Traditional understandings of the supernatural events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection, ascension, and second coming (parousia) have faced many challenges by the development of cosmology. Just as the dualism of Plato and Descartes shaped incarnation and atonement, ancient and medieval cosmology has impacted the way Christians developed thoughts about Jesus’ survival and return. Attempts by the church to limit the development of cosmology have left very deep scars in the academic community. Copernicus and Galileo were not exactly awarded sainthood by the church. In chapter 4 of “Christology and Science”, LeRon Shults attempts to rethink this aspect of theology by humbly working with science rather than fighting it.

These cosmological developments challenge several aspects of traditional formulations in Christian eschatology, perhaps even more deeply than the rejection of empyrean sphere and elemental astrology by Newtonian mechanics. Here we have issues that go far beyond simply giving up the tiered hierarchical cosmos presupposed in some expressions of Jesus’ ascension. The idea that Christ will “return” from a place in the cosmos at a particular point on a timeline, simultaneous to all observers, is itself rendered problematic in light of relativity theory.

This clearly undercuts the whole enterprise of trying to determine the date for such an event on an (absolute) “time-line,” but it also opens up a whole range of new possibilities for Christian eschatology. The main point at this stage in the argument is that we must engage the cosmological assumptions of our own context, just as Origen and Thomas (and others) engaged theirs. Undoubtedly our current understandings of space and time will seem equally inadequate to future generations, but this should not keep us from embracing the ongoing theological task of reforming Christology.

We can no longer imagine Jesus going “up” into heaven or literally coming back “down” on a cloud. The Christian tradition has tried to uphold the intuition that the resurrection, ascension, and coming of Jesus are in some sense “bodily”. At the same time the tradition has wanted to affirm (with Paul) that Jesus became a life giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). Again, the dualism of material and immaterial substances led theologians to some dicey conclusions. Fundamentalists continue to marginalize Christianity by setting it against science and suggesting that being Christian actually means adopting ancient or medieval superstitions (their "world view"). We do have other options. Some current day Christians accept science but don’t have any problems using religious metaphors that seem silly in the face of our present understanding of the world. Other people of faith abandoned the language completely (maybe even the term “Christian”). Bishop John Shelby Spong famously said, “Christianity must change or die”. To be honest, I’m not sure which option is better, but I’m not ready to give up yet. I’m still holding hope that Christianity can survive after the end of Cartesian dualism.

The latest scientific discoveries do present new metaphors for discussing what it might mean to transform our way of being and incarnating divine values. The very notion of matter itself has been refigured as a result of late modern developments in physical cosmology. Today even particle physics is not really about actual “particles”, but rather about relationships within a shared energy field. Matter is no longer center stage in the discussion and it has been replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information. Take for example the property of “wetness”, which is not a property of individual water molecules, but emerges when they are organized appropriately in sufficient quantities. Similarly, as chemical reactions in inorganic materials increase beyond the threshold of complexity they power what we have come to call “living metabolism”. It is the collective emergent properties of these materials that we call life. These new scientific understandings give us rich metaphorical language to describe the coming of Christ as a web of interrelated parts that bring about the emergence of a greater whole. The cosmology of the 21st century may well bring even more ways for us to imagine what the New Testament authors described as “the kingdom of God” and “the body of Christ”.