Meet Christopher Skinner in Faith and Conversation

Christopher W. Skinner

Crux Sola: An Interview with Christopher W. Skinner

http://nblo.gs/12ded2

by Allan R. Bevere

December 22, 2014

Today's interview is with Christopher Skinner, who is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Mount Olive in North Carolina. I got to know Christopher when we became contributors to a recent book published by InterVarsity Press, Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies. Chris blogs at Crux Sola (along with Nijay Gupta). I have found him to be a careful scholar and a person of deep and questioning Christian faith. If you have not read anything he has written, you need to do so.

Let the interview begin.

---

ARB: Tell us a little about yourself.

CWS: Well, that's a little open-ended! I guess I'll start with the most important things first. I have been married to my wife, Tara, since 1997 and our lives together revolve around caring for our three children, Christopher (14), Abby (12), and Drew (9). The four of them are the very best things in my life.

When I am not with my family, I serve as Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Mount Olive in North Carolina, where I have taught since 2010. I have a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (2007), where I was privileged to spend significant time with a "who's who" of NT scholars, including Francis J. Moloney, Frank Matera, Joseph Fitzmyer, and Raymond Collins. 

I'm also a huge fan of the NFL franchise based in Washington, D.C., as well as the Baltimore Orioles…..which essentially means that I have been disappointed every football and baseball season for the better part of two decades.

ARB: What has been your faith journey, thus far? What are your core beliefs as a Christian?

CWS: I have talked about this a bit elsewhere. I was raised in a church culture that was quite conservative. That conservatism included how literally we interpreted the Bible and extended to social and political conservatism as well. While that foundation served me well in some respects throughout my youth and early adulthood, I ultimately found it to be far too restrictive in too many ways.

However, in that context I began to recognize something of a "calling" when I was about 14 years old, though I refused to acknowledge it until I was about 19. I guess you can say that I began to pursue that calling in my early 20s though it looks much different today than it did back then and certainly much different than I expected it to look when I first began the journey.

As far as my "core beliefs" go, I would say that I confess the Apostles' Creed (which we actually recite weekly at my church), even if there are some things in the creed that give me pause. I guess my core beliefs are somewhat Barthian in that I believe Jesus Christ must be the focus of a uniquely Christian faith.

ARB: How have you progressed as a scholar? What did you believe that you no longer can?

CWS: I would say that my progression as a scholar has been steadily incremental during this first full decade of my teaching career. Of course, the most dramatic growth took place during my doctoral program. Compared to most of my colleagues and friends, I had a fairly atypical experience. While many are able to devote themselves solely to a course of study during their doctoral program, I did not have that opportunity. I was married with children and serving on the full-time pastoral staff at a church in Baltimore while working on my Ph.D. at Catholic University. Though this schedule was demanding and created tremendous work (and stress) for me, it was an ideal situation in many ways.

The rigorous emphasis on developing competency in Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, Syriac, etc.-- which was a real hallmark of the program at CUA-- along with a focus on staying close to the text, helped me develop in more ways than I could have ever imagined. When you are that close to a text, its original language(s), and all the trappings of its interrelated cultures, previously "clear" theological formulations and doctrinal commitments can easily become very messy. 

This caused problems for my faith but also opened up other vistas that I never imagined. On the other hand, there was a real sense of urgency in my mind each week, to consider in fresh ways the significance of these texts for the community of faith I was serving. All of this made me much more sensitive to both ancient and modern contexts.

My progression as a scholar continues but it's not as dramatic. It helps to explain it like this: when you see your children every day, you don't get a true impression of how much they're actually growing. But when you look back at pictures from the previous year, you get a real sense of their growth and how dramatic it actually is. Every so often I'll read something I wrote a few years before or listen to something I previously taught or preached, and only then do I get a feel for how I've progressed. 

If I'm being completely honest with you, there are many things that I no longer believe, though I'm not sure it would be helpful to list all of them here. Perhaps it will be helpful for me to express it this way: There have been times when certain biblical texts spoke to me and edified me in clear and substantive ways-- ways that essentially determined major trajectories in my life. Today, those texts do not (and in most cases, cannot) speak to me with that same voice from the past. There's an inevitable sense of mourning and even disillusionment associated with that reality, though I am also driven to discover the new voices and different ways through which the text can speak. These days I find that I don't have a lot of answers, just a lot more questions. 

As I get older, my parents have gotten much smarter(!), and my mother has actually been immensely helpful as I wrestle with these issues. She's a very keen thinker with a great sensitivity toward the fragility of the human experience. I often bounce these things off of her to see if she has arrived at any more clarity than I have. Even if I don't arrive at answers, I find edification in the very conversation.

ARB: What have you written and published. What are you looking to write in the future?

CWS: My specific interests lie in the areas of Jesus and the gospel traditions. I have written or edited six books, all but one of which are devoted to issues in the interpretation of the gospels. I have just finished a manuscript for an introductory level textbook entitled, Reading John, which is set to be published in the Cascade Companions series early next year:

http://wipfandstock.com/catalogsearch/result/index/q=cascade+companions&t_imprint=13441. 

I am currently working on two projects, both of which are under contract. The first is a book I'm co-authoring with my blog mate, Nijay Gupta entitled, Across the Spectrum of New Testament Studies (Baker, 2017). That book aims to present an accessible and balanced introduction to the "spectrum" of viewpoints on key issues in New Testament studies. For each subject, between two and five positions are outlined, addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each stance.

The second project is an edited volume entitled, Johannine Ethics: The Moral World of the Gospel and Epistles of John (Fortress, 2017). Once these two projects are completed, I hope to write a few things for a wider audience than just students and scholars in the field of New Testament studies. I would like to address bigger questions for a much broader readership.

ARB: Too many persons, unfortunately think faith and scholarship are mutually exclusive. How do you bring the two together?

CWS: I don't think there's any formula for living in the midst of the tension that is created by the messy conclusions of biblical scholarship juxtaposed with the sometimes "tidy" world of faith commitments. I will admit that it is not easy for me. I often find sermons intellectually dishonest and condescending, which can make the tension even more unbearable. I have told my wife over and over that so often I feel like the father in Mark 9 who exclaims, "I believe. Help my unbelief."

I also think it is important to strive for intellectual honesty at every turn and admit when a belief either no longer makes sense or is no longer useful in light of what we are learning about the Bible and the world around us. In my thinking about theology I rely a lot upon the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. What I believe has to make sense in the contexts of reason, Scripture, tradition, and experience.

ARB: As a scholar and a churchman, what would you like to say to the church in general?

CWS: I would love for churches to stop baptizing their political ideologies in the name of Christianity and mining the pages of the Bible for proof texts that will support their political views and affiliations. Recently a study was released that found that an overwhelming majority of Christians in the United States were not opposed to torture. This leads me to wonder, does Christianity conceive of Jesus as the Prince of Peace or the Purveyor of Preemptive Justice? There's a lot more I could say here, but let’s fix one thing at a time.

ARB: If you could attend your ideal church, how would it look?

CWS: I have always found this to be such a difficult question. If we are to believe the accounts we read in the NT, Jesus was a very counter-cultural, non-institutional figure. So a major problem with ecclesiastical expressions of Christianity is that they build entire institutions with their own intentionally normative culture(s).

Ideally, I would love to be a part of an inclusive community that takes Jesus seriously. Too often in western churches the things we should take literally (like turning the other cheek, praying for our enemies) are spiritualized while things like "being forgiven so that we can go to heaven" (never explicitly mentioned in the NT) are literalized to the point of becoming the only basis of faith.

Also, I grew up in a Baptist church and there was always lots of food, so I guess an ideal church would also have an abundant supply of fresh, flaky biscuits. :-)

ARB: Thanks Chris for your time. If you would like to interact with Dr. Skinner, please visit his blog, Sola Crux.

Questions of Time: Is the Source to Time's Aarow based on Entropy or Gravitation?

2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2-futures-can-explain-time-s-mysterious-past/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

by Lee Billings

December 8, 2014

New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning,

and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe

In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past.

Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Physicists have a problem with time.

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” as the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington first called it in 1927, has been that it is an emergent property of thermodynamics, as first laid out in the work of the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In this view what we perceive as the arrow of time is really just the inexorable rearrangement of highly ordered states into random, useless configurations, a product of the universal tendency for all things to settle toward equilibrium with one another.

Informally speaking, the crux of this idea is that “things fall apart,” but more formally, it is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which Boltzmann helped devise. The law states that in any closed system (like the universe itself), entropy—disorder—can only increase. Increasing entropy is a cosmic certainty because there are always a great many more disordered states than orderly ones for any given system, similar to how there are many more ways to scatter papers across a desk than to stack them neatly in a single pile.

The thermodynamic arrow of time suggests our observable universe began in an exceptionally special state of high order and low entropy, like a pristine cosmic egg materializing at the beginning of time to be broken and scrambled for all eternity. From Boltzmann’s era onward, scientists allergic to the notion of such an immaculate conception have been grappling with this conundrum.

Boltzmann, believing the universe to be eternal in accordance with Newton’s laws, thought that eternity could explain a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow. Given enough time—endless time, in fact—anything that can happen will happen, including the emergence of a large region of very low entropy as a statistical fluctuation from an ageless, high-entropy universe in a state of near-equilibrium. Boltzmann mused that we might live in such an improbable region, with an arrow of time set by the region’s long, slow entropic slide back into equilibrium.

Today’s cosmologists have a tougher task, because the universe as we now know it isn’t ageless and unmoving: They have to explain the emergence of time’s arrow within a dynamic, relativistic universe that apparently began some 14 billion years ago in the fiery conflagration of the big bang. More often than not the explanation involves ‘fine-tuning’—the careful and arbitrary tweaking of a theory’s parameters to accord with observations.

Many of the modern explanations for a low-entropy arrow of time involve a theory called inflation—the idea that a strange burst of antigravity ballooned the primordial universe to an astronomically larger size, smoothing it out into what corresponds to a very low-entropy state from which subsequent cosmic structures could emerge. But explaining inflation itself seems to require even more fine-tuning. One of the problems is that once begun, inflation tends to continue unstoppably. This “eternal inflation” would spawn infinitudes of baby universes about which predictions and observations are, at best, elusive. Whether this is an undesirable bug or a wonderful feature of the theory is a matter of fierce debate; for the time being it seems that inflation’s extreme flexibility and explanatory power are both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

For all these reasons, some scientists seeking a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow find explanations relying on inflation slightly unsatisfying. “There are many researchers now trying to show in some natural way why it’s reasonable to expect the initial entropy of the universe to be very low,” says David Albert, a philosopher and physicist at Columbia University. “There are even some who think that the entropy being low at the beginning of the universe should just be added as a new law of physics.”

That latter idea is tantamount to despairing cosmologists simply throwing in the towel. Fortunately, there may be another way.

Tentative new work from Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick and Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn’t really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time’s arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.

The team’s conclusions come from studying an exceedingly simple proxy for our universe, a computer simulation of 1,000 pointlike particles interacting under the influence of Newtonian gravity. They investigated the dynamic behavior of the system using a measure of its "complexity," which corresponds to the ratio of the distance between the system’s closest pair of particles and the distance between the most widely separated particle pair. The system’s complexity is at its lowest when all the particles come together in a densely packed cloud, a state of minimum size and maximum uniformity roughly analogous to the big bang. The team’s analysis showed that essentially every configuration of particles, regardless of their number and scale, would evolve into this low-complexity state. Thus, the sheer force of gravity sets the stage for the system’s expansion and the origin of time’s arrow, all without any delicate fine-tuning to first establish a low-entropy initial condition.

From that low-complexity state, the system of particles then expands outward in both temporal directions, creating two distinct, symmetric and opposite arrows of time. Along each of the two temporal paths, gravity then pulls the particles into larger, more ordered and complex structures—the model’s equivalent of galaxy clusters, stars and planetary systems. From there, the standard thermodynamic passage of time can manifest and unfold on each of the two divergent paths. In other words, the model has one past but two futures. As hinted by the time-indifferent laws of physics, time’s arrow may in a sense move in two directions, although any observer can only see and experience one. “It is the nature of gravity to pull the universe out of its primordial chaos and create structure, order and complexity,” Mercati says. “All the solutions break into two epochs, which go on forever in the two time directions, divided by this central state which has very characteristic properties.”

Although the model is crude, and does not incorporate either quantum mechanics or general relativity, its potential implications are vast. If it holds true for our actual universe, then the big bang could no longer be considered a cosmic beginning but rather only a phase in an effectively timeless and eternal universe. More prosaically, a two-branched arrow of time would lead to curious incongruities for observers on opposite sides. “This two-futures situation would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning that there would be essentially two universes, one on either side of this central state,” Barbour says. “If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.”

What’s more, Barbour says, if gravitation does prove to be fundamental to the arrow of time, this could sooner or later generate testable predictions and potentially lead to a less “ad hoc” explanation than inflation for the history and structure of our observable universe.

This is not the first rigorous two-futures solution for time’s arrow. Most notably, California Institute of Technology cosmologist Sean Carroll and a graduate student, Jennifer Chen, produced their own branching model in 2004, one that sought to explain the low-entropy origin of time’s arrow in the context of cosmic inflation and the creation of baby universes. They attribute the arrow of time’s emergence in their model not so much to entropy being very low in the past but rather to entropy being so much higher in both futures, increased by the inflation-driven creation of baby universes.

A decade on, Carroll is just as bullish about the prospect that increasing entropy alone is the source for time’s arrow, rather than other influences such as gravity. “Everything that happens in the universe to distinguish the past from the future is ultimately because the entropy is lower in one direction and higher in the other,” Carroll says. “This paper by Barbour, Koslowski and Mercati is good because they roll up their sleeves and do the calculations for their specific model of particles interacting via gravity, but I don’t think it’s the model that is interesting—it’s the model’s behavior being analyzed carefully…. I think basically any time you have a finite collection of particles in a really big space you’ll get this kind of generic behavior they describe. The real question is, is our universe like that? That’s the hard part.”

Together with Alan Guth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cosmologist who pioneered the theory of inflation, Carroll is now working on a thermodynamic response of sorts to the new claims for a gravitational arrow of time: Another exceedingly simple particle-based model universe that also naturally gives rise to time’s arrow, but without the addition of gravity or any other forces. The thermodynamic secret to the model’s success, they say, is assuming that the universe has an unlimited capacity for entropy.

“If we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy,” Guth says. “That may sound dumb, but I think it really works, and I also think it’s the secret of the Barbour et al construction. If there’s no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point you’d expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space. Eternal inflation is a natural context in which to invoke this idea, since it looks like the maximum possible entropy is unlimited in an eternally inflating universe.”

The controversy over time’s arrow has come far since the 19th-century ideas of Boltzmann and the 20th-century notions of Eddington, but in many ways, Barbour says, the debate at its core remains appropriately timeless. “This is opening up a completely new way to think about a fundamental problem, the nature of the arrow of time and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics,” Barbour says. “But really we’re just investigating a new aspect of Newton’s gravitation, which hadn’t been noticed before. Who knows what might flow from this with further work and elaboration?”

“Arthur Eddington coined the term ‘arrow of time,’ and famously said the shuffling of material and energy is the only thing which nature cannot undo,” Barbour adds. “And here we are, showing beyond any doubt really that this is in fact exactly what gravity does. It takes [entropic] systems that look extraordinarily disordered and makes them wonderfully ordered. And this is what has happened in our universe. We are realizing the ancient Greek dream of order out of chaos.”

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continue to -

Index to past articles on "Particle Physics, Quantum Science, and the Universe"

Additional References

Aarow of Time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

Inflation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

The Big Crunch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

Dark Energy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

Time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time

* * * * * * * * * * *

FROM THE BLOG OF SEAN CARROLL

Why Does Dark Energy

Make the Universe Accelerate?

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/11/16/why-does-dark-energy-make-the-universe-accelerate/

by Sean Carroll

November 16, 2013

Peter Coles has issued a challenge: explain why dark energy makes the universe accelerate in terms that are understandable to non-scientists. This is a pet peeve of mine — any number of fellow cosmologists will recall me haranguing them about it over coffee at conferences — but I’m not sure I’ve ever blogged about it directly, so here goes. In three parts: the wrong way, the right way, and the math.

The Wrong Way

Ordinary matter acts to slow down the expansion of the universe. That makes intuitive sense, because the matter is exerting a gravitational force, acting to pull things together. So why does dark energy seem to push things apart?

The usual (wrong) way to explain this is to point out that dark energy has “negative pressure.” The kind of pressure we are most familiar with, in a balloon or an inflated tire, pushing out on the membrane enclosing it. But negative pressure — tension — is more like a stretched string or rubber band, pulling in rather than pushing out. And dark energy has negative pressure, so that makes the universe accelerate.

If the kindly cosmologist is both lazy and fortunate, that little bit of word salad will suffice. But it makes no sense at all, as Peter points out. Why do we go through all the conceptual effort of explaining that negative pressure corresponds to a pull, and then quickly mumble that this accounts for why galaxies are pushed apart?

So the slightly more careful cosmologist has to explain that the direct action of this negative pressure is completely impotent, because it’s equal in all directions and cancels out. (That’s a bit of a lie as well, of course; it’s really because you don’t interact directly with the dark energy, so you don’t feel pressure of any sort, but admitting that runs the risk of making it all seem even more confusing.) What matters, according to this line of fast talk, is the gravitational effect of the negative pressure. And in Einstein’s general relativity, unlike Newtonian gravity, both the pressure and the energy contribute to the force of gravity. The negative pressure associated with dark energy is so large that it overcomes the positive (attractive) impulse of the energy itself, so the net effect is a push rather than a pull.

This explanation isn’t wrong; it does track the actual equations. But it’s not the slightest bit of help in bringing people to any real understanding. It simply replaces one question (why does dark energy cause acceleration?) with two facts that need to be taken on faith (dark energy has negative pressure, and gravity is sourced by a sum of energy and pressure). The listener goes away with, at best, the impression that something profound has just happened rather than any actual understanding.

The Right Way

The right way is to not mention pressure at all, positive or negative. For cosmological dynamics, the relevant fact about dark energy isn’t its pressure, it’s that it’s persistent. It doesn’t dilute away as the universe expands. And this is even a fact that can be explained, by saying that dark energy isn’t a collection of particles growing less dense as space expands, but instead is (according to our simplest and best models) a feature of space itself. The amount of dark energy is constant throughout both space and time: about one hundred-millionth of an erg per cubic centimeter. It doesn’t dilute away, even as space expands.

Given that, all you need to accept is that Einstein’s formulation of gravity says “the curvature of spacetime is proportional to the amount of stuff within it.” (The technical version of “curvature of spacetime” is the Einstein tensor, and the technical version of “stuff” is the energy-momentum tensor.) In the case of an expanding universe, the manifestation of spacetime curvature is simply the fact that space is expanding. (There can also be spatial curvature, but that seems negligible in the real world, so why complicate things.)

So: the density of dark energy is constant, which means the curvature of spacetime is constant, which means that the universe expands at a fixed rate.

The tricky part is explaining why “expanding at a fixed rate” means “accelerating.” But this is a subtlety worth clarifying, as it helps distinguish between the expansion of the universe and the speed of a physical object like a moving car, and perhaps will help someone down the road not get confused about the universe “expanding faster than light.” (A confusion which many trained cosmologists who really should know better continue to fall into.)

The point is that the expansion rate of the universe is not a speed. It’s a timescale — the time it takes the universe to double in size (or expand by one percent, or whatever, depending on your conventions). It couldn’t possibly be a speed, because the apparent velocity of distant galaxies is not a constant number, it’s proportional to their distance. When we say “the expansion rate of the universe is a constant,” we mean it takes a fixed amount of time for the universe to double in size. So if we look at any one particular galaxy, in roughly ten billion years it will be twice as far away; in twenty billion years (twice that time) it will be four times as far away; in thirty billion years it will be eight times that far away, and so on. It’s accelerating away from us, exponentially. “Constant expansion rate” implies “accelerated motion away from us” for individual objects.

There’s absolutely no reason why a non-scientist shouldn’t be able to follow why dark energy makes the universe accelerate, given just a bit of willingness to think about it. Dark energy is persistent, which imparts a constant impulse to the expansion of the universe, which makes galaxies accelerate away. No negative pressures, no double-talk.

The Math

So why are people tempted to talk about negative pressure? As Peter says, there is an equation for the second derivative (roughly, the acceleration) of the universe, which looks like this:

(I use a for the scale factor rather than R, and sensibly set c=1.) Here, ρ is the energy density and p is the pressure. To get acceleration, you want the second derivative to be positive, and there’s a minus sign outside the right-hand side, so we want (ρ + 3p) to be negative. The data say the dark energy density is positive, so a negative pressure is just the trick.

But, while that’s a perfectly good equation — the “second Friedmann equation” — it’s not the one anyone actually uses to solve for the evolution of the universe. It’s much nicer to use the first Friedmann equation, which involves the first derivative of the scale factor rather than its second derivative (spatial curvature set to zero for convenience):

Here H is the Hubble parameter, which is what we mean when we say “the expansion rate.” You notice a couple of nice things about this equation. First, the pressure doesn’t appear. The expansion rate is simply driven by the energy density ρ. It’s completely consistent with the first equation, as they are related to each other by an equation that encodes energy-momentum conservation, and the pressure does make an appearance there. Second, a constant energy density straightforwardly implies a constant expansion rate H. So no problem at all: a persistent source of energy causes the universe to accelerate.

Banning “negative pressure” from popular expositions of cosmology would be a great step forward. It’s a legitimate scientific concept, but is more often employed to give the illusion of understanding rather than any actual insight.

Exploring Evolution Series - What Is the Driving Force Behind Evolutionary Life? Perhaps "Adaptive (Replicating) Organization" Driven by "Energy Dissipation" (the Second Law of Thermodynamics)

Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazin | Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT,
thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life.

This Physicist Has A Groundbreaking Idea About Why Life Exists

http://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12

NATALIE WOLCHOVER, QUANTA MAGAZINE

DEC. 8, 2014, 4:48 PM

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck.

But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. 

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

Kristian Peters | Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible
chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by capturing sunlight.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

Courtesy of Jeremy England | A computer simulation by Jeremy England
and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid
in  which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over
time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds
among the particles.

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.

Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example.

As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Courtesy of Michael Brenner | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Self-Replicating Sphere Clusters: According to new research at Harvard, coating

the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously assemble into a

chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which then triggers nearby

spheres  into forming an identical structure.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time.

As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating.

He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

Wilson Bentley | If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as
responsible for the origin of  living things could explain the formation of
many  other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and
self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples
of  dissipation-driven adaptation.

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. 

He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates.

“One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”

Emily Singer contributed reporting.

Rob & Kristen Bell - The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage

Lord of the Harvest

Chasing Cars : Snow Patrol - Movie Montage

In "making room for the other" we remove ourselves
from "the other's room" until it may more gently be
filled with the other's space that we had once occupied.
And then, by mutal admission, are allowed back into
the rooms of our loved one in mutual occupation of
love and respect. This is the tzim-tzum of divine love.

                                               - r.e. slater

It is with admission that the postmodern church of the 21st century has entered into the era of post-Christianity and by this admission Relevancy22 was birthed to serve as a reference site for post-modern, post-Christian, theological spaces. As such, this site will look at contemporary issues and doctrinal topics from this perspective rather than the older, more traditional perspective that this author and others have been stamped heart-and-soul with over the many long years of faithfulness and service to Fundamental and conservative Evangelical churches. As such, we speak sympathetically but knowingly and strongly.

The growing chasm between the church then and now is as wide-and-deep as the novice reader would suppose. Nor was it with any degree of speed - or without deep anguish of heart and soul - that its gaping maw was crossed over in an attempt to update, upgrade, and essentially reboot, an old-timey Christianity whose 500 year-old bones must be reverently, but finally, laid to rest. RIP, old friend. Be at peace.

And with this assessment, along with the strong, supernatural sense of the burden of the Holy Spirit, Relevancy22 was born to speak to this new era of post-modern, post-Christianity. Not by "throwing out the baby with the bath water," as the saying goes, but by dissecting it piece-by-piece in a more contemporary doctrinal arrangement that would allow life-and-breath back into the dying corpse of Christianity that has been rotting away for too long under dogmas of judgment, exclusion, isolation, discrimination, a general malaise of dithering, self-righteousness, and the fiction of a powerful religious folklore long since determinative of its own future than of any act of the Holy Spirit excluded by its bona fide resources of sanctity and sanctimoniousness.

Harsh words? Yes. But spoken with a deep care and love for God's church and its many good people needing truer, more literate shepherds in the pulpits of the Lord. Asked a different way, "How would the prophets of yore have come to the people of God do you suppose?" With a meek word and groveling posture? By weakly speaking "By your leave" and "Might I say?" to the congregants within the Lord's temple? No, I think not.

The prophets of old, like the Jesus of the Gospels, came with a mighty voice, a strong spirit, and a "Thus saith the Word of the Lord" against all obstacles, naysayers, enemies, and determined foes. They did not back down when speaking judgment measured from an all-gracious God whose heart was broken before a hard-headed, hard-hearted people wishing only to grasp their idols, listen to their false prophets, and pretend that everything is the same as it ever was. Would we expect anything less today of God who is alive and well and inhabiting planet Earth? No, not really.

Introduction to "Tzimtum"

[cf. Wikipedia for further discussion]

And so, to my voice and the voices of those who are quoted in the length and breadth of this website comes another old and familiar voice. That of Rob Bell and now his wife, Kristen, whom I-and-my-wife know as past friends and servants to the Spirit of the Lord from Mars Hill. In their newest book they speak together as one voice to a non-Christian generation of disspirited, disillusioned, perhaps agnostic or atheistic generations of disbelievers about the Lord to the ready sacrament of marriage without using the long, pontificating words of the church overfilled with dogmatic (as versus good, healthy doctrinal) import that is all too familiar to our dulled ears. (By the way, I said familiar biblical doctrines, but perhaps not understood nor connected in any wholistic way as we commonly think of them within the church. Accordingly, this blogsite has made a feast of such attitudes I'm sorry to say).

It is a good book, a solid book, but quirky and filled with the expected Robbisms of new speech and new ideas that will challenge the more conservative student of Scriptures. For myself, I have learned a long time ago to remember to bear Jesus' cross... not Rob's. That I'm not placed here on this earth to bear Rob's cross except as a brother in the Lord who is being used in other ways than the more typical church models of service and servanthood. Nay, my cross, as should be all of our crosses, is that of the Lord's alone. If we do this than we speak with God's voice and not that of another.

Hence, let us start by saying that the title of the Bell's book is not "zim-zum" but, in the Hebraic language, "SIM-sum". If you check the language dictionary you'll see that the initial "z" of zimzum is a transliteration from the Hebrew into English. But in Hebrew that "z" is actually a "ts" like "sit, zit, zilch, and zumba".

It also consists of two syllables - a "zit" and a "zum" where the first takes on the harder strike of the tongue and the latter a softer pronunciation almost as an afterthought. Thus, we would say "TSIT" really hard and "tsum" really soft as if you are expelling your breath.

Lastly, "zimzum" is spelled in Hebrew as "tzim-tzum". So, put it all together, and it sounds like "TSIM-tsum". Cool, eh?

But what does it mean? It essentially means "creating an empty space for a new thing to form." As held within the ancient sects of Jewish mysticism this took on its own meaning pertinent to that sect or cult's idea of God. And, as you would realize, most cults (and some sects) fixate upon some "new" spiritual meaning that has come to their group to spin it off in a trajectory more towards their own envisioning words and ideologies than perhaps the Lord's. Essentially then, trading one religious dogma for another, more human, dogma. But we do this all the time, which again is why the church has its theologians to question and reflect even as colleges and universities have their own professors doing the same. Each attempting to keep to the foundations of a churchly or scholarly idea without losing sight of the overall import to the societal structure at large.

For instance, in science, a theory is a theory until it becomes qualified as a "natural law". Similarly, a spiritual insight or theological teaching doesn't automatically become part of the church's doctrinal foundation without becoming qualified by the worshipping community as a whole. Basic liturgy within Christianity understands what a denomination is apart from a sect or a cult. Moving left to right a Christian fellowship may slowly, by degrees, part from its origination point until it has become something other than what it once was. Jewish mysticism, like Christian mysticism, is no different.

And so, "TSIM-tsum" became a non-traditional Jewish teaching that led to other things. It dealt with paradoxes and philosophies and religion in a mixed bag of ideas seeking to sort itself out along lines of mystical thought about God, self, and life itself. Where Christian teaching differs from mysticism is that its mystical center is God Himself who is both mystery and revelation to His people. But, it is important, that the God of the Bible has e-x-p-l-a-i-n-e-d Himself through the words of His prophets, the personal stories of His servants and non-servants alike, and even within the events of history itself. God doesn't maintain His silence or remove His words from us but makes every effort that we should know Him as He wishes to be known. He is no mystery! And so, Christianity is not a mystery religion whose center is hidden in secrecy and darkness. No, this God has revealed Himself. And ultimately through Jesus Christ as the second person of the triune Godhead become incarnated as a man to this good earth whacked by sin and ruin.

A New Christmas Message - One of Peace and Solidarity with the World

So then, God does not wish to be a secret even though any Christian man or woman will be the first to tell you that in the knowing of God through His Word He is still beyond our imaginings and is mysterious to us in many ways ontologically and metaphysically. However, that mystery become incarnated flesh in the person-and-work of Jesus who is the very Word of God Himself. Not simply a prophet, a priest, a judge, or a man, but more than these.

Yes, Jesus was the spoken, revealed Word of God. Who became the Offerer as well as the Offering as the Most High Priest/Mediator and Lamb of God. Who became for us the suffering Servant of Isaiah whom we know as Emmanuel, God with us, in the Gospels. And yet, through it all, He became the incarnated God who lived amongst us even as He was the r-e-v-e-l-a-t-i-o-n of God to us through His earthly life, words, and actions so we might better see and understand this God of the bible we would worship and seek to understand.

As such, Christianity is mystical in its essence, but must also be regarded as a revealed religion - which is why Christianity is not simply a mystery religion just as ancient Judaism was not a mystery religion in the Old Testament. And yet, within both eras of the Old and New Testament religious mystical groups would arise to add (or subtract) from biblical doctrine according to their philosophies, preferences, and ideologies. But it is important to know that the God of creation has taken pains (both figuratively and literally) to reveal His heart, mind, plans, and purposes, to us in innumerable ways of examples and ancient stories. And now it behooves us to become better listeners than we thought we were to this very same God of redemption and recreation, renewal and life, in this post-Christian age that we now live.

Thus today's straight-forward, measured words to the traditional church of the 21st century resisting God's newer words which are actually older words neither secret nor mysterious to its life and practice. Words that are being spoken through non-typical orifices of prophets and publicans alike as God's revealed words to a contemporary postmodern, post-Christian generation. A pagan context demanding we think differently - and in newer ways - while remembering that once Christianity's more ancient spiritual center is found so too will be found the lively God of Scripture in a more profound, more passionate, more forceful way, than we thought possible or could believe.

Perhaps what we are living through is the Age of Kingdom as it breaks into man's more parochial churchly structures to experience its tension between the Gospel of Jesus to the words of man. Even so we know this to be true ever since our Lord and Savior came so many years ago. That even as the Church Age replaced Israel's Kingdom Age so now is God's heavenly Kingdom breaking into this very Church Age we live within. Creating with it a reversal of structures, an upside-down character of weak and strong, a salt-and-light yeasty thing, intermixing ancient thoughts with newer thoughts, until the tensors of God's Kingdom at the last replaces the very Church itself before the advent of Christ who has come to disrupt and displace man's kingdoms both lost and found. This is the kind of thing only the God of universe who has come to us can do. Not a thing that is created by us with feeble hands. But by His holy designs of love and peace upon a sin-torn world of injustice, war, greed, and pride. This is the kind of God who has come to disrupt our very lives within its torn fabrics of conscience and misery, hurts and harms, desperate plights and ingracious lives, built upon the sacrileges of self-righteousness, legalism, and prideful living.

And thus and thus the Kingdom of God has become acutely problematic for us, the church of God, as we listen to God's newer, disruptive words to our hearts as we try to comprehend them without killing the messengers of God whom He has sent to speak to us between the tensions of this age and the age to come. In reality, for many of God's prophets it ended badly as God's people slew them and then went about their hard-bitten lives oblivious to God until final judgment came upon them as a thief in the night within the tent folds of their ancient societies. Let us not do the same. But let us be wiser servants of the Lord, united in cause and in spirit, to the glistening Words of the Lord not unlike the 10 virgins of the Lord come to seek Him with lit candle-lamps in the black darks of a benighted , bewildered world. Amen.

R.E. Slater

December 22, 2014
updated December 29, 2014

* * * * * * * * * * *

Amazon Link

Book Contents

As he revolutionized traditional teaching on hell in the phenomenal New York Times bestseller Love Wins, Rob Bell now transforms how we understand and practice marriage in The Zimzum of Love, co-written with his wife, Kristen.

Despite the divorce statistics, people are still committing to each other, instinctively believing and hoping that theirs is a sacred union that will last forever. Yet when these couples encounter problems, they often lack the resources that keep them connected to this greater mystery surrounding marriage.

Rob and Kristen Bell introduce a startling new way of looking at marriage, The Zimzum of Love. Zimzum is a Hebrew term where God, in order to have a relationship with the world, contracts, creating space for the creation to exist. In marriage, zimzum is the dynamic energy field between two partners, in which each person contracts to allow the other to flourish. Mastering this field, this give and take of energy, is the secret to what makes marriage flourish.

Rob and Kristen Bell are brutally honest about their own struggles, their ups and downs, as together they pass along what matters most for couples. In this wise book, they explore the secret of what makes a happy union—probing the mystery at the heart of the extraordinary emotional connection that binds two people. With his down-to-earth charm, a dose of whimsy, and memorable stories, Rob, writing with his wife Kristen, changes how we consider marriage, providing insight that can help all of us create satisfying and sacred unions of our own.

Product Details

Hardcover: 160 pages

Publisher: HarperOne (October 28, 2014)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0062194240

ISBN-13: 978-0062194244

Customer Review

A Helpful Way to Talk about Christian Marriage Outside the Church

by JR. Forasteros

November 1, 2014

You may not have heard, but Rob Bell put out a new book. More specifically, Rob and his wife, Kristen, dropped a book last week called The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage. (Now that Rob has published a marriage book and Mark Driscoll has resigned from his Mars Hill Church, the eerily-similar career trajectory of these two guys continues to get creepier).

The Zimzum of Love is a short, quick read. As with most of Rob’s books, it’s light and playful, while not shying away from deeper waters. It’s good. It’s helpful. Did I mention it’s short? Is it worth your time?

The Zimzum of Love claims to be a new way to understand marriage. Is it?

Yes… and no. Depends on who you’re talking to. When Rob left his church in 2012, he made a conscious decision to step out of pastoring in a church to pastoring outside the Church. His last book - What We Talk About When We Talk About God – reflects that trajectory, and The Zimzum of Love. In other words, Christians looking for a deep book on marriage should probably go check out Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage instead.

Rob and Kristen wrote a book on Christian marriage for non-Christian people.

The Zimzum of Love is a celebration of the sacramental nature of marriage, grounded in Trinitarian life and love of God. You won’t find the word “sacrament” anywhere in the book (and Trinity only once or twice), but that’s the point. This picture of marriage is good news to people who don’t know it, but only if they can understand it.

Rob and Kristen use language that sounds much more at home on the O Network [Oprah's OWN] than in a pulpit. This will doubtless make Evangelicals looking for something to complain about happy; they’ll surely find the confirmation they were seeking that Rob has abandoned Orthodox Christianity in favor of the trendy spirituality-lite. That’s an exceptionally uncharitable reading of the book, and if that’s what you choose, it’s too bad, because you’ll miss the real benefits of the book for both Christians and non-Christians.

The Zimzum of Love should be read more like a latter-day incarnation of Paul’s sermon at Mars Hill.

Rob and Kristen show Christians a new way to talk about marriage. (Well, it’s not actually new… Christians have been talking about marriage as a sacrament for quite a long time. Evangelicals just aren’t very good at it these days.) As did Paul, he begins where people outside the Church are and invites them slowly, inexoribly closer to the center of the life of the Trinity.

Their thesis is that marriage is sacramental. Whether you’re explicitly, intentionally following Jesus or not, marriage can orient you towards God. Marriage can be an opportunity for and means of grace in your life, if you choose to play along. As they say:

"Marriage has the uniquely powerful capacity to transform you both into more loving and generous and courageous and compassionate people."

The Zimzum of Love explores what exactly a sacramental marriage looks like. They begin, of course, with the concept of zimzum. Though they borrow the concept from Jewish mysticism, they steer clear of the rabbit hole, settling for a simple explanation:

"[Rabbis contend] that for something to exist that wasn’t God, God had to contract or withdraw from a certain space so that something else, something other than God, could exist and thrive in that space. And the word they used for this divine contraction is zimzum. God zimzums so that everything we know to be everything can exist and thrive."

Rob and Kristen use the concept of zimzum as a picture of the self-sacrificing love that is the heart of the trinity. They don’t “go there” until nearly the end of the book, but a discerning theological reader should pick up on that right away (again, the brilliance of the book). The rest of the book, then is a movement from zimzum to Trinity, exploring what it looks like to love another person with this sort of self-effacing love, a love that makes intentional space for the Other within the Self.

And if that sounds heady and complicated, don’t worry. The Zimzum of Love is anything but. It’s clear, compelling, accessible and practical.

Rob and Kristen use humor, wit and lots of personal anecdotes to make the book an easy but helpful read. Their vision of marriage is inspiring and exciting. It’s not easy – and they’re open about that. They also offer questions at the end of the book to help a couple walk through the book together.

I do a lot of weddings, for both Christian and non-Christian couples. Ever since I read [Tim] Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage, it’s been my go-to for Christian couples. But as excellent as Keller’s book is, the degree to which it’s steeped in Christian language and theology makes it off-putting for people who aren’t Christians. I’ve found myself using ideas and concepts from the book rather than the book itself.

I plan to offer non-Christian couples The Zimzum of Love. Rob and Kristien articulate many of the same ideas and theological truths, but in ways that are more accessible and relatable for people who aren’t Jesus-followers. Rob and Kristen present Marriage as an invitation into the life of God. As they say near the end of the book:

"In this trinitarian understanding of God, love is the engine of the universe, the life force that surges through all of creation… This love takes us back to that first impulse you had to zimzum for this person you love. When you zimzum, you are aligning yourself with the most foundational creative energies of the universe. You’re experiencing the same love that sustains the world."

The Zimzum of Love is an excellent resource for the Church.

Marriage done well can connect us to the first love of creation.It doesn’t take a Counseling degree to see that the larger culture doesn’t care to hear what the Church has to say about marriage. At the same time, relationships in our culture are a mess. We’re more alone, more isolated, than at any point in our history.

Our culture hasn’t quit listening to the Church because what we have to say is untrue. Christian marriage is still the best hope we have to know and be known as we truly desire. Our message has become irrelevant because we’re not speaking the language of our culture anymore (and because our marriages aren’t particularly compelling all-too-often).

While traditional theological language may be very helpful for those inside the Church (and I mean inside the Church tradition – we have plenty of people in our buildings who are theological outsiders), more and more of our culture is outside the Christian theological tradition. If we want to speak meaningfully to them about love and relationships and sex and all the other things wrapped up in marriage, we must learn to speak their language.

The Zimzum of Love is an excellent starting point for us to learn how to speak meaningfully about marriage with those outside the Church.

One final note – most people who have followed Rob Bell know that shortly after he left Mars Hill, he came out in support of Marriage Equality. Early in the book, he and Kristen make it clear that wasn’t a misquote:

"Marriage – gay and straight – is a gift to the world because the world needs

more – not less – love, fidelity, commitment, devotion, and sacrifice."

Disagreeing with Rob about this point is enough to make many Evangelicals toss the book across the room and quit reading.

I would challenge you to keep reading, no matter what your views on this issue are. Here’s why:

First, that’s literally the only time in the book the issue comes up. Throughout the rest of the book, Rob and Kristen speak about “husbands and wives” - even eschewing the language of “partners”. I spent some time trying to figure out why they chose to do this and couldn’t for the life of me. I would assume a gay couple reading this book might still feel alienated by the rest of the marriage language in the book. And since Rob is always so careful about his words, I am not sure what to make of this.

Second, whether you agree with Rob and Kristen’s view on Marriage Equality or not, their sacramental view of marriage is still spot-on. If you think only straight marriages are sacramental, but Rob and Kristen think gay marriages are too, you can still benefit from the picture of marriage they endorse in the book. That one sentence aside, Marriage Equality doesn’t show up once in the whole book, not even obliquely.

So does The Zimzum of Love offer a new way to think about marriage?

Yes. For non-Christians, it offers a powerful, sacramental view of marriage as an invitation into the deep mystery of God. For Christians, it offers a fresh, meaningful way to talk about distinctively Christian, Trinitarian marriage with those who are outside the Christian theological tradition. Rob and Kristen point us toward incarnational language that invites us all to have healthier, more loving marriages. As they conclude:

"When you are faithful to each other, zimzuming as you act for the well-being of the other,

the space between you becomes a place in the universe that isn’t broken and divided but

one and whole… There is a larger purpose to your marriage… one that shapes each of

 you into better people as it makes the world a better place."

BOTTOM LINE: The Zimzum of Love offers a powerful vision of marriage in language our culture can understand and engage. It’s not written for Christians, but Christians can use it as a guide to engage the larger world.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Rob Bell, Billy Graham, and the Zimzum of Oprah

http://www.newsandpews.com/rob-bell-billy-graham-and-the-zimzum-of-oprah/
DECEMBER 15, 2014

It is that magical time of the year, but I am not feeling it. My holiday feasting seems to be savory servings of irritation, deep fried in frustration, and generously layered with melancholy gravy. Bon appetit.

What’s bothering me? Christians. The church. My brothers and sisters who are supposedly on the same journey with me—called by God to become like Christ—and yet seem to be going in such different directions.

Can I get this off my chest? I am hoping it will help.

Take the reaction from some Christians to Rob Bell’s new book, which he wrote with his wife Kristen, The Zimzum of Love. I try to be like Rob and ignore the criticism, but part of my job is tracking what Christians are talking about. And these critics are proudly shouting out their attacks, thinking it counts as righteousness. Rob found the word zimzum in the Jewish Kabbalah! He toured with Oprah and has a new show on her channel—he’s gone New Age! He hardly quotes the Bible anymore!

One only has to read the book’s introduction to discover that Rob takes the idea of zimzum (God had to withdraw to make space for us, his creation, to thrive) and applies it in a wholly original way, to marriage. So why would the idea’s source in the Kabbalah even count as important, let alone count more than whether it’s true or false, right or wrong? And what is “new age” about the idea that in marriage you contract to make room for your partner to thrive, while they do the same for you? Talking about how well the relational energy flows between a couple only counts as heresy if you worship at the altar of I’m Okay, You’re Okay. News flash: seventies-era psychology and nineteenth-century pietism are not the only paradigms Christians can use for understanding relationships.

There was also a parody in a prestigious Christian publication, Books & Culture, satirizing the back-room machinations of publishers pushing Rob Bell. In the parody the “Shadow Government of Religious Publishing” (presumably, HarperOne) likes religion as a category (because it sells) but hates evangelicals (because we are demonic), and so we love Rob, allegedly, because he sounds Christian but softens or undermines the faith by using words like zimzum and because he likes sacred but not holiness. That’s why Oprah loves him, too.

Get it? I didn’t.

I am all for laughing at myself. Beats crying or whining. But how did the writer, Jason Hood, not notice that his humor only works if readers already see themselves as the pure and righteous good guys, like Hood? People reveal more than they realize in their humor. Look at what words he attacks Rob for not saying: sin, holiness, righteousness, prayer, repentance, submission, Satan, sin, cross, God’s design and plan for the world—“you know, Genesis, male-female complementarity, that sort of thing.”

So why attack someone already deemed outside the tribe? Why is Hood so anxious that he needs to question the faith of anyone who responds positively to Rob? Has anyone else noticed that people who insist on using the language he wants Christians to use are not creating the kinds of Christians anyone wants to be around—especially the younger people fleeing the church? This is pure humor—as in, only for the righteous remnant unstained by the evil world.

When Billy Graham’s ministry started to blossom, he faced a difficult decision. Was God calling him to stick with the categories he inherited from the fundamentalists and evangelicals he emerged from, or should he open new doors as long as he could preach the gospel freely? He chose the latter. He began to invite mainline Protestants and, eventually, even Catholics to participate in his work. Overnight Billy Graham went from hero to enemy number one in many conservatives’ eyes. How could he consort with the enemy? they wondered.

So here’s a different take on Rob Bell. Rob felt called by God to reach people who won’t go to church. He first did this by building a new kind of church, which many people loved. Next he tried reaching them by videos and books, which eventually caused some tension with his church work. So he decided to stay true to his calling, gave up his security, and moved to California to see if he could use television to reach the unchurched. After several experiments, he eventually got the green light to develop a show with Oprah’s OWN Channel (debuting December 21) and to go on a speaking tour with her. Being a gifted communicator and a deep student of God and Scripture, he strategized how he could further God’s kingdom by framing his message in ways that do not put off readers and listeners and yet connect people with God/life/soul through the way of death and resurrection (a theme in all his books).

And when he is in front of an audience, he connects. People respond to his spirit and his message. Even Oprah.

So is befriending Oprah a sign of compromise or of success? Just remember that, despite the fantasies held by Books & Culture’s humorists, you don’t get your own television show or tour with Oprah simply because you compromise your Christian faith. Sorry. Not that easy. Something more is needed, something exceptional, something rare, something that may even be worth celebrating.

So why all the animosity for Rob who, otherwise, might seem to be an evangelical success story? Here’s a line Hood puts in the mouth of one of the demonic publishers for why they like Rob: “He kinda looks evangelical, but he’s cool with gay marriage.”

Really? A “sin” that costs suburban white heterosexuals nothing to condemn is the measure of whether one is right with God? Convenient.

And that is why I am looking forward to Christmas. We desperately need Jesus to come back to his church. O come, O come, Emmanuel.

Michael G. Maudlin

Senior Vice President and Executive Editor

Is God's love limited to the heterosexual? No. There
are legitimate homosexual bonds out there too...what
the church is calling "gay marriages". And so, let us
not neglect those couples who may as well enact the
tzim-tzum of God's love within their marriage bonds.

                                                                 - r.e. slater


Luce & Rachel // Feels Like I'm in Love // Imagine Me & You