The Red Herring of a Three-Story Universe

The late James D. Pike, well-known Episcopal maverick, often dwelt on the incompatability of the biblical language of a “three-story universe” with modern man’s post-Copernican understanding of space and time. He liked to inform audiences that, since scientific research had rendered the biblical picture of the universe obsolete, the Christian doctrines associated with this outdated world-view must also be considered untenable, at least in their traditional form. Man’s dwelling-place is not a flat earth with four corners. God’s is not above the bright blue sky. The dead do not descend into the lower parts of the earth. The earth is not central to the cosmos. The sun doesn’t rise as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber to run his course. In short, talk about the universe as three-storied is meaningless to space-age man.

Similarly, Bishop John Robinson of Woolwich, England, enamoured of Tillich’s abstraction “Ground of being” as a name for God, broadcast the idea that “out there” or “up there” (caricature concepts regarding God, anyway) could very well in these days give place to some image from depth psychology. Divine transcendence is out! Human sensitivity is in! But the theological iconoclast shows a blithe naïveté when he offers the spatial image of “depth” to replace the spatial image of “height.”

With such unconvincing “demythologizations,” proponents of a radical theology for tomorrow offer to deliver Christianity from an irrelevant frame of reference. If we take as our mentor Paul Tillich, then we can have a world-view “rooted in the divine ground which is man’s own ground.” Or if we welcome Teilhard de Chardin as prophet for our evolution-oriented culture, we can have a theology in which God is looked upon as the goal of the universe rather than its creator. The criterion for deciding whether a particular doctrine may or may not be believed appears to be its appeal to the twentieth-century secularist. If the typical man of our technologically-oriented age approves a doctrine, then it is considered relevant and intellectually respectable. If not, then the doctrine must be discarded.

The theological revolutionary has some hidden assumptions that do not seem warranted either by Scripture or by common sense. His attitude seems to be that since we find ourselves in a world transformed by scientific knowledge, we should jump to the conclusion that God is calling his Church to exchange its God-given role in the world for a role virtually dictated by that portion of the modern world that feels self-sufficient; then, allowing the world to prepare its agenda, the Church should provide for the world a doctrinal buttress for its mancentric world-view and, in general, a quasi-scientific “religion without revelation.” We are invited to fall for the fallacy that the secular viewpoint is the final criterion of what can be thought, uttered, or believed in.

Let us consider the red herring of the “three-story universe.” The Apostle Paul did indeed speak of three realms as a means of indicating the universal scope of Christ’s cosmic redemption, for which “every knee should bow—in heaven, on earth, and in the depths” (Phil. 2:10, NEB). In attributing to Christ the total prerogative and execution of the creativity of God, Paul spoke of “everything in heaven and earth … not only things visible but also the invisible orders of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers,” as “created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15–20). The creeds do indeed speak of Christ as the One who “came down from heaven,” “descended into hell” (or, the place of departed spirits), and “ascended into heaven.” We rejoice in the whole biblical witness to the centrality of Christ in the divine scheme of things and the all-embracing validity of the cosmic redemption he accomplished. And there is not one shred of evidence that the obsolescence of the Ptolemaic world-view and the ensuing changes in the world-view of Western man have invalidated any of these biblical doctrines.

The argument used by proponents of a reductionist or radical theology runs like this: Christianity was originally propagated in an age ignorant of the scientific facts that began to come to light with the Copernican revolution in cosmology; therefore modern Christians should jettison doctrines whose biblical sources employ language reminiscent of the idea of an earth-centered, three-story universe. But this argument injects unnecessary confusion. It may be quite proper to use the term pre- or post-Copernican in a chronological sense in a discussion of the history of modern science. But it is quite another matter to employ the terms polemically when the context of the discussion is theological. It is as unscholarly as it is unfair to fling pre-Copernican as a kind of dirty word at Christians who see no threat to the faith of the New Testament in the advance of modern science and the scientific world-view.

The world-view discredited by the Copernican revolution is not the biblical view so much as that element in medieval Thomist cosmology derived from Aristotle. Cosmological references in the Psalms and other parts of the Old Testament are neither Ptolemaic nor Copernican. The poetry of Psalm 104 is as appropriate for the twentieth century as for the first: “Thou hast spread out the heavens like a tent.… Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it can never be shaken.” And Psalm 102:25, “The heavens shall grow old as a garment,” sounds more like the Second Law of Thermodynamics than anything Copernicus ever said.

A Christian world-view can readily subsume within its total presentation the insights of Einstein. Yet there is no reason why modern Christians should not still use “three-story universe” language and still be considered intellectually honest. It is hard to improve on the language of St. Paul if we want to communicate his insight into the universality of Christ and the cosmic efficacy of his saving work. No one would criticize the astronauts for talking, as they doubtless often do, about the “sunrise” or “sunset,” or label them “pre-Copernican” for this. They do not let their technical knowledge rob them of the spiritual insights that are a valid witness to truth.

Men who get their scientific knowledge from its literary popularizers often show less humility in the presence of the mysterious universe than professional scientists. The scientist is a devotee of truth as his researches uncover it. In the laboratory he pays little heed to the philosophical implications of his discoveries. From time to time he may have to contradict the imperfect, partial, or even false conclusions of his predecessors. And at all stages of his progress as scientist it is still possible for him to be a Christian believer and accept essential New Testament truth. The noted scientist Sir A. S. Eddington has said:

A belief not by any means confined to the more dogmatic adherents of religion is that there is a future non-material existence in store for us.… The scientist declares that time and space are a single continuum, and the modern idea of a Heaven in time but not in space is in this respect more at variance with science than the pre-Copernican idea of a Heaven above our heads [The Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge, 1933, p. 351].

Then, in his conclusion regarding the lack of finality of scientific theories, he wisely warns: “The religious reader may well be content that I have not offered him a God revealed by the quantum theory, and therefore liable to be swept away in the next scientific revolution” (p. 353).

The achievements of science have been due in part to the intellectual joie de vivre and curiosity of thinkers and experimenters emancipated from the last vestiges of pre-Christian superstition in the Western world, and in part to the desire for utilitarian rewards; but most significantly scientific progress came from intuition into the ultimate principles at work in the physical cosmos, and to that inspired devotion to the discovery of what Einstein, borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Leibniz, called “a pre-established harmony.” This devotion is wholly in harmony with the essential Christian outlook on the universe as expressed by the Apostle Paul in his paean to the Christ whose Person, prerogatives, and power are cosmic in their relevance and redemptive scope. “His is the primacy over all created things. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created.… The whole universe has been created through him and for him … and all things are held together in him.… Through him God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself” (Col. 1:15–20). “God has made known to us his hidden purpose—such was his will and pleasure determined beforehand in Christ—to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely, that the universe, all in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ” (Eph. 1:9, 10). “This is in accord with the age-long purpose which he achieved in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:11).

We can have a space-age Christology without the exaggerated fears of those who have made shipwreck of the faith on the grounds that three-story-universe language is now untenable. A space-age Christology will see Christ as the Creator-Sustainer, the everlasting Lord and sole Redeemer of the whole universe. The magnitude of the universe as unveiled by astronomers is indeed awe-inspiring, but it is of less significance than the amazing grace of God in the biblical story of his dealings with and purpose for his creature, man, and of the centrality of Christ in the achievement of these.

The question arises: What would be the relation of Christ to creatures in other worlds, assuming there might be such? Biblically revealed truth is unchangingly relevant. There can be only one God, and one Mediator between God and his creatures. Therefore the whole universe, in its totality and in all its parts, is subject to the sovereignty of Christ the eternal Word, through whom it has been created; he is the rightful recipient of the adoration and praise of all orders of creation. There is as yet no evidence of the existence of human beings in other worlds; it is just a conjectural possibility based on the assumption that, given the existence of countless numbers of stars, it might be considered mathematically improbable that the planet Earth should out of all this wealth of creation be the only one that could support life and have human inhabitants. It now seems clear that in our own solar system no other planet has conditions that make even the most rudimentary forms of life possible. Yet it may be permissible to assume, for theological purposes, the existence of sentient and conscious life in other worlds than our own.

C. S. Lewis in his space trilogy has written fascinating stories based on this assumption, in such a way that the underlying theology is perfectly sound and in harmony with the Scriptures. And in his essay on “Religion and Rocketry” (The World’s Last Night, Harcourt Brace, 1960, p. 84), he says, regarding the supposed threat to Christianity, particularly the doctrine of the Incarnation:

Usually, when the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before. So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism, with Biblical criticism, with the new psychology. So, I cannot help expecting, it will be with the discovery of “life on other planets”—if that discovery is ever made.

He then raises a point that non-Christians always seem to forget:

If there are species, and rational species, other than men, are any or all of them like us fallen?… They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because they are not worth dying for: to make them worth it. Notice what waves of unwarranted hypothesis these critics of Christianity want us to swim through. We are now supposing the fall of hypothetically rational creatures whose mere existence is hypothetical!… Perhaps of all races we only fell. Perhaps man is the only lost sheep; the one therefore whom the Shepherd came to seek.

Then, after wondering how things would go if men met an unfallen race, Lewis concludes: “I have wondered before now whether the vast astronomical distances may not be God’s quarantine precautions. They prevent the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading” (p. 91).

In his science-fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, the same author has imagined a conversation between a redeemed astronaut visiting the planet Mars and Oyarsa, the planet’s tutelary angel. Speaking of the “war in heaven” when the Bent One was driven back and bound in the air of his own world, Oyarsa says:

There doubtless he lies to this hour, and we know no more of that planet: it is silent. We think that Maleldil would not give it up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that he has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra. But of this we know less than you; it is a thing we desire to look into [Out of the Silent Planet, Macmillan, 1947, p. 130].

Our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, is a cosmic Creator and a cosmic Redeemer. Just as the Old Testament prophets were inspired to tell of the grace of God awaiting future generations and “tried to find out what was the time, and what the circumstances, to which the spirit of Christ in them pointed, foretelling the sufferings in store for Christ and the splendours to follow”; and just as St. Peter and the other apostles were able to proclaim: “Now it has been openly announced to you through preachers who brought you the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven” (1 Pet. 1:11, 12); so too we may be permitted to say, These are things that angels in charge of other worlds and all the invisible orders of thrones, sovereignties, and powers that happen to have been created “through him and for him,” as the Apostle says, “long to see into.” We can even conceive of a missionary role for the ransomed of earth into the farthest limits of outer space. For the worship of heaven will ever be the worship of “the Lamb in the midst of the throne.” By the light of the Lamb “shall the nations walk, and the kings of the earth shall bring into it all their splendour … but nothing unclean shall enter, nor anyone whose ways are false or foul, but only those who are inscribed in the Lamb’s roll of the living” (Rev. 21:24–27, NEB).

The Challenge Off Resistance

No doubt a world in which matter never got out of place and became dirt, in which iron had no flaws and wood no cracks, in which gardens had no weeds, and food grew already cooked, in which clothes never wore out and washing was as easy as the soapmakers’ advertisements describe it, in which rules had no exceptions and things never went wrong, would be a much easier place to live in. But for purposes of training and development it would be worth nothing at all.

It is the resistance that puts us on our mettle: it is the conquest of the reluctant stuff that educates the worker. I wish you enough difficulties to keep you well and make you strong and skillful!

—HENRY VAN DYKE

John W. Duddington has retired from the post of associate rector of St. Peter’s Episocpal chruch, Redwood City, California. He previously was a caplian at Stanford University and a missionary in the Phillippians and China. He has the M.A. (Durham University, England).

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