The older I get, and the more I read and learn, the more ignorant I feel. I keep learning new things I never heard of before, and I encounter things I learned a long time ago and forgot, and I am reminded of things I thought I knew, but find out now that I am wrong. It reminds me of a short poem I learned in elementary school – “Why Study?” It posits: The more you want to know, the more you learn; the more you learn the more you know; the more you know the more you can forget; the more you can forget the more you DO forget, the more you forget the less you know; so, why study?

So, recently I have been reading some theology of the late 19th and early 20th century, and I keep tripping over the word/concept emanationism. Emanationism traces its roots back to a Greek neo-Platonist named Plotinus who lived and wrote in the third century. He wrestled with the idea of an anthropomorphized view of God, believing that the more we created God in our own human image, the greater the danger of reducing God to mere mortal standards. He was clear that any human conception of God was incomplete, inaccurate, ignorant, and ill-advised. He felt that God was absolute and beyond all human comprehension, but that at the very least God (or whatever name we flawed and fallible humans use) was the primary source and author of every emanation of creation, energy, life force, beauty, purpose, ethical good, and truth. As the early church engaged in the ethereal juggling act of defining God in three persons, emanationism came into regular and consistent alignment with the Holy Spirit of God, viewed as the creative energy, essence, and transcendence of God. Emanationism popped up and was dusted off throughout the history of Christianity’s westward progression, finding a solid academic respect in the modern era into the early 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s emanationism fell into disrepute as a powerful evangelical fundamentalism all but destroyed the relationship of philosophy to Christianity.

My approved doctoral dissertation (that I never go around to finishing) was, believe it or not, The Extra-Canonical Pneumatological Writings of the Ante-Nicene Church. Fascinating stuff, huh? We have always had a strong and powerful focus on Judeo-Christian theology and we have developed a rigorous and complex Christology (if you care to actually study and understand it…), but our pneumatology – our understanding and core beliefs about God’s Holy Spirit – has been deficient and nominally explored. This stems to the fact that much writing in the early Christian movement was extremely speculative from a mythic-magic worldview, it smacked of superstition and magic, and it was taken in a wide variety of weird directions by gnostics. As reason, rationale thought, scientific methods, multiple awakenings to modernism evolved, emanationism took on more of a “new age” reputation and it has all but disappeared from our church lexicon.

Except in one area. There is a growing dialogue between theologians and quantum physicists, AI developers, astrophysicists, and postmodern philosophers about what can accurately be labeled emanatioism. More and more science is indicating that everything came from something rather than nothing (creation ex nihilo). While much energy cannot be called sentient, there is often evidence of a direction, an intentionality, and a purpose to fields of energy and the massive space and “dark matter” in the universe. While there may not be a directing hand upon creation there is a deep awareness of a something from which all emanates. I am not at all well enough versed to lay out the connections, cross patterns, and complexities in much of this exploration, but I find it deeply fascinating and I find that it bolsters my faith and my core beliefs.

Here is my heresy: I do not believe in an old white bearded man sitting in the clouds, speaking and thinking English, managing the ins and outs of heaven, listening to all our prayers simultaneously while figuring out who deserves to be hit with a hurricane, an earthquake, a fire, cancer, AIDS, abject poverty, hunger, violence, or a bad hair day. I don’t think heaven is someplace we go. I don’t think hell is flames and torment and endless suffering; hell is rejecting God and having to live in isolation from all that is truly good and beautiful and true. I do believe that we all have come from the absolute reality that we/I call God and that by grace and mercy I will return to this source when all is said and done. I believe in the eternal now, and if I am not living life for God in the moment, then I am not living life for God. God is more than just creation and creator; God is intention and that intention is that we will live together in unity, allowing the good principles of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23), mercy, justice, and humility (Micah 6:8) to be manifest in our thoughts, words, and actions. These things are the emanations of the absolute that we call love, for God is love.

The Holy Spirit is not Casper the Friendly Ghost. There is actually noting very woo-woo about our Holy Ghost. The pneuma is the breath, the life force, the imminence of God available to each and every one of us, though we seem to do all in our power to inhibit if not outright deny its power. I hope and pray that science doesn’t steal our amazing concept of emanationism, but that it might rise again in the thinking and discussing of open, progressive, process theologians and every day Christians. We might just need this way of thinking and believing now more than ever.