Transfiguration and Paradigm shifts

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a game-changer book, which caused a bit of a kerfuffle in his own field – and has been taken up by nearly every other field since. The book had the unpromising title of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but is probably one of the few books in the philosophy of science that could genuinely be called a bestseller. The premise is sort of simple, which is why it translates well. He was addressing the common view of science: that we gradually know more and more; We refine our ideas, create greater detail and enlarge concepts. Science is slowly progressing to an ever more complete understanding. Instead, he argued, science is tied to narratives, ideas and models. Normal science operates by developing these pictures to account for anomalies and new information. But these narratives, ideas and models are not necessarily true in themselves; They’re just ways of thinking that help scientists imagine and organise experiments and observations in order to predict future events with greater accuracy.

Then, he says, there are these moments – when for varying reasons, which may be because there are rather too many anomalies to account for, Or it may just be cultural and societal assumptions or predilections; But someone comes up with a new model or idea and suddenly everything changes; all that old work gets tossed out and the poor little scientists have to start again. This is a scientific revolution. So the big examples would be things like the Copernican revolution when people changed from seeing the centre of the solar system as the Earth to the sun. Or the beginning of Quantum science, where the model that works for really, really small things don’t work in the same way as big things. There are many examples though – like Schrodinger’s cat – no one’s ever quite sure whether he’s alive or dead, and posters on lampposts brought in no convincing evidence; Heissenberg’s famous ‘uncertainty principle’ – that, still, no one’s really sure about; but part of the point, and the inspiration for the book, comes from the difficulty of looking from one point in science to another. So Thomas Kuhn talks about giving lectures on the history of science, and reading through Aristotle’s Physics. He came away thinking – “wow, this guy is just a ‘dreadfully bad physical scientist” – despite the fact that Aristotle – who is still widely read and admired 2400 years after he died – is clearly a brilliant mind. What he concluded was that Aristotle was not a bad version of Newton – He just was working with an entirely different set of tools and ideas about the world. To understand Aristotle’s science is remarkably difficult because we just cannot get our imagination around all the differences, the different assumptions, between then and now.

On a side note, I’ve always been baffled that Christians still have strong feelings about the old doctrine of transubstantiation. It’s one of those words that makes good Protestant stand up and shout “Down with this sort of thing!” For those of you who have been preserved from this particular internecine debate, the Catholic doctrine is that the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ. The “science” behind the doctrine though is Aristotelian. In his day, for complicated reasons we shall not address here, objects in the world were said to have substance and accidents. So the ‘substance’ was the thing-in-itself – The core essence of Sarah or chairs or bread – And the ‘accidents’ were what we perceive – so taste, feel, smell, appearance, sound. With this ‘science’ the old doctrine makes sense – the accidents remain as they were – It tastes, looks, smells, feels like bread. But the substance has changed – it’s now substantially the body of Christ. When you understand this way of looking at the world, the doctrine makes sense. But no one now thinks of the world as having substance and accidents – That is no longer normal science. Which makes it very odd to talk about this doctrine at all, and leads to a lot of confusion.

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But I bring all this up, because today the Church celebrates an event in the Gospels called the Transfiguration. Jesus has taken the inner circle of disciples – James, John and Peter – off in secret. There they have this moment of Epiphany; this transformation, this dream-like sequence, as they see Christ in his divinity. And the core of this vision is Christ speaking with Moses and Elijah about the death that awaits him in Jerusalem. We hear that the disciples are terrified, they keep silent, despite the declaration of heaven that Jesus is the Son of God, despite the flashing lights.

This moment is a paradigm shift. It’s the revolution in Judaism that Jesus brings about. Not in ethics or ritual or eschatology; Jesus’ ideas are quite radical but not remarkably so. The revolution is in what it means to be the Messiah. And we see it over and again in the Gospels that what stresses and confuses the disciples is when Jesus tries to explain what is coming in the crucifixion. The idea of a suffering messiah is in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the prophet Isaiah; But it was not the accepted paradigm of what a messiah looks like.

From our Christian paradigm, Jesus saying that he’s going to die in Jerusalem is expected. It’s very hard to imagine how this just wouldn’t make sense to a first century Jew waiting for liberation from the Romans. Even his disciples don’t get it. – and keep getting things wrong until the resurrection. Because the point is that Jesus isn’t about a small colony seeking liberation; A people wanting their independence back; Which is what was understood. The true Messiah is about the revelation of the meaning of the world as love; It’s about the definition of love as self-giving even to death; It’s about divine kingship going further than one particular nation to all people; It’s about true power lying in service; It’s about the reality of suffering in discipleship and the Christian life; We’d need to imagine our King Charles walking out of his palaces to live under the stars, preaching to the confused paparazzi that followed him, and proclaiming that he would suffer the fate of his namesake, to imagine the magnitude of the change Jesus is proclaiming. In short, Jesus is turning upside down all the ideas of messiahship/kingship in the first century and many ideas about what a blessed life looks like today.

The question it asks us is are we truly converted? Have we really got this new paradigm? That following Christ is about service, it involves suffering; it’s unpopular and it’s not easy. Would we rather be followers of a king who lives in palaces, content to live out his days in peace? The brightness of this moment of transfiguration pre-empts the darkness that is to come. It is the bright field, Jesus spoke of last week, that will become Golgotha. The primary image of Christ is that of the light of the world taken into the darkest of places. That is the reassurance we have – that there is nowhere in which the light of Christ does not shine. But the difficult message of the Gospel holds these things together – Christianity does not propose a simple happy ending: It holds together hope and fear; Faith and abandonment; Love and suffering; And says: here is the new paradigm – this is what it actually means to be God. So we are asked today – do we have the right paradigm of faith that will sustain us in the darkest of hours? Are we following Christ or some other king? Have we noticed that as Christ is lifted up in light, it is to shine a spotlight on the road of suffering that is the path of love? A paradigm shift is a kind of conversion – Not in the superficial things, not a refining of concepts; But a change in the soul – a metanoia – Like Paul blinded by the light, Like John Newton, realising the wickedness of slavery Like an apple falling from a tree bringing about the fall, or the discovery of gravity. Amen.