My Intellectual Odyssey
In Postcolonial Pubic Theology (2016), I sought to relocate the significance of natural science and theology of nature within postcolonial problematics. My approach to postcolonial epistemology is of constructive, critical character in the tradition of phenomenology of Husserl and M.Merleau-Ponty, to some deagree, Hegel's phenomenology of recognition.
Around this time I was involved in hermeneutically mediating Barth's theology of speech event with Peters' proleptic theology of nature. Two great scholars have shaped considerably my intellectual journey. However, another speciality
is my sociological study of systems biology and a structure of evolutionary theory (Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin)
During my postdoctoral studies at the GTU and UC Berkeley Sociology Department, I was committed to studying the relationship between biological evolution and cultural evolution, which is elaborated in Robert Bellah's masterpiece Relligion in Human Evolution (2011). I was keenly interested in conceptualizing the organismic view of life according to the theory of punctuated equibrium, Richard Lewontin's dialectical biology, and a cellular theory of conserved core process and facilitated variation, as clarified in The Plausibility of Life (Kirschner and Gerhart).
Theologically, I stand in the prophetic tradition of Karl Barth, as represented by Helmut Gollwitzer and F.W. Marquardt.
Along this line, I seek to reframe of public theology of nature in sociological frame of reference, which is grounded in the school of phenomenology of sociology (Alfred Schutz, Max Weber, and Merleau-Ponty).
Husserl in his later stage attempted to incorporate a biological view of life into his phenomenology of life-world. Merleau-Ponty in his Phenemenology of Perception articuates the bodily dimension as the site of cognition. Human cognition is not merely abstract, but fully embodied in the dynamic interaction with life-world. Merleau-Ponty paves the way to acctuating the significance of embodied episteme and praxis in conversation with a dialectical tradition of Hegel and Marx.
This epistemic stance finds its concepual expression in the Santiago school of cell biology, as developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varlea. They bring a term autopoiesis, the organization of the living comes to the fore.
Fritjof Capra in his poupular book The Web of Life (1996) introduces a new scientific understanding of living systems in a broader spectrum, dealing with a notion of autopiesis underlying the systemic thinking.
In my scological view, however, it is necessary to bring a systemic thinking of self-organization in connection with Nikas Luhmann's systems sociology and theory of communication. Luhmann creatively synthesizes Husserl's phenomenology with self-organizing idea of cellular network. This complements Habermas' intersubjective theory of communication action. Habermas also is influenced by the systemic tradition of Hegel and Husserl, actualizing its significance of civil society against the colinization of lifeworld (political power, economic wealth, ideology of mass media among others).
On the other hand, Francisco Valerla advances a phenomenology of neuroscience and embodied cognition, integrating a critical theory of lifelines (Steven Rose) with his practical dimsenion of Buddhist meditation and right action.
Given this icomplexity of my intellectual journey, I turn to my constructive reading of Karl Barh and Ted Petdrs for public theology of nature,
Barth: Public Theology of Nature
In the proleptic line of thought, I argue, Barth’s doctrine of lights and words continues to reinforce the word of God in universal effectiveness, while critically renewing the traditional structure of seminal reason and proleptic position in terms of natural scientific rationality. Barth finds scientific discovery of the intelligent cosmos indispensable, because we live by natural science and technology, which are based on useable working hypotheses and have valid formulas as an indication of relative necessity.[1]
There are world logoi and so many of all creaturely truths and intelligibilities, which are integrated and instituted to conscribe in service to God, who radically changes and renews the world. They shine as expression of the one truth of God.[2] The present reality in the theatre of creation is service in the future of God shining upon the process of continual creation in the system of complexity.
In doing so, a theological notion of continuing creation in the theatrum gloriae Dei can be seen in ways that God creates the world in an ongoing manner through creativity of self-organizing life in its emergence, which is taken as an extraordinary way of divine communication in the world of reconciliation.
The created world is a text to be deciphered as well as its own reader and expositor in its evolutionary history and process of co-evolution. This aspect marks an important task for public theology of nature, which is involved in the achievements of natural science and its technological rationality toward a new theological construction of divine action.
The intelligibility and intelligence of the divinely created world and cosmos assume multiple forms in the network of symbiosis, which include the many, the particular, the change, the alteration, and the diversity. This complexity of life is not reducible to mathematical or other rational patterns of law. God does not take away freedom, movement, process, and new beginning in the evolutionary-ecological sphere, which is still beset by trial, error, extinct species, and suffering. Rather than deliberate intelligent designer, God is concurrent activity of grace and love, undergoing the life cycle of continual coming and going, “not becoming without perishing, but no perishing without new beginning.”[3]
This epistemic stance affirms the relational God which helps reformulate creation out of nothing in terms of creation as emancipation (and later resurrection) ex nothingness, while in collaboration with us and the universe. The final creation is God’s consummation of the universe in terms of new heavens and earth, which is proleptically present with us—redemption in wider vision of original creation, continuing creation, and new creation. This epistemic whole of life-world articulates a proleptic frame of synthesizing the past and the present with the future of God. The light of the Future of God shines upon the beginning (Rev. 22:5).
A narrative’s discourse reorders a given story in terms of literary synthesis of the plot in dealing with flashing back to the past (anamnesis) in the story (analepsis), or retention of the present in reference to flashing forward (protension horizon or prolepsis).
Ted Peters: Divine Action in the Complexity of Life
Given the reinterpreyatin of prolepsis, it is important to examine Ted Peters’ proleptic theology of God’s future by complementing its insight into the life-world of God. Peters’ prolepticism integrates Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures and arrow of time into his eschatological panentheism. God’s creatio ex nihilo foresees God’s novum, in other words, God’s final indwelling and rest in all in all (1 Cor 15:28).
According to Ilya Prigogine, an arrow of time, in his research on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium structures, is irreversible on the macro scale, moving from past through the present and toward the future; it implies that the universe is finite in time. It had a beginning and it will have an end, but this end does not necessarily mean a frozen death.
Rather the increase of entropy in an open system far from equilibrium is connected with the interplay of randomness and chance in the continuing creativity of the dynamic universe. Reaching at a bifurcation point, it is indeterminate about a change in future direction through fluctuations—whether disintegrating into further chaos or leaping to a new and higher level of order.[4]
This perspective remains crucial in human cognition in the stream of time correlate with the regime of meaning moved within the protension–arrow of time toward the future.
Given the interdependence at biosphere level, new and higher forms of order can emerge on earth in continuing creativity through interplay, fluctuation, and increase in entropy, while there is a relentless march toward the final dissipation of all energy at the macro-inclusive level.
A notion of created co-creator implies human beings as walking ecosystems, such that we are participants in and collaborators with God with ethical responsibility in the continual or epigenetic creative advance, care, and transformation. We are symbiotic collaborators with God.
This accords with proleptic principles of creation: God creates and emancipates the past from God’s future of new heaven and earth (a theology of God as the Place and Future of the world), which is proleptically present through the resurrection of Jesus Christ in our present. Prolepsis is the source of healing the broken and the oppressed, thus anamnesis on Jesus Christ mediates the reality of analepsis with the anticipatory vision of God’s prolepsis at the moment of kairos.