The God of Hope and the End of the World
I cannot bring myself to accept Polkinghorne’s bleak view of the nature of the after life. I say ‘bleak’ because if I understand his thesis, and I cannot be certain that I have, he can give no more than the ‘hope’ - definitely not the ‘certainty’ - that our personalities will be ‘resurrected’ in human form at the time of ‘the new creation’, which he sees following on from the end of the possibility of life in this universe, which he believes will ultimately be the case in many billions of years time. It saddens me to find that one of the leading scientist/theologians of the day, of such evident intelligence and imagination has never heard of, and has never read any of the books of Swedenborg, who was the leading scientist/theologian of the 18th century.
His whole thesis rests on a primary assumption, namely the ‘end of the world’, as in his title. He says: “... the universe itself faces a highly problematic future. Its long-term history is controlled by the competing effects of expansion (the ‘explosive’ consequences of the big bang) and gravity (drawing matter together). These contrasting tendencies are evenly balanced and we do not know for certain which will win in the end. If expansion predominates (the possibility currently favoured by most cosmologists), cosmic history will continue for ever in a world growing steadily colder and more dilute. Eventually, all will decay into low grade radiation. If gravity predominates, the present expansion will one day be halted and reversed. What began with the big bang will end with the big crunch, as the universe implodes into a cosmic melting pot. The time scales for these processes are immensely long, spanning many billions of years, but one or other of them is a certain prognostication of the cosmic future. However fruitful the universe may seem today, its end lies in futility”.
I cannot accept this thesis, on two grounds, one scientific and one religious. But before I come to that, mention must also be made of Polkinghorne’s second ‘catastrophe’, which, if true, would probably destroy the earth long before the end of the universe. He says: “In about five billion years time ..... the Sun will swell to become a red giant, burning any life surviving on earth into a frazzle in the process. Our understanding of the course of stellar evolution is good enough to make this prediction absolutely reliable.” Scientifically this is harder to dispute, but I still do not believe that it will happen. Our knowledge of the universe is all based on the past; the light reaching us from all but the nearest stars started on its way long before mankind appeared in this world and in most cases billions of years ago. The pattern of stars like our sun becoming red giants must be based on a relatively insignificant number of the literally billions of stars in the universe. No one has ever seen a sun become a red giant. I do not believe that any scientist should ever say that any prediction is absolutely reliable. There is also a religious objection. I find it hard to believe that God will allow the planet on which he actually lived for thirty years to be destroyed. The symbolism of the Holy Land is so deeply embedded in God’s Word that I believe it will survive.
To return to the prediction of the end of the habitable universe. Polkinghorne’s thesis depends very heavily on the theory of Big Bang; this is the currently accepted theory to explain the expanding universe . But the theory is fairly recent. When I was a young man the accepted cosmological theory was Professor Hoyle’s Steady State theory. I am willing to predict that the Big Bang theory will be discredited within the next fifty years. The Hubble telescope in space has recently made some startling discoveries, which ought I believe to have made cosmologists think again very seriously about the validity of Big Bang. The Hubble scientists now believe that the universe is younger than previously thought, about 12 billion years rather than the 15 billion quoted by Polkinghorne. But their startling discovery is that when they photographed the most distant galaxies - around 12 billion light years away - they had expected to find these galaxies dating from the beginning of time to be obviously still in process of condensing from clouds of gas. To their surprise, however, every single galaxy was fully formed and mature. You would think that this would have led them to question the validity of Big Bang. So far as I can understand that is not so. Instead they are planning to build an even more powerful telescope in space. I presume they are hoping that they have not yet in fact seen the earliest galaxies and that somewhere out there they will find an immature galaxy, which will allow them to continue with Big Bang. However, since they claim already to have photographed galaxies, which by their reckoning go back to the beginning of time, it seems to me much more likely that they will either find no more galaxies, or just possibly a few more mature galaxies. Then I think they will have to abandon Big Bang. What this will leave them with I don’t know, presumably some form of steady state. This too of course might be expected eventually to cool down - unless matter is being continually created in interstellar space. Scientists won’t accept this because it relies on the supernatural. But I reckon that may be the nearest we can get to the truth.
Now for the religious objection to Polkinghorne's theory. Swedenborg tells us that every created thing exists on different discontinuous levels of reality at the same time. I illustrate discontinuous levels with the example of an office table. At its outermost level it can be described in terms of its dimensions and the materials of which it is made, wood, plastic and chrome steel. But at the same time there is a completely discontinuous level - the quantum level, where the table is a mass of movement with electrons whizzing around the nuclei of atoms. The table cannot exist without both levels existing simultaneously, but the levels are distinct and discontinuous. Human beings exist on three levels simultaneously; the innermost self, the outer mind and the body. The inner mind and the outer mind exist on distinct levels. It is the existence of these two levels which makes possible self-consciousness and gives human beings free will. Our inner mind can contemplate and comment on our outer thoughts and volitions and on our sensual feelings. I am able to say “buck up Guy, try harder”; that is my inner self conversing with my outer self. In the same way, the observable universe is the outer level of the spiritual and divine levels of reality. None can exist without the other. The higher levels have their ultimate manifestation in the outermost material level. This is as true of the universe as it is of an office table, Swedenborg says: (Heaven and Hell - para. 304) “..... it follows that the connection and conjunction of heaven with the human race is such that one continues in existence from the other, and that the human race apart from heaven would be like a chain without a hook; and heaven without the human race would be like a house without a foundation”. Iam therefore convinced that whatever the scientists may say, the universe will continue for ever. It is unthinkable that heaven should disappear.
Polkinghorne has an interesting sentence in Chapter Two, in support of his thesis: “... eschatological discontinuity will not be so abrupt as to be an apocalyptic abolition of the old, wiping the cosmic slate clean in an act of almost magical tour de force and so severing all connection between the old and the new - any more than the present creation came into being ready-made and fully formed, out of nothing at a snap of the divine fingers”. The italicised phrase seems to me to be much nearer the truth (the galaxies I believe to have come into existence ‘fully formed’) although nothing can be made from nothing. In the same chapter Polkinghorne has what I take to be a most ingenious explanation of the Trinity. I don’t know whether this is the standard Anglican view. He says: “Quantum theory has shown that once two subatomic entities have interacted with each other, they remain mutually entangled, constituting effectively a single system, however far apart they may separate. Each retains a counter-intuitive power to influence the other instantaneously.” And on the next page he says: “such insights are congenial to Christian theology, the nature of whose triune God is founded in the relational exchange .... between the Persons of the Holy Trinity”. As you well know, Christine, I cannot accept a Holy Trinity of three Persons. God, I believe also exists on three levels of reality.The innermost Divine essence - the mind of God - is the Father, Jesus the Son is the human manifestation of that mind, the Holy Spirit is the Divine proceeding. The analogy with the human being is exact, we were after all created in the ‘image’ of God. The chapter on human intuition and experience makes a number of interesting points.
He says that the intuition of hope is a significant and essential aspect of what it is to be human. He goes on to say: “It is not just a survival technique for whistling in the dark to keep our spirits up, but it is an encounter with the reality within which we live”. He speaks more truly than he knows. Swedenborg tells us that whilst we are still in his world, we are in the company of good and evil spirits; our souls are, as it were, unconsciously also already in the next world. This is the source of our ‘intuitions’. He completely rejects any reliance on any paranormal phenomena. But goes on to say: “.. we shall take the view that it is intrinsic to full humanity to be embodied in some way or another.” Here at least we agree.
Polkinghorne next looks for evidence of a life after death in the Old Testament and in the New. His key texts are from Isaiah in the Old and Revelations in the New. From Isaiah 65:17 - “ For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind”. And from Revelations 21:1 - “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” In my view he interprets these statements far too literally. Swedenborg has told us that every word of the Bible (except the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles) has an inner spiritual meaning. In this meaning the word ‘earth’, when used in a good sense, signifies the Lord’s kingdom in the heavens and in the earth. The Lord’s kingdom on earth rests with his church. Swedenborg uses the word ‘church’ not to signify an organised institution, but the body of men and women who worship the Lord and obey his commandments. The Lord’s church on earth is the medium whereby the spiritual world (the upper discontinuous level) interacts with the material world (the lowest level). Without that influx the world could not exist. In every age, from the very beginning of mankind, there has been a ‘church’ performing that function. The earliest churches worshipped Jehovah as God. But the churches slowly degenerated and by the time of Abraham even the name of Jehovah had been lost. The Israelites lost the name again during their stay in Egypt. When Moses asked God what his name was, the reply was “I AM THAT I AM” - a God who is not in space or time and always omnipresent.
The Israelites represented the nadir of churches since the creation of man. They were wholly material (as Polkinghorne points out they did not believe in an after life); they were natural idolaters. Even in their worship of Jehovah they tended to treat him as an idol; they would carry out the rituals required by him if they thought that it would help them overcome their enemies or provide greater material wealth. But they were often equally prepared to turn to Baal. The Israelite ‘church’ was therefore a representative church. All the rituals contained in the law of Moses represented goods and truths and provided the vital link between heaven and earth. When the Israelites were no longer able to provide that link the Lord came into the world and the first Christian church was born. The passages in Isaiah and Revelations foreshadow a new Christian church, which may well not be the crown of all churches. All churches decline and have to be replaced and there may be many more in the next 10 billion years or more. An objective viewer would have to conclude that the first Christian Church has declined; it has become increasingly secular. As the Rev. Edward Norman has said : “The message promoted by the institutional churches in Britain is scarcely distinctive at all, appearing to be a sanctified endorsement of the Humanist preoccupation with the details of material welfare, which is general in our society”. Moreover - and Edward Norman would not agree with this - its doctrines have gone awry; the triune God has to make way for Jesus as the one and only God. I strongly suspect that neither Anglicans nor Catholics will still exist in two or three hundred years time.
The resurrection of Jesus plays an important part in Polkinghorne’s thesis. He sees it as foreshadowing the ultimate resurrection of all mankind. He makes the very important point: “.. the stories [of witnesses to the resurrection] not only contain moments of recognition but also, in a way that modern sensibility often finds disturbing, they involve palpability ... and even the eating of food”. In other words Polkinghorne foresees the resurrected as fully embodied. The difference between Jesus and us in the next life is that we are not divine. Jesus, whilst in the world, steadily made his human divine by overcoming temptations, so that by the time of the resurrection his human body had become totally divine. Jesus is the only person ever to have been born who was his own father and left no mortal remains (the empty tomb).
Polkinghorne makes the important point the “Eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem. We must participate in our own salvation”. But he doesn't carry this thought on and talk of regeneration - being born again of the spirit. And yet to Swedenborgians this regeneration (a salvation in which we participate) is the new creation. The kingdom of God is within us. Polkinghorne sees the ‘Day of the Lord’ - a day of vindication and judgement - as something that happens only when the material universe ends. Swedenborg tells us that we are all judged when we arrive in the next world - within three days of the death of the body.
Many people today find it inconceivable that there should be a hell. Surely, they say, it can never be too late to be redeemed. God’s offer of mercy and forgiveness is not, they think, withdrawn at death. But Polkinghorne quite rightly says that “The Johannine concept of judgement is not that of a divine rejection but of a human self-exposure. In the face of reality (‘the light’), we reveal by our actions who we really are”. He also rightly, I believe , says: “We must ask the question of whether, in the end, the resistance of even the most stubborn and contemptuous of sinners will melt in the fire of God’s love, or whether there will be those who resist God for ever? In the latter case, those who make an enduring decision against God have condemned themselves to hell”.
He wonders what will be the destiny of non-human creatures and says, mistakenly, I believe, “... the kind of theological thinking that has too exclusively an anthropocentric focus surely takes too narrow a view of God’s creative purposes.” There will be animals in heaven. Polkinghorne says: “Perhaps there will be lions in the world to come but not every lion that has ever lived”. I am sure that there will be lions in the next world, but in no way are they ‘resurrected’ embodiments of lions which have died in this world. Animals in the next world correspond to the affections of those in whose company they are seen. Lions, Swedenborg tells us, in a good sense, signify divine truth in power (hence the Lion of Judah) and , in a bad sense, false principles destroying the truths of the word. Lambs, as we all know, signify those who are in the good of innocence and love to the Lord.
Finally I find Polkinghorne’s vision of the ultimate destiny of mankind bleak indeed. Having not read Swedenborg he cannot say anything about what it will be like in the next world which to my mind has any credibility. He says; “Even the man who said that when he went to heaven he would play golf everyday, might sicken of the game after a few thousand years. Even less attractive is the caricature notion of sitting on a cloud, eternally strumming a harp”. How right. But what does he put in its place? “What awaits us”, he says, “ is the unending exploration of the inexhaustible riches of God, a pilgrim journey into deepest reality that will always be thrilling and life enhancing.” This seems to me an almost meaningless sentence. For my part I confidently expect a heaven with houses, gardens, trees, flowers and rivers; in which I shall for ever be married to Daphne and in which I shall grow in wisdom and the capacity to love in the course of, and this is most important, doing a useful job. Perhaps I shall be a teacher, for which I think I have some aptitude ( newcomers from this world who do not know about Jesus or who have muddled views will need teaching ).
Guy de Moubray, Buxlow Manor
31st October 2003