c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com)

UNDATED _ Pathfinder’s discovery of water on the planet Mars forces the faithful to decide: Is Mars beyond the realm of God, or is God’s realm astonishingly larger and more ancient than we believed?

Finding signs of a flood on Mars isn’t the same as finding organic life _ or little green men _ but it’s a mega-leap closer, for water is a precondition for life as we know it.

The questions rain upon the tidy world of theology, whose conflicts are deep but stay within relatively narrow bounds.

If a flood happened a billion years ago on Mars, should the biblical flood of Genesis be considered as more than a sign to Israel of God’s judgment and forgiveness, a sign of vast sweeps of divine intention such that whatever happened on Mars might be in the process of being paralleled now on Earth?

The strange plural of Genesis _”Let us make man in our image”_ has been seen, variously, as a remnant of Israel’s polytheistic past or a precursor to Trinitarian theology. In view of Pathfinder’s discovery, is it beyond reason to imagine the Yahweh of Earth consulting with the deity of Mars on divine plans for a new community? I don’t think I believe that, but the question must arise.

Ancient Israel’s triumphant view that even the creation of the planets and stars was merely a stage in the calling of Israel now looks absurdly egocentric. If Mars was living and dying before Earth even breathed its first, ancient assumptions about the order of things must be re-examined. Rather than seeing God standing astride the Fertile Crescent fashioning a garden, we could as easily imagine God weeping over the loss of whatever life he created on Mars. Was that the brooding deep over which the Spirit of God hovered on the day God created something new?

The Bible itself comes under new scrutiny. The Reformation’s battle cry of”sola scriptura”_ only Scripture! _ has produced in our day an entire industry of Bible publishers, Bible colleges and preachers whose assertion is that all meaningful answers can be found within a book whose last new word was written nearly 1,850 years ago.

In a micro-view of life, such an assertion is as arguable as ever. For life as we know it comes down to issues of love, fidelity, loneliness, greed, fear and purpose. The parable of the Prodigal Son and the Sermon on the Mount still answer such questions in ways that drive us to our knees.

But the macro-view of life _ the vast sweep of time and matter, our human place in that restless drama, the ground of being, indeed the nature of being _ is profoundly larger than it was a generation ago, not to mention 3,000 years ago when Genesis was written. Perhaps Pathfinder’s discoveries will help all believers move beyond the worry that it is unfaithful to question Scripture. The door to this room opened long ago with discoveries in astrophysics and quantum mechanics.

Maybe now, a small vehicle traversing a reality beyond our imagining will bring to our TV screens, and thus to our minds, the possibility that what we have known up to now, even in faith, isn’t all that can be known. Maybe Pathfinder will be remembered as the moment our conceptions of God magnified and we saw ourselves embraced by a God whose immensity and determination far exceed ancient bounds.

This leap into space might even make us humble. Just as the brashest certainties stand aside at the moment of death or of watching one’s child be born, perhaps we all could put aside the miniature theological ramparts from which we assault each other, and we could bend the knee in awe_ not just in awe of the gifts that God has given us to hurtle explorers to another planet, but in awe of a God whose hand reaches so far into time and space.

Maybe we humans aren’t the center of creation, as we have wanted to believe. But that’s OK. Faith has never been about our centrality, but about God’s.

MJP END EHRICH