Some 18 months ago I was just getting acquainted with Dr. Ilia Delio’s writing, and shared a brief paragraph about getting our theology better aligned with our cosmology. Today I’m reading her book Christ in Evolution, wherein she provides a longer version of that insight. I heard her say something similar on the B4NP podcast, and it was the biggest lightbulb moment I’ve had in a while. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with it, but the core of the idea seems just right.

So from chapter 1 (paragraph breaks and emphasis mine):

In his book A Window to the Divine, Zachary Hayes writes that “a careful reading of the theological tradition prior to the modern era indicates that before the so-called Copernican revolution … there existed a religious cosmology that involved not only the insights of faith but the physical understanding of the cosmos as it was known at that time. The breakdown of such a cosmology by the shift from a geocentric model to a heliocentric model led eventually to the isolation of theology from the development of modern science.”

The most fundamental shift in our understanding of the cosmos is the move from the vision of a universe launched essentially in its present form by the hand of the creator at the beginning of time to a vision of the cosmos as a dynamic, unfolding chemical process, immensely large in both time and space…

According to Hayes, we live in two worlds. In our everyday experience we live in a culture deeply conditioned by the insights and theories of modern science. But in the context of the church, its theology and liturgy, we live in a premodern world. Christian theology, he states, no longer has an effective cosmology that enables believers to relate to the world in its physical character in a way that is consistent with their religious symbols. We need to reshape our religious understanding of the world, he claims, by engaging our faith with the best insights of science concerning the nature of the physical world.

Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, Chapter 1

As I’ve listened to Delio on a number of podcasts and read a couple of her books (with more on the pile to read), I’m amazed by how clearly she can embrace the Bible’s teaching about Jesus but interpret it in ways that embraces modern science — ways that are very different than the anti-scientific approach most churches I’ve been a part of have held to.

My heart and imagination come alive as I consider these possibilities. “There’s so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see,” wrote Rich Mullins. And with these new lenses through which to consider the cosmos, I echo his next line: “And everywhere I go, I’m looking”.