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One of my first moves when I began
as associate pastor at Bidwell Presbyterian Church was to engage the
congregation’s faith with science. I had written Creation and Last Things for the Presbyterian Church (USA), which,
in book form, summarized a class I’d taught at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian for
most of the six years I served there. So I called the Chico Enterprise-Record (the daily paper that serves our town of
100,000) to see if they were interested in a story. It seemed like a long-shot,
but to my surprise, they promoted the class with front page picture—something
that certainly didn’t happen when I called The
New York Times! And though Bidwell is a growing congregation now with 1600
members (and about 1000 in our worship services), I still didn’t anticipate 120
people waiting expectantly for something to happen that very first night of
class.
Thus
the dialogue began. Subsequently, I regularly taught on science and faith in
our Wednesday night adult ed classes. Every month, I hosted the Chico Triad on
Philosophy, Theology, and Science at my house with participants in those fields
drawn from the two local colleges, California State University and Butte
College, as well as independent scholars. And “the Triad”—along with Bidwell
Pres’s adult discipleship leadership team—put together a yearly science and
religion conference with 60-125 in attendance featuring local faculty in biology,
physics, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies, as well as guest
speakers like Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Karl Giberson.
The
project that was guided by two essential questions: First of all, is
scientific? Better put, can we scientifically support the purported benefits of
MBSR? Secondly, is it Christian? Can MBSR be integrated into Christian faith
and practice? Our team felt the stakes in the dialogue were substantial. If MBSR
were based upon bad science, we would be advocating a practice that may have
some subjective or anecdotal support for its health benefits, but isn’t confirmed
by credible, repeatable scientific studies. We were convinced that both
credible science and substantive theology and/or Christian practice must come
to dialogue. Too often shallow findings from “science” are slapped onto
theology, which little rigor or examination. Similarly, if theological
considerations are ignored, and, in our case, if any religious tradition can be
uncritically inserted into congregational life, what makes their church life distinctively
Christian?
With
those issues in mind, I as a pastor, and Steve Koch, a psychologist from Chico
State, jointly provided a project that addressed certain key goals. We utilized
the issue of MBSR as a catalyst to a collaborative dialogue between science and
faith in a local congregation, first of all, by developing and delivering a
series of five adult education classes both five face-to-face and through
distance learning. The latter allowed us to multiply the learning from the
class both geographically (in principle, participants could attend our class
via the internet anywhere in the world) and through time (the clas is banked so
students could watch at a later date). Our parish associate and teaching
pastor, Allen McCallum, also wrote up a provocative paper, “Mindfulness Based
Stress Reduction (MBSR) and the Christian Faith,” which we distributed. Finally,
we brought the findings to the Chico Triad and our yearly science and religion conference
to expose the conclusions and practices to a wider public with the hope that
all this would spin off into future engagement with MBRS specifically or
meditation more generally. More on that in later paragraphs…
Incidentally, one other
by-product of the MBSR and Christian faith project was to engage psychology, an
often forgotten partner in the dialogue of science and faith. Over the past
fifty years (during the current age of the science-religion dialogue), books
regularly ponder how faith and reason go together, what the physics on Big Bang
has to say to the doctrine of creation, and how can to reconcile evolutionary
biology with the “image of God.” All good topics, but I’ve read far fewer books
on psychology and faith. (And, in fact, no other SinC projects focused on
behavioral sciences.) So we decided to take it on.
What
did we conclude about strategies for a more substantive and generative
engagement between religion and science in congregational life?
Let’s
start with our pitfalls, ones I imagine other pastors and congregations need to
anticipate. Put simply, pastors need to avoid speaking in generalities about
the process of engagement. Congregations need to be given more tools to
understand how science operates, and where its limitations and strengths lie.
The process could be compared to providing concordances, Greek and Hebrew
dictionaries, and commentaries to facilitate Bible study.
What
themes garnered the most interest? Our audiences want to be assured that they
can have a spiritual faith and explore science without being forced to choose
one or the other. They also want to learn specific practices that help them
move closer to God, while providing relief from their struggles with anxiety,
depression, and other health issues. In other words—and this is hardly a
surprise—we wanted to be more theoretical, and the congregation wanted
practice. We did try to join theory with practice in our class. Steve and I
tried academic journal articles in the adult class, and they were too dense—filled
with jargon and statistics. Put simply, we shot too high. We wanted to show the
quantitative analysis and substantive data that backed up our conclusions; in
contrast, the class kept asking, “How do we do MBSR?” They wanted to get still
and find God in the stillness. Put another way, it might be more accurate for
congregations to talk more about faith
and science rather than theology or religion and science because congregants
always seem most interesting in “How does this affect my faith and my
well-being?”
I
think the concern that drove this project—and that has motivated me to engage
my theology with science—is this: how do we articulate Christian faith in a
science- and technology-soaked world? I remember a quip from Friederich
Schleiermacher, who had become deeply concerned that Christianity in the late
18th and early 19th century was increasingly distanced
from good intellectual engagement. He asked, “Shall the tangle of history so unravel that
Christianity becomes identified with barbarism and science with unbelief?”
Similarly, I have become convinced that we can’t let our theology be wedded to
sub-par science, nor can we allow legitimate science to be connected solely to atheistic materialism.
In that light—and because Bidwell Pres
blends mainline theology with West Coast evangelicalism—our congregation holds
a high view of the Bible. So we needed a solidly effective biblical hermeneutic.
And here I learned a great deal from a Christian thinker not often mentioned in
this context, C. S. Lewis. Christians that love science also value the Bible,
and Lewis was a world-class Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar who read scripture
in a neither truly liberal nor conservative mode, which allowed for a discerning
engagement with a variety of other disciplines. (Full disclosure: I was also engaged
in research on Lewis for a book during two years of SinC and wanted to try out
some of his ideas here. So I presented these and other conclusions at a conference
of all the SinC grantees in 2011 and an adult ed class on C. S. Lewis and
Science in 2012.)
Lewis
viewed the Bible as carrying the word of God, that its authority derives from
the one Word of God, Jesus Christ, and that much of its content comes through
“myths,” which for him are not untrue stories, but those that carried profound
meaning. Lewis concluded that science had a rightful place in intellectual work
and in the development of the West, but had no right to determine all truth and
knowledge. In that light, Lewis believed the Bible as a book could be read on
its own terms and offer legitimate wisdom. The Bible doesn’t need science to substantiate
its claims. Paradoxically, this may be the best way for congregations that take
science seriously as they read their Bibles. Science can have a freedom not
bound by its corroboration with a specific biblical text. We could read the Bible, and we could practice
MBSR, and not find ourselves filled with anxiety that we’re doing both as long
as both carry truth. Lewis further liberates us to read the Bible as a powerful
book—one that leads Christians to the center of their faith, Jesus Christ—and
to let the liberated study of science also take place.
Our
project experienced something that was replicated throughout the other
thirty-six congregations—we discovered that the Bible and science can and must
speak to one another, but we are free to make connections where they exist
without forcing a connection with the hermeneutical duck tape of proof-texting.
Faithful Christians can engage science in a free interchange without forced
agreement or impenetrable conflict. In fact, I had underestimated the degree to
which my congregation simply felt stressed out and wanted to find “the peace,”
described by Paul in Philippians 4:7, “that passes understanding.” They weren’t
particularly worried if MBSR was the vehicle to arrive at that destination, as
long as they met Christ there too. For example, one of our class members had
studied MBSR to help with an anxiety disorder. That experience, however, was at
hospital, and he was all to glad to practice within a Christian framework. The
bottom line was that MBSR calmed their souls. And that was enough. It was
sufficient for me too.
In
conclusion, I’d note that many of the effects of our project have been subtle.
One is that subsequent small groups have begun to spring up around the topic of
mindfulness and its practice in Christian meditation. Another is a current Wednesday
night adult ed class also around this topic (built, by the way, more on
practice than theory). And, as I mentioned above, by equipping one of our
classroom with distance learning capabilities, we hope that technology could
spread the news about what it means for Christians to engage with science.
Probably most important is that Bidwell Presbyterian demonstrated that there is
nothing to fear—and everything to learn—from science. A soon to be published book by Calvin College sociologist Jonathan Hill, Emerging Adulthood and Faith, analyzes the
way we engage challenging topics by blending affect (learned primarily through
our social groups) with rational reflection into “motivated reasoning.” The
most important influencers therefore in how congregations engage science will
be friends, family, and pastors (not—as he is somewhat crestfallen to note—professors).
I wish I had read that before, and not after, we finished SinC! Nevertheless,
it remains very good news for me and for those congregations that engage faith
with science.
I think the effects of MBSR might have taken root in our congregation in much more mundane ways. I saw a church member with eyes closed during a recent sermon. I knew she wasn’t sleeping—she was simply engaged in mindfulness meditation.
I think the effects of MBSR might have taken root in our congregation in much more mundane ways. I saw a church member with eyes closed during a recent sermon. I knew she wasn’t sleeping—she was simply engaged in mindfulness meditation.
