Religion in the Post-Modern World

An adult class at Trinity Church is now studying and discussing a book by Dr David Griffin entitled “Religion and the Modern World”.   Dr Griffin describes the “Modern World View” within which we all ”live and move & have our being” as the current dominant scientific view of everything, understood as nothing more than matter or objects in motion that have evolved over millions of years and finally (?) to have arrived to us human beings.  So in this modern view, everything that is now or ever has existed can be studied and known empirically by scientific observation (sight, sound, hearing, smell), including religion.

Dr Griffin, a Christian “Process” theologian, points out how religions world-wide, including Christianity, have been discarded from the curriculum in the scientific universities as not worth the time, money or energy. UCSC abolished its Religious Studies Department thirty years ago. 

Christians and other religious people my feel  increasingly ignored and left our of this  modern scientific world-view’s dismissal of what may be not only real but precious to us. But it is true that the pre-scientific ages of religious influence on human culture has shrunk precipitously in our modern scientific culture. The old “orthodox” traditional conception of an Omnipotent (all powerful) Omniscient (all knowing) God who lives in a place we call ”heaven,” somewhere beyond our earth or cosmos, and who intervenes at will in human affairs for good or ill to achieve His ends, is simply no longer tenable.  Such a pre-scientific view of a Divine Being living somewhere (in heaven) who may or may not respond to our prayers and entreaties has been reasonable rejected by the Modern Scientific World View.  Unfortunately this “orthodox” Christian view is often maintained in our churches, though largely by very strident evangelical Christians.

Dr. Griffin urges Christians & other thinking religious people to move beyond this old medieval- orthodox faith and also the current “modern scientific” worldview to a “Post Modern World View” that includes empirical science but also includes an “animism” or life force in which “God” and therefore “Religion” can play  an important but limited part  

So Griffin proposes a “Post Modern” World-view that includes a GOD-energy  which is real but has self-limiting power in the world.   God is Love, but Love is also God, which means the God-energy is never intrusive but always appealing and luring us to respond in loving, forgiving and caring ways in all we are and do. 

In this “Post-Modern World View”, God-energy is part of the emerging Process in which we, by faithful, loving lives, may play a vital part within our space-time limitation.   We Christians can discover that part by paying attention not only to the ancient. O. T. value commandments, the O. T. prophetic writings, and most especially to the life and teachings of Jesus, but also to our earthly & human history. And by keeping alert to what our particular calling is toward creating the reign (kingdom) of God=energy on earth in our time as we imagine it to be in an eternity where our highest God-inspired  human & planetary values reign.