I have to confess to being a bit of a fan of the Church of England’s two archbishops - the most senior leaders in my church. Both are men who have a bigger world vision than just the narrow confines of the church. Rowan Williams comes from Wales and was previously a professor of theology at Oxford. He presided over the signing of the Covenant between our churches from the Anglican side a couple of years ago. John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is from Uganda, a former high court judge who had to leave following death threats from the Idi Armin regime. Both men began their terms of office by saying that they wanted to see Christianity once again capture the imaginations of the people of this land.

Note the language. It is Christianity that they want to see capture people’s imaginations, not just a particular Church. One of the ways this will happen is through ensuring that the faith we proclaim is credible and fits with how life really is. While we may look to the hope of heaven, we live in a real world and our faith must connect with that.

There is something that I have been involved with recently that is turning out to be quite topical. As some of you know I am a governor at Temple Moor High School. Temple Moor has Science College status, which means it gets extra money to boost science not only in its own school, but in other schools in the community. Those with connections at local primary schools will know that the portable lab has been around bringing science to life and high tech interactive white boards are everywhere. Long gone are black boards and chalk! It’s all lap tops and data projectors with electronic pens and touch sensitive screens.

The area I have been involved with has been the whole question of creation and evolution and this was in the news last week. I was asked recently to take an AS Level lesson on science and public understanding. They have to look at different ways of accounting for how the world is here and creation is one of them. The link with the desire for Christianity to capture young imaginations is that we have to take dinosaurs seriously and they don’t fit with 6 day creation. The world is not 6,000 years old, but that is the age we get if we add up all the various dates in the bible. The bible is quite simply wrong. Or is it?

It depends what we mean by wrong and right. To take the bible as a science text book we need to put on blinkers and ignore the overwhelming scientific knowledge that we now have. However, that is not how we are supposed to read the bible. The authors of the creation stories had no idea how the world came into being. What they had was a deep sense that it wasn’t here by accident. There was a reason for it and that reason lay in the religious stirrings they experienced. They were drawn to awe and wonder. It didn’t occur to them that it might have emerged through billions of years, they had no notion of that, so it seemed obvious to them that it must have just appeared in an instant. The story of 6 days captured their imaginations and it was a resonant story.

What we need today is to capture the imaginations of the scientists with the prospect of an emerging universe but one that emerges from the mind of God. We can still hold to the biblical idea that there was creation, but have to take on board that this has and does involve evolution and a process that has lasted billions of years, not six days.

This though takes us to the heart of other questions like how does God act in this emerging and scientific world. Questions about how God acts very quickly get stuck on the problem of suffering. How can a loving God allow mudslides in the Philippines that bury children? I was talking to a grandmother the other day whose baby granddaughter is dying. It was making her wonder about the hand of God.

Part of our problem is that we approach these questions with the image of a puppeteer God in our heads. Like a skilled puppet master, God pulls strings and ensures that we get the parking space we need, blesses and curses, gives fortune and withholds it. Before we know where we are free-will has been removed and we are just play things to amuse divine boredom in eternity.

If we approach God’s activity in the world from a different angle, seeing God rather as the context in which we exist, things start to look different though suffering is still hard to come to terms with. God is not so much tiddling about in the world, but is the very stuff of which it is made; God is the place where the world is. So God and the world are not separate but the world exists in God.

There are Christian scientists who approach the enormous questions which modern science throws up from this angle. It puts God back on the agenda, but out of the microscope. If we could find a microscope strong enough, we are not going to find God waving at us. These scientists see God as being more of a transcendent love who generates the world in such a way that it generates itself. It does this because it exists within the context of God. It cannot escape from God.

There are some surprises that follow on from this. One of these is that a sacramental understanding of the world, which John Wesley held, becomes strangely more relevant than we might have thought. Sacraments speak of the world being alive with God, as Rowan Williams has described them. Through their symbolism and the ways they speak to us they communicate the presence and overarching love of the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Take God out and we become nothing. The world tingles with God and there are ways we can become aware of this tingling.

Prayer equally becomes a vehicle for entering into this deeper mystery and draws on the well of our being. We commune in the stillness and silence with the source and goal of everything that there is. We allow the eternal context to set the agenda now and trust in his redeeming presence to transform what would otherwise be futile and transitory.

So, far from finding that the God of the gaps in our scientific knowledge retreating into irrelevance as scientific understanding expands, God is the God of science, the one in whom all of this incredible knowledge exists and this becomes part of the wonder of creation.

If Christianity is going to capture the imagination of a scientific understanding, we need to make it clear that we believe in creation, but not creationism. Creationism is the view that God made the world in 6 days or in an instant as it is. That has no credibility in today’s world. We just know it isn’t true. But creation on the other hand can be held with evolution and even expands our concept of what evolution is about.

To believe in creation is to believe that the world tingles with God. Living in harmony with that tingling is the way that leads to life in all its fullness. Living against it leads to death and so many evils. This also lies at the heart of the Covenant between God and Abraham, we just today have to take account of so many developments in our understanding and work out what that means for how we understand that Covenant faith.

© Ian Black 2006

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