Reading Scripture through the Lens of Teilhard de Chardin

One of the great theological problems in the last century of biblical studies was trying to figure out what is the hermeneutical center of all of scripture? There were many views set forth but one of the more popular views among Evangelicals was Walter Kaiser's proposal that promise theology or God fulfilling his promises throughout all of scripture was the center that held all scripture together. What critics of Kaiser rightly showed was that the wisdom material of scripture did not really fit into Kaiser's promise theology.

Maybe if Evangelicals would have simply been more immersed into the theology of the early church fathers and their theological interpretations of scripture, they would have been more sympathetic to Christ as the center of the Bible. Many had made moves like this through the centuries including the great theologian Karl Barth. The problem of western dualistic theology is it has too often segmented and separated the older testament from the newer testament and the literal from the figurative or symbolic. The person who had the greatest vision of the cosmic Christ in the twentieth century from my estimation was Teilhard de Chardin who holistically viewed science and the Christian religion together as well as all humanity could be caught up in the great cloud of witnesses where God is all and all and all reality is one with God.

One of the things missing in Teilhard de Chardin studies is a stronger working model from scripture. Chardin would typically say Jesus or Paul or the Gospel of John says this theologically without hardly ever saying where in scripture this came from or the exact reference. So I was excited when I heard of Marie Noon Sabin's book Evolving Humanity and Biblical Wisdom. On the one hand, Sabin's book only very loosely and generally relates her studies of wisdom literature and the gospels to Teilhard De Chardin. One might had hoped she would have unpacked more exact references from Chardin's theological works. On the other hand, one will not be disappointed in her mystical and scriptural vision way of putting various biblical texts together and how they weave into a beautiful tapestry of the image of Jesus Christ throughout all of scripture. She sees God revealing himself everywhere discovering Christ's centrality but also humanity's divinization of entering, participating, and becoming like Christ. She not only shows how Christ ties wisdom literature together but all of biblical scripture in what Teilhard would call the omega point which is Christ.