The discipline of theology prides itself on being a rigorous one, especially when it comes to systematic theology and its philosophical foundations. But those foundations, according to John Haught, are largely built on an outmoded cosmology and a prescientific understanding of matter and spirit. Catholic Theology for an Unfinished Universe, the subtitle of his latest book, Resting on the Future, indicates a need for theology to redefine itself in light of what science now tells us about our universe: it is unfinished. It is precisely the incomplete nature of the universe that challenges the future of systematic theology, because creation is not static and fixed. Since the universe is in the process of being created and thus open to the future, theology can never posit a complete systematic organization of the things of faith. Haught therefore describes his objective as “simply to acclimatize Catholic theological and spiritual concern to the new environment of a dramatic cosmos” (3).
There is perhaps no better scholar today to challenge the foundations of Catholic theology than John Haught. As someone engaged in the science and religion dialogue for over forty years, he is keenly aware that theologians have only marginally engaged the new science. His book is a concerted effort to initiate a “Copernican shift” in contemporary theology by turning our vision from the past and toward the future, that is, “toward the horizon of what is yet to come” (27). This new vision, he argues, is the basis by which the universe “can become intelligible to us” (27).
His principal mentor in this new vision is the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Haught describes as “the most important religious thinker of the twentieth century” (38). Teilhard realized that the “world leans on the future as its true foundation” (27; emphasis in the original), thus challenging the static metaphysical foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The author writes that no Catholic thinker has done more in the post-Darwinian period to integrate modern science and Christian faith than Teilhard, although he was neither a theologian nor a biblical scholar.
Haught's book begins with the challenge of metaphysics, which, according to scientific materialists, is lifeless matter, and for traditional Roman Catholic theology, a spiritual and material world wedded to the eternal present. A “metaphysics of the eternal present,” the author states, “clips the wings of hope” and flattens out the sacramental depths of nature by locating the “fullness of being and intelligibility in a domain of timelessness immune to all becoming” (25). He looks to Teilhard's evolutionary metaphysics of the future and to another great Jesuit scholar, Bernard Lonergan, who spoke of evolution as emergent probability. In light of these scholars he indicates that only an anticipatory universe governed by the openness of drama and narrative can make room for the biblical God of hope, the God of the future. The whole universe and not just the people of God, he indicates, are on a long journey into a yet unknown future.
Haught lays the groundwork for a renewed Catholic theology in fourteen chapters, considering the gamut of theological thought, from God to the development of doctrine, spirituality, human life, suffering, destiny, and morality, as well as ecology and the future of human life. All along the way, he invites the reader to consider these areas through the lens of the future, reflecting on human life in relation to God, who is deeply related to a universe that is still coming into its fullness of being.
This is an important book by a scholar who has devoted his life to bridging religion and science. Today more than ever before these two pillars are in need of a new synthesis, one that respects the distinct disciplines but widens the horizon of inquiry to include cosmic, physical, and spiritual life. Haught provides a new path for future theologians to travel, but his is not a book for theologians alone or even those in pastoral ministry. Rather, it is directed to those who seek to make sense of faith in a chaotic, unfinished universe.
