For most of human history, people believed that the earth was flat and that the sun rotated around it. This was a perfectly reasonable belief based on what they observed when looking at the horizon and the daily passage of the sun across the sky.
The first people to question this belief were Greek astronomers who studied the motion of celestial bodies and used newly-invented instruments to measure distances and interpret phenomena such as the solar and lunar eclipses. The most important of these was Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 BC), who came up with the revolutionary theory that ours is a heliocentric rather than geocentric solar system. However, he was too far ahead of his time and his theory was largely ignored.
Almost two millennia passed before the Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543 AD) reintroduced this heliocentric idea. A brilliant scholar and master of several scientific disciplines, Copernicus was also a canon in the Catholic church. When his heliocentric theories were introduced to Pope Clement VII in 1533, they were well received, and when his main work, De revolutionibus orbium coeletium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was published on his death in 1543 it was dedicated to Pope Paul III.
However, the Catholic hierarchy would soon move to denounce the revolutionary theory of Copernicus, which the Roman Inquisition did in 1615. This decision was largely aimed at another great Renaissance polymath, the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had embraced the Copernican theory. The Inquisition condemned him for “vehement suspicion of heresy”. To avoid torture and execution, he renounced heliocentrism, but Pope Urban VIII anyway ordered him to remain under house arrest, which lasted until his death.
But Copernicus was a contemporary of Martin Luther, the most important figure in the Protestant Reformation. A close colleague of Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, arranged for the astronomer Georg Rheticus to become a student of Copernicus, and it was Rheticus who arranged for the first publication of the seminal work of Copernicus. Both Luther and Copernicus were influenced by the Christian humanists, notably Petrarch and Erasmus, pointing to the intertwined nature of the two great transformative movements of that era: the Renaissance and Reformation. Thus the Copernican revolution would not be stopped, and when Isaac Newton (1642-1727) proved the validity of heliocentrism mathematically, what had once been heresy was on an irreversible path to becoming orthodoxy. Today we know for a certainty that Aristarchus, Copernicus and Newton were correct.
With our minds long since unchained from unquestioned beliefs, from superstition and religious dogma, we are free to choose explanations of the universe that make the most sense, based on evidence, logic and experimentation. When we look at our earth and our sky, we see the very same things that have always been visible to the naked eye, but we now know so much more than our ancient forebears about the structure and function of our universe. With this ever greater knowledge, science and technology have flourished and the world we live in has been transformed in a myriad good ways.
What does this revolution in knowledge have to do with the topic of this book, Jesus in the Divine Providence?
Our contention is that a similar revolution is needed in the way that we understand Jesus. In the same way that Aristarchus and Copernicus observed the very same universe as everyone else but, with the help of science, were able to interpret what they saw in a way that rightly challenged established beliefs, so too we must look with new eyes at the Biblical account of Jesus that is widely accepted as the truth by most Christians.
We are suggesting that the missing ‘science’ needed to see Jesus in a true light is the Divine Providence. In other words, it is not possible to recognize Jesus for who he really was—and is—without the perspective of the original Divine purpose for the creation, the reason for the human fall, the need for human salvation from the dominion of Satan, and the historical process that led up to the advent of Jesus as the Messiah.
The Divine Providence is the invisible hand of God that guides humanity to the fulfillment of our original purpose. The better we understand it, the better we can understand Jesus, our own purpose and the mission Christians have inherited from Jesus.
Christians have waited for 2,000 years for Christ to return and establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. However, without a providential understanding of the nature of Jesus and the significance of his life ending in his crucifixion it is not possible to know how a second advent of Christ can be realized and what we can do as Christians to prepare for it.
This book offers a new, providential perspective on the nature, purpose and life of Jesus, and what this understanding means for every individual and for the world.
Other works by
Thomas Cromwell
