Detail of Holy Ghost,
Giusto de Menabuoi. Credit: Alinari/
Art Resource, NY.

SPIRITUAL INFORMATION SYMPOSIUM
Years ago, while an officer in the British army, John Bowker was sent to control a riot over a donkey between religious factions in a marketplace in northern Nigeria. “I did everything by the book—you had to blow a trumpet, you had to have an interpreter, you had to say ‘go home,’ three times or ‘I’ll fire.’” It was no use. The tense crowd could not be calmed and soon pulled the donkey limb from limb. While witnessing the spectacle, Bowker had an epiphany. “I suddenly realized I wanted to understand why religious people hated one another so much,” he says.

During a career that has included Anglican priesthood, pioneering religious studies scholarship, the authorship of 17 books and the editorship of The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, among other accomplishments, John Bowker, now the honorary Canon Bowker, has answered his question. “My answer is that religions are so dangerous because they matter so much.” It is, he says, “the paradox of religious urgency.”

In April 2005, another fundamental question was before Canon Bowker and 13 leading theologians, scholars in religious studies, philosophers and scientists gathered at Trinity College, Cambridge. This time the question was the profound mystery of God’s presence and absence. And how to understand this absence as an invitation.

Amongst some Christians, that invitation has been interpreted as a call to come, through contemplation or action, further and deeper into God’s presence—to seek Christ in the Eucharist and look for Him, as one contemporary theologian writes, “in other places of brokenness” throughout the world. Or, in a Hindu context, it is an invitation to think more intensely about the paradox of experiencing a world without God, even turned away from God, while at the same time remembering God’s gracious intent to be nearby—to rediscover God where God seems not to be. Amongst some scientists, the invitation has been read as a challenge to push further and deeper into the universe itself. The perspectives of the symposium participants differed, but their shared conviction is that we can learn something from the varied ways in which people in both science and religion have engaged with the hidden and the open.

The philosophic framework for the symposium arose from a core interest of the Foundation—the possibility of learning more about “a God who would be known but dwells as non-being beyond the realm of our conception.”

The conference was part of a bridge-building exercise that brought scientists and theologians together to consider the virtues of attempting to know the unknowable.

“What if God is unknowable?” asks Canon Bowker rhetorically. “How are we going to enter into any knowledge or communion with God? The great mystics, not just in Christianity, but in Islam and other religions, say if you’re saying “X” is unknowable, how can we possibly interact with “X”? And that’s when the great breakthroughs in human spiritual progress were made. In the case of science and these religious traditions, the grappling with the unknowable was itself enormously creative and caused manifest consequences.”

“The symposium (For a full list of participants click here) was not only important,” says Bowker, “but also unique. It was not reductionist. We drew the religious experts into conversation with the science experts in a way that was not explaining it all away. I’ve never been involved in anything like it. It was a uniquely creative exchange of vision and hope and reassurance.”

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