast segments of time?
The seven-day week, like communion bread, is tangible and physical—“six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.”
Sabbath observance could honor God’s supervising eons of change just as the tangible bread helps us “remember” a Jesus we did not physically meet. Our part is to work six days, and honor and remember the God of creation on the seventh. Short creation or long creation, young earth or old, the commemoration is the same.
Our feud does some damage
I’m told by scientists that their debates can become passionate and contentious. Like us, they can also become overly attached to the things they’ve “discovered.”
As people of faith, it would be wonderful if our love and compassion settled conflict more peacefully. Unfortunately, the current tone in the church is combative in its arguments for a smaller and smaller God—more carefully defined in each noun, verb, and even article of our statements of fundamental belief.
Officially, we’ve held up our members—and our teachers and leaders especially—to this cutout of the smaller God, to assess them for loyalty and orthodoxy. There is something un-Adventist and unbelieving about this pressuring of our brightest minds. Instead of being bold enough to ask what science, philosophy, and theology can tell us about God in a safe and trusting conversation, we’ve limited God by the lines of warfare we’ve drawn against these “rival” disciplines.
We’ve been especially cruel to the professionals who have trained and sacrificed to teach science in academy and college. We’ve placed them on a razor’s edge: expecting them to cushion and select their words and curriculum to teach facts, yet to remain employed they must not slide over into what some consider error. Either way, their professional reputation is constantly on the line.
We may owe them an apology for embracing a stronger faith than ours: a God big enough to spin atoms and create universes is big enough to encounter our questions.[1]
Common ground
My hypothesis is that we can be brave enough to do better. It’s understandable if we are not ready, or equipped to ask these questions ourselves: we honor our creator God by allowing those gifted with that interest and ability to investigate without our censure.
After all, in the scope of all knowledge and all of eternity, we can do nothing besides confess our relative ignorance. I’m neither scientist nor theologian, but I know I share their difficulty when facing all that remains to be known. I’m eternally grateful we are all offered the confidence that more will be revealed.
- My arguments are those of a writer/storyteller. We should refer to actual scientists for the science. I recommend an earlier essay by Rich Hannon in AT. His discussion inspired me to examine the Genesis account from a philosophical and storytelling context. ↑
Shelley Curtis Weaver lives in coastal Washington state. She is a clay-artist, writer, wife, mother, grandmother, and a frequenter of Columbia River crossings. She has edited and contributed to The Journey to Wholeness addiction recovery curriculum from AdventSource.
