If you can, get hold of a book called "Chaos" by James Gleick. It's a history of the development of chaos theory, and reads like what the history of the emerging church will be.

Technorati Tags: chaos theory, Emerging Church, fractals, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Mandlebrot, Pete Rollins

Before there was chaos theory there were sets of problems which people ignored because they'd been trained to ignore (just like Christians are trained to ignore certain sets of questions. Freud apparently said that the church trains its people to ask only the questions it can answer.). Experimenters would notice slight variations in their observed data - "noise" - which wasn't supposed to be there. Theoreticians work in a perfect world in which there isn't any noise, so they could simply ignore it. The noise was, it was thought, simply an indication of the presence of some annoying un-eliminable factors, like friction or air resistance, or slightly imperfect equipment.

However, a few crazies on the edge of the accepted way of doing things decided to investigate - in many cases on their own for many years, only slowly meeting others who were doing the same thing. This took decades and lots of work, from American cotton price fluctuations over 100 years to weather patterns to intermittent line noise...people buried within their disciplines were coming across the same sort of problem expressed in different ways. Very few people were doing cross-disciplinary work and those that were began to see a pattern (this is why we must not just look to theologians for our theological answers).

Slowly the momentum built until suddenly one day a critical mass of scientific opinion was reached and *poof* chaos theory was the new exciting thing. Scientists were pulling out incredibly simple experiments to play with basic questions, like determining the onset of turbulence (like a simple water wheel...slowly turn up the volume of water coming into the system and at some point turbulence sets in and the rotation of the wheel actually reverses - in non-predictable "chaotic" ways). They found out that chaotic systems could be created by using narrowing down the amount of variables in a system to just 3. Simple causes had complex effects, completely undermining the Newtonian physics of "every action has an equal and opposite reaction." Phsyics had to be divided into "classical physics" and "new physics" (and of course quantum mechanics had a large part to play in this too, with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle showing that there is no such thing as an objective observer, a fundamental assumption of the old physics).

Then Mandlebrot (who solved mathematical problems by constructing a picture of the problem in his head and then playing with it until it felt right...definitey the wrong way of doing maths - but it worked!) discovered fractals and again a whole new world of possibility was opened up to us. In many ways it was just the same old world, but now it looked fresh...and full of exciting potential. Lines of zero length but infinitely many points (the Cantor set). The Lorenz attractor signified a shape of pure disorder but signaled a new kind of order. The (seemingly paradoxical) stable chaos in the red spot of Jupiter. The length of the boundary around a Koch snowflake tends towards infinity, yet its surface area remains less than the area of circle drawn around the snowflake. The length of a coastline is not an absolute value, but depends upon the size of the measuring tool used. The discovery of nonlinearity, meaning the act of playing the game changes the rules of the game. Scientists began to see that the way science is set up determines the answers it gets (echoes of the Freud quote above).

Chaos theory changed the very landscape of physics and science.

This is the future we have ahead of us in the emerging church conversation! Pete Rollins talks about the potential the emerging church conversation has to change the very architecture of western Christianity. Unfortunately it means being called crazy by the majority of the Christian community, who know better. Perhaps we'll even be called heretics. It means possibly long solo journeys with little encouragement, and wondering if somewhere along the line we've lost the plot. And times of working on things when nothing changes or is discovered...lost in the desert. But the task is worth it, especially through the dark and impossible times.

Perhaps you know a few crazies...and maybe you're one youself! As the Apple Mac ad says: "Here's to the crazy ones."

So a toast to all who think they've lost their mind, who are straining for a new way of being a Christian community in this new rainbow world, who have played in the old, classical world and have discovered - or been pushed to discover - something...something which changes everything in unpredictable ways. Someday we'll look back and it'll make sense - just like life, which can only be understood backwards but which must be lived forwards.

Cheers!

Excellent comparison. I've long been fascinated by chaos theory but as a non-scientist, don't really have the background to understand it fully (if anyone can be said to understand it fully!) And what a wonderfully apt comparison with Christianity. We spend years being 'classical Christians' - however that is understood in one's own denomination - and then suddenly, one day, something triggers you to start looking at things differently, from other perspectives. And as your vision enlarges, you DO start wondering if you're heretical, damned to hell, backsliding ... etc. Especially when the people you trust and love don't understand why it is you're suddenly questioning everything you've always accepted as being true. And the more you read, research, explore, talk and think, the broader your vision gets and, quite honestly, the scarier it gets - to start with!

Nowadays, though, I mostly just feel liberated. :-)

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Posted by: Elle 09 Dec, 2007 - 12:04:39

Thanks for this comment, Elle. It's interesting to note that in the modern world people specialise more and more in their particular disciplines. Part of the joy of chaos theory was seeing it applied across the board, from meteorology to stock prices.

In a similar way Christians need to be exposed to thinking from other denominations and traditions, instead of embracing a stance which says, "I'm right and I know I'm right, and they're wrong...or not as right as I am."

My personal opinion is that denominations need to be approached like a dance: every 3 years everyone takes a step to the left.

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Posted by: Roger Saner 10 Dec, 2007 - 16:18:40

It is so refreshing to find Christians looking at these questions. I am certain that the questions raised by Chaos theory find an expression in synchronicity. Especially when synchronicity is closest to explaining the mystery of God at work in Life and especially our lives

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Posted by: Kevin Sprong 01 Feb, 2008 - 20:43:55

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