Free first chapter
Ascendidng the Double Helix: Uniting with God Achieving the World's Future
Introducing myself and my new book to religious thinkers
(If you email me I will send you free the first chapter of the book I am here describing:)
Do Jacob’s Ladder and the Double Helix amount to the same thing?
This ponders the interface of science and religion, if they are talking again. What if God’s own becoming and human evolutionary becoming were seen as a rising double helix—a ladder on which God and humans are wrapped together in the ultimate Becoming of the universe?
What if humans make God the chief actor in their lives, in a new play. What if God turns around and summons humans to their own roles to complete the play? God and earth are in conversation! The world is no longer pronounced as heading for a dead end.
` The conversational traffic on Jacob’s ladder will be enriched with science and mystical Logos theology in grand dialog. DNA with God as ultimate Actor is catchy for the new conversation. So let it occur in sermons and teaching and congregational life too.
The image of the double helix ascending tantalizes us with thoughts of God and humans in evolutionary embrace, partners in divine and human Becoming—just as two molecules ascend, wrapped around each other, in a double helix. It evokes a reflective theology becoming a collaborative eschatology—God and humans sharing end-times. Much more than I saw on the old Berkeley millennial bumper sticker: Jesus is back and he’s pissed.
The Incarnation which grounds us is not merely something God once did, but an intimation of what God is always doing. The Incarnation not only presented Jesus but was meant to awaken us to ourselves. When Christ took on flesh, it also meant that all flesh took on Christ. Spirit can express itself through matter. God inhabits Creation. Jesus came to show us what God looks like in us. What if Christ became human so that humans could awaken to their divine nature?
So we are the Body of Christ in the world today. Whatever you are doing in the world as a Christian is what Christ is doing in the world these days! Diligent Christians are where God shows up. At his Ascension, Jesus is enlarged from the cross to be the key to the entire universe. Paul imagined newly founded churches as satellites of heaven. Christ the divine Logos is much more than the Jesus I invited into my heart.
Just imagine, you religious thinkers. The universe could be awakening to self-consciousness in this third millennium. Assisted by provocative sermons! All of nature, including humans, may be shot through with purpose, as we all once thought. We are no longer lost in a dead-end world
I imagine the Church regularly coming together inside a yellow tape that marks the boundaries where unique blessing occurs. Experiences inside the tape measure become thresholds to the world outside it. Inside the designated yellow tape is the “treasure in a field” that Jesus foresaw as the prize of the coming Kingdom of God. Perhaps visionary women will be the first to bear Christ again.
All this is in the new book I have just written. You can find out more about me in the Amazon author statement that underlies my six books on Christian thought. I am a Lutheran minister and professor emeritus in Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. My classes ranged among Biblical studies, history of Christian thought, liturgy, Christian social ethics, sociology of religion.