Introduction: Can Transcendence be Found in Things?

Abstract

This book is about many questions: God, time, and the search by human beings for God in time and space. As Coleridge said of George Berkeley, the philosopher and bishop, because the topic reaches from ‘tar-water, ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace,’1 carrying a map or fixing upon a geophysical satellite might be useful as readers travel through the terrain. In the foreground I will examine the ways in which metaphors for time function in the natural sciences and theology or religious studies.2 But I will aim for a view of God and divine action in our world that includes, rather than excludes, all of creation – from the formation of metals and planets to human beings. To complete these tasks will require some clarity about notions of metaphor, changing notions of temporality in the sciences, and Christian theology. If it has been chronically painful for theology since the nineteenth century to become privatized, relegated to personal experience or intimate interpersonal interactions, this book hopes to be some remedy.