IMAGES OF GOD IN TIME AND SPACE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Henry, Patrick

ABSTRACT

Time and space-how we think and feel about them-determine our images of God. Space used to be territory and time an arrow, so hierarchical arrangements and stories that proceed relentlessly from beginning through middle to end made sense. But what if the world is not hospitable to a sovereign with schemes? Contemporary cosmology shifts us from a world where God has all the ducks in a row to a world of invention and variety, the ducks flying around all over the place. Italo Calvino's stories in Cosmicomics serve the religious imagination, which has been given a renewed lease on life by modern science.

1 E. Allison Peers, ed. and Irans., The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila (New York: Image, I960), 174 (ch. 18).

2 I have checked my memory of the program against the transcript that was subsequently available at the ABC website, www.transcripts.tv/2020.cfm (26 Apr. 2004).

3 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988), 136.

4 See my The Ironic Christian's Companion: Finding the Marks of God's Grace in the World (New York: Riverhead, 1999), 222-30, where I apply Jean-Luc Godard's remark about movies needing a beginning, middle, and end, but nol necessarily in that order, to the story of Joseph and his brothers and the parable of the prodigal son.

5 Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 20.

6 Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30, cited in Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A Slate of the Univerxe(s) Report (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 13 and n.3, 313.

7 Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon, 1972), 521.

8 Halo Calvino, Cosmicomics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968).

9 Ibid., 9.

10 Ibid., 36.

11 Albert Warden, quoted in K. C. Cole, "Escape from 3-D," Discover (July 1993): 52-62.

12 Calvino, 43.

13 IbId., 44.

14 IbId., 121.

15 See my The Ironic Christian's Companion, 71-7, where 1 draw on Egon Serieller, SJ, The Icon, Image of the Invisible: Elements of Theology, Aesthetics, and Technique (Torrance, CA: Oakwood, 1988), ch. 8, "The Icon and the Laws of Perspective," 119-34, and ch. 9, "The Theories of Inversed Perspective," 135-48; and Karyl M. Knee, The Dynamic Symmetry Proportional System as Found in Some Byzantine and Russian Icons of the 14th-16th Centuries (Torrance, CA: Oakwood, 1988), section 3, "Iconographic Reverse Perspective," 26-37.

16 Carl Sagan, Contact (New York: Pocket, 1986), 351-2.

17 Roland Mushat Frye, "Metaphors, Equations, and the Faith," Theology Today 37 (1980): 66.

18 e. cummings, "when faces called flowers float out of the ground," no. 67 in the collection XAIRE (1950), in Complete Poems 1913-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 665.

Patrick Henry retired in June alter twenty years as executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research (Collegeville, MN). He is author, most recently, of The Ironic Christian's Companion: Finding the Marks of God's Grace in the World (1999), and editor of Benedict's Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict (2001). This article is a revision of an address delivered at Tulane University in the Public Lecture Series sponsored by the Chair of Judeo-Christian Studies.