Many people have a ‘God of the gaps’ theology. God is presented as their answer for everything unknown to humankind. The problem with this approach is that humankind is constantly learning more and more about the world and many of its mysteries are being solved or finally understood- and, I must say, at an amazing rate. Surely there will always be mysteries to be solved, but is this fact simply because of the present limitations of our collective knowledge, understanding, or skill?
If the only place for God is to be our answer to things we currently do not understand, then, the more we learn about our world, the less relevant God becomes to us. This may be why many Christians ‘kick against the goads’ of our growing scientific body of knowledge and are forever trying to demonstrate that scientific evidence is 'no evidence at all' (just a conspiratorial attempt to sidetrack the God question evoked by the supposed 'gaps').
What if folks are wrong to embrace the God of the gaps in the first place? What if God gave us our various gifts for inquiry and our determined curiosity because God desires for us to better understand the workings of God's world? What if God delights in seeing humans peering into the wonders of God's amazing creative work and even tinkering with it in order to understand how God did it and how to join God in God's creative work? What if the only thing missing in many laboratories is praise and glory to God at the end of a good day's work (and most everything else is a noble pursuit)?
No. In the end, I do not find the God of the gaps to be a very mighty ‘God’. God is Lord of everything, not simply 'the gaps'.
*For more on this theme, see Bonhoeffer's, Letters and Papers From Prison (Tegel- 30 April 1944).
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