A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [9]
Or imagine it’s the early nineteenth century. You’re voyaging with Alfred Russel Wallace between the islands of Indonesia, or you’re on board The Beagle with Charles Darwin, exploring the Galapagos Islands. You’re noticing patterns—patterns of variation among closely related species of birds, turtles, bats, and other animals and patterns of distribution of those species across islands and continents. Church dogma says that all species now alive disseminated from Mt. Ararat in Turkey less than six thousand years ago, after Noah’s flood. If that’s true, you’d expect species to radiate out from that one center, but the patterns you’re observing don’t support that dogma at all. You wonder, “Why don’t the facts conform to dogma? Should another explanation be sought?”
Or imagine it’s 1905. You’re in Bern, having coffee with an unknown would-be physicist named Albert Einstein, who is working on an article with a strange equation in it. Is it possible to imagine with Albert that matter and energy are not absolute and that one can be transformed into the other? Or imagine it’s a few years later, and now the young scientist has proposed the relativity of time and space. Will you give such absurd ideas a second thought, or will you call it all nonsense, muttering about slippery slopes and pledging fealty to Sir Isaac Newton and his world of secure laws and simple formulas?
Or imagine it’s in the early 1960s, and you’re watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News on your black-and-white TV. The scene cuts to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as he preaches about a beloved community replacing a segregated society. Or maybe it’s 1991 and you’re a white South African watching SATV, and Nelson Mandela, newly released from prison, is proclaiming a new vision for his apartheid-torn nation. Will you dare question conventional wisdom enough to consider signing on to Martin’s or Nelson’s wild new viewpoint and dangerous dreams, maybe even join in a march or boycott?
Or zip back to 1610, in Italy, and imagine you’re standing in starlight among friends on Galileo’s rooftop deck. You’re taking turns gazing at Jupiter through his newfangled telescope, and there you see—amazing!—against the deep night, three, no, four luminous moons suspended as if by magic around the banded planet. And suddenly you feel dizzy, as if you’re falling out of one universe and into another. And not only dizzy, but afraid, because somehow you know that church leaders would not be happy about your observations and the speculations they may lead to. After all, for over a thousand years, all Christians have known with absolute and objective certainty that the earth is fixed and immovable in the center of the universe, and that the moon, planets, sun, and stars are securely embedded in ten majestic crystalline spheres that rotate around the earth. This model, the invention of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century, has worked perfectly for a long time. Well, almost perfectly. There has been one pesky problem.
If you look at heavenly bodies on consecutive nights, you’ll notice that nearly all of them stay in formation, in the same relative positions, creating stable patterns that we call constellations. But a few heavenly bodies don’t follow the pattern. These renegades move across the background constellations. That’s why the ancient Greeks called them “wanderers” (which is the origin of the word “planets”). Even though their motion is different from that of the starry background, at least it is consistent: they wander from west to east, night after night, and the model of Ptolemy even explains this movement. Usually, that is.
Sometimes, some planets pause in their eastward course, dip, reverse course, and move west for a while, and then loop back again to the east. How can this be? Why does every other heavenly body move in an orderly motion across the sky, but these dancers step out of line and behave erratically? These are the questions that helped bring down a paradigm that had held sway for over a thousand years.
Ptolemy’s