The Big Bang

Many creation myths involve great struggles that result in the separation of originally unified elements bringing about the pairs of opposites that is our experience of life: male and female, birth and death, day and night, etc. The Old Testament creation story is not one of these. God brings form to an empty and formless earth and then brings living things out of the earth, already differentiated into species and gender. Adam, the first man, comes along, the lone human, a male, formed from the soil. The only conflict in this part of the story is that he has trouble finding a companion out of all the creatures God has placed in the Garden of Eden with him. God puts this first human into a deep sleep and only takes one layer of protective bony tissue from his torso, out of which He makes Eve, Adam’s female counterpart.

We later see many great struggles in both the Torah (the Old Testament to Christians) and the New Testament. There’s the disobedience of the first couple and their fall from grace resulting in you and me and all other humans being barred from the peace and beauty of the Garden, and whence come all the rivalries, murders, floods, wars, etc., all stemming from the original sin of Adam and Eve.

Jesus Christ, in answer to a dogmatic enigma put to him by Jewish theologians about the pair of opposites that is inherent in earthly humanity, unexpectedly explained that in the Kingdom of God to come after the resurrection of the dead there will be no male and female, but people there “will be like angels walking the earth.” He seemed to intimate that one of the problems causing strife and misunderstanding in this earthly human life that will be solved in the life to come is the temporal separation into a pair of opposites. Did he mean that all the women will disappear back into the male rib cages from whence they came? I think not.

Modern conventional cosmology purports that at the beginning there was a unification of elements that was separated in an incomprehensibly stupendous explosion. We know this as the “Big Bang”. Some of the biggest “bangs” ever witnessed by humanity have resulted from humans purposely splitting the atoms of a man created substance called plutonium. But, far from being a creative act, these bangs bring horrible sickness, death and desolation that can go on for decades. Out of the aboriginal Big Bang came awesome beauty, and on this one resultant sphere of congealed, sun warmed matter called planet earth came a vast plethora of life forms yearning for life itself, bringing forth like life forms, giving their life’s energy and even sacrificing their own lives so that life can and will go on. What, exactly, could have possibly been split that caused all this beauteous stuff called the Universe to be called into existence?

Paul wrote that “Christ was crucified before the foundation of the earth.” Now, if, as it is taught, the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Only Begotten Son of God, who was with God and was God from the beginning, was only intended to counteract the effects of human sinfulness, both original and personal, why does it need to be an act that occurred before the foundations of the earth were laid?

If we analyze what we know from what the New Testament authors tell us about the crucifixion of Christ and place this in the intellectual atmosphere of modern secular cosmology, an interesting juxtaposition occurs. Let us assume that before the foundations of the earth and, hence, the entire Universe were laid, the Trinity of Christendom was in a complete, loving and eternal Union. It follows that when the cataclysm of Divine separation that came into being when the Son of God, one-third of the Triune Godhead, was “abandoned” to the death by God his Father took place, we have now the establishment of a situation that, in the light of what happens when a few tiny atoms are split, could do nothing less than to bring forth a mammoth and prodigiously creative and life giving “Bang“. Into the void of this eternal moment of loss, grief and yearning for reunion between this, the most loving Parent and Child relationship that has ever been and could ever be, poured creative love from both sides bringing forth a Universe of Life made up of pairs of opposites yearning for each other and for Life itself.

Each and every loving relationship that forms in this life has an eternal quality to it, and yet all in such life giving unions will lose the other to suffering and death. But in the lexicon of the spiritual Universe being explored herein, all have the Promise in the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ that there will be the Great Reunion in the Kingdom where all will be together again, One in Him and Them.