Revisiting the God of the Gaps: On the Tempestuous Experience of Overwhelming Presence

Abstract

Rudolf Otto, commenting on the famous thesis of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer that the message of Jesus, according to the NT, was fundamentally eschatological, calls attention to an apparent contradiction, namely, that a radical eschatology with apocalyptic effects as attributed to Jesus is ill-disposed to what Schweitzer also found in Jesus, a “marvelous ethic.” The problem is how the imminent breaking in of eternity may be reconciled with strict responsibility toward things that endure in time. This is the problem that Antje Jackelén addresses in her work, particularly in Time & Eternity. Her proposal to bring back the partnership of time and eternity that modernity has split asunder suggests a revisiting of the infamous and vilified argument for the “god of the gap.” The latter is a symptom of modernity’s diagnosed alienation of eternity from time confining eternity to the flickering epiphanies in the presumed ever closing fissures in the scientific attempt to account for the cosmos in a seamless narration. Even as Jackelén dismisses the disparaged “arguments” for an ever retreating god of the gap, the argument of this essay is that the derision is in the fact that the more the gap seems to be mended by science the more the texture of narrated time rips apart, heralding the perennial return of the sacred salvage. Some of the critiques of modernity in the works of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and literary critics may show the way out of the maze and aid the efforts of theologians to reclaim their discourses in the interstices of the received dominant narrative of this age.

If it can be reasonably assumed that Newton did not intend a development toward a “God of the gaps,” would the result have been different if he had included Christology? What …would the Incarnation mean for absolute space and absolute time?

Antje Jackelén