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W.R. STOEGER S.J.
76
1 (2008) 64-77
tion. God is their source and origin and holds them in existence, continuing to create
through them. God did not create the universe with deficiencies, or with impairments,
which would necessitate God’s special direct intervention in the evolutionary process.
Secondly, evolution forces us, therefore, to take the immanence of God in Nature, in
creation, in our lives very seriously. God is present and active – in many different and
wonderful ways – in all that is going on. Sometimes we tend to think of God’s creative
action only in special events of intervention – miracles. But this is a very distorted and
constricted view of God’s action. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his “Contemplation for Obtaining
Divine Love,” at the end of his Spiritual Exercises, asks us to consider how all the
wonderful things around us – including ourselves – the gifts of creation and the gifts of
redemption – are expressions of God’s great love for us. After asking us to express our
love for God in return in complete commitment, Ignatius goes on to ask us to consider
that God is present in all his gifts – not only does God give us gifts as signs of God’s care
and love, but God give us God’s self in the gifts. Next, Ignatius goes even further, asking
us to reflect on the fact that God is not only present in all that God has created and
bestowed but that God is working and struggling for us out of love in all things. It is
clear that the first stage of the “Contemplatio” refers to creation, the second stage reflects
the profound impact of the Incarnation on all reality, and the third stage sees the
immanence of God in terms of vulnerability, struggle and suffering of Christ – of God –
in creation. This is the deeply Christian perspective the natural sciences and all the
processes they reveal to us reinforce.
But, we must also take the transcendence of God very seriously. God is not just
another cause, similar to the forces and causes within nature we can isolate and describe.
God’s action is radically different, and cannot be isolated or objectified. Nor can
God God’s self be grasped or comprehended. What the sciences have revealed to us –
particularly through what we know about cosmic and biological evolution – forces us to
consider God the way the best of Christian tradition has always insisted upon – not as
another cause that complements deficient natural causes but as the source of all that is,
beyond all our conceptions and understandings, and at the same time as that in which
we live, and move, and have our being – very close, very respectful and supportive of us,
acting and working with us and through us, and in and through the laws of nature – the
regularities, processes, relationships which characterize reality, those we understand and
those we do not understand.
Fourthly, in Scripture and in Tradition, God’s relationship with humanity is always
developing, growing deepening. God’s choice of Abraham is reaffirmed again and again,
always in a deeper more intimate way. God comes closer and closer to God’s people, to
us, dwelling with us, and finally establishing God’s definitive presence with us in Jesus
Christ and in all that flows from His death and resurrection –the sending of the Spirit.
What we discover concerning cosmic and biological evolution is a deeply consonant
development within creation itself which prepares for the development of God’s relationship
with us. It involves the gradual unfolding of possibilities – of complexification
and diversification – which leads to intelligent and free persons, and societies (communities)
in the image and likeness of God, who can respond to God initiatives for deeper
relationship. This occurs, very fittingly, within an intricately, hierarchically ordered, dy-