Facts Complement Faith
Sermon
A SEASON OF SAINTS
Sermons For Festivals And Commemorations After Pentecost
May 24
Nicolaus Copernicus, Teacher, 1542
One day last week I ran into a graduate student colleague of mine in the university library. He asked me what I was doing research on, and I told him "Nicolaus Copernicus." That surprised him, since my field is 19th century American Christianity, and Copernicus was a 16th century Polish astronomer. So I explained to him that I was working on a sermon commemorating Copernicus. That surprised him even more. "Why," he wondered, "is a Lutheran church commemorating a Polish Catholic scientist, especially one who is often considered a symbol of the tension between religion and science?"
The easy answer to his question would have been, "Because it says so on our church calendar." But why is Copernicus on our calendar? Sure, we want to honor people of a variety of nationalities, whose contributions to Christian life have been made in a variety of fields. But why is the only day on our calendar commemorating a scientist devoted to Copernicus?
The calendar designates May 24 as the commemoration of "Nicolaus Copernicus, Teacher." That in itself is puzzling. Copernicus was never a teacher. He was a church bureaucrat in a Polish town called Frauenburg, and was trained in medicine, mathematics, astronomy and economics. He wrote two books in his life, one on monetary policy and one on astronomy. He only taught one student in his life, a Lutheran professor from Luther's own university in Wittenberg who traveled to Frauenburg to investigate Copernicus' theories about the solar system.
So if Copernicus is considered a teacher of the church, it's not because he was a classroom whiz. But Copernicus was a teacher in a much broader sense: he taught the whole world new ways of thinking and understanding the universe, so profound that they are often collectively described as the "Copernican revolution."
Copernicus, whose Polish name was Miklaj Kopperningk, was born in 1473, ten years before Martin Luther, and 19 years before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World. Through the efforts of a clergyman uncle, he was appointed as a young man to a position in church administration, which provided him with a livelihood and an opportunity to study with some of the best teachers in Europe. His special love was mathematics, and he was fascinated by the complex mathematical theories that had been developed since ancient times to explain and predict the movement of heavenly bodies.
Those theories were so complex because they all started with the assumption that the earth is the center of the universe and all the celestial bodies travel around the earth. Of course, that's the way it appears to common sense and the naked eye, and people in a more primitive age had no reason to believe it wasn't so. As more and more data were collected about astronomical events and patterns, it became harder to fit the facts to the theory. For example, sometimes planets seemed to back up, or to exchange positions in the sky. So the mathematical solutions to astronomical puzzles became hopelessly complex.
Even some ancient Greeks had suggested that the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of the planetary system, and the earth travels around the sun along with the planets and comets. Copernicus, aware of those ancient and generally rejected theories, made the bold claim that the hypothesis of a heliocentric universe - one with the sun at the center - made it much simpler to explain the odd behavior of stars and planets. When a planet appeared to move backwards, that planet was moving the same direction as the earth, but slower. When planets switched positions relative to each other, it was because the earth had moved to a point in its orbit that changed the angle at which we viewed the planets.
Years of study convinced Copernicus that this was the true configuration of the universe. He wrote up his findings in a book that remained unpublished for years; Copernicus first saw the published edition of his work on the day of his death, May 24, 1543.
Of course, his theory still had rough edges, and it wasn't until the invention of the telescope and the research of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei a century later that his conclusions were proven valid. But Copernicus had turned the universe on its head, and had begun a revolution in both scientific and religious thought.
Still, many scientists have made important discoveries. Why do we single out Copernicus as a teacher? First, he taught the world a new way of thinking. Medieval people called science "philosophy," and it was. Instead of forming ideas based on facts, people before modern times formed their ideas first about how things should be, and then made the facts fit their ideas.
The combination of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology that the Catholic Church stamped with its authority led to a belief that the universe was a certain way, and people bent, looped and carved up their facts to fit the theory.
Copernicus reasoned the other way around: find out the facts and then form a hypothesis that reasonably accounts for the facts. One intense debate provoked by Copernicus' work was whether a hypothesis formed in that way could be considered an attempt at stating the truth. Of course, to question the legitimacy of making up your mind about something after you have the facts instead of before seems ridiculous to modern people, but 450 years ago that was an astonishing breakthrough. It's easy to see how we moderns are beneficiaries of the Copernican revolution.
What Copernicus did in astronomy is similar to what Martin Luther was doing at the same time in theology. In fact, Copernicus has been called the "Luther of science," and Luther has been called the "Copernicus of theology." Copernicus refused to accept a system of astronomy that contradicted mathematics, and Luther refused to accept a system of theology that contradicted the Bible. Each man claimed the right to form his own conclusions based on original information, and each one revolutionized his own discipline. They never convinced each other: Copernicus remained a loyal Catholic and Luther called Copernicus a "fool who would upset the art of astronomy," but they made parallel movements of mind and spirit.
But that still doesn't establish Copernicus' significance for the modern church. What did the Copernican revolution contribute to Christian thought? On one hand, a problem. The ancient view - that the sun, stars and planets revolve around the earth - is reflected in much of the language in the Bible. If Copernicus is right, the Bible is wrong; if the Bible is right, Copernicus is wrong. But there's a third way of relating the two positions: both Copernicus and the Bible are right, and the disagreement only results from a wrong interpretation of the Bible.
In the Bible, God reveals himself to inspire our faith and guide our conduct. The center of the revelation is God's grace in Jesus Christ. But God chose to communicate his revelation through the writings of an assortment of human authors over hundreds of years, and as human beings they expressed their faith in the language and concepts of their own time. The language and the worldview might change, but the revelation still remains valid. So, although the writers of the Bible proclaimed God to be the creator of a universe with the earth at its center, changing the details of the picture doesn't change the truth of the revelation: Copernicus moved the pieces around, but still confessed that God had created them.
Three hundred years after Copernicus, a new battle between science and faith erupted over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Again, changing the details of the story doesn't necessarily change the point of the story, and many Christians have no trouble believing that God created us even if it took much longer than people used to believe. But Darwin went further: his theory includes the principle of random mutations and natural selection of the fittest. It specifically denies any loving purpose, any guiding principle, any Creator or sustainer or provider. Darwin challenged the meaning of the creation story for Christian faith: Copernicus challenged the terms in which the story is told.
Aside from challenging our way of thinking, Copernicus' theory made some positive contributions to Christian thought. It vastly enlarged our sense of the size of God's creation. One objection to his theory was that the stars don't seem to change their relative position in the sky: if the earth is moving around, why doesn't the angle or distance between stars seem to change? Copernicus speculated that the stars are so far away the few million miles the earth moves in a year don't make any difference discernible by the naked eye. The later invention of the telescope affirmed his theory.
That information made the scope of God's creation and providence millions of times greater than human beings had ever imagined. God hadn't just created a little greenhouse earth with a lighted sky-dome over it that he could sit in heaven and keep an eye on: he had created a universe that stretched for billions of miles, with movement and order and precision and balance and beauty that served no apparent purpose but his own pleasure in it.
Which in turn makes God's grace the more amazing. If the earth is the center of the universe and human beings are the most important creatures on it, then it only makes sense for God to be supremely concerned about us. But if we are tiny specks on a little piece of dust in the corner of an infinite cosmos, then for God to tend to us day-by-day and to have sent his own Son to die for us can only be considered astonishingly gracious acts of love.
Copernicus believed all that. He never thought his book, On the Revolution of Celestial Orbs, could undermine Christian faith. In fact, he loved to study the skies because it added to his wonder at the greatness and grace of God. In an age when it has become customary to hold the claims of science and of faith in tension, we do well to learn from Nicolaus Copernicus, teacher: to learn that the insights of science complement our confession of faith; to learn to desire knowledge and understanding of the universe God has created. Amen.
Nicolaus Copernicus, Teacher, 1542
One day last week I ran into a graduate student colleague of mine in the university library. He asked me what I was doing research on, and I told him "Nicolaus Copernicus." That surprised him, since my field is 19th century American Christianity, and Copernicus was a 16th century Polish astronomer. So I explained to him that I was working on a sermon commemorating Copernicus. That surprised him even more. "Why," he wondered, "is a Lutheran church commemorating a Polish Catholic scientist, especially one who is often considered a symbol of the tension between religion and science?"
The easy answer to his question would have been, "Because it says so on our church calendar." But why is Copernicus on our calendar? Sure, we want to honor people of a variety of nationalities, whose contributions to Christian life have been made in a variety of fields. But why is the only day on our calendar commemorating a scientist devoted to Copernicus?
The calendar designates May 24 as the commemoration of "Nicolaus Copernicus, Teacher." That in itself is puzzling. Copernicus was never a teacher. He was a church bureaucrat in a Polish town called Frauenburg, and was trained in medicine, mathematics, astronomy and economics. He wrote two books in his life, one on monetary policy and one on astronomy. He only taught one student in his life, a Lutheran professor from Luther's own university in Wittenberg who traveled to Frauenburg to investigate Copernicus' theories about the solar system.
So if Copernicus is considered a teacher of the church, it's not because he was a classroom whiz. But Copernicus was a teacher in a much broader sense: he taught the whole world new ways of thinking and understanding the universe, so profound that they are often collectively described as the "Copernican revolution."
Copernicus, whose Polish name was Miklaj Kopperningk, was born in 1473, ten years before Martin Luther, and 19 years before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World. Through the efforts of a clergyman uncle, he was appointed as a young man to a position in church administration, which provided him with a livelihood and an opportunity to study with some of the best teachers in Europe. His special love was mathematics, and he was fascinated by the complex mathematical theories that had been developed since ancient times to explain and predict the movement of heavenly bodies.
Those theories were so complex because they all started with the assumption that the earth is the center of the universe and all the celestial bodies travel around the earth. Of course, that's the way it appears to common sense and the naked eye, and people in a more primitive age had no reason to believe it wasn't so. As more and more data were collected about astronomical events and patterns, it became harder to fit the facts to the theory. For example, sometimes planets seemed to back up, or to exchange positions in the sky. So the mathematical solutions to astronomical puzzles became hopelessly complex.
Even some ancient Greeks had suggested that the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of the planetary system, and the earth travels around the sun along with the planets and comets. Copernicus, aware of those ancient and generally rejected theories, made the bold claim that the hypothesis of a heliocentric universe - one with the sun at the center - made it much simpler to explain the odd behavior of stars and planets. When a planet appeared to move backwards, that planet was moving the same direction as the earth, but slower. When planets switched positions relative to each other, it was because the earth had moved to a point in its orbit that changed the angle at which we viewed the planets.
Years of study convinced Copernicus that this was the true configuration of the universe. He wrote up his findings in a book that remained unpublished for years; Copernicus first saw the published edition of his work on the day of his death, May 24, 1543.
Of course, his theory still had rough edges, and it wasn't until the invention of the telescope and the research of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei a century later that his conclusions were proven valid. But Copernicus had turned the universe on its head, and had begun a revolution in both scientific and religious thought.
Still, many scientists have made important discoveries. Why do we single out Copernicus as a teacher? First, he taught the world a new way of thinking. Medieval people called science "philosophy," and it was. Instead of forming ideas based on facts, people before modern times formed their ideas first about how things should be, and then made the facts fit their ideas.
The combination of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology that the Catholic Church stamped with its authority led to a belief that the universe was a certain way, and people bent, looped and carved up their facts to fit the theory.
Copernicus reasoned the other way around: find out the facts and then form a hypothesis that reasonably accounts for the facts. One intense debate provoked by Copernicus' work was whether a hypothesis formed in that way could be considered an attempt at stating the truth. Of course, to question the legitimacy of making up your mind about something after you have the facts instead of before seems ridiculous to modern people, but 450 years ago that was an astonishing breakthrough. It's easy to see how we moderns are beneficiaries of the Copernican revolution.
What Copernicus did in astronomy is similar to what Martin Luther was doing at the same time in theology. In fact, Copernicus has been called the "Luther of science," and Luther has been called the "Copernicus of theology." Copernicus refused to accept a system of astronomy that contradicted mathematics, and Luther refused to accept a system of theology that contradicted the Bible. Each man claimed the right to form his own conclusions based on original information, and each one revolutionized his own discipline. They never convinced each other: Copernicus remained a loyal Catholic and Luther called Copernicus a "fool who would upset the art of astronomy," but they made parallel movements of mind and spirit.
But that still doesn't establish Copernicus' significance for the modern church. What did the Copernican revolution contribute to Christian thought? On one hand, a problem. The ancient view - that the sun, stars and planets revolve around the earth - is reflected in much of the language in the Bible. If Copernicus is right, the Bible is wrong; if the Bible is right, Copernicus is wrong. But there's a third way of relating the two positions: both Copernicus and the Bible are right, and the disagreement only results from a wrong interpretation of the Bible.
In the Bible, God reveals himself to inspire our faith and guide our conduct. The center of the revelation is God's grace in Jesus Christ. But God chose to communicate his revelation through the writings of an assortment of human authors over hundreds of years, and as human beings they expressed their faith in the language and concepts of their own time. The language and the worldview might change, but the revelation still remains valid. So, although the writers of the Bible proclaimed God to be the creator of a universe with the earth at its center, changing the details of the picture doesn't change the truth of the revelation: Copernicus moved the pieces around, but still confessed that God had created them.
Three hundred years after Copernicus, a new battle between science and faith erupted over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Again, changing the details of the story doesn't necessarily change the point of the story, and many Christians have no trouble believing that God created us even if it took much longer than people used to believe. But Darwin went further: his theory includes the principle of random mutations and natural selection of the fittest. It specifically denies any loving purpose, any guiding principle, any Creator or sustainer or provider. Darwin challenged the meaning of the creation story for Christian faith: Copernicus challenged the terms in which the story is told.
Aside from challenging our way of thinking, Copernicus' theory made some positive contributions to Christian thought. It vastly enlarged our sense of the size of God's creation. One objection to his theory was that the stars don't seem to change their relative position in the sky: if the earth is moving around, why doesn't the angle or distance between stars seem to change? Copernicus speculated that the stars are so far away the few million miles the earth moves in a year don't make any difference discernible by the naked eye. The later invention of the telescope affirmed his theory.
That information made the scope of God's creation and providence millions of times greater than human beings had ever imagined. God hadn't just created a little greenhouse earth with a lighted sky-dome over it that he could sit in heaven and keep an eye on: he had created a universe that stretched for billions of miles, with movement and order and precision and balance and beauty that served no apparent purpose but his own pleasure in it.
Which in turn makes God's grace the more amazing. If the earth is the center of the universe and human beings are the most important creatures on it, then it only makes sense for God to be supremely concerned about us. But if we are tiny specks on a little piece of dust in the corner of an infinite cosmos, then for God to tend to us day-by-day and to have sent his own Son to die for us can only be considered astonishingly gracious acts of love.
Copernicus believed all that. He never thought his book, On the Revolution of Celestial Orbs, could undermine Christian faith. In fact, he loved to study the skies because it added to his wonder at the greatness and grace of God. In an age when it has become customary to hold the claims of science and of faith in tension, we do well to learn from Nicolaus Copernicus, teacher: to learn that the insights of science complement our confession of faith; to learn to desire knowledge and understanding of the universe God has created. Amen.
