Book Review Science and Wisdom by Margaret Kohl

Question: Discuss one or more recent books on the relationship between science and theology.

Through this essay, I will be discussing the relationship between religion (specifically theology) and science with reference to a recent book on the topic by Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology, University of Tübingen, Germany, Jürgen Moltmann. The book being titled Science and Wisdom, translated in 2003 by Margaret Kohl from the German, Wissenschaft und Weisheit: Zum Gesprüch zwischen Naturwissenscheft und Theologie (2002).

I would like to commit a major portion of this essay to the first two papers and to later papers, which show an amount of coherence with the ideas presented in the first.

The middle section of the book, Theology and Cosmology, contains six chapters and concerns issues of:

- Creation under differing (universal) system paradigms

- The consummation of Creation, the history of the universe in terms of Jewish theology of God’s Shekinah, the Christian theology of Christ’s Kenosis and the Kabbalistic concept of zimzum.

- The future of the universe from eschatological perspectives.

- The nature and experience of time and the subject’s place in it.

- Space as a requirement of the living and the homely necessity of bounded space.

- Makom, trinitarian spaces of God and the ways in which it can be perceived that Creation dwells in the space of God and also as God dwelling within his Creation.

The reason I have passed over this material with only a schematic outline, is that these issues, while thoroughly interesting and thought provoking, were put forward from a heavily theological perspective. I found them to be of little importance in developing ideas of the relationship between science and theology; that is, except to give the reader a precise indication of the author’s background and theological views. The discussions on the relationship between science and theology are to be found in the opening two chapters and also the first half of the last section.

Moltmann states clearly in the Preface the he ‘never found the time to study physics thoroughly’ and ‘though lacking professional expertise in the scientific field, science is nevertheless for me a subject of interest and delight.’ This said, the section Theology and Cosmology does not fail to live up to the initial hope Moltmann had in publishing the papers: ‘that (the) contributions may encourage others to set out for themselves, and to follow their own paths into what we must surely call this new theological territory.’ (Xiii)

In a very broad sense, the text is divided into three major sections.