Preface
Preface
I recall as a young PhD student in cell biology at Rutgers walking into my advisor’s office. I had just been observing motile immune cells of a sea cucumber under the microscope moving about with what looked like directed intentional motility to me. With no food, chemotaxis, or predatory pressures in the medium of the microscope slide to influence their behavior, the cells were free to move on their own volition in real time. In my observations, it seemed that the cells were making “decisions” regarding directionality and speed of movement. Sometimes two cells would encounter one another, pause, slide over one another in a kind of mutual exploration and then go their ways. What I was observing appeared as though the cells had a deeper kind of “knowing” or awareness beyond chemical stimuli. Careful not to anthropomorphize the cells’ behavior to what might very well be random motility, I did what any cell biology doctoral student worth their weight in salt does: I formulated a hypothesis.
So, on that day I walked into my advisor’s office with the intent to design an experiment to test cell consciousness. I explained my observations carefully and methodically. I outlined my hypothesis and my experimental approach to test it. My advisor keenly listened, nodding a time or two, interjected with the occasional “Hmmmmm . . . I see.” When I was finished and proposed to test my hypothesis, he peered over the rim of his glasses, glared straight at me and said, “Leave my office and don’t ever talk to me of this nonsense again.” I was chastised into the methodological naturalism of my discipline, which firmly demarcated the lines of what was “science” and what was not. Questioning the metaphysics of cellular consciousness was not.
Now you might think that the adamant discouragement of, and humiliation involved in, asking these kinds of questions would have deterred me from exploring them, particularly at such a formative stage in my scientific development. Well, it did not. In fact, it sent me into an interior world within my own head where thoughts and ideas about the natural world, its physics and metaphysics, particularly involving biological systems, had deep theological underpinnings. After my post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and as a young faculty member at Boston University, I had developed a kind of dualistic way of being—my external life was compartmentalized into two parallel, and very separate, tracks. There was the one track of being a marine cellular immunologist, studying the biochemistry, immunology, and cell biology of marine invertebrates, and the other parallel track was my life of faith, participating in ecclesial activities and personal spiritual practice. It was in the confines of my interior world that the two tracks crossed and became one convergent highway of God’s divine acting in and through the structures that were created, the molecular pathways and processes that I was teaching to my biology students, and researching in my laboratory.
However, I could not write grants to test the hypotheses that were building up in my brain. I had to write grants regarding how sea urchin blood clotted or how hemoglobin was transported within the invertebrate water-vascular system. However, as God’s wise leading would have it, I was connected with the Science and Religion program at BU under the direction of Dr. Wesley Wildman. Dr. Wildman contacted my department to recruit a cell biologist to teach cell and molecular biology to doctoral students studying the intersection of science and theology. Out of all the faculty in my program, I was the only one who eagerly volunteered. This was the early 1990s when the emerging discipline of Science and Religion was taking flight. So, there were people who thought like me after all. I found a home and a community.
Again, as God’s wise leading would have it, I was able to flourish at the University of Northwestern in St. Paul, Minnesota, a Christian liberal arts institution where I have been a professor for eighteen years now. Northwestern is really a gem of a school, dedicated to the integration of faith and learning in all of the academic disciplines, including the sciences. Originally, my colleagues in marine biology out east scoffed at me for even thinking of moving to the mid-west to a small Christian college. “Lisanne, look at the map—you are as far from an ocean as you can get anywhere on the continent of North America! As a marine biologist you are committing professional suicide.” My walk of faith had taught me to trust God’s leading. In fact, moving to Minnesota was not professional suicide, but the exact opposite. I was able to travel to world oceans with my students to do fieldwork with echinoderms, which included a Fulbright to Japan, and I was able to have a robust laboratory with a room full of aquaria and a whole lot of seawater. However, and most importantly, I was able to pursue the questions that were incubating in my mind since my early graduate school days and before. At Northwestern, I was given the support and freedom I needed to integrate biology and theology. With the enthusiastic support of the administration, I was able to develop a full undergraduate program in Science and Theology including an academic minor, a seminar series once per month, and a full research program for undergraduate students under faculty in both the Department of Biology and Biochemistry, and in the Department of Biblical and Theological Studies as well.
I realized what a unique position I was in, and wanted to do it well. In order to do so, however, I was lacking one important and key ingredient: theological training. It was a decade ago that I went back to seminary “in my spare time.” The education I received at United Theological Seminary, leading to theological training and ministry ordination, became the foundational groundwork for my doctoral studies in Divinity and Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. It was under the guidance and direction of my second PhD supervisor, Dr. Phil Ziegler, that I was eagerly invited to ask those theological and metaphysical questions that had sent me with tail between my legs twenty-five years earlier.
Thinking about the workings of the natural world, and the meaning embedded in its structures and mechanisms has been a life-long pursuit beginning, not only when I was a graduate student at Rutgers, but when I was a nine year-old girl living in New Jersey exploring the changing biology in the pond in my yard. I had many afternoon walks in the woods with my younger brother and sister, or alone. I felt something when I was out there, something I simply did not have the vocabulary to articulate, nor the spirituality to connect it. The biology I learned by becoming a scientist. However, it wasn’t until seminary that I was introduced to the theology and mystic spirituality of Jonathan Edwards where I finally felt I had a kindred spirit in my understanding of the natural world as a revelation of the divine. Edwards, an eighteenth-century Congregational minister, used his theology of nature in sermons over the course of his ministries in Northampton and Stockbridge, and illustrations from nature were instrumental in the Great Awakening in American Religious History. As an ordained Congregational minister myself, I have brought to my own congregations this kind of Edwardsean experiential spirituality involving direct experiences in nature accompanied by contemplating messages embedded in its mechanistic complexities.
This book, A Trinitarian Theology of Nature, is my understanding of what nature is, what the role of science is toward that understanding, and most importantly, what I believe comprises the multidimensional glorious communication that the Love that Created intended it to be. You will have to read the rest of this book to see my few meager thoughts on this, but I will give you a teaser, the very teaser that Jonathan Edwards gave me. More than just the stage upon which the plan of redemption is played out (as Calvin put it), the whole of nature is God’s Trinitarian divine acting and Self-revelation. As a biologist I study and research its structural platform. But these many years engaging with the natural world as I have done, I have come to know it and love it as a communication of divine attributes and spiritual truths to creatures (beings called human) who were fashioned to receive it. Nature itself is a story of the God who out of infinite agape reaches to them every moment through the very world they encounter. We only need eyes to see and an open heart to receive the deep, beautiful, spiritual dimensions that the Love that Created will reveal to us. It is not all pretty roses and snowflakes. Although these are part of its mysterious beauty. It involves pain, suffering, loss. It involves resurrection, regeneration to new life, salvation. It is indeed a gospel of nature.
LW
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, 2019