Because many of you in the blogosphere have yet to learn who I am and why I write, a short bio and introduction are in order.
I am a 77-year-old male who is married and has five children and seven grandchildren. I attended UCLA for three years, lost my student deferment (flunked out!), and served on active duty in the USMC from 1968 to 1971. I was in lawn care and landscaping for the first 20 years of my working life. At age 44, I returned to school and earned a PhD from the University of Washington School of Medicine, Academic Department of Pharmacology. I worked for 15 years as a research neuroscientist. Now I am Retired.
I was born and raised Lutheran. But the middle 40 years of my life were spent in the Roman Catholic Church as a disciple of Richard Rohr OFM. After retiring, my lovely wife Carol and I moved to Bend, Oregon. I joined an ELCA church and now attend Bend Church, UMC.
I plan to begin each of my posts with a quote from someone who has inspired me, so here goes…
“The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men [sic] of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Bonhoeffer was accused of being associated with the January 20 plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested by the Gestapo and held at Flossenbürg concentration camp Until he was hanged on 9 April 1945 during the collapse of the Nazi regime. The portion of a letter that he penned from prison in May of 1944 is quoted below:
“Bonhoeffer also participated in little Dietrich's baptism by penning a sermon of sorts (Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge). The more the church finds itself situated in a post-Christendom context (as is already the case in Europe), the more I believe he has to say to us. Bonhoeffer knew the war would end eventually, and much of his prison theologizing was toward answering the question of what the Christian faith would/should look like in the future. Sadly, his work was cut short, but you can understand his thoughts in this excerpt from the baptism sermon. It ends with a prayer.
Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge
“Today, you will be baptized a Christian. All those great ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be spoken over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out on you without your knowing anything about it. But we are once again being driven right back to the beginnings of our understanding. Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ, and Christian discipleship - all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In traditional words and acts, we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, although we cannot grasp or express it yet. That is our own fault. Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Therefore, our earlier words are bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action. By the time you have grown up, the church's form will have changed greatly. We are not yet out of the melting pot, and any attempt to help the church prematurely to a new expansion of its organization will merely delay its conversion and purification. It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when men will once more be called to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming - as was Jesus' language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God's peace with men and the coming of his kingdom. (Italics mine CG) 'Till then, the Christian cause will be a silent and hidden affair, but there will be those who pray and do right and wait for God's own time. May you be one of them, and may it be said of you one day, 'The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter till full day' (Prov:4-18). [1]
This particular letter of Bonhoeffer from prison spoke to me deeply for a couple of reasons. First, it was written almost exactly two years before my own baptism in July 1946. At the time of this writing, my father, Bernard Guthrie, was a soldier in the US Army fighting the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Second, I hear this as a call to renew the church in an entirely new way as we enter the 21st century.
I will introduce my first post with my take on cosmic theology, using a couple of images to set the stage.
Matter (both normal and dark) and radiation become less dense as the Universe expands owing to its increasing volume, dark energy, and field energy during inflation, which is a form of energy inherent to space itself. As new space gets created in the expanding Universe, the dark energy density remains constant. -Credit E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy
My image of “God,” for lack of a better word at this time, comes from my inspiration both from Bonhoeffer's writing above and modern quantum physics. I see this god as very different from the god of the Bible and theology up to this time.
Studying the images above shows that regular matter, stars, galaxies, etc., and dark matter become less dense as the universe expands. Dark energy density remains constant, violating the law of conservation of energy and matter, E=MC2. More energy is constantly being created.
My view is that my god is outside of our time and space, entering our universe via the quantum foam from what I will call the energyverse.
[1] 145. Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge. Letters and Papers from Prison, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Reader’s Edition, 2015, (pp 380-382).
Thanks, Chris.