I had a skeptical, smart student in my youth group once say: “I’ll believe in God when we find life on another planet and they worship the same God we do.”
Well, that day of reckoning may soon come.
Did you catch the news last month that NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered the first known system of Earth-like planets around a single star? It gets even more intriguing in that three of the planets are located in the declared “habitable zone” (or what’s now called the “Goldilocks zone”) a zone determined by the size of the planet and its star along with the distance from its star. It gets even MORE intriguing in that NASA has discovered only one other planet like this and that was just a couple years ago. A trend is emerging.
So maybe it’s time to form, or at least think about, our own extraterrestrial theology, to ponder the question beyond an “after lights out” discussion on a youth retreat. What if extraterrestrial life was discovered? Would that validate our biblical world view or undermine it?
By the way, we actually have a coined word for extraterrestrial theology: exotheology (not yet recognized, I see, by earthbound spell checkers). The word does garner only 10,400 search results, small for Google standards but we’re obviously not the firsts in this discipline.
In fact, church fathers in the first centuries of the church age pondered the question of God creating many worlds. In more recent history, Winston Churchill, though not a theologian, wrote a philosophical essay on the possibility of alien life in 1942 (this was recently discovered and written about in light of the recent earth-like planet discoveries). And one of the first modern Christian writers to seriously address the subject was C.S. Lewis in an article in The Christian Herald published in the 1950s. While the theology of the extraterrestial may not be a serious discipline (though you can find scholarly articles), it does pose intriguing and thought-provoking questions:
- Would Jesus need to incarnate in another form?
- Would extraterrestrial beings have their own Bible and a different God story?
- What if the other world had never “fallen,” if its Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the fruit?
- What would happen if a fallen world interacted with a “Garden of Eden” world?
- If the other world was fallen, would our redemption cover them?
Scripture gives no nod to the possibility of extraterrestial life. It does, however, address the cosmos in various settings. In fact, take a minute to read a cross-section of references through the lens of exotheology (and with those keystrokes I am adding it to my MS Word dictionary).
Genesis 1:14-19
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years,
15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so.
16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.
17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth,
18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.
19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
Psalm 8:1-5, 9
1 Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens.
2 Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.
3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.
9 Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Genesis 1:16 may be the biggest understatement of all time: He also made the stars. It sounds like an afterthought: “Oh yeah, God made the stars. Almost forgot.” But what if in that slight statement about making the stars that God made other beings for relationship around one of those stars. What if our sun is represented in another creation’s understated phrase about God making the stars?
Yes, to ponder the theology of life on other planets is an exercise in pure conjecture. But, the pondering is a helpful thought exercise for theological concepts we stake our faith on: the incarnation, redemption, the Fall, God’s revelation, etc. Applying these vital concepts to another world deepens our personal understanding. It’s like creating a 3-D model of a theological concept and looking at it from angles we can’t see from the 2-D printed page.
And you never know. Someday the exercise might come in handy. There was a time when everyone, theologians included, believed the sun circled the earth (a geocentric model) rather than the earth circling the sun (a heliocentric model). Had computer documents existed at that time, I’m sure the word “heliocentric” wouldn’t have been in spell checkers then either.
Download a small-group exercise of this blog post here.