The Church as Collaborator in the Human Project
To be Forward Thinking
I am on onboard with the human project. I am excited about every scientific and technological advancement. Even more, I am grateful for the depths of reality that we have been able to plumb in this potent sliver of human history that began with the Renaissance. For the first time, we are beginning to understand the interior structure and dynamism by which inanimate matter becomes living and interactive. Imagine! It is scary. It is amazing. Whatever it is, it is real, and our foremost allegiance is to the real and not to the ideological. It is because all of this is real that we are interested in shaping it for the good. For we must now grapple in a new way with our perennial, existential questions in this freshly unveiled universe, in order that we may walk in it by the undying light of Wisdom.
Does Wisdom only descend to this earth in a Greco-Roman garb? Was life better “back then” in the classical days of antiquity? If it was, let the world go back. But they say it cannot, that it is impractical now to go back to those healthier times when the world was still free of phones and TVs. Is it that the world cannot go back? Or that it would not? What we mean to say – or perhaps what we are afraid to admit – is that the world has no compelling reason to go back because today’s world, despite all its shortcomings, is unimaginably better. The only way it would ever go back is if civilization was so utterly decimated that the world had no choice but to start over. Perhaps this is a bold claim, but it is only bold in that it is violently opposed, not because there is any reasonable ground on which to oppose it.
In the moment of need, all pretensions disappear. When one is hungry, one eats from the yield of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. When one is naked, one puts on the affordable clothing mass produced by machines. When one is on the verge of death, one receives all that is proffered by medicine, technology, AI, and every other product of human genius. If I suddenly found myself in a world where 30 out of 100 children would be dead before they turned 5, including my own nephews and nieces, I would hope and pray that I was only in a nightmare. Yet that was precisely the condition of all our ancestors before the modern era, over the countless centuries, since time immemorial.
We ought to think forward and not backward, to be forward thinking, and to thank God for progress. Anyone who is taking humanity forward is a friend of humanity even if not always a mature and wise friend. That is why our attitude towards such people must be one of collaboration. A collaborator is one who contributes, encourages, and challenges, not one who merely points the finger. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven in a batch of dough. It has no business walking away from the dough; it wants that dough to rise. To be forward thinking is to engage collaboratively with the constructive developments of the world, and I believe that this is the call of the Church.
Non-Collaborative Spirits
At times we may find ourselves possessed by non-collaborative spirits. Among these, I will draw our attention to the dichotomous spirit and the condemnatory spirit in particular.
The Dichotomous Spirit
At times, we see the developments of the world as existing in a different plane of reality from our intellectual and spiritual lives. As intellectuals, we may continue speculating about questions that were raised before we knew that there are a couple of trillion galaxies in the cosmos or that other hominid species once coexisted with us. We expatiate on our topics as though nothing has changed and that these ground-breaking discoveries could largely be ignored.
Spiritually, sometimes we opt for a “childlike” spirituality, which allows us to indefinitely extend the carelessness of childhood without ever having to face reality. Chasing this euphoria in fleeting experiences, we fail to embrace the responsibilities of our personal lives, not to mention our shared responsibility for the great questions, advancements, and evils of our day. Or perhaps we opt for a selectively “monastic” spirituality, not living under any kind of obedience but isolating ourselves from the world whenever we feel uncomfortable. One way or the other, we live out our spiritual lives in alternate universes constructed by ritualism, emotionalism, legalism, or anything else.
The Condemnatory Spirit
By calling this spirit ‘condemnatory’, I do not mean to connote that it comes from arrogance. In fact, in all the cases I have seen, it has never been malicious. The condemnations are defensive, protective, and, in that sense, even loving. Nevertheless, when we merely point fingers and speak in intangible generalities, we benefit no one despite the best of intentions. In fact, we do harm, since we position the Church as a force antithetical to human advancement. Consequently, with every step forward, the world grows increasingly suspicious of the Church. This happened after the Church’s initial (and in some cases persistent) reactions to the discoveries of modern science and philosophy. Charles Darwin traveled on a ship for five years, collecting fossils, and trying his best to make sense of the past. What he published was a sincere and brilliant attempt to reasonably explain the reality that is before our very eyes, though we would sometimes prefer to close our eyes. But if we find ourselves resisting the genuine discovery of truth, how can we say that we stand with Christ, who is truth? If we are afraid of what is discovered in nature, how can we say that we represent God who chose to design nature in this way? We must all be very careful before condemning scientific discovery and technological advancement, if not for the aforementioned principles, at the very least because it puts us on the wrong side of history. We passively accept every technological advancement that preceded us (e.g. airplanes, spectacles, books). How silly would that make us if we rejected every advancement that succeeded us, which our descendants will embrace as naturally as we drive our cars each day?
Summary
In summary, I suggest that we the Church should be collaborators. We should be involved. We should care. This does not mean that we have all the answers, and we can be honest about that. Perhaps we do not yet know what quantum superposition/collapse mean metaphysically or in relation to salvation history. Perhaps we do not yet know if there are hard boundaries between the capacities of an artificial neural network and a biological, central nervous system and what this may mean anthropologically and theologically. We are fellow pilgrims on the journey, not people already there. But even now, we have been given the firstfruits of the Spirit to share with the world this great hope, this wonderful and saving message of Jesus Christ, the power of the Cross to lift every burden of evil, and the infinite mercy of God. In other words, Christ empowers us to be the soul of the world, and that is what it means to be a collaborator in this great, human project.