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A Joyful Theology:
Creation, Commitment, and an Awesome God
by Sara Maitland
Augsburg Books, 2002. 144 pages.
Reviewed by John Tintera
One of my favorite sayings about religion comes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Everything to be believed is an image of Truth.” That statement was in my mind one evening not too long ago when I was having dinner with a respected professor of theology. During our meal, she revealed to me that she loves reading books about how aliens arranged the monoliths at Stonehenge and helped create the great pyramids. Blake’s saying also came to mind as I was reading Sara Maitland’s new book from Augsburg, A Joyful Theology: Creation, Commitment, and an Awesome God. It’s not that Sara has anything to say about aliens. Rather, reading her book has reminded me that we are living in a universe so mind-boggling and, as she says, “awesome,” that it takes the suspension of our normal beliefs to begin to come to terms with it.
One belief that I’ve had to rethink since reading A Joyful Theology is the well-accepted notion that evolution and the creation stories in Genesis fit together hand in glove. I can remember my pastor in confirmation class telling us that Genesis, while not literally true, is true in the sense that God guided evolution so that it ended up with Adam and Eve. I daresay that many readers of this will be familiar with the way we have grafted evolution onto the beginning of the Hebrew / Christian creation story. Well, it turns out that when you come to understand how evolution actually works, combined with what we know about the world at the quantum level, the two myths, evolution and Genesis, are actually much less compatible than we’ve been led to believe. At the heart of both evolution and quantum physics is a randomness that is both real and incontrovertible. To Maitland, “God is a gambler.”
Having thus deconstructed the safe, inherited foundation of our faith, Maitland then proceeds to convince her readers that this new understanding of the cosmos should not unhinge us. She asks,
How can a God -- absolute, complete, pure spirit, eternal, and all-powerful -- create a contingent, evolving universe, imperfect, changing universe? And not just how, but why?
Seriously, I don’t know.
I don’t know, but I hardly have time to be too bothered, given the extraordinary universe in which we live.
The balance of the book contains a treasure trove of weird and wonderful facts about this extraordinary universe, which Maitland believes has more to tell us about God than a room full of theologians and philosophers. For example, did you know that our bodies contain almost exactly the same number of cells as the Milky Way contains stars? Or that infinities come in an infinite number of sizes? Or that all the heavenly bodies in our solar system turn in the same direction, except Triton, the moon of Neptune, which “stubbornly” turns in the opposite direction? To which, says Maitland, “Life is complex, baffling, and designed to keep us on our toes.” (Maybe we should withhold our judgment on aliens as well.)
Readers looking for systematic theology, won’t find it here. Instead, Maitland recommends a spiritual discipline that involves approaching the world with a new set of eyes each day. In the last section of the book, entitled, “The Joy Gym,” she spells out her “methodology”:
Find out and think about one new and preposterous thing everyday (something for which the only proper response is “Wow!”)
It has long been my hunch that if religion is “for” anything it should at least be for making people more joyful. The laughing saints should always be taken much more seriously than the dour ones. Sara Maitland is one of the laughing saints.
If you are a spiritual seeker looking for a more joyful existence and for a book-full of reasons to cast off your sorrows, then take my advice and make your first “new and preposterous thing” the purchase of this wonderful, “wow” filled book.
John Tintera is a marketing manager with Holtzbrinck Publishers. He spent one year studying for the Catholic priesthood.
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