One of my college roommates turned out to be a world class physicist. The last time I heard Barry Berman’s voice in public was many years ago, when my wife and I were driving the long-haul route, via the Pennsylvania Turnpike, from our residence in Akron, Ohio to our old farmhouse in southwestern, Maine.
At one point I flicked on the car radio, and – that was Barry’s voice! He was being interviewed on NPR, because he had just published a scholarly article that proposed a new finding about the age of the universe (!).
Barry, who died some years ago, was a particle physicist, among many other things. As a research faculty member of the University of California, Berkeley, he had figured out a way to go very small in order to come to some very large conclusions. Particles, in Barry’s reckoning back then, told a truth about the whole cosmos.
I would like to think of myself as a particle theologian of the whole creation. It has been my habit over my theological lifetime to go very small in order to project some very large theological claims. Some have called this kind of theological vision “the scandal of particularity.” I agree. But it’s also more, or it can be. I believe that this way of doing theology can lead to – the riches of universality.
Let me illustrate by calling to mind the contributions of two great theologians from the last century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich, both of whom were of deep existential consequence for me as a college undergraduate.
In those days, I was struggling to find a responsible way for Christians like myself to follow Jesus in the public arena, not just to devote myself to some inner, private spirituality or even some more public, liturgical praxis. By the grace of God, and the help of my own campus pastor, I discovered the theological legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who had joined in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s was a profoundly public, not just a private, theology of Christian discipleship.
Back then, with many others, I also struggled to find creative theological ways to take seriously the findings of the natural sciences, from cosmological physics to the insights of biology and ecology. By the grace of God, and again at the suggestion of my own campus pastor, I then also discovered the lectures and the works of Paul Tillich and his theology of culture. Tillich claimed the whole world of cultural creativity as his own, above all the arts and the theology of nature, not just the inner world of personal faith or the communal world of church practices.
Early on, then, when I was first intensively studying theology, with the help of theological visionaries such as Bonhoeffer and Tillich, I found myself both a theological particularist and a theological universalist. Surprise now. What goes around, comes around.
In what is truly my last book, The Earth and the Fullness Thereof: A Down-Home Reader in Ecological Theology, I deal not only with the challenges of being an enthusiastic disciple of Jesus in this, our era of global, ecojustice crisis, I also try to describe for readers how they can discover a creative and inspiring theological vision inspired by the arts.
I wholeheartedly invite anyone who’s interested to come along. In these times of sometimes unbearable political, cultural, and ecological crisis: discover or rediscover what are for me and for many others who take theology seriously is the scandal of particularity and the riches of universality, with particular reference to the theological creativity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich. Imagine yourself, too, as a particle theologian of the whole creation.
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