Co-evolving God

This Sunday in worship we will celebrate Evolution Sunday. On the birthday of Charles Darwin (February 12)  we will celebrate the compatibility, and yes, the indivisibility of our human knowledge.

On May 29, 1944 the preeminent theologian of the 20th century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge from the Nazi prison: ...Weizsäker’s book “The World-View of Physics” is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize God’s presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. (highlight A.S.)

Bonhoeffer wrote about modern quantum physics, but his observation can be applied to any science, including biology and its principal of evolution. God is not a stopgap of our knowledge, God is not anti-evolution, God, God's self, is the essence of life, and evolving life. If we say that we believe in living God, this God cannot be a rigid unchanging absolute. The Living God is a changing God, an evolving and a co-evolving God. The fourth chapter of the Book of Jonah strives to uphold and reveal just this message. While our idols (material or intellectual) are rigid, stiff and dead-bound, our living God changes, evolves, lives and promotes life. Come join us in celebrating our co-evolving living and loving God.