Interesting piece in Christianity Today about the implications of String Theory to theology. Actually, not so much String Theory as much as the Brane implications of said to theological thinking. (The article starts off sort of slow with a lot of gee-whiz stuff about string theory.)

But then it picks up with the idea that multiple universes would seem to imply a multitude of Jesus’ incarnations. (I suppose assuming that the other Universes needed redeeming too.)

From the article, this quote by Robin Collins, a professor at Messiah College in PA (near where I grew up actually):

“‘I’ve always had problems perceiving the infinite God that we believe in [as] creating life in just one spot,’ Cleaver says. ‘Over the entire past and future of humankind, there’ll probably be no more than a few hundred billion humans to interact with God on this earth. That is a finite number that does not make consistent theological sense to me.’

Collins is intrigued by the possibility of a Messiah with two or more—even a million—faces. Since the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, orthodox Christian theology has drawn a distinction between the divine nature and the human nature in the single person of Christ. There is no reason, Collins believes, that Christ’s divine nature could not unite with other incarnational forms.

‘Who’s going to redeem the Klingons? And they’re very much in need of redemption, as we know from various Star Trek series,’ Collins quips. ‘God the Son, being infinite as he is, could take on the Klingon nature, human nature—you know, a Klingon version of Jesus.… So the traditional formula, which is the standard orthodoxy, is actually very compatible with the multiverse idea.’
Whether or not we discover a multiverse, Cleaver wants to see the church address the idea of life elsewhere.

‘The Catholic Church is far ahead of the Protestant churches on this,’ Cleaver says. ‘The Catholic Church had a conference on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe within the past few years and invited both leading theologians and scientists. The Protestant churches should be doing the same thing.”

Read the full article here.

Oddly enough I found the link to this article in an essay about the Mormon cosmological beliefs and the idea of Kolob and the destiny of humankind. That’s worth another note in and of itself…