On Waking

Photo by Shelia Peuschel

Faith & Science We Work Best with Two Eyes Open

Words & Photo: The Rev. Dr. Vincent Joseph Kopp, Priest Associate

As Christians we are told to “Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (BCP, 324)

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused me to think about faith and science in a new way.

Participating in the diocesan task force for reopening churches has made me realize that people of faith must also be people of science. Not scientists, necessarily, but persons who find in God’s cCreation lessons about how we might fulfill the Great Commandments in a crisis like the one we face, that calls upon science.

In the context of the Great Commandments, faith and science are never in conflict. The pivotal point is that while each is expressed in different words, each is “like unto” the other in every respect. Like two eyes in one head, faith and science work best together. They work together to help us see creation and our relation to it more clearly. Close one eye—or the other—and your view gets distorted. Divide the eyes’ neural connections in the brain’s anatomy, and your mind becomes less integrated, more nonsensical.

Folks who insist faith trumps science or science negates faith distort God’s creation. Neither faith nor science can bear the full burden of God’s reality. Only love can do that, and then imperfectly until time ends. Our job is to be in relationship with God, our neighbors and ourselves, on God’s terms, and to do the best we can.

Where faith tries to uncover creation’s certain meaning and science attempts to uncover Creation’s unfolding mystery, neither meaning supplied by faith nor mystery dispelled by science completes God’s love for us. That’s because God’s love is impassable beyond meaning and mystery and depends totally on relationship.

Like Moses, we can ask God to “show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). Faith and science, in different ways, make this request—and most clumsily at that. Yet experience teaches what scripture reveals—God’s reply will be “I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I shall take away my hand, and you will see my back; but my face shall not be seen” (Exodus 33:22–23).

Only in Christ do we get to see full-on what Moses asked to see; and only in keeping God’s Great Commandments do we see God’s glory through Jesus Christ, who loves us best of all. Great as faith and science are — alone or together—they can only place us near God’s back. To see God we must first see God in others, as Jesus Christ’s Gospel reveals and Christianity purports to teach.

And this brings me back to the task force work being done. It is really an act of love. Put simply, the guidance prepared for churches to reopen illustrates science serving faith, but also faith deferring to science. But it is not just any faith or any science. It is faith and science as two eyes, God-given, working as one mind, heart, and

soul to fulfill God’s will for us in our part of creation. The faith served by the task force is the faith Christians profess when they work to keep the Great Commandments as a whole, not as separate installments. It is the true faith of the full gospel contained in the Great Commandments.

There are people who profess to love God but whose actions reveal they surely hate their neighbors (or themselves). Conversely, there are those who evidently really love themselves and mostly tolerate their neighbors but cannot love God—either because God has “disappointed” them, or they don’t believe God exists in the first place. In either case, such people might live by a Good Commandment but rarely strive to live by the Great Commandments. Instead they would sooner assert some rights-based or faith-based claim of personal or holy exception to the detriment of others than accept an evidence-based or science-based conclusion that protects their neighbors as well as themselves.

That the Holy Spirit remains with us always is central to Christian belief though agreement on what this looks like divides Christians. For us it is incarnational. During this pandemic, incarnate love might mean another virtual meeting, wearing a mask, and staying 6 feet apart even if you don’t want to. This is what science recommends. This is what faith should support. Loving our neighbors as ourselves, after all, is “like unto” loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind—the very mind that best works when two eyes remain wide open.