A Gospel of Peace and Solidarity. Of Activism and Nonviolence.

What Do These Activists All Have In Common?

Rene Girard, Rob Bell, James Wellman, & James Alison?

Today I would like to create a brief, imperfect, sketch of several men and their movements which may be reflective of our postmodern times. Ahead of this let me express my apologies for the length of this post. One that might require a revisit or two in order to read through its entirety. However, postmodernism has brought to contemporary Christianity disturbing questions about our moral acts and actions, sociological ideas, and civic involvements. And to this have come many respondents - like the ones we'll review today. Who wish to reform humanity's global societies towards the more proper behaviors of tolerance and respect, mutual affection and listening, corporate solidarity and good will. Wishing to instill a climate of generalized human improvement across all the lines and divisions that would separate ourselves from each other.

A laudable task, I would submit, to each man and their method using Scripture to advance and support a variety of ideas towards their several themes and particulars. As each man or woman shares with us his/her vision of God amongst a humanity that is careless with its self, its resources, its peoples, and cultures. Now whether each separate vision is true or not, I'll let you the reader determine. But for myself, its a bit like describing the elephant in the room by a group of blind men. Each seeing some aspect of God, Jesus, or the Bible, describing what is important to their arena of interests and abilities. And like the Apostle Paul, I would say, "So be it. Let each man follow Christ as their hearts tell them so. They are our brothers in the Gospel of Jesus." (1 Cor. 1.12; 3.4)

So then, who are these figureheads, and what generally do they teach? Let's look at each one while asking the question, "Just what would each idea have to offer Emergent Christianity?" Or, asked another way, "In what way would each idea tell us how the Christian faith might become interlocked within the scope of human solidarity. And how by this activity would it undo the cruel institutionalizations of humanity's hatreds, wars, and intolerances?"

Rene Girard

Wikipedia Bio - René Girard (born December 25, 1923) is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is the author of nearly thirty books (see below), in which he developed the ideas of:

1. mimetic desire: all of our desires are borrowed from other people;
2. mimetic rivalry: all conflict originates in mimetic desire;
3. the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry;
4. the Bible reveals the three previous ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

René Girard's writings cover many areas. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature that uses his hypotheses and ideas in the areas of literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy

Publications - Here is a list from Amazon with several of his books below:

And a website link - Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: Understanding the Bible Anew Through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.

Observations

Rene's integrates his mimetic theory with his theory of divine scapegoating in his book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening. Here he tells of the cyclical histories found in human history of diverting troubling ideas and messy societal turmoil by electing a person, or an idea, as the common cause that when put away will end the division occurring in a society, culture, or ethos. Examples abound, from Jesus, to Joan of Arc, to the American war in Iraq, to even end-of-the-world scenarios, what Rene would call types of "apocalyptic enders." So that, with the advent of personal, or societal, disruptions must come the sacrifice of an idea, an institution, a person, country, a social order, or an ethos, in order to sustain that society's previous identity of itself.

Another example of Rene's mimetic principal can be found in the idea of Christians making a religion out of their faith, and in the unconscious act of doing this, have created the ancillary affects of secular modernity sustained within society today. Paradoxically, when Christians have taken the words of Jesus and followed through on biblical principals they believed were true, these acts have resulted in secularizing the bible to one's needs and  wants (indicative, I think of our old man, or sin nature, that lives on underneath the renewing image of Christ regardless of our supposedly righteous acts when undertaken in our own prideful power or religious zeal):

In René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, Scott Cowdell provides the first systematic interpretation of René Girard’s controversial approach to secular modernity. Cowdell identifies the scope, development, and implications of Girard’s thought, the centrality of Christ in Girard's thinking, and, in particular, Girard's distinctive take on the uniqueness and finality of Christ in terms of his impact on Western culture. In Girard’s singular vision, according to Cowdell, secular modernity has emerged thanks to the Bible’s exposure of the cathartic violence that is at the root of religious prohibitions, myths, and rituals. In the literature, the psychology, and most recently the military history of modernity, Girard discerns a consistent slide into an apocalypse that challenges modern ideas of romanticism, individualism, and progressivism.

In the first three chapters, Cowdell examines the three elements of Girard’s basic intellectual vision (mimesis, sacrifice, biblical hermeneutics) and brings this vision to a constructive interpretation of “secularization” and “modernity,” as these terms are understood in the broadest sense today. Chapter 4 focuses on modern institutions, chiefly the nation state and the market, that function to restrain the outbreak of violence. And finally, Cowdell discusses the apocalyptic dimension of Girard's theory in relation to modern warfare and terrorism. Here, Cowdell engages with the most recent writings of Girard (particularly his Battling to the End) and applies them to further conversations in cultural theology, political science, and philosophy. Cowdell takes up and extends Girard’s own warning concerning an alternative to a future apocalypse: “What sort of conversion must humans undergo, before it is too late?”

"Scott Cowdell's book is the first comprehensive study of modernity and secularity in René Girard's thought. Cowdell brings Girard's theory into a fruitful dialogue with leading approaches on secularization like those of Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, or Charles Taylor. Scholars and students of theology, philosophy, and sociology will benefit from this wide-ranging overview of the relationship between religion, modernity, and secularization." —Wolfgang Palaver, Institute of Systematic Theology, University of Innsbruck

Rob Bell

Besides being my former pastor at Mars Hill, Rob is a novel thinker who is passionate about his Christian faith when liberated from religious stereotypes and focused solely upon Jesus' message and mission. As we have followed along here before with many posts and commentaries (sic, Relevancy22's sidebars, Love Wins, Rob Bell), let me quote from several outside sources of Rob's passion and vision:

---

"Rob’s newest book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, tells how God is described today striking many as mean, primitive, backward, illogical, tribal, and at odds with the frontiers of science. At the same time, many intuitively feel a sense of reverence and awe in the world. Can we find a new way to talk about God?

"Pastor and New York Times bestselling author Rob Bell does here for God what he did for heaven and hell in Love Wins: he shows how traditional ideas have grown stale and dysfunctional and reveals a new path for how to return vitality and vibrancy to how we understand God. Bell reveals how we got stuck, why culture resists certain ways of talking about God, and how we can reconnect with the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, pulling us forward into a better future—and ready to help us live life to the fullest." - Amazon Review

---

"Rob Bell, Subversive? Celebrity? Radical? Heretic? Holy Man? Making the cover of Time Magazine, star of the influential Nooma series, game-changer in the church, and budding TV entrepreneur, Rob Bell has caused the entire evangelical world to wrestle with the scope of salvation with one daring question: who gets to be saved?

"For religious progressives, Rob Bell offers a passionate faith, a prophetic challenge, a biblical acuity, and a generous vision of who God is in the world. For conservatives, Bell’s the voice that young Christians are looking for—a person who takes science seriously, speaks at cutting edge of popular culture, and argues God is bigger than our language for him.

"The Christian message needs a new interpreter: one particular enough to embody the tradition but broad enough to evoke thought and feeling from a range of people, including evangelicals, religious progressives, and those disenchanted with churched religion—the spiritual but not religious, who find themselves compelled by Bell’s charisma and artistic creations." - James Wellman, Rob Bell and a New American Christianity

James Wellman

From his blogsite we discover that James Wellman is "an Associate Professor and Chair of the Comparative Religion Program in the Jackson School of International Studies. Teaching at the University of Washington since 2002, his areas of expertise are in American religious culture, history and politics.

"Wellman’s most recent book, Rob Bell and a New American Christianity (Abingdon Press, 2012), explores one of the most well-known and controversial evangelical ministers in America. Bell, up until 2011, led a 10,000-member megachurch, and is now pursuing TV opportunities in Hollywood. Bell’s artistry as a preacher, his fearlessness in pursuing various forms of media, makes him an ideal person to examine the future horizon of American Christianity.

"As Wellman wrote: "In this way, Bell is a postmodern evangelist--a slam poet, a Billy Graham type, who beguiles with words, images, and ideas about a beautiful Jesus, whose stories transfix and transduce words into flesh, making incarnation the arbiter of all value."

"Wellman’s other publications include an award-winning book, The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto: Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism (Illinois, 1999); two edited volumes: The Power of Religious Publics: Staking Claims in American Society, with Bill Swatos (Praegers, 1999), and Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). His 2008 monograph, Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press), received Honorable Mention for the 2009 Distinguished Book Award by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

"Wellman has recently completed editing a volume with Clark Lombardi, called Religion and Human Security: A Global Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2012). This volume examines case studies of the impact of religious groups on the human security of diverse global populations.

"His next book project, High on God: How the Megachurch Conquered America (Oxford University Press), is based on a national survey of twelve national megachurches, engaging quantitative and qualitative data from interviews with clergy and laypeople. The book explores the powerful affective forces within these congregations and is a fascinating portrait of the dominance of megachurches in American religious life.

"Wellman is a Presbyterian minister. He lives in the Seattle area with his partner, Annette Moser-Wellman, and their two daughters, Constance and Georgia, whom Jim calls his  bright and shining morning stars."


Sojourners

Sojourners is an activist group centered upon political pacifism and social causes for justice. In a book review on Rob Bell’s latest book (see below) Rene Girard's mimetic theories are tied in with Sojourner’s ideas of societal sacrifice, healing, and redemption. Their history is one of social struggle, ethnic diversity, international community, and call to renewal (as found in their website):

"Sojourners are Christians who follow Jesus, but who also sojourn with others in different faith traditions and all those who are on a spiritual journey. We are evangelicals, Catholics, Pentecostals and Protestants; progressives and conservatives; blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians; women and men; young and old. We reach into traditional churches but also out to those who can't fit into them. Together we seek to discover the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. We invite you to join, to connect, and to act. Welcome to the community."


James Alison

A disciple of Rene Girard, British Theologian James Alison promotes the idea of forgiving one’s victim. Which is all-well-and-good but one which may reiterate a form of naturalistic theology authorizing man’s cultural lifestyles as the definitive hermeneutic for biblical exploration and derivation. As example, homosexuality is a natural instinct and is not a sin, which may, or may not be true, and one we've been exploring in our support for the rights of gender, and sexual preference and equality without actually addressing the question in the way that James Alison has been doing.

At which point you have to ask how this type of hermeneutic is different from William Webb's theistically-based Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic. Which is a biblical type of trajectory hermeneutic speaking to the moral progression found in Scripture unto this present day. Here, morals are viewed as a relative set of ethics that have been evolving through man's primitive histories. Where one set of morals is viewed in a certain way in the Old Testament until Jesus comes along and "uplifts" them towards another definition and meaning. And then the 21st century breaks out under postmodernity to challenge our contemporary structures of morals and ethos to reform yet again. Understandably, the problems this view presents are manifold.

However, Webb's definition, like Alison's, are asking some very hard questions about the moral sentiments and ethical practices of the Christian church as foundered outside of Scripture within its subjective network of religious folklores and traditional belief structures. Such that other Christians, organizations, and institutions, are saying perhaps we should re-hear Jesus on these matters. Asking questions of whether God condoned the very violence, injustices, and moral outrage we read of in the OT. Or whether we have somehow misunderstood that violence to actually be a mirror of that same violence found within our own wicked hearts?

But, then comes the question of why God would reveal Himself in this way? Or why He commanded Israel to commit violence against its neighbors? Or even why the holy men of Scripture wrote of God in this way? Is this God the same God of love, peace, mercy and forgiveness that Jesus tells us of? That Jesus demonstrates to us as God Incarnate amongst us? Who speaks a much different message to sinful humanity than He did in the OT when telling Noah of His plans to wipe out all of humanity in a massive flood? Where was God's mercy and forgiveness then? Are we to take these stories as literal evidences of God, or as comparative literature to polytheistic nations of Israel testimony of Yahweh? Which tells of a powerful God who spared Noah in a flood's devastation because he looked to God for his salvation and acted upon his faith? There are no simplistic explanations here when thinking through sovereignty and sin, free will and disbelief, purpose and meaning. Where people and religion are involved all is dark and murky.

So understandably, one can see the many interpretive problems we might have when relating the idea of divine revelation to that of static human reasoning. As such, Natural Theology is similarly based upon human reasoning and experience. But unlike biblical theology, natural theology is not based upon Scripture as revealed theology. Thus, natural theology must use human convention for its particulars and assertions, unlike Christian orthodoxy which states that God revealed Himself to His people in the Old Testament telling of His mind and heart, divine plans and purposes. Even as He did in the New Testament through the Apostles, and especially through His Son. Who is the second person of the Trinity, and very God Himself. And that this revelation gives to us the authority and assurance of a God unlike any we can imagine in our human souls. Which revelation and relationship and Spirit-imbued empowerment causes us to imagine, to collaborate, to envision, to reach out, in a thousand different ways and wonts searching for life's meaning and purpose, our responsibility in this life, for the human touch, hope, and peace, as centered in-and-around all things God and through His Son, Jesus.

Overall, it seems that Webb and Alison are asking the ultimate questions of the church. Just "what good is religion if it doesn't do much good?!" For them, Jesus, and the church's idea of God, must focus upon human morals and ethics if it is to have relevancy and meaning. That the faith of Jesus is a faith that not only changes people, but changes people's civic institutions towards the revolutionizing idea of doing good to one another. For the Naturalist it is enough that this effort is promoted and practiced. For the Christian, we see this effort as that and more. For God is our reality. And Jesus is the truer picture of the God of the OT. That our tasks are manifold spiritual, apocalyptic, societal, personal, regenerative, and redemptive. That in Jesus will come the Kingdom of God. And not by our own hands, but through our hands submitted to His Spirit of Love and Wisdom shall it be inaugurated. This would be the gospel of Jesus. One that resonates with the (spiritual) revisioning of the world for the solidarity of mankind in Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord.


Let Us Summarize

My reaction? Like Paul’s statements who once had said, “The one who is for Christ is our brother, not our enemy.” Whether it is Girard, Rob Bell, James Wellman, the Sojourners Community, or even James Alison, each are promoting Jesus in the light of their religious understanding of Scripture. An understanding that plays out differently to our temporal, moiling societies so locked into greed, pride, selfishness, and ambition.

Yes, I suppose we might debate their separate theologies, as being too earthy, too subjective, or too societally-oriented, and such like. But what is the point so long as Jesus is uplifted as the Life-and-Light of sinful mankind? And furthermore, the question of what good is religion if it doesn't inspire and transform our relationships with one another, is a significant one! This is a very legitimate question when reviewing the church's history of Muslim genocide in the Middle Ages; its cruel religious Inquisitions in Spain and Western Europe; its wars and lusts down through the secular Ages of the 19th-20th Century; its intolerance - if not outright advocacy of - slavery, domination, murder in witchhunts, extortions, bribes, power, pride and greed? Did Jesus envisage these as Christian acts (or as the gospel's acts) when saying "Love God and Love your neighbour?" No, I think not.

In fact, Jesus said that faith in Him, or the active practice of following His examples, will divide families and children from one another, even as they will divide churches and societies from one another. To expect political, economic, and sociological disruption while attempting to practice the arts of global healing, forgiveness, mercy, unity, and redemption. These are but some of the biblical themes one comes across when reading either the OT or the NT. Themes that divided Noah's heart. That disturbed David's sin. That caused Abraham to withhold his hand from sacrificing his son and to lay down his knife of disbelief before the God of love and reconciliation.

There is a solidarity that can be found in mankind. But its discovery will be from within the heart of the God whose image He has placed within us: a heart that seeks good. That practices love and thoughtfulness. That engenders peace and good will. That preaches a gospel of service and care to others. That epitomizes self-sacrifice and selflessness. A Christian theology that is amazingly convoluted, but one that makes me glad that I have taken the time to write down my observations of it, along with that of others different from mine own. Of what an Emerging Christianity could look like as it is pulled in a million different directions into nothingness by its many separate reformers and reformations. An Emerging Christianity that continues to synthesize itself from the many disruptive, and caustic, movements pulling it apart towards fracturous results. One that is seeking to develop a central core of tenets that may lend the attitudes of Life-and-Light to its many separate causes and promotions of a contemporary Christianity growing within this present post-modern era of reflection and revisionism, post-structural deconstruction and reconstruction,  spiritual reformation and repentance. It is an emerging vision of inspiration to the power of the Spirit who can heal and bring peace.

These, then, are my thoughts and sentiments. What say you?

R.E. Slater

February 13, 2013

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More about Sojourner's Political Activism for Justice and Peace

http://sojo.net/



Rob Bell on Facebook


A Sojouner's Book Review:
'Rob Bell and a New American Christianity'
http://sojo.net/blogs/2013/01/25/book-review-rob-bell-and-new-american-christianity

by Adam Ericksen 01-25-2013 | 11:17am

"Can we watch a video with that guy who has the weird hair and the dark rimmed glasses?"

- a member of my youth group

"Love wins the in the sense that God’s will is the reconciliation of all things - 
the soul, the body, the earth, the cosmos, and everything in it."
- James Wellman, Rob Bell and a New American Christianity, 59 

American Christianity is experiencing a theological shift. Many have tried to explain it, sometimes making the shift far more confusing than it actually is. Fortunately, the shift can be explained quite simply, and while it may be new to American Christianity, it is actually very old. Indeed, it dates back 2,000 years. The shift boils down to the two theological axioms of the New Testament, both found in the letter 1 John:

“God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (1:5)

and

“God is love” (4:8 and 16)

Those statements, while simple, are far from simplistic. John was bold in affirming these statements. He knew he had to give it to us straight – probably because he and the other disciples had a hard time understanding what Jesus meant in his teachings and parables. So, John cut to the chase and simply claimed that Jesus reveals, “God is love and God is light. There is absolutely no darkness within God.”

That’s the shift within American Christianity, and Rob Bell is leading the way. I highly recommend James Wellman’s book Rob Bell and a New American Christianity as a great resource for anyone wanting to understand Bell’s biography, his role in the shift, and the admiration along with the fierce criticism he engenders. Personally, I admire Bell. I find his books, videos, and sermons a source of inspiration, as do many others. His appeal transcends generational gaps. Members of my youth group frequently plead, “Can we watch a video with that guy who has the weird hair and the dark rimmed glasses?” Interestingly, their parents like Bell, too. A few years ago I showed Bell’s video Rhythm to some adults of my church. They were quickly engaged by Bell’s artistic style and message. His fundamental point in that video, and throughout his ministry, is to teach what God is like. Bell says in Rhythm:

Jesus is like God in his generosity and compassion. That’s what God is like. In his telling of the truth, that’s what God is like. In his love and forgiveness and sacrifice … that’s what God is like. That’s who God is.

Of course, there are theological consequences in these claims. What does it mean to say that God is love? That God is generous and compassionate? That God is forgiving and sacrificial? Ultimately, what does it mean to say that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all? First, it means that God’s love is nonviolent. This changes our understanding of many Christian doctrines, including the all-important doctrine of atonement. Many believe that doctrine insists that God is holy and that sin offends the all-holy God. God’s wrath must be taken out on someone pure and innocent, and so Jesus saves us from God by sacrificing himself to God’s wrath. One of the problems with that theory of atonement is that it places darkness within God … but “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” But the question remains: What are we to make of the atonement and the sacrificial language of the New Testament?

Wellman states, “Bell believes that Christ’s sacrifice is not for God’s sake. Rather, it is the ultimate revelation of the innocent victim, the final scapegoat.” Then Wellman makes an important association by claiming that Bell’s understanding of atonement has been influenced by the French anthropologist René Girard. “Girard’s theory of scapegoating illumines how Bell negotiates this knotty problem … [Jesus’] death is not demanded by God, but made necessary to reveal the folly of humanity and the necessity to begin to love and forgive the enemy” (127-128). In other words, Girard helped Bell understand that it is not God who demands the violent sacrifice of Jesus. Rather, humans demanded it. The wrath was human, not divine. James Alison, one of Girard’s greatest students and who has a brilliant curriculum for the New American Christianity, states in his book On Being Liked, “Jesus revealed that God had and has nothing at all to do with violence, or death, or the order of this world. These are our problems and mask our conceptions of God…” (23).

What I appreciate most about Bell is his attempt to live into God’s non-violent love and forgiveness. If he is one of the most admired leaders of the “New American Christianity,” he is also one of the most criticized — one might even say demonized. With passionate furor, many accuse him of being a heretic, of leading people away from the true faith, and of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Bell has a particular way of not responding to these accusations, and Girard is helpful in understanding why Bell’s non-response is vital for the New American Christianity. Girard states that humans tend to imitate the violence and accusations committed against us. We respond to accusations with accusations of our own. “I’m not the problem! You are the problem!” Girard writes, “If nothing stops it [accusations and violence], the spiral has to lead to a series of acts of vengeance in a perfect fusion of violence and contagion” (Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 17). The most important thing Bell teaches and models for the New American Christianity is to not participate in cycles of accusations and violence. Wellman states that in the face of these accusations “The takeaway for Bell [is] not bitterness or accusations. It is, as he consistently says in all sorts of venues, that the story is not done; your story, our story, my story is not done” (67). Bell’s response to the harsh criticism and accusations made against him is to ignore them and move on with telling the story.

Of course, the story is ultimately not Bell’s or ours. It is God’s. The reason Bell doesn’t defend himself by imitating the accusations against him is because he has faith that God is in control. Bell can be “in a non-anxious, non-reactive state” (Wellman, 85) with those accusations because he knows it’s not about him. Rather it’s about the God who is Love; the God who has nothing to do with the darkness, violence, and the accusations of our world. For Bell, this is the God of Resurrection. He says the resurrection tells a “better story” than the stories of violence and accusations. It is the story that “culminates in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, whereby Christ reconciles all things to God. The power of the restoration of all things has no limit and works not only in the human body and soul, but also into the very roots of creation itself” (Wellman, 18).

The story of resurrection is told by the God of love who is restoring and reconciling the world back to God. We have the choice of participating in that story of nonviolence love and reconciliation, or not. If there is any substance to the New American Christianity it will look like the God who has nothing to do with violence and accusation, but everything to do with love, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

Bell is leading the way and I hope more people will follow. Wellman’s book is a great place to start.

Adam Ericksen blogs at the Raven Foundation, where he uses mimetic theory to provide social commentary on religion, politics, and pop culture. Follow Adam on Twitter @adamericksen.

Rob Bell, "What We Talk About When We Talk About God"

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Rob Bell

Has God Been Left Behind?

Pastor Rob Bell explains why both culture and the church resist talking about God,

and shows how we can reconnect with the God who is pulling us forward into a better

future. Bell uses his characteristic evocative storytelling to challenge everything you

think you know about God. What We Talk About When We Talk About God tackles

misconceptions about God and reveals how God is with us, for us, ahead of us, and

how understanding this could change the entire course of our lives.









Preview of Rob's Writing Habits

A behind-the-book video about Rob's newest book describing
the creative process he uses to bring a book to life.


 

Rob Bell (Author)

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Book Description

Release date: March 12, 2013

 

How God is described today strikes many as mean, primitive, backward, illogical, tribal, and at odds with the frontiers of science. At the same time, many intuitively feel a sense of reverence and awe in the world. Can we find a new way to talk about God?

 

Pastor and New York Times bestselling author Rob Bell does here for God what he did for heaven and hell in Love Wins: he shows how traditional ideas have grown stale and dysfunctional and reveals a new path for how to return vitality and vibrancy to how we understand God. Bell reveals how we got stuck, why culture resists certain ways of talking about God, and how we can reconnect with the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, pulling us forward into a better future—and ready to help us live life to the fullest.

 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne (March 12, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062049666
• ISBN-13: 978-0062049667

Reviews
by Brandan, October 24, 2013

Bell is back! I am excited to have the opportunity to review Rob Bells upcoming book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God. The review will be coming in the next few months, but from what I have seen, this book will be another important and thought provoking book about the identity, character, and nature of the One we call "God" and how he is to be understood in light of the Biblical Narrative.

 

The official description of the book from HarperOne is:

 

“What Rob Bell did for hell in the New York Times bestseller Love Wins he does for God in What We Talk About When We Talk About God, the sequel to Love Wins, addressing who God is and how we relate to God.”

 

“Love Wins was an overnight viral phenomenon and New York Times bestseller that created a media storm, launching Bell as a national religious voice that is reinvigorating what it means to be religious and a Christian today. He is one of the most influential voices in the Christian world, and his new book is poised to blow open the doors on how we understand God. Bell believes we need to drop our primitive, tribal views of God and instead understand the God who wants us to become who we were designed to be, a God who created a universe of quarks and quantum string dynamics, but who also gives meaning to why newborn babies and stores of heroes and sacrifice inspire in us a deep reverence. What We Talk About When We Talk About God will reveal that God is not in need of repair to catch him up to today’s world; we need to discover the God who goes before us and beckons us forward. What will be a full of mystery, controversy, and reverence, What We Talk About When We Talk About God has fans and critics alike anxiously awaiting publication, and it promises not to disappoint.”

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath: The Stigma of Writing and Mental Illness

February 11, 2013

You’ll Love Her! She’s Crazy!

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html?mbid=nl_Daily%20(178)

Posted by Sarah Manguso

I’m told that one of my grandmothers suffered from what must have been postpartum depression. She was prescribed Miltowns in the forties, and hid an opiate addiction for more than fifty years. On the same branch of my family tree is an aunt who ended her life. Everyone who would know the details of either story is dead.

Many somber words have been intoned about the taboo surrounding mental illness, recently and notably by former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy this past January, soon after the shootings in Newtown. “If we’re going to get rid of the stigma—one of the great civil-rights challenges of our time—we need more discussion in the real world, and less shame by those suffering with mental illness, or the loved ones around them,” he wrote, in an essay published by The Daily Beast.

Until recently in human history, mental illness was indeed a stigma, discussed in whispers with the vocabulary of shame. To varying degrees, however, these whispers have always been accompanied confidently by the vocabulary of pride.

In her 1978 essay “Illness As Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote about the received ideas that surrounded tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, and cancer in the twentieth. The tubercular character was vaunted as “sensitive, creative, a being apart.” She added, “In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity.”

Indeed, wherever I go in the twenty-first century, people are proudly mentally ill, and conversations about mental illness invoke the idea of specialness and the stereotypical mad genius. Contemporary scripted TV advertises the benefits of disordered thought, perception, and behavior, from the associative manias of the bipolar C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison on “Homeland” to the precise memory of the phobic, obsessive-compulsive private detective on the eponymous “Monk.” Unusual brains are shown to correlate with creative intelligence and exceptional cognitive sensitivity. Stereotypes of shameful weakness come far behind, if at all.

Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems. The short lives of Shelley and Byron comprised several suicidal lovers and a half-dozen unfortunate children, all adopted or dead by age five. Deaf, miserable Beethoven; van Gogh and his severed ear; Hemingway and his shotgun; Poe in his gutter; Woolf in her heavy raincoat. The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.

* * *

Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, attended my high school, Gamaliel Bradford Senior High, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1950, and when I graduated in 1992 she was still the most famous person ever to have gone there. Her long shadow remained, decades after her death, and the writing prize was named for her.

She’d sat in the back right-hand corner of Room 200, the room where Wilbury Crockett had taught his English courses. We all knew it. I often ate lunch by myself, in Sylvia’s seat, when the room was empty—not because it was her seat but because it was the seat furthest from the door. I never read her poems. I didn’t like the idea of poetry. I liked the idea of long books that were impossible to understand, and I read Pynchon’s novels laboriously, consulting multiple reference books as I inched down the dense pages. Plath had been dead longer than I’d been alive, but we didn’t count the years. She was ageless and occupied all history.

Mr. Crockett, a legendary teacher whose written comments on Plath’s poems allegedly first encouraged her to become a poet, retired when I was in kindergarten, but when he was seventy-eight he visited my eleventh-grade English class. Our English teacher had prepared us to receive his great wisdom. Most important of all, she reminded us that he had been the teacher of Sylvia Plath.

What never seemed strange to me until much later is that Plath’s poems weren’t taught to us in high school; only her suicide was taught to us. A lady, who had lived on Elmwood Road, across the street from my elementary school, had become a poet and become inconsolable and stuck her head in an oven. The books we were assigned to read for our English classes were tedious novels about boarding school and dated plays about the American Dream. Our frowsy English teacher who had invited Crockett to speak assigned each of us to read a different Dylan Thomas poem, and we each presented our poem to the class, and that was it for our education in poetry.

A minute into Crockett’s presentation, a straight-A student made a sound. Did he mutter something? Whatever Crockett thought he’d heard, it lit a fuse. We sat silent while the great man raged. In our shame we knew Crockett had chosen the wrong boy to castigate—he was humorless and inoffensive. That the boy would have insulted an honored visitor is unimaginable. Crockett screamed that we had rejected a great gift, and that we were worthless. Worthless! He strode out of the room. Two years later, he died, and our sparse little school library was named in his honor.

* * *

Despite having begun college determined to become a physician, I failed Chem 10 and, after a cascade of results, went to writing school instead. My first poetry collection was published modestly by a small press when I was twenty-seven. A few poems found their way into anthologies. I worked part-time as a copy editor and ate a lot of oatmeal.

After my book came out, my former college boyfriend said, “At least you can go nuts, now that you’ve become a real writer.” Like every recent college graduate I knew, bringing up the rear of Generation X, he yearned to check out and waste some serious time. Despite his classics degree he’d become a management consultant, though, and, as such, he simply couldn’t find his way into the seemingly exclusive and glamorous milieu of mental illness. Was he depressed? Perhaps, but he couldn’t conceive of it as a possibility—not because of the taboo but because he didn’t believe he’d fulfilled the prerequisites. Management consultants drank. They didn’t take antidepressants. They weren’t interesting enough to go nuts. Going nuts was a point of pride. You had to train for it.

One of my graduate-school colleagues used to boast about his antidepressant prescription. “I’m crazy!” he’d squeak at parties. A little depression? It probably was the most interesting thing about him. Fifteen years later, he publishes workmanlike best-sellers. Several of the poets with whom I went to school, clinging to modest functional abilities, are too mentally ill even to know they could be boasting about being mentally ill. You will never hear of them.

Shortly after I earned my degree, caught in a constellation of simultaneous disappointments, I found myself in a locked psychiatric ward. One of the social workers spoke excitedly about the therapist he wanted me to see after I was released: “You’ll love her! She’s crazy, just absolutely crazy!”

I remember responding to the social worker as coolly as I could while pushing down hard on a weeping rage: “I’m not sure we share the same tastes.” “What do you mean?” he asked in his best therapist’s voice, his little eyes open wide to indicate he cared. I tried to explain why standing around in a circle holding hands and talking about my feelings made me want to hang myself. Squinting, as if calling out from a high pulpit, he said, “Standing around in a circle holding hands is my favorite thing to do.”

Treating mental illness is an economic, and therefore practical, problem. But more fundamentally it is a problem of rhetoric and therefore also an abstract one. Before we can address it, we must speak about it, and the vocabulary we use is highly polarized. On one hand, the sufferer is responsible for getting over the shameful condition; on the other, the sufferer is a mad genius whose quirks and foibles demand respect. Seldom is mental illness just illness.

In order to develop workable policy serving those functionally impaired by mental illness, we need to learn to talk about it without recourse to the broad brushes of its existing metaphors. What if we could imagine a mentally ill person as neither a potentially violent simpleton nor a mad genius but simply a person with an illness that might be diagnosed, treated, even cured?

I expect that history might solve the problem all by itself, now that the very condition of illness has moved from a strictly medical milieu to a capitalist one. As far as the drug companies care, mental illnesses provide just another opportunity to sell pills to impressionable consumers. When I visit my psychiatrist, more often than not there sits a smartly suited young person with a full briefcase. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, but the suit is always navy blue. The person does not look tempted to sit upon the lap of the enormous stuffed bear I call Flat-Bear, who sits in the corner, against the wall, his lap increasingly grubby and compressed. The person enters and leaves the doctor’s office briskly, in a few minutes. On my bad days, I am sure I would buy whatever he is selling, and that psychotropic medications will become the twenty-first century’s bottled shampoo.

That the medical establishment is in league with the pharmaceutical companies seems inevitable and in fact has been widely observed. It seems dubious that the language of commerce could be a positive influence, but brisk business feels like progress beyond the language of myth.

And, even without the help of commerce, time wears away at myth and everything else. Plath’s suicide at thirty, after publishing just one volume of poems, invited the stereotype of the mad poetess, the wife betrayed; it was impossible to read the posthumous publications without considering the biography. But in the fifty years since her death the myth has dimmed; the work endures.

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

Though the facts of her life won’t soon fade from historical memory, Plath is now, at least, more poet than suicide.

Sarah Manguso is the author of five books, most recently “The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend,” which will be published in paperback next month.

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html#ixzz2KhNvgmpu

"The Paradox of Quantum SpaceTime" for Emergent Theology Today

I read the Scientific American article below not many days hence when reviewing the topic of spacetime (Where Does Space and Time Come From?) and thought a complimentary piece on (quantum) Theology might well be in order too. Obviously, the naturalist point of view from Scientific American will be one of mundane experience void of any biblical commentary per the divine element of creation, life, or death. But still, our purpose here is to simply try to conceive of Time in it's origin, conservation, causality, connection, need, necessity, and quantum nonexistence to multi-dimensional spacetime. And once conceived, perhaps one day better commentate about the corollaries we might find between quantum science and that of its sister philosophy, quantum theology.

Statedly, God's universe is as often paradoxical as it is incomprehensible. And we would do well to bear this in mind when attempting to understand this same God theologically. Too often we have simplified God by our plethora of philosophical and biblical statements when we might do better to sever all ties to the church's outdated (and outmoded) mundane expressions of God while attempting to re-imagine this same God through the refracting lenses of postmodern science and theology. Add this to the errant idea of trying to qualify any postmodern discoveries against the past judgments of any pre-modern, medieval, ancient, or pre-civilized, cosmological sentiments of bygone eras (grammatical, contextual hermeneutics not withstanding) and you'll get the point I'm trying to make. That our past may inform us to previous enlightenments but cannot disengage us from making our own more relevant insights and discoveries for post-modern society today.

By attempting to re-describe our theology of God we might, perhaps, be more attune to developing a theology that is more in line with contemporary thought and expression. A theology that connects yesteryear's orthodoxies to today's poststructural language and idioms, thoughts and ideas. Which might reach across the humanistic divides of all scientific disciplines and find the biblical God of the Old and New Testaments re-expressed in today's 21st century contextualized understanding. A theology which would be more robust in philosophical and scientific thought while more compellingly re-expressed through comparative biblical terminology using contemporary postmodern paradigms. Some few examples that come to mind would be that of Deconstructionalism, Open Theism, Relational-Process Thought, Existential Behavioralism and Cultural Anthropologies, Evolutionary Creationism, and so forth. A labyrinth, as such, of open sourced theological study forming the literary backbone of a postmodern, Emerging (or, Emergent) Theology.

But do not imagine for one moment that the church's biblical theologians can look away from today's scientific discoveries and not be impacted to think new thoughts previously unthought of God differing from the ages past. Ages that did not have the science and learning availed to it as we do today. Which cultural event is nothing new since the early days of the church influenced first by Hellenism, then by later medieval and Renaissance thought, which then evolved once again in the Age of Enlightenment and Modernism. Even so, today's postmodernism will be similarly affective upon the church's many outdated doctrines, dogmas, and conceptual understandings of God, the Bible, and even of ourselves.

This is not heresy but the natural progression of human endeavor and enterprise. Moreover, the heresy would be to retain our older concepts of God as unmoved and unmovable, rather than remitting to the living God of humanity found through all time and expression in the ages of man. Who urges the aegis of the church to master its relevancy of mission and message by progressing into every age of man actively, dynamically, humanely, and hopefully. Not negatively, fearfully, acrimoniously, or uncertainly in despair and frustration.

Even so, does God Himself move forward apocalyptically in contemporary lockstep with man's overeager, sometimes Babel-like, societies unfailing in their aspirations and attainments to overreach their potential by sinful means, war and domination. Requiring some sort of divine caution and brakes to this world's aggressive humanism, and godless re-conception, of itself. For we are graciously invited into God's creational temple-space not to replace Him but to enjoy His creation with Him. As exampled by the fall of Adam and Eve who rejected this hallowed templed space by wishing to be like God by their own will and admission. Which was quite out-of-plan and out-of-sorts with God's overall objectives of sharing and fellowship, rest and peace. And to God's great wisdom to not let it proceed any further towards its ultimate eternal destruction by removing humanity's reach of the Tree of Life.

Let us likewise be not so hasty to do this same thing. For we are mortal, though joined immortally with one another through time eternal. Showing wisdom then in seeking God's design and blessing without usurpation, greed, envy or ill-will. Using the Spirit's wisdom to update our old-line church doctrines and dogmas in re-evaluation of God's overall plans and design for contemporary relevancy of mission and message.

Who plants within the restless hearts of men His laudable insights and searching knowledge towards the discovery of newer medicines, ecological practices, technologies, and societal improvements. Who opens man's eyes to the beauty, the majesty, the paradox, and mystery, of His divine Being, creation, and even to ourselves, spun in the web of moiling existence, turmoil, and dark meaning. Each temperament lifted like a silken filament leading towards unexplored shores heralding novel frontiers rich in unfathomed insight, progress, and societal development. For this is the hope of the Kingdom of God by its inauguration into the life of humanity and its civilizations through Jesus' death and resurrection. An earthy kingdom with a heavenly design. A kingdom filled with life and light, not death and destruction. A kingdom God ushers us all towards as honored guests and adoptive children enjoying all the rights of privilege and position, pedigree and purchase.

Even so, it would behoove us as Emerging Christians to develop an emerging theology of God in a postmodernistic age of endeavor and challenge, accomplishment and despair. Providing an emergent theology granting relevancy to the mission and message of Jesus our Savior, Redeemer, Sovereign Creator, wise Ruler and gracious Lord. Who seeks with us a country not of our own making, but one filled with the wisdom and glory of the God of the Ages. Who clothes Himself with the garments of Time and Space, and strides across the Heavens in holy adoration, breathless wonder, and inscrutable council. To this God we bow our hearts in contrition to whisper, in the waning silences of the deepest voids of our hearts and the quantum universe, Amen and Amen.

R.E. Slater
February 12, 2013

 


The Paradox of Time:
Why It Can't Stop, But Must
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=could-time-end

ByGeorge Musser

September 2010

"For time to end seems both impossible and inevitable.

Recent work in physics suggests a resolution to the paradox."

In our experience, nothing ever really ends. When we die, our bodies decay and the material in them returns to the earth and the air, allowing for the creation of new life. We live on in what comes after. But will that always be the case? Might there come a point sometime in the future when there is no “after”? Depressingly, modern physics suggests the answer is yes. Time itself could end. All activity would cease, and there would be no renewal or recovery. The end of time would be the end of endings.

This grisly prospect was an unanticipated prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which provides our modern understanding of gravity. Before that theory, most physicists and philosophers thought time was a universal drumbeat, a steady rhythm that the cosmos marches to, never varying, wavering or stopping. Einstein showed that the universe is more like a big polyrhythmic jam session. Time can slow down, or stretch out, or let it rip. When we feel the force of gravity, we are feeling time’s rhythmic improvisation; falling objects are drawn to places where time passes more slowly. Time not only affects what matter does but also responds to what matter is doing, like drummers and dancers firing one another up into a rhythmic frenzy. When things get out of hand, though, time can go up in smoke like an overexcited drummer who spontaneously combusts.

The moments when that happens are known as singularities. The term actually refers to any boundary of time, be it beginning or end. The best known is the big bang, the instant 13.7 billion years ago when our universe—and, with it, time—burst into existence and began expanding. If the universe ever stops expanding and starts contracting again, it will go into something like the big bang in reverse—the big crunch—and bring time crashing to a halt.

Time needn’t perish everywhere. Relativity says it expires inside black holes while carrying on in the universe at large. Black holes have a well-deserved reputation for destructiveness, but they are even worse than you might think. If you fell into one, you would not only be torn to shreds, but your remains would eventually hit a singularity at the center of the hole, and your timeline would end. No new life would emerge from your ashes; your molecules would not get recycled. Like a character reaching the last page of a novel, you would not suffer mere death but existential apocalypse.

It took physicists decades to accept that relativity theory would predict something so unsettling as death without rebirth. To this day, they aren’t quite sure what to make of it. Singularities are arguably the leading reason that physicists seek to create a unified theory of physics, which would merge Einstein’s brainchild with quantum mechanics to create a quantum theory of gravity. They do so partly in the hope they might explain singularities away. But you need to be careful what you wish for. Time’s end is hard to imagine, but time’s not ending may be equally paradoxical.

Edges of Time

Well before Albert Einstein came along, philosophers through the ages had debated whether time could be mortal. Immanuel Kant considered the issue to be an “antinomy”—something you could argue both ways, leaving you not knowing what to think.

My father-in-law found himself on one horn of this dilemma when he showed up at an airport one evening only to find that his flight had long since departed. The people at the check-in counter chided him, saying he should have known that the scheduled departure time of “12 a.m.” meant the first thing in the morning. Yet my father-in-law’s confusion was understandable. Officially there is no such time as “12 a.m.” Midnight is neither ante meridiem nor post meridiem. It is both the end of one day and start of the next. In 24-hour time notation, it is both 2400 and 0000.

Aristotle appealed to a similar principle when he argued that time can have neither beginning nor end. Every moment is both the end of an era and the start of something new; every event is both the outcome of something and the cause of something else. So how could time possibly end? What would prevent the last event in history from leading to another? Indeed, how would you even define the end of time when the very concept of “end” presupposes time? “It is not logically possible for time to have an end,” asserts University of Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne. But if time cannot end, then the universe must be infinitely long-lived, and all the riddles posed by the notion of infinity come rushing in. Philosophers have thought it absurd that infinity could be anything but a mathematical idealization.

The triumph of the big bang theory and the discovery of black holes seemed to settle the question. The universe is shot through with singularities and could suffer a distressing variety of temporal cataclysms; even if it evades the big crunch, it might get done in by the big rip, the big freeze or the big brake. But then ask what singularities (big or otherwise) actually are, and the answer is no longer so clear. “The physics of singularities is up for grabs,” says Lawrence Sklar of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a leading philosopher of physics.

The very theory that begat these monsters suggests they cannot really exist. At the big bang singularity, for example, relativity theory says that the precursors of every single galaxy we see were squashed into a single mathematical point—not just a tiny pinprick but a true point of zero size. Likewise, in a black hole, every single particle of a hapless astronaut gets compacted into an infinitesimal point. In both cases, calculating the density means dividing by zero volume, yielding infinity. Other types of singularities do not involve infinite density but an infinite something else.

Although modern physicists do not feel quite the same aversion to infinity that Aristotle and Kant did, they still take it as a sign they have pushed a theory too far. For example, consider the standard theory of ray optics taught in middle school. It beautifully explains eyeglass prescriptions and funhouse mirrors. But it also predicts that a lens focuses light from a distant source to a single mathematical point, producing a spot of infinite intensity. In reality, light gets focused not to a point but to a bull’s-eye pattern. Its intensity may be high but is always finite. Ray optics errs because light is not really a ray but a wave.

In a similar vein, nearly all physicists presume that cosmic singularities actually have a finite, if high, density. Relativity theory errs because it fails to capture some important aspect of gravity or matter that comes into play near singularities and keeps the density under control. “Most people would say that they signal that the theory is breaking down there,” says physicist James B. Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

To figure out what goes on will take a more encompassing theory, a quantum theory of gravity. Physicists are still working on such a theory, but they figure that it will incorporate the central insight of quantum mechanics: that matter, like light, has wavelike properties. These properties should smear the putative singularity into a small wad, rather than a point, and thereby banish the divide-by-zero error. If so, time may not, in fact, end.

Physicists argue it both ways. Some think time does end. The trouble with this option is that the known laws of physics operate within time and describe how things move and evolve. Time’s end points are off the reservation; they would have to be governed not just by a new law of physics but by a new type of law of physics, one that eschews temporal concepts such as motion and change in favor of timeless ones such as geometric elegance. In one proposal three years ago Brett McInnes of the National University of Singapore drew on ideas from the leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity—string theory. He suggested that the primordial wad of a universe had the shape of a torus; because of mathematical theorems concerning tori, it had to be perfectly uniform and smooth. At the big crunch or a black hole singularity, however, the universe could have any shape whatsoever, and the same mathematical reasoning need not apply; the universe would in general be extremely raggedy. Such a geometric law of physics differs from the usual dynamical laws in a crucial sense: it is not symmetrical in time. The end wouldn’t just be the beginning played backward.

Other quantum gravity researchers think that time stretches on forever, with neither beginning nor end. In their view, the big bang was simply a dramatic transition in the eternal life of the universe. Perhaps the prebangian universe started to undergo a big crunch and turned around when the density got too high—a big bounce. Artifacts of this prehistory may even have made it through to the present day [see “Follow the Bouncing Universe,” by Martin Bojowald; Scientific American, October 2008]. By similar reasoning, the singular wad at the heart of a black hole would boil and burble like a miniaturized star. If you fell into a black hole, you would die a painful death, but at least your timeline would not end. Your particles would plop into the wad and leave a distinct imprint on it, one that future generations might see in the feeble glow of light the hole gives off.

By supposing that time marches on, proponents of this approach avoid the need to speculate about a new type of law of physics. Yet they, too, run into trouble. For instance, the universe gets steadily more disordered with time; if it has been around forever, why is it not in total disarray by now? As for a black hole, how would the light bearing your imprint possibly manage to escape the hole’s gravitational clutches?

The bottom line is that physicists struggle with antinomy no less than philosophers have. The late John Archibald Wheeler, a pioneer of quantum gravity, wrote, “Einstein’s equation says ‘this is the end’ and physics says ‘there is no end.’ ” Faced with this dilemma, some people throw up their hands and conclude that science can never resolve whether time ends. For them, the boundaries of time are also the boundaries of reason and empirical observation. But others think the puzzle just requires some fresh thinking. “It is not outside the scope of physics,” says physicist Gary Horowitz of U.C. Santa Barbara. “Quantum gravity should be able to provide a definite answer.”

How Time Slips Away

The hal 9000 may have been a computer, but he was probably the most human character in 2001: A Space Odyssey—expressive, resourceful, a bundle not just of wires but also of contradictions. Even his death was evocative of human death. It was not an event but a process. As Dave slowly pulled out his circuit boards, HAL lost his mental faculties one by one and described how it felt. He articulated the experience of regression in a way that people who die are often unable to. Human life is a complex feat of organization, the most complex known to science, and its emergence or submergence passes through the twilight between life and not life. Modern medicine shines a lantern into that twilight, as doctors save premature babies who once would have been lost and bring back people who have passed what was once a point of no return.

As physicists and philosophers struggle to grasp the end of time, many see parallels with the end of life. Just as life emerges out of lifeless molecules that organize themselves, time might emerge from some timeless stuff that brings itself to order [see “Is Time an Illusion?” by Craig Callender; Scientific American, June]. A temporal world is a highly structured one. Time tells us when events occur, for how long and in what order. Perhaps this structure was not imposed from the outside but arose from within. What can be made can be unmade. When the structure crumbles, time ends.

By this thinking, time’s demise is no more paradoxical than the disintegration of any other complex system. One by one, time loses its features and passes through the twilight from existence to nonexistence.

The first to go might be its unidirectionality—its “arrow” pointing from past to future. Physicists have recognized since the mid-19th century that the arrow is a property not of time per se but of matter. Time is inherently bidirectional; the arrow we perceive is simply the natural degeneration of matter from order to chaos, a syndrome that anyone who lives with pets or young children will recognize. (The original orderliness might owe itself to the geometric principles that McInnes conjectured.) If this trend keeps up, the universe will approach a state of equilibrium, or “heat death,” in which it cannot get possibly get any messier. Individual particles will continue to reshuffle themselves, but the universe as a whole will cease to change, any surviving clocks will jiggle in both directions and the future will become indistinguishable from the past [see “The Cosmic Origins of Time’s Arrow,” by Sean M. Carroll; Scientific American, June 2008]. A few physicists have speculated that the arrow might reverse, so that the universe sets about tidying itself up, but for mortal creatures whose very existence depends on a forward arrow of time, such a reversal would mark an end to time as surely as heat death would.

Losing Track of Time

More recent research suggests that the arrow is not the only feature that time might lose as it suffers death by attrition. Another could be the concept of duration. Time as we know it comes in amounts: seconds, days, years. If it didn’t, we could tell that events occurred in chronological order but couldn’t tell how long they lasted. That scenario is what University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose presents in a new book, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe.

Throughout his career, Penrose really seems to have had it in for time. He and University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking showed in the 1960s that singularities do not arise only in special settings but should be everywhere. He has also argued that matter falling into a black hole has no afterlife and that time has no place in a truly fundamental theory of physics.

In his latest assault, Penrose begins with a basic observation about the very early universe. It was like a box of Legos that had just been dumped out on the floor and not yet assembled—a mishmash of quarks, electrons and other elementary particles. From them, structures such as atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies had to piece themselves together step by step. The first step was the creation of protons and neutrons, which consist of three quarks apiece and are about a femtometer (10^–15 meter) across. They came together about 10 microseconds after the big bang (or big bounce, or whatever it was).

Before then, there were no structures at all—nothing was made up of pieces that were bound together. So there was nothing that could act as a clock. The oscillations of a clock rely on a well-defined reference such as the length of a pendulum, the distance between two mirrors or the size of atomic orbitals. No such reference yet existed. Clumps of particles might have come together temporarily, but they could not tell time, because they had no fixed size. Individual quarks and electrons could not serve as a reference, because they have no size, either. No matter how closely particle physicists zoom in on one, all they see is a point. The only sizelike attribute these particles have is their so-called Compton wavelength, which sets the scale of quantum effects and is inversely proportional to mass. And they lacked even this rudimentary scale prior to a time of about 10 picoseconds after the big bang, when the process that endowed them with mass had not yet occurred. “There’s no sort of clock,” Penrose says. “Things don’t know how to keep track of time.” Without anything capable of marking out regular time intervals, either an attosecond or a femtosecond could pass, and it made no difference to particles in the primordial soup.

Penrose proposes that this situation describes not only the distant past but also the distant future. Long after all the stars wink out, the universe will be a grim stew of black holes and loose particles; then even the black holes will decay away and leave only the particles. Most of those particles will be massless ones such as photons, and again clocks will become impossible to build. In alternative futures where the universe gets snuffed out by, say, a big crunch, clocks don’t fare too well, either.

You might suppose that duration will continue to make sense in the abstract, even if nothing could measure it. But researchers question whether a quantity that cannot be measured even in principle really exists. To them, the inability to build a clock is a sign that time itself has been stripped of one of its defining features. “If time is what is measured on a clock and there are no clocks, then there is no time,” says philosopher of physics Henrik Zinkernagel of the University of Granada in Spain, who also has studied the disappearance of time in the early universe.

Despite its elegance, Penrose’s scenario does have its weak points. Not all the particles in the far future will be massless; at least some electrons will survive, and you should be able to build a clock out of them. Penrose speculates that the electrons will somehow go on a diet and shed their mass, but he admits he is on shaky ground. “That’s one of the more uncomfortable things about this theory,” he says. Also, if the early universe had no sense of scale, how was it able to expand, thin out and cool down?

If Penrose is on to something, however, it has a remarkable implication. Although the densely packed early universe and ever emptying far future seem like polar opposites, they are equally bereft of clocks and other measures of scale. “The big bang is very similar to the remote future,” Penrose says. He boldly surmises that they are actually the same stage of a grand cosmic cycle. When time ends, it will loop back around to a new big bang. Penrose, a man who has spent his career arguing that singularities mark the end of time, may have found a way to keep it going. The slayer of time has become its savior.

Time Stands Still

Even if duration becomes meaningless and the femtoseconds and attoseconds blur into one another, time isn’t dead quite yet. It still dictates that events unfold in a sequence of cause and effect. In this respect, time is different from space, which places few restrictions on how objects may be arranged within it. Two events that are adjacent within time—when I type on my keyboard, letters appear on my screen—are inextricably linked. But two objects that are adjacent within space—a keyboard and a Post-It note—might have nothing to do with each other. Spatial relations simply do not have the same inevitability that temporal ones do.

But under certain conditions, time could lose even this basic ordering function and become just another dimension of space. The idea goes back to the 1980s, when Hawking and Hartle sought to explain the big bang as the moment when time and space became differentiated. Three years ago Marc Mars of the University of Salamanca in Spain and José M. M. Senovilla and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country applied a similar idea not to time’s beginning but to its end.

They were inspired by string theory and its conjecture that our four-dimensional universe—three dimensions of space, one of time—might be a membrane, or simply a “brane,” floating in a higher-dimensional space like a leaf in the wind. We are trapped on the brane like a caterpillar clinging to the leaf. Ordinarily, we are free to roam around our 4-D prison. But if the brane is blown around fiercely enough, all we can do is hold on for dear life; we can no longer move. Specifically, we would have to go faster than the speed of light to make any headway moving along the brane, and we cannot do that. All processes involve some type of movement, so they all grind to a halt.

Seen from the outside, the timelines formed by successive moments in our lives do not end but merely get bent so that they are lines through space instead. The brane would still be 4-D, but all four dimensions would be space. Mars says that objects “are forced by the brane to move at speeds closer and closer to the speed of light, until eventually the trajectories tilt so much that they are in fact superluminal and there is no time. The key point is that they may be perfectly unaware that this is happening to them.”

Because all our clocks would slow down and stop, too, we would have no way to tell that time was morphing into space. All we would see is that objects such as galaxies seemed to be speeding up. Eerily, that is exactly what astronomers really do see and usually attribute to some unknown kind of “dark energy.” Could the acceleration instead be the swan song of time?

Your Time Is Up

By this late stage, it might appear that time has faded to nothingness. But a shadow of time still lingers. Even if you cannot define duration or causal relations, you can still label events by the time they occurred and lay them out on a timeline. Several groups of string theorists have recently made progress on how time might be stripped of this last remaining feature. Emil J. Martinec and Savdeep S. Sethi of the University of Chicago and Daniel Robbins of Texas A&M University, as well as Horowitz, Eva Silverstein of Stanford University and Albion Lawrence of Brandeis University, among others, have studied what happens to time at black hole singularities using one of the most powerful ideas of string theory, known as the holographic principle.

A hologram is a special type of image that evokes a sense of depth. Though flat, the hologram is patterned to make it look as though a solid object is floating in front of you in 3-D space. The holographic principle holds that our entire universe is like a holographic projection. A complex system of interacting quantum particles can evoke a sense of depth—that is to say, a spatial dimension that does not exist in the original system.

But the converse is not true. Not every image is a hologram; it must be patterned in just the right way. If you scratch a hologram, you spoil the illusion. Likewise, not every particle system gives rise to a universe like ours; the system must be patterned just so. If the system initially lacks the necessary regularities and then develops them, the spatial dimension pops into existence. If the system reverts to disorder, the dimension disappears whence it came.

Imagine, then, the collapse of a star to a black hole. The star looks 3-D to us but corresponds to a pattern in some 2-D particle system. As its gravity intensifies, the corresponding planar system jiggles with increasing fervor. When a singularity forms, order breaks down completely. The process is analogous to the melting of an ice cube: the water molecules go from a regular crystalline arrangement to the disordered jumble of a liquid. So the third dimension literally melts away.

As it goes, so does time. If you fall into a black hole, the time on your watch depends on your distance from the center of the hole, which is defined within the melting spatial dimension. As that dimension disintegrates, your watch starts to spin uncontrollably, and it becomes impossible to say that events occur at specific times or objects reside in specific places. “The conventional geometric notion of spacetime has ended,” Martinec says.

What that means in practice is that space and time no longer give structure to the world. If you try to measure objects’ positions, you find that they appear to reside in more than one place. Spatial separation means nothing to them; they jump from one place to another without crossing the intervening distance. In fact, that is how the imprint of a hapless astronaut who passes the black hole’s point of no return, its event horizon, can get back out. “If space and time do not exist near a singularity, the event horizon is no longer well defined,” Horowitz says.

In other words, string theory does not just smear out the putative singularity, replacing the errant point with something more palatable while leaving the rest of the universe much the same. Instead it reveals a broader breakdown of the concepts of space and time, the effects of which persist far from the singularity itself. To be sure, the theory still requires a primal notion of time in the particle system. Scientists are still trying to develop a notion of dynamics that does not presuppose time at all. Until then, time clings stubbornly to life. It is so deeply engrained in physics that scientists have yet to imagine its final and total disappearance.

Science comprehends the incomprehensible by breaking it down, by showing that a daunting journey is nothing more than a succession of small steps. So it is with the end of time. And in thinking about time, we come to a better appreciation of our own place in the universe as mortal creatures. The features that time will progressively lose are prerequisites of our existence. We need time to be unidirectional for us to develop and evolve; we need a notion of duration and scale to be able to form complex structures; we need causal ordering for processes to be able to unfold; we need spatial separation so that our bodies can create a little pocket of order in the world. As these qualities melt away, so does our ability to survive. The end of time may be something we can imagine, but no one will ever experience it directly, any more than we can be conscious at the moment of our own death.

As our distant descendants approach time’s end, they will need to struggle for survival in an increasingly hostile universe, and their exertions will only hasten the inevitable. After all, we are not passive victims of time’s demise; we are perpetrators. As we live, we convert energy to waste heat and contribute to the degeneration of the universe. Time must die that we may live.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

George Musser is a staff editor for Scientific American.

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