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A Symposium
Queens' College, Cambridge
1 and 2 October 1998
Chaired
by
The Revd. Dr. John Charlton Polkinghorne, K.B.E., F.R.S.
PURPOSE
 Meeting
at the ancient university that was home to Isaac Newton, James Clerk
Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford, and, in more recent times, Francis Crick
and Stephen Hawking, eleven scientists and theologians gather to probe
two interlocking mysteries - the love of God and the nature of the universe
He made. The Greek verb kenosis, used by St. Paul in Philippians
2:7 to describe the Incarnation as God's emptying of himself, has suggested
to some scholars that when the eternal Word became flesh, it renounced
divine power and knowledge. The implications of the possibility that
God shares in finite experience, having been "born in the likeness of
men and women" and "obediently accept[ed] even death, death on a cross,"
are profound. To consider what divine restraint may mean for us, as
truly free creatures, and what it signifies for natural history, the
evolving structure of space, and our cosmic destiny is the purpose of
the conversation among the leading thinkers from disparate disciplines
assembled at Queens' College, Cambridge, under the aegis of the John
Templeton Foundation.
CHAIR
The
distinguished particle physicist and author John Charlton Polkinghorne
was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1982. He took up his
new vocation in mid life after playing a role in the discovery of the
quark, the smallest elementary particle of matter. A graduate
of Cambridge University, where he was a fellow at Trinity College and
earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1955, Dr. Polkinghorne was
forty-eight years old when he resigned his Cambridge professorship of
mathematical physics to begin studies at Westcott House, an Anglican
seminary in Cambridge. He went on to serve as a curate in a working-class
parish in South Bristol and as vicar of Blean, a village outside of
Canterbury. In 1986 he accepted a call to return to Cambridge as dean
of the chapel at Trinity Hall, and in 1989, he was named president of
Queens' College, a position he held until his retirement in 1996. A
Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Society of Ordained
Scientists, Dr. Polkinghorne was granted a Sc.D. by Cambridge in 1974
in recognition of his contributions to research and has received honorary
degrees from the University of Kent, the University of Exeter, and the
University of Leicester. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997
and is currently a fellow of Queens' and Canon Theologian of Liverpool.
In addition to an extensive body of writing on theoretical elementary
particle physics, he is the author of eight books on the interrelationship
of science and theology in which he explores questions about God's action
in creation. His latest study, composed of his Terry Lectures, is Belief
in God in An Age of Science (Yale University Press, 1998).
PARTICIPANTS
Ian
G. Barbour has been writing about science and religion, with a deep
understanding of both cultures, for more than forty years. Born in Peking,
China to missionary parents, he graduated from Swarthmore College and
received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1950.
His initial research focused on cosmic ray mesons. He began his
teaching career at Kalamazoo College and rose from assistant professor
to professor and chair of the physics department. Taking a leave of
absence, he enrolled in the Yale Divinity School where he earned a B.D.
in 1956. The year before he had accepted an appointment at Carleton
College, teaching both physics and religion, and in 1974 he was promoted
to professor of religion and named director of Carleton's Program in
Science, Technology, and Public Policy. Dr. Barbour became the Winifred
and Athernon Bean Professor of Science, Technology, and Society in 1981,
a chair he held until his retirement in 1986. A member of Phi Beta Kappa
and Sigma Xi, he has won many honors over the course of his career,
including a Ford Faculty Fellowship, an American Council of Learned
Societies Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fullbright Fellowship,
a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Danforth Foundation's
Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the American Academy
of Religion's Annual Book Award. He was Lilly Visiting Professor of
Science, Theology, and Human Values at Purdue University in 1973-74
and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center in 1980-81. Dr. Barbour
has served on the editorial boards of Process Studies, Zygon, Research
in Philosophy and Technology, and Environmental Ethics. The most
recent of his dozen books is Religion and Science: Historical and
Contemporary Issues (Harper Collins, 1997 and SCM Press, 1998).
As
widely respected for his anti-apartheid Quaker activism as for his contributions
to cosmology, George F. Rayner Ellis was born in Johannesburg,
South Africa and educated in Natal and Cape Town. He received his Ph.D.
in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge University
in 1964 and has taught in both fields on three continents. For the past
decade, he has been a professor of applied mathematics at the University
of Cape Town while lecturing throughout the world. Dr. Ellis has served
as president of the Royal Society of South Africa and of the International
Society of General Relativity and Gravitation. His scientific work on
the mathematical foundations of general relativity and cosmology is
recognized for its depth, originality, and wit. He studies fundamental
questions like the geometrical structure of the universe and is not
afraid to challenge conventional assumptions about how our universe
began and is built. In his alternative model to the violent Big Bang,
the Whimper model, all starts with Quaker gentleness. In the bleak South
Africa of the 1970's and 1980's, Dr. Ellis used knowledge both as a
weapon and a shield against violence and injustice. During the past
decade, he has been deeply involved in race relations, housing policy,
and the future of the scientific enterprise of his country. He is a
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Mathematics
and its Applications, and among the prizes he has won are the Herschel
Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa, the Claude Harris Leon Foundation
Achievement Award, and the Gold Medal of the South African Association
for the Advancement of Science. He holds an honorary degree from Haverford
College. Co-author with Stephen W. Hawking of The Large Scale Structure
of Space Time (1973), his more than 200 scientific papers and eight
major books reflect the rigor of his mind and the depth of his moral
understanding. His latest studies are: (with Peter Coles) Is the
Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe (Cambridge
University Press, 1996) and (with Nancey Murphy) On the Moral Nature
of the Universe (Fortress Press, 1996).
Theologian
Paul S. Fiddes is principal of Regent's Park College, Oxford University,
and holds the title of University research lecturer. A graduate of Oxford,
where he took first-class honors degrees in English language and literature
and in theology, he went on to earn an Oxford D.Phil. in theology in
1975. After post-doctoral work at the University of Tübingen, he returned
to Oxford as a fellow and tutor in Christian doctrine at Regent's Park.
In 1979 he was also appointed a lecturer in theology at St. Peter's
College, Oxford, a position he held for six years. A member of the board
of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford since 1989, he served as chairman
from 1996 to 1998. Dr. Fiddes is an ordained minister in the Baptist
Union of Great Britain. He has served as a member of ecumenical study
commissions of the British Council of Churches and Churches Together
in England, as chairman of the Doctrine and Worship Committee of the
Baptist Union of Great Britain, and as convenor of the Division for
Theology and Education of the European Baptist Federation. Since 1995
he has been vice chair of the Baptist Doctrine and Inter-Church Cooperation
Study Commission of the Baptist World Alliance. His books include studies
of atonement and the relationship between Christian doctrine and literature.
In The Creative Suffering of God (1988), he surveys recent thought
about a central theme in Christian faith and explores what it may mean
to claim that God has freely chosen to be vulnerable to hurt from His
world. Dr. Fiddes's most recent work is a study of salvation in the
series Edinburgh Studies in Constructive Theology (forthcoming, Edinburgh
University Press).
Malcolm
A. Jeeves,
an eminent neuropsychologist, is the president of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy of Science and Letters. Currently
Honorary Research Professor at St. Andrews University, he was Foundation
Professor of Psychology there from 1969 to 1993 and established the
university's acclaimed psychology department. His own research has focused
on brain mechanisms and neuroplasticity. Educated at Cambridge University,
where he received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1956, he also did graduate
work at Harvard University. Before joining the St. Andrews faculty,
he was a lecturer at Leeds University and Foundation Professor of Psychology
at Adelaide University in South Australia. He served as vice principal
of St. Andrews from 1981 to 1985 and as director of the Medical Research
Council's Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group at St. Andrews from
1981 to 1986. A past member of three of Scotland's most active research
bodies, the Science and Engineering Research Council, the Neuroscience
and Mental Health Board of the Medical Research Council, and the Manpower
Sub-Committee of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, Dr. Jeeves
was formerly chairman of the International Neuropsychology Symposium
and editor-in-chief of Neuropsychologia. He was made a Commander
of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1992. He is the author
of more than one hundred scientific papers and eleven books, including
six related to science and faith. His most recent studies are Human
Nature at the Millennium (Baker, 1997) and (with R.J. Berry) Science,
Life and Christian Belief (Apollos, 1998). Dr. Jeeves served as
an acting company commander with the 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters
in Germany at the end of World War II. He is honorary sheriff of Fife
and Tayside in Scotland.
A
twenty-year old prisoner of war interned in England when he began his
study of theology and philosophy, Jürgen Moltmann has become
one of the most respected theologians of our time. For the past thirty
years, he has been engaged in a profound exploration of the meaning
of divine suffering and the unique role of the Cross in disclosing the
nature of God. His work draws not only on the great theological tradition
of Luther and Barth, but also on his experience as a pastor in post-war
Germany. After completing his doctorate in theology at Göttingen University,
he served the Protestant Church in Bremen for five years. In 1958 he
became a professor of theology in a Protestant seminary in the Rhineland
city of Wuppertal, and in 1963 he accepted the chairmanship of the department
of systematic theology and social ethics at the University of Bonn.
Since 1967 Dr. Moltmann has been a professor of systematic theology
on the Protestant Faculty of the University of Tübingen. As a visiting
professor, he has taught all over the world. He holds honorary degrees
from Raday College in Budapest, St. Andrews University, the University
of Louvain, and the University of Iasi in Rumania, as well as Emory
University, Duke University, Bethlehem Theological Seminary, and Kalamazoo
College in the United States. In addition to his monumental study, The
Crucified God (1974), Dr. Moltmann's most influential works include
his reflections on eschatology (Theology of Hope, 1967) and on
a Trinity deeply involved in and affected by the world (The Trinity
and the Kingdom of God, 1981). His latest book is The Coming
of God (Augsburg Fortress, 1996).
Arthur
Peacocke devoted the first twenty-five years of his career to teaching
and research in the field of physical chemistry, specializing in biological
macromolecules and making significant contributions to our understanding
of the structure of DNA. His principal interest during the past twenty-five
years has been in exploring the relation of science to theology. After
going up to Oxford, where he was a scholarship student at Exeter College,
he worked in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, with Nobel laureate
Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, and earned a D.Phil. in physical biochemistry
in 1948. For the next eleven years, he taught at the University of Birmingham
and then returned to Oxford as a fellow and tutor at St. Peter's College
from 1959 to 1973. In addition to publishing more than 125 papers and
three books in his field, he served as editor of Biopolymers,
the Biochemical Journal, and a series of monographs on physical
biochemistry published by Oxford University Press. While lecturing at
Birmingham, Dr. Peacocke also had studied theology, and he was ordained
a priest in the Church of England in 1971. He went on to serve as dean,
and as a fellow, of Clare College, Cambridge, for eleven years. He became
founding director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at St. Cross College, Oxford,
in 1985, a position he held until 1988. In 1995, he resumed the directorship
of the Centre, which studies issues in the relation of theology to science,
to oversee the administration of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
A founder of the Science and Religion Forum in the United Kingdom, of
the corresponding European society (ESSSAT), and of the Society of Ordained
Scientists, a new dispersed religious order, he was honorary chaplain
of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, from 1989 to 1996 and is now an
honorary canon. Dr. Peacocke has been awarded the senior degree of D.Sc.
as well as a D.D. by Oxford and honorary degrees from Georgetown University
and De Pauw University in the United States. He was made a member of
the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993. The author
of nine books exploring the relationship between science and religion,
his most recent studies are From DNA to Dean: Reflections and Explorations
of a Priest-Scientist (Canterbury Press, 1996) and God and Science:
A Quest for Christian Credibility (SCM Press, 1996).
One
of the world's leading environmental ethicists, Holmes Rolston III
has devoted his career to interpreting the natural world from a philosophical
perspective. His work is unusually accessible to a wide audience, and
he has been a pioneer in the application of ethical theory to actual
environmental problems through consultancies with conservation and policy
groups, including a Presidential commission and the United States Congress.
A graduate of Davidson College, where he majored in physics and was
elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he earned a B.D. from Union Theological Seminary
in Richmond, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in theology from the University of
Edinburgh before spending nearly a decade as a Presbyterian pastor in
rural southwest Virginia. He learned the natural history of his surroundings
in splendid detail and became an activist on local environmental issues.
In his search for a philosophy of nature to complement his love for
and curiosity about nature, he entered the philosophy program at the
University of Pittsburgh and received a master's degree in the philosophy
of science in 1968. He then embarked on a teaching career at Colorado
State University where he was named University Distinguished Professor
of Philosophy in 1992. Over the past three decades, he has served as
a visiting scholar and lecturer at universities throughout the world.
President of the Rocky Mountains-Great Plains Region of the American
Academy of Religion and past president of the International Society
for Environmental Ethics, Dr. Rolston is a founder of the influential
academic journal Environmental Ethics and a member of the editorial
boards of Zygon, Public Affairs Quarterly, and Conservation
Biology. He is the author of numerous professional papers and six
books, including the groundbreaking Environmental Ethics: Values
in and Duties to the Natural World (1988), a systematic presentation
of his developed views that provides a philosophical defense of policies
aimed at preserving wild species and wilderness. His latest study is
Conserving Natural Value (Columbia University Press, 1994). A new
work, Genes, Genesis and God, will be published by Cambridge
University Press next year.
William
H. Vanstone is a theologian who has been an Anglican priest for
nearly half a century. A 1948 graduate of Oxford University, which subsequently
awarded him a master of arts degree, he also holds both a B.A. and M.A.
from Cambridge University. He studied theology at Westcott House, Cambridge,
and was ordained in 1950. Turning aside from the possibility of an academic
career, he committed himself unreservedly to parish work in the north
of England. Curate at St. Thomas' Hall in Halliwell and then curate-in-charge
of the Kirkhold Conventional District, he was appointed vicar of Hattersley
in 1977 and, the following year, canon of Chester Cathedral, a position
he held until 1990. Named to the ancient office of Six Preacher at Canterbury
Cathedral in 1983, he was awarded a Lambeth doctor of divinity degree
by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1988. Canon Vanstone is the author
of several theological studies, including the prize-winning Love's
Endeavor, Love's Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God
(1977). Published in the United States as The Risk of Love, it
explores the nature and cost of authentic love, distinguishing it from
destructive imitations, and ponders the precarious activity of God in
creation, the "sublime self-giving, which is the ground and source and
origin of the universe" and requires the Creator to wait upon the response
of His creation. Canon Vanstone's most recent book is Fare Well in
Christ (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997).
Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, Keith Ward is one
of Britain's foremost writers on Christian belief and doctrine in the
light of modern scientific discoveries and in the context of other faith
traditions. He has explored the tensions between the classical tradition
of natural theology, with its atemporal and self-sufficient God, and
the Biblical idea of a creative and responsive God, critically examined
recent secular theories of human nature that have led to what he perceives
as a subtly misconceived attack on the idea of the soul, compared the
place of revelation and concept of creation in the major world religions,
and sketched a revised Christian vision that looks to a convergent global
spirituality. A graduate of the University of Wales, where he took a
first-class honors degree in 1962, he holds a B.Litt. from Oxford and
an M.A. and doctorate in divinity from both Oxford and Cambridge universities.
He has been a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, St. Andrews University,
and King's College, London. Elected a fellow and named dean and director
of studies in philosophy and in theology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge,
in 1976, he was appointed F. D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social
Theology at the University of London in 1986 and subsequently professor
of the history and philosophy of religion, a position he held for five
years before returning to Oxford in 1991. He has been a visiting professor
at Drake University and at the Claremont Graduate School and lectured
in India and New Zealand as well as throughout the United Kingdom. Ordained
a priest in the Church of England in 1972, he has been canon of Christ
Church, Oxford, for the past seven years and is a member of the Council
of the Institute of Philosophy and of the Academic Advisory Board of
the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Professor Ward formerly served
as joint editor of Religious Studies. The author of numerous
works on theology and philosophy, he is in the middle of a four-volume
series of comparative theology. His latest book is Religion and Human
Nature (Clarendon Press, 1998).
Michael
Welker is a philosopher and a theologian who works through the biblical
traditions to address questions of contemporary culture. Warning against
a reductionist systematics that can block thought, he has focused on
the interplay among religious, legal, moral, scientific, and other cultural
codes that shape the ethos of the postmodern world. His work is exceptionally
wide ranging, and he has recently considered the inner texture of pluralism
and central questions of pneumatology and Christology. Professor and
chair of systematic theology at the Theological Faculty of the University
of Heidelberg, he has been director of the university's Internationales
Wissenschaftsforum since 1996. Dr. Welker is a graduate of the University
of Tübingen where he studied with Jürgen Moltmann and earned a doctorate
in theology in 1973. Ordained in the Evangelische Kirche der Pfalz,
he received a Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1978. He was professor of systematic
theology at the Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen from
1983 to 1987 and, for the next four years, professor and chair of Reformed
theology at the Theological Faculty of the University of Münster. He
has held an honorary research fellowship at the Institute for the Advanced
Study of Religion of the University of Chicago Divinity School and been
a visiting professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada,
and, several times, at Princeton Theological Seminary. A member of the
Consultation on Science and Religion of Princeton's Center of Theological
Inquiry since 1993, he has published more than one hundred papers and
been the author or editor of nineteen books, including God the Spirit
(1995) and Creation and Reality (1998). His most recent study
is What Happens in the Lord's Supper? (Eerdmans, 1999).
QUEENS'
COLLEGE
Queens'
was founded in 1448 by Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI.
Seventeen years later, Queen Elizabeth Woodville became its second foundress
hence the position of the apostrophe in the college name. In 1511 a
much sought-after scholar from the Continent joined the Queens' faculty
at the invitation of its president, St. John Fisher. Erasmus of Rotterdam,
the most cosmopolitan Christian humanist of his age, taught at the college
for several years while working on a new Latin New Testament based on
his critical reading of the original Greek.
A
HYMN TO THE CREATOR
by
William H. Vanstone
Morning
glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows' flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;
Soaring music, tow'ring words,
Art's perfection, scholar's truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory's treasure, grace of youth;
Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love's agony,
Love's endeavour, love's expense.
Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.
Drained
is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.
Therefore
He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.
Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron'd in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.
The
Humble Approach Initiative
Contact Mary ann Meyers, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
A
Program of the John Templeton Foundation
300 Conshohocken State Road, Suite 500
West Conshohocken, PA 19428
610.941.2828 Fax 610.825.1730
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