One World, One Word: A Theology of Knowing Together
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #3
Dear friends,
I promised you a letter on shame, but halfway through the draft—somewhere between the neurobiology of affect and Paul’s language of the self—I realized I owed you a confession first. Before we can talk about shame and pride, we have to talk about truth, because every conversation about who we are depends on whether the world is still real, whether words still name it, and whether faith still means trusting reality rather than pledging loyalty to a team.
I · Confession — When Truth Began to Feel Optional
Conversations After Church
I learned that the slow, parish way. In the early 2000s, standing at the parish-hall doorway after Eucharist, I began to notice a shift in tone. Conversations that once began with “I wonder what’s true?” started to end with “Well, that’s my truth.” It sounded generous, even democratic, but underneath was fatigue. We were tired of seeking what was real together. It is easier to trade reality for civility and call it love.
A decade later, that fatigue had hardened into suspicion. Then came the pandemic—a kind of exam we hadn’t studied for. People who had prayed with me at hospital beds began forwarding conspiracy videos. Gentle souls declared, “You can’t trust science.” Others, no less devout, said, “You can’t trust religion.” Prudence metastasized into paranoia. We stopped asking what is true and started asking whose truth wins.
I wish I could say I was immune. I wasn’t. I compartmentalized like everyone else—faith on Sunday, science on Monday, politics on Tuesday. It felt responsible, as though holiness required zoning laws. But the longer I lived that way, the more polytheistic it felt. Different gods ruled different rooms, and none of them spoke. The god of efficiency at work, the god of sentiment at home, the god of outrage online—each promised control; none delivered peace. We multiplied gods and called it adulthood.
Whatever claims our ultimate concern becomes our god—whether we recognize it religiously or not.1 To carve creation into rooms where God speaks and rooms where God must whisper is not humility; it’s idolatry with better lighting. The Church trained us for this.2 We catechized generations to live as practical atheists—pious in worship, anxious everywhere else—and then pretended surprise when they did. We told people how to be good without ever teaching them how to be real.
So this letter begins as repentance. I’m still trying to live and think in one piece again. The cure for our post-truth fatigue will not come from cleverer arguments but from slower attention—the courage to love reality until it answers back. Perhaps that’s what faith has always been: the refusal to outsource truth. One world, one Word.
II · How We Lost Truth
Factories of Facts
We didn’t mean to lose it. We traded it for kindness.
Late in the twentieth century, compassion taught us to listen to unheard voices—holy work—but somewhere along the way that moral insight hardened into an epistemology: each group with its own truth, each grievance a gospel. When every perspective became sacred, truth itself became optional.
Meanwhile, populists baptized suspicion. If elites had their truth, ordinary people needed ours. Different slogans, same spirit. Both sides declared truth negotiable, and between them reality became a turf war.
We no longer ask Is it true? We ask Whose narrative wins? Our children are fluent in my truth and illiterate in reality. The serpent would understand. The serpent never promised knowledge; the serpent promised customization—”You will be like gods.”
But I should confess: I watched the shift happen first not in lecture halls or cable news, but in vestry meetings.
I remember the night one of our wardens—a woman who’d served the parish for fifteen years, who knew the prayer book by heart—prefaced her comment about the importance of the sacrament of baptism with, “Well, this is just my truth, but...” She wasn’t being coy or ironic. She genuinely believed that’s how humility worked now: you protected yourself from correction by making your claim too small to contest. What had begun as therapeutic language for trauma survivors—honoring each person’s experience—had migrated into the doctrine of the Trinity. We’d traded the scandal of water and Spirit for the safety of private opinion.
I didn’t know what to say. How does the Spirit form the mind of Christ in community when every theological conviction has to be introduced as optional? How do you invite someone into discovery when discovery itself might wound them?
Five years later, different parish, the same confusion but sharper. We’d proposed a Lenten series on the Apostles’ Creed—nothing provocative, just the basics. After the meeting, one of our vestry members found me in the hallway. She was shaking. “If you go forward with this,” she said, voice tight, “I’m leaving. We don’t believe in discipleship here. Who are we to suggest people need to learn anything? That’s just judging their truth.”
I stood there—parish hall, burnt coffee, careful silence—trying to understand. She wasn’t arguing the Creed was wrong or that our teaching might be inadequate. She was arguing that teaching itself was violence, that formation was fundamentally unkind. The idea that we might gather to learn something true together, that we might let ancient wisdom correct our modern assumptions, felt to her like domination.
I wanted to say: But what if we’re all learners? What if discipleship isn’t about me knowing and you needing, but about all of us paying attention together to something bigger than any of us? I wanted to say: How do we even have community if we can’t study together, can’t let something outside us teach us, can’t risk being changed?
But I didn’t. I stood there calculating costs—if she left, who else would follow? That’s how it happens. Not in one dramatic betrayal but in a thousand small surrenders. We stopped believing we could learn truth together and started treating every claim as a potential weapon. Formation became coercion. Teaching became judgment. And bit by bit, the possibility of shared discovery dissolved into the fear of shared anything.
We called it pastoral sensitivity when we stopped inviting people into discovery. We called it humility when we stopped believing truth was findable.
Even the Church helped make this world. For generations we kept a polite truce—faith would handle meaning, science would handle facts—and we called it progress. But peace built on division always becomes war somewhere else. Secularism is what happens when the depth of life is exiled into private feeling while the surface is handed over to instrumental calculation.3 The cost isn’t just that faith becomes irrelevant to public life. The cost is that faith becomes incoherent even to itself, a therapeutic aid rather than a claim about reality. When depth and surface split, we lose the ability to see them as dimensions of the same world. Science maps surfaces without knowing what makes them meaningful; religion guards meanings without testing them against what is. Both become less than they are.
We lose integrity—not moral failure but the breakdown of wholeness, the inability to hold our lives together as one integrated reality.4
When truth becomes a private possession, responsibility dissolves. If everything is interpretation, then nothing is betrayal. If every perspective is sacred, then cruelty is just someone else’s narrative. And if truth is only power, then mercy is only weakness.
This is not abstract philosophy—it’s the collapse of freedom itself. Political philosopher Philip Pettit reminds us that freedom isn’t simply doing what we want without interference (what he calls “negative liberty”). Real freedom—what he calls “republican liberty”—means living without domination, without anyone having arbitrary power over us.5 That kind of freedom requires more than absence; it requires presence. It requires institutions, practices, people committed to holding power accountable. It requires what he calls “resilient non-interference”—structures that don’t just leave you alone but actively protect you from domination even when you’re vulnerable.
The fragmented self lives in a kind of internal tyranny. When reason rules emotion or emotion hijacks reason, when one aspect of the self dominates the others, we experience precisely the kind of arbitrary power Pettit warns about. Freedom requires integration—not harmony, but accountability. The different aspects of the self need to be in conversation, checking and balancing each other, none holding ultimate veto power. That’s not weakness. That’s republican government applied to the soul.
Without a shared world that corrects our claims, authority becomes arbitrary, and the vulnerable become prey.
Paul knew this long before modern politics. His confession that “Jesus is Lord” was a public act of resistance—a way of saying Caesar doesn’t own reality. The gospel broke that spell; it said power is accountable to love, that truth exists outside every throne. That is the real freedom Christ brings—not autonomy but liberation into communion, the freedom to love without needing to control, to act in concert rather than competition.6
And here’s what connects this to everything that follows: we dominate when we’re afraid. When we can’t bear the vulnerability of letting reality—or God—judge us, we seize the judge’s seat ourselves. We create alternative standards where we can claim superiority, false selves that shield us from exposure. The theological mutations that now dominate American Christianity aren’t intellectual errors awaiting correction; they’re emotional architectures designed to avoid unbearable shame. But that’s a story for next week.
Post-truth isn’t cultural confusion; it’s spiritual sickness—the refusal to let reality correct us. It breeds cynicism about facts and sentimentality about feelings. Together they hollow out hope, because hope requires something outside us to be true.
And yet even in that hollowness, the life of God still holds the world together, waiting to be noticed. Recovering confidence in a shared world means awakening to the communion that has held us all along, not discovering a new remedy but joining the life God is already living with creation.
III · The Afternoon Everything Changed
Meeting Davidson
For years I lived inside that diagnosis—able to name what we’d lost but powerless to imagine recovery. The problem wasn’t ignorance; it was despair masquerading as sophistication. We’d convinced ourselves that fragmentation was the mature position, that anyone claiming we could still know truth together was either naive or dangerous. I needed philosophical permission to hope again. That’s what made an afternoon texting session with my Duke classmate and carpool mate Derek feel like conversion—not the discovery of new information but the recovery of a world I’d stopped believing was findable.
The turning point came when I sent him a new essay by church historian David Congdon, whom Derek knew from their days together at Princeton. “What Has New Haven to Do with Hungary?” traces how the old Yale school of post-liberal theology—Frei, Lindbeck, Hauerwas—seeded today’s political post-liberalism of Deneen and Dreher. Congdon argues that post-liberalism’s habit of treating every community as its own language-game, each with its own grammar of truth, has finally borne political fruit: rival tribes convinced they inhabit different worlds. He was right about the history. But Derek sent back one short message that rearranged the furniture in my head:
“Congdon doesn’t know his Davidson.”
I laughed—half because I didn’t either, and half because that’s how most revelations begin: with the embarrassment of being caught fluent in a language we never understood. Theologians are slow to repent of their footnotes.
“Neither do I,” I typed back. Within an hour I was deep in Davidson’s essays, reading as if someone had handed me a decoder ring. By evening I was pacing the house with that mix of exhilaration and shame that comes when you realize you’ve been breathing fog.
What Derek saw—and what I was about to discover—was that Davidson had already dismantled the philosophical foundation of our post-truth confusion. Not through theological argument, but through careful attention to something so ordinary we’d stopped noticing it: the simple fact that we can talk to each other at all.
What Derek saw—and what those essays taught me—was simpler than I expected: we can only understand each other because we already share a world. Davidson showed that understanding requires charity—we have to assume the other person is mostly rational and mostly right about the world, or interpretation collapses before it starts. The shared world isn’t something we build through successful communication. It’s the condition that makes communication possible at all.
I wrote all this down in my notes as if I’d discovered something. But Davidson wasn’t giving me new information—he was giving me philosophical permission to trust what I already knew from experience. The shared world isn’t just a theoretical claim. It’s the ground we stand on every time we speak, every time we meet a stranger and assume their words might mean something we can understand.
I’d tested that assumption most acutely not in a philosophy seminar but in the strangest classroom I’ve ever inhabited—eight years ago, in a radiation-oncology suite where my first wife Claudia was being marked for treatment.
IV · Learning to See Again
The Eucharist of Knowing
The room was brightly lit but not sterile. Friendly. While nurses rehearsed the positioning on the table where Claudia would receive treatment, marking her body with colored pens for where the radiation sources and monitoring devices would go, we heard a bell ring somewhere down the hall. A patient and her family celebrating the completion of their radiation therapy. Claudia looked forward to that bell. We both did. We were eager to be done with the six rounds of chemotherapy and ready to start this next phase—radiation meant progress, a clear protocol, an end in sight.
While the nurses worked, the radiation oncologist took me aside and explained what was happening in her body, why radiation was planned, how it would work, what results we could hope for. He quickly grasped I was highly technical—I’d been a nuclear submarine officer, president of a high-tech company—and he poured himself into what can only be called a proud tour of his vocation. We connected. Not through therapeutic platitudes but through the physics of it, the precision required, the careful calibration of rays that could destroy or heal depending on their aim. He conveyed to me how my wife would be made whole by radiation directed appropriately.
I didn’t have Davidson’s language then. I didn’t know I was practicing anything philosophical. But I knew I trusted him—not blindly, but because his words were intelligible, because his care showed itself through precision, because we shared enough reality that his technical explanations made sense. We were doing more than exchanging information. We were participating in a plan for her restoration. The physician’s knowledge, my understanding, Claudia’s body, the technology, the physics of radiation—all of it held together because we inhabited the same world, spoke toward the same goal, trusted the same fundamental intelligibility.
That was eight years ago. When Derek sent me to Davidson’s essays a few weeks ago, that Friday afternoon suddenly made sense in a new way. I hadn’t just survived that season with Claudia—I’d been catechized by it. The radiation suite had trained me in something Davidson could only describe: the stubborn, pre-rational conviction that understanding is possible because we share a world, that interpretation works because reality is one, that we can trust each other’s words because we stand on common ground.
We don’t build bridges to each other’s private islands; we discover the continent was always connected underground. Truth isn’t what we construct through consensus; it’s what makes consensus possible. I’d practiced it before I could name it. Every act of understanding is a miniature incarnation—a rehearsal for the divine logic that holds all things together. That’s how all real knowing works.
A few weeks later, after I’d worked through Davidson’s essays, I texted Derek back. “Congdon’s right about the genealogy but wrong about the philosophy.” Post-liberalism claimed that different communities inhabit different conceptual worlds—that a Hauerwasian Christian and a secular liberal really do see different realities, speak different languages, operate with incommensurable grammars of truth. That sounds sophisticated. It sounds humble, even—a way of honoring difference without flattening it.
But Davidson proved it’s incoherent. If interpretation is possible at all—and it obviously is, since we’re having this argument—then we already share one world. We don’t need to agree about everything to share reality. We need to share reality to disagree about anything. Every act of translation, every moment of cross-cultural understanding, every argument that actually engages rather than talking past each other—all of it presupposes a common world we’re arguing about.
The post-liberal move—treating communities as sealed language-games, each with its own internal logic—doesn’t protect particularity. It abandons the possibility of truth. If the Hauerwasian and the liberal really inhabit different worlds, they can’t even disagree. They can only misunderstand each other, forever. That’s not humility. That’s despair dressed up as sophistication.
And here’s what terrified me as I read: that same move has migrated everywhere. It’s no longer just an academic theory about how traditions work. It’s the water we swim in. We’ve convinced ourselves that Red America and Blue America inhabit different realities, that Fox News viewers and NPR listeners see different worlds, that understanding across political difference isn’t just difficult—it’s conceptually impossible. We’ve turned epistemic humility into epistemic nihilism, and we call it being realistic.
Christian nationalism weaponizes this same logic. It claims that “biblical worldview” Christians and secular progressives operate with fundamentally different epistemologies, that there’s no shared ground for conversation, that every disagreement is really a clash of mutually exclusive realities. This isn’t theology. It’s tribalism given a philosophical veneer. And it mirrors exactly what it claims to oppose: the progressive insistence that different communities construct different truths, that understanding requires adopting someone else’s “lived experience” as epistemically authoritative, that objectivity itself is a white Western fiction.
Both sides have accepted fragmentation as final. Both have abandoned the stubborn conviction that reality is one, that truth is shared, that understanding across difference is not just possible but necessary. They’ve turned intellectual modesty into a weapon—a way of claiming that anyone who disagrees with them must be operating from an entirely different world, unreachable by argument, impervious to evidence.
Davidson showed me that’s a lie. Not a well-intentioned mistake—a lie. Every time we argue with someone, we’re proving we share one world. Every disagreement is secret evidence that reality is still common property. Every act of interpretation—even hostile interpretation, even interpretive charity extended to an enemy—presupposes that understanding is possible because we stand on common ground.
I think of the epidemiologists during the pandemic—vilified in some quarters, lionized in others, mostly just exhausted. What they were actually doing was practicing Davidsonian charity at scale: interpreting incomplete data, revising provisional conclusions as evidence accumulated, trusting that reality would eventually clarify itself if we paid patient attention. When models changed, it wasn’t conspiracy; it was what learning looks like when you’re learning in public, under pressure, about a novel pathogen.
The scientific method is epistemological humility institutionalized—the willingness to be corrected by what is, even when correction is costly. Those who mocked their revisions as proof of dishonesty had mistaken certainty for faithfulness, as if God’s faithfulness required the world to be simpler than it is, as if changing your mind when evidence changes were weakness rather than integrity.
But the epidemiologists were doing theological work whether they knew it or not: trusting that creation is intelligible, that patience matters, that truth-telling in the midst of uncertainty is both possible and obligatory. They were practicing the same attention the radiologist brought to Claudia’s scan—disciplined love before what is, refusing both despair and false comfort. That’s what I failed to recognize when my own parish fractured: the people reading data and adjusting recommendations weren’t betraying truth; they were serving it the only way finite creatures can—through humble attention that trusts reality more than our anxious need for premature closure.
We were practicing the same faith—the stubborn, pre-rational conviction that the world is shared, that the other person’s reality touches mine, that understanding is possible even when it’s difficult.
The church fathers had a name for this kind of knowing—this practice of assuming the other person’s reality touches yours even before you have evidence, this willingness to interpret charitably before you’re sure you should. They understood that such knowing wasn’t just cognitive work. It was spiritual discipline. It required the same posture of receptivity, the same relinquishing of control, the same trust in gift.
Augustine saw this in the practice of reading Scripture. Before you can interpret a difficult passage, he argued, you must first assume the author means something true and good—otherwise you’ll twist the text into whatever confirms your prejudice. Charity isn’t optional for understanding; it’s constitutive. You can’t know what someone means if you begin by assuming they’re wrong or wicked. The movement toward understanding begins with the will to receive—a grace that precedes method.
That’s what the oncologist and I were enacting: a disciplined trust that the other’s words carried meaning, that our shared attention to Claudia’s body pointed toward the same reality, that understanding was worth the cost of vulnerability. Knowledge wasn’t conquest. It was communion.
Augustine wasn’t describing an ideal. He was naming what the church had always practiced—the disciplined habit of assuming the best about the other’s meaning before assuming the worst, of treating understanding as a gift to be received rather than a victory to be won. This wasn’t naive. It was trained. It required the kind of spiritual muscle that atrophies without use.
Barth understood this Eucharistic pattern of knowing. All truth, he insisted, is gift—not achievement but grace. We don’t ascend to God through reason; God descends to us in revelation. Even our capacity to know truth about creation is itself a gift of the Creator, whose Word holds all things in being. Knowledge is always reception, never conquest.7
But here’s what terrifies me: we’re rapidly losing the ability to practice this kind of knowing. We’ve built entire information ecosystems designed to make charitable interpretation impossible. Our feeds sort us into echo chambers where everyone sounds right because everyone sounds the same. Algorithms reward outrage and penalize nuance. We’ve trained ourselves to scan for the worst possible reading of anyone who disagrees with us, to treat every interpretive choice as a loyalty test. The digital tools we thought would connect us have instead taught us to treat understanding as betrayal—because to interpret someone charitably is to risk discovering they might be partly right, which would mean we might be partly wrong, which feels like death.
And the cost isn’t just political. It’s intimate. When we lose the habit of charitable interpretation in public, we lose it everywhere. Marriages fracture because partners can no longer assume the best about each other’s motives. Friendships dissolve because every disagreement feels existential. Church communities split because we’ve forgotten how to be wrong together, how to trust that someone else’s critique might be a gift rather than an attack.
But I learned this not only through philosophy. I learned it in rooms where understanding decides whether someone lives—where the question of shared reality becomes a question of whether to hope or despair.
V · Rowe at the Areopagus — The Friendship of Truth
Paul Among the Altars
If Davidson taught me that understanding is impossible without charity, Kavin Rowe showed me what charity looks like when it speaks.
At the Areopagus, Paul stands before Athens’ marketplace of gods and ideas. He does not sneer; he listens. “You are very religious,” he begins, letting the compliment breathe—one heartbeat, two—the city leaning in. Beneath all their arguments he hears hunger: human beings trying to touch the depth of life with the tools of reason.
This is friendship as truth-telling—the kind of relationship where accurate knowledge serves love rather than control.8 Paul doesn’t invent a rival world; he reveals the unity of the one we already share. He doesn’t conquer; he converses. He trusts that even the most foreign grammar can carry grace if we are patient enough to translate.
Paul’s interpretive generosity at Athens enacts Davidson’s principle of charity in theological mode. When Paul says “you are very religious” and reads their altar to an unknown god as preparation for the gospel rather than merely pagan error, he’s demonstrating that charitable interpretation isn’t just epistemically necessary (Davidson’s claim) but Christologically grounded. The Incarnation is God’s ultimate act of charitable interpretation—entering our language game from within rather than correcting from outside.9 God doesn’t translate humanity from a position of safety; the Word becomes flesh, learns our grammar in a manger, speaks our language from a cross. Paul at Athens is doing what he’s seen God do: risking understanding from within rather than pronouncing judgment from above.
Friendship, not argument, is the Church’s first apologetic. Paul’s friendship ends with an invitation—to turn toward the God who raised Jesus. Truth doesn’t just make peace; it changes people.
Rowe’s insight is that Paul doesn’t deploy a separate “religious” rationality at Athens. He uses the same logos the Stoics prize, the same evidence the Epicureans examine, the same public reasoning the Areopagus requires. This is Davidson in missionary mode: the apostle trusts that minds formed by different traditions can still reason together about the same world because there is only one world, created by the God Paul proclaims. The risk Paul takes—that pagan reason might actually lead somewhere true, that Athenian altars might contain genuine longing rather than mere idolatry—is the risk Davidson’s philosophy makes intelligible. But Paul can take that risk only because he’s already been seized by the God who took the greater risk: becoming human to befriend enemies. Philosophy describes what Paul performs; the gospel forms people who can perform it.
Davidson proves that understanding requires charity, but he can only describe what interpretation looks like when it succeeds. He can’t tell us how to become people who extend that charity when understanding endangers us—when the truth we discover contradicts our tribe, when charitable interpretation of the other costs us our status, when reality itself demands we change. Philosophy can show that shared reality is the precondition for meaning, but it takes formation in a particular community of practice to become the kind of person who loves reality even when it crucifies us.
This is where Paul’s performance at the Areopagus exceeds Davidson’s description. Paul doesn’t argue his way to charitable interpretation of Athens; he enacts it—and that enactment is only possible because he himself has been interpreted charitably by God. “While we were still enemies, Christ died for us.” The cross doesn’t just model generous understanding; it forms us into people who can risk it. We can dare to interpret the other faithfully because we’ve been faithfully interpreted first—not after we got our story straight but in the midst of our incoherence. The particular practice of following Jesus discloses (and sustains) the universal truth: that understanding is possible because creation is one, and one because it is loved. Davidson teaches the grammar; Paul teaches the practice. The catholic is found in the particular.
Once you see that truth is shared rather than siloed, the faith-and-science conflict starts to look like a misunderstanding waiting for friendship. When faith retreats to its private sphere and cedes the public square to secular reason, both faith and reason are impoverished.10 We’ve done just that—one god for church, another for science, another for politics—and we call it pluralism as if fragmentation were virtue. We call it peace when we stop talking and wisdom when we stop believing.
Paul’s sermon explodes that partition. Standing among marble altars and philosophers, he declares that the Lord of heaven and earth “does not live in temples made by human hands.” Truth has no jurisdiction; it inhabits all. To speak the gospel is not to plant a new flag but to name the coherence that was always there.
Rowe’s Paul is the first post-truth missionary. He refuses both relativism and domination. He listens long enough to find the rhythm of the Athenian heart and then joins the beat, shifting the melody toward fulfillment. The result isn’t argument won but friendship formed.
That is what I want for our age: a theology that walks into the public square with neither sword nor sneer, confident that reality is still one, that reason is still common, that every altar of longing can yet be interpreted as prayer.
That Friday afternoon in the radiation suite—standing beside a physician reading images of my dying wife—disclosed exactly this kind of unity.
VI · One Reality — Faith and Science in Concert
Attention, Depth, and One World
What that afternoon disclosed was not a new conviction but the manifestation of an old one: that every form of scientia—medicine, physics, theology alike—shares the same posture of faith seeking understanding. Each proceeds through attention, testing, correction, and renewal: a dialectic of trust and discovery in which reality teaches us how to know it. The radiologist and the theologian serve the same vocation from different altars—the disciplined pursuit of truth through love of what is. Theology is the study of the source and goal of everything that exists—including physics, biology, and radiology.11
Our ability to pay attention is a gift of grace. The Spirit draws us into Christ’s faithfulness and teaches us to see truth together.
In that sense, faith and science are not parallel tracks but converging rays. Both arise from wonder before the real. Both depend on humility—the willingness to let what is reveal itself. Every science is a beam refracted through the one prism of creation’s light.12 Science maps the surface of reality while faith names its depth.13 Even Einstein was doing theology when he trusted that the universe was intelligible—a faith beyond proof, grounded in wonder.
Faith and science, rightly understood, share this posture of wonder before creation. Both begin with humility—the recognition that reality precedes us and invites our attentive participation. Faith confesses that the world is intelligible because it is spoken into being by a faithful God; science enacts that confession through patient observation and self-correction. When each honors the other’s vocation, the result is not rivalry but reverence—a shared confidence that truth is both discoverable and trustworthy. Yet the question is not only whether faith and science can coexist in principle, but what becomes of our shared life when they do not.
To silence science is not to exalt faith but to unmake the world faith seeks to redeem. When we discredit those who labor to understand the created order, we estrange ourselves from both creation and Creator. Vaccines, climate models, and epidemiological data become symbols of a deeper fear—that truth might not always favor our side. Yet mature faith welcomes correction, for it trusts that all truth, wherever found, belongs to God. Faith does not need to shrink from microscopes or telescopes; both are ways of listening to creation’s praise. When we mock our truth-tellers, we trade revelation for resentment. A community that despises its listeners cannot long sustain its faith.
This kind of attention has to be practiced. Weekly Eucharist re-centers us in reality.14 Learning to listen to trustworthy experts honors truth in our common life. Churches can hold honest conversations about health, and even create simple services of reconciliation when misinformation divides neighbors.
The Church’s vocation, then, is not to choose between faith and science but to model a form of life in which both can flourish—where humility before revelation and humility before evidence become one habit of love. To defend science is, at heart, to defend the possibility of shared truth: the trust that creation is not chaos but gift. In practicing such trust, the Church bears witness to a deeper reconciliation, showing that genuine faith does not fear the truth wherever it appears, because the One who is Truth has already made the world his own.
God’s wisdom isn’t another explanation inside the universe; it’s the reason the universe makes sense at all.15 Beauty is one of the ways truth makes room for us.
The Eucharist teaches this pattern through liturgical repetition: we bring forward what is (bread, wine, our actual lives); we name it truthfully in thanksgiving; we allow it to be broken and transformed; we receive it back as gift to be shared. This is exactly the movement of scientific inquiry—observation, hypothesis, testing, communal verification, application—and it’s the pattern of prayer. Both require what the prayer book calls “true knowledge” of God: not mastery but participation, not control but communion. When we gather at the altar, we’re rehearsing the epistemology the rest of the week requires: vulnerable attention before reality, trust that truth is findable because the world is beloved, confidence that knowledge is possible because we were made for it. The physician reading the scan performs the same liturgy in clinical grammar. Every act of genuine knowing is Eucharistic—matter lifted, examined, broken open to understanding, and returned as gift. This is why faith and science share one posture: both begin in wonder, proceed through patient attention, and end in thanksgiving. To know truly is already to worship.
Every telescope image, every DNA sequence, every act of patient prayer is a little Eucharist—matter lifted in thanksgiving. Theology without science forgets the body; science without theology forgets the soul. Together they describe one creation learning to speak its native language again.
If we keep faith and science in separate rooms, the next crisis—medical, political, planetary—will find us divided again. We will argue about methods while creation itself waits for reconciliation. The work of uniting them is not academic; it is moral. Attention is the Church’s first act of hope.
VII · Coda — The World as Sacrament
Knowing as Communion
What follows from the unity of faith and science is not abstraction but sacrament. To see creation truthfully is already to glimpse grace at work within it. Every act of knowing—whether through microscope, telescope, or prayer—is a form of communion, a participation in the same light refracted through many lenses. The Eucharist teaches us how to see this: matter offered, blessed, broken, and shared until the ordinary world becomes transparent to glory. Science, too, performs that liturgy in its own tongue, taking the material of the world and learning to read its praise. Both disciplines are ways of saying thank you with the mind, hope with the hands.
We are not waiting for another world; we are learning to live in this one deeply enough to notice its holiness. Truth is shared before it is argued, eternal even while it unfolds in time. To know truly is to be known—by Christ and by one another.16 The “mind of Christ” Paul describes is something we share; it forms us into people who see together. Attention is adoration slowed to the pace of love. We belong before we perform.
And that is where the next letter will begin—with the self that aches when that belonging breaks, with what happens when anxiety hijacks the creative capacity I’ve been describing. With the body and brain that science studies and the soul that theology names. They are not opposites; they are one creation learning again how to listen.
Next week: when listening stops, shame rushes in—and jazz becomes impossible.
Endnotes
Paul Tillich argued that whatever claims our ultimate concern functions as our god, regardless of whether we recognize it in religious terms. See Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 1-4. Karl Barth approached this same territory from the opposite direction: not asking what captures our ultimate concern, but insisting that only the God revealed in Jesus Christ deserves ultimate concern. Where Tillich describes the functional gods we actually serve, Barth insists that all such rivals are idols that must be dethroned by the one Word of God. Both converge on the same diagnosis: we are incurably religious beings who will worship something, and the question is whether we worship the living God or projections of our own desires. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §17, “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), where Barth argues that even “religion” itself becomes idolatrous when it replaces receptivity to God’s self-revelation with human constructions about the divine.
Stanley Hauerwas has consistently critiqued how modern Christianity formed people to compartmentalize faith from the rest of life, creating what he calls “practical atheists.” See especially A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 55-65. Tillich argued that secularism isn’t simply the absence of religion but the compartmentalization of depth (meaning, ultimacy) into private experience while public life becomes purely instrumental. Karl Barth’s critique of “natural theology” makes a parallel point from a different angle: when theology attempts to build bridges from general human experience to God, it inevitably domesticates revelation, making God answerable to prior human categories. The result is the same fragmentation Tillich describes—a “God” cordoned off from the messy business of politics, science, and public life. See Church Dogmatics II/1, §26, “The Knowability of God” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), where Barth argues that God is known only through God’s own self-disclosure in Christ, never through natural reason or religious experience abstracted from that concrete revelation. Both Tillich and Barth, in different vocabularies, refuse the Enlightenment settlement that privatizes faith while secularizing public reason.
C. Kavin Rowe explores this loss of integrity (etymologically “wholeness”) as a defining feature of late-modern fragmentation. See One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), especially chapters 1-2 on how rival philosophical traditions create competing accounts of the integrated life.
Philip Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), especially chapters 1-2 on republican liberty as non-domination. Pettit distinguishes between negative liberty (absence of interference) and republican liberty (absence of arbitrary power), arguing that genuine freedom requires structural protections that remain resilient even when we’re vulnerable.
Douglas Campbell’s reading of Paul’s letters as participatory gospel rather than contractual religion provides the theological framework here. Campbell argues that Paul’s gospel isn’t about individual transactions with God (sin → faith → justification) but about participation in Christ’s liberating work that draws us into communion with God and others. See The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), especially Part I on “The Intrusion.”
Karl Barth’s entire theological method begins with the acknowledgment that we cannot know God unless God makes himself known. This applies not only to revelation but to all knowing—our capacity to understand creation depends on God’s faithfulness in sustaining creation’s intelligibility through the Word. Truth is gift before it’s discovery. See Church Dogmatics I/1, §8, “God in His Revelation” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), and II/1, §27, “The Limits of the Knowledge of God” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), where Barth argues that even our natural knowledge of the world is possible only because of God’s grace in maintaining creation’s order.
C. Kavin Rowe, “Acts 17 and the Ancient Cultural Context of the Gospel,” in One True Life, explores Paul’s engagement with Athens as a form of cultural criticism rooted in friendship. Rowe argues that true friendship requires truth-telling, which means both charitable interpretation and honest critique—knowing the other accurately in order to love them well, not to dominate them.
Karl Barth’s doctrine of the Incarnation grounds all Christian engagement with the world. God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ means God enters human history, speaks human language, suffers human limits—not as compromise but as the ultimate act of solidarity and communication. This establishes the pattern for Christian witness: not domination from above but vulnerable presence from within. See Church Dogmatics IV/1, §59, “The Obedience of the Son of God” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), especially pp. 157-210 on the humiliation of Christ, and IV/3.1, §69.2, “The Prophetic Office of Jesus Christ” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), on how Christ’s light shines in the world through the church’s witness.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 40-51. Tillich argued that the modern separation of religious and secular spheres—where faith becomes private sentiment and reason becomes purely instrumental—creates a “split consciousness” that damages both domains. True secularity, he argued, requires depth; true faith requires engagement with culture. Karl Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation makes this separation theologically untenable: if Christ is Lord of all creation, then no sphere of life lies outside his claim. The church’s witness is not to “religious” concerns but to the totality of reality under Christ’s lordship. When Christians retreat to private piety, they implicitly deny the scope of Christ’s victory. See Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, §69, “The Glory of the Mediator” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), especially the section on Christ as the light of life that shines in the world, not just in the church. Both theologians, from different starting points, refuse the modern bargain that trades public irrelevance for private freedom.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.7. Aquinas defines theology (sacra doctrina) as the science that considers all things in relation to God as their first principle and last end. This means theology doesn’t compete with other sciences but situates them within the unified intelligibility of creation.
Bonaventure, De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology). Bonaventure argued that all human knowledge—mechanical arts, natural philosophy, ethics—finds its unity and completion when “reduced” (led back) to theology as the study of divine illumination. Every discipline is a ray of divine light refracted through creation.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 18-28. Tillich distinguished between the “dimension of depth” (ultimate concern, the religious question) and the horizontal dimensions explored by science. He argued that even scientific inquiry presupposes faith in the intelligibility and meaningfulness of reality—what he called the “ontological shock” that being exists rather than nothing. On Einstein specifically, see Tillich’s “A Conversation with Einstein” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 127-133, where Tillich reflects on Einstein’s wonder-based faith in cosmic intelligibility. Karl Barth offers a complementary perspective: scientific inquiry succeeds because creation is ordered by the Word, the same Logos through whom “all things were made” (John 1:3). The scientist who patiently observes and tests creation is unknowingly relying on the faithfulness of God to maintain the world’s coherence. See Church Dogmatics III/1, §41, “Creation and Covenant” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), where Barth argues that creation’s intelligibility is not self-explanatory but depends on God’s decision to be faithful to what God has made. Both Tillich and Barth, despite their methodological differences, agree that science without theology loses its grounding, while theology without science loses its body.
Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 257. Wells argues that the Eucharist is the church’s primary practice of “being with” God and one another, where presence rather than production becomes the measure of faithfulness.
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 134. Hart argues that divine intelligibility is not a rival explanation within the cosmos but the transcendent ground of its coherence, and that beauty is truth’s hospitable form.
Susan G. Eastman, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 111–116. Eastman emphasizes that to know truly is to be known “in Christ,” whose relational mind reshapes human identity.