Introduction

“That God the transcendent Creator of the universe and the infinite Source of all its structure and order should thus become one of us and one with us in the birth, life, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ in such a way as to effect a renewing of the creation and the setting of it on a new basis in which it is eternally bound up with the life of God himself, makes our minds reel with its immeasurable significance; but what is particularly staggering is the fact that it gives Jesus Christ a place of cosmic significance, making him, man of earth as he the incarnate Son of God is, the point of supreme focus for the whole universe of space and time, by reference to which all its meaning and destiny are finally to be discerned” (pp. 21-22).

“As acts of God, however, [the Incarnation and Resurrection] are finally explicable only from grounds in God, and are therefore ultimates which are not open to complete formalization, or therefore verification, within the natural order of things in which they nevertheless share. Within that order they constitute the ‘boundary conditions’, to borrow a term from Einstein and Polanyi, where the natural order is open to control and explication from a higher and wider level of reality, in a way similar to that in which the various levels with which we operate in any rigorous science are each open to the meta-level above it. This participation of the incarnation and resurrection in the natural order of things, however, must not be understood as an interruption of the natural order or an infringement of its laws, but rather the contrary. As acts of God who is the creative Source of all order in space and time, they are essentially ordering events within the natural order, restoring and creating order where it is damaged or lacking, and it is in terms of that giving of order that they constitute the relevant boundary conditions within the natural order where it is open to the transcendent and creative reality of God.” (pp. 22-23)