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Seek Spirit, Savor Intellect

Revealing God: A New Theology from Science and Jesus
by Patricia A. Williams

Table of Contents
Introduction

Part 1: Yesterday’s God

1. Creator
2. Savior

Part 2: God As Generative: A Scientific Perspective

3. Matter
4. Cosmology
5. Life
6. God

Part 3: God As Generous: Jesus’ Perspective

7. The Historical Jesus
8. God and the Four Rs
9. Two Parables
10. Honor, Generosity, and the Kingdom

Part 4: Revealing God

11. God Revealed
12. The Divine Image

From the Introduction
The purpose of this book is to characterize God for the twenty-first century. The tools used are reason and evidence—evidence from science and the Bible. On the surface, deriving evidence about God from science and the Bible is impossible. Science does not mention God, and the Bible depicts God in varied ways. How, then, will this book achieve its goal?
The book succeeds by making two assumptions. The first assumption is that God created the universe science describes, which reflects the character of its creator. With this assumption, the universe science describes reveals God. However, science does not tell us everything, for science merely describes the material world. It says little about humanity. To describe the relationship between God and humanity, the book makes a second assumption.

The second assumption is that founders of religions—and outstanding religious figures in general—are close to God and can tell us about the deity. This book uses Jesus as exemplar. He is the originator of one religion and considered a prophet in two others. Moreover, Jesus is well studied. I mean the historical Jesus, the person known from historical evidence and rational argument, not the Christ of faith and theological speculation.
Although this book begins with the assumption that God created the universe science describes, I soon found the concept of creator inadequate. Or, at least, I found my concept inadequate. When I think of a creator, I think of the God portrayed in Genesis 1 who stands outside creation, and whose word brings creation about, or the God depicted in Genesis 2 who molds Adam from clay, or creative persons in general, who stand apart from their creations and control them. All these creators achieve their goals only when they complete their creations.

However, the universe science describes is incomplete. According to science, it will continue to develop for billions of years. Moreover, probably God creates continuously, for our universe itself is creative, producing novel objects and structures as it develops. Furthermore, it is apparently created from within in a way that excludes external control. I decided the word that best captures these aspects of our universe is generative, a mobile adjective rather than a motionless noun, stemming from the Latin genus. Genus has to do with descent and birth, family and tribe, but also order and relation. In the universe science describes, there is much order and relation, but also descent and relatedness, insofar as things transform into other things over time—electrons, protons, and neutrons form atoms, atoms coalesce into stars, light elements fuse into heavy ones, and the elements create simple organisms, which unite into complex organisms that evolve into us.

Then, when I examined Jesus’ concept of God, I decided his God is best characterized as generous, a word having the same Latin derivation as generative. Jesus sees God as parental and us as God’s children, referring to descent and birth, family and tribe.

Therefore, the book has four parts. Part I, Yesterday’s God, discusses concepts we can no longer believe because science has clearly refuted them.
Part 2 begins the characterization of God for the twenty-first century with God as Generative: A Scientific Perspective. It discusses the metaphors we have used for matter, how mysterious matter is in contemporary science, the development of our universe, and the evolution of life. It ends by deriving concepts of God from this standard scientific information about the material universe

Part 3 is God as Generous: Jesus’ Perspective. It discusses the search for the historical Jesus, the evidence, and what the scholars say, then traces what Jesus says about God, primarily using the parables, for scholars are certain most of them go back to Jesus in some form.
The final part, Revealing God, integrates the God science discloses with the one Jesus reveals. To my own surprise, the integration works: the book reveals one God, not two. The concluding chapter argues that we have evolved sufficiently in the divine image to live in God’s realm, here and now, as Jesus taught. Interestingly, this very contemporary work aligns with some of the earliest themes in Christianity concerning God and our relationship to God.

by Patricia A. Williams