c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-There is something of the prodigal son in Christopher B. Kaiser.

He has come home.

Kaiser has arrived in familiar, charted territory-a place where science and faith are not at odds with each other but parts of a greater truth.

And contrary to popular belief, Kaiser says, this territory is part of our common history. It was something we claimed all along.

“It’s like finding my spiritual roots,” Kaiser said.

Kaiser, author of “Creation and the History of Science” (Eerdmans, 1991), recently was awarded one of 11 prizes for outstanding books in theology and the natural sciences by the John Templeton Foundation and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

His work, eight years in the making, provides a historical review of the relationship between religion and science. It traces the history of what he calls the “creationist” tradition, which holds that God is creator of the universe and works through the processes of nature.

It opposes modern Western notions that natural processes are separate and independent from divine actions.

Kaiser said the creationist tradition can be found in ancient writings, going back to Jewish Hellenistic thought of the second century before Christ.

“At one point,” Kaiser said, smiling, “I called it the Hellenistic- Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. It’s all in there.”

For Kaiser, the project was personally healing. In a sense, he was able to reach back across the centuries and contact his intellectual kin-people who neither compromised on their science nor gave up on their faith in God.

Bespectacled, modest and articulate, Kaiser is professor of historical and systemic theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich. A native of Massachusetts, he came to West Michigan 20 years ago.

But that move was minor compared to his long, challenging intellectual odyssey into the history of the warfare between science and religion. That warfare is actually a relatively recent development, Kaiser said.

“Faith was instrumental in inspiring early scientists,” Kaiser said. “Major scientists right up through the 18th century were Christian believers. They believed that God was the creator. Scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle and Newton were motivated by that faith to make breakthroughs.”

But in the modern age, there has developed a “mechanical philosophy,” Kaiser said, that “tends to separate mechanics and spirit.”

On the one hand, he said, “many churches and Christians have become suspicious of science.” On the other hand, many scientists developed a conviction that “we can do science independent of spirit,”he said.

“What was once a common tradition is now in pieces. What God has put together, we have put asunder.”

Kaiser poured nearly a decade of his life into 400 pages of history and thought. His book grew out of an offer Kaiser couldn’t refuse. It began in 1981.

“I had an invitation to work on a book in the area,” Kaiser said, “and I felt it was something that needed to be done. I wasn’t sure I was qualified, but it was an offer I couldn’t turn down.”

There followed eight years of writing, discovery and painstaking historical research.

It demanded a personal price.

“It was very difficult,” Kaiser said. “We had young children, and I’m a committed father. My wife was finishing her graduate degree-she’s a reading instructor.

“So you have to juggle the job you do-teaching, family responsibilities, research.”

For that matter, the project grew out of a personal struggle-the encounter between the scientist and the theologian inside Kaiser.

“For someone like myself, it was a struggle,” Kaiser said. “I started from the science side-not as a believer but as a believer in science. Then I had an evangelical awakening and came to a faith in Christ.”

But did Kaiser’s conversion demand that he discard his commitment to science?

No, said Kaiser-there was no paradox between science and faith.

“We need to understand as a common quest for truth,” he said. “The key issue is truth.

“If Christians can believe that God is a God of truth, then there shouldn’t be anything to fear from good science.”

The reconciliation continues. A growing number of scientists say there are “grounds for belief in God,” Kaiser said. “There is a recognition that some kind of faith is necessary to make sense of science.”

Kaiser said he found his work on the book “positive and healing. But then I said, `Now, wait a minute. Why did I have to go through that in the first place? Why did I have to figure that out?’

“In the Amazon forest, they don’t have to be taught this-that there’s spirit in the middle of everyday life. They know already.”

MJP END HARDIMAN