The Kingdom of God is Like…a Vernal Pool Ecosystem

The Kingdom parables combine Jesus’ favorite topic with his preferred pedagogy. They usually start “The kingdom of God is like…” and then go on to describe something that is empirically unimpressive that is infused with a more fundamental and powerful reality. Yeast is hardly visible but makes bread possible, the mustard seed is among the smallest of the seeds but grows into an enormous plant[1] and the ordinary field conceals treasure hidden just beneath the surface. [2]

Far from the uncritical reading that the ‘kingdom of God’[3] is talking about a future ‘pie in the sky,’[4] disembodied, ethereal state…Jesus is talking about an empirically subtle parallel reality that is more fundamentally real than our reality. In this reality, God rules truly (hence the kingdom language) and it occasionally breaks through into our reality. ‘Your kingdom come,’ is not a prayer for the end of the world but that we would be rooted enough in true reality to make this one reflect it more accurately.

One of the primary features of Jesus’ parables was their situatedness. Even the most rudimentary mental picture of Judean peasant life demonstrates that he was doing HIGHLY contextualized theology, telling the story of Israel’s liberation with the cultural furnishings of the life of a Judean peasant. I was once in a Bible study where the leader asked us to re-tell the yeast parable using something from our profession or daily life. Mine sucked. I have tried to think of better examples several times with limited success. But now I have one. The Kingdom of God is like…a Vernal Pool Ecosystem.

I am taking my first entomology class this quarter: Aquatic Invertebrate Ecology. It is simply thrilling.[5] I could not have predicted[6] how engaging I would find bugs that live under rocks. But the other amazing thing about this ‘lab class’[7] is that most of the labs are field trips. Are you kidding me?!? As if the class wasn’t already fun enough.[8]

All of that to say…our first field trip was to a set of ‘vernal pools.’ Now, vernal pools are not impressive. It is a fancy way of saying ‘really big puddle that accumulates during spring rains and dries during the summer.’ They totally fit the criteria for the topic of a Kingdom of God parable…visually unremarkable. And that is why they constitute a threatened ecosystem…because no one thinks twice before tiling them up for crop land…surely there is nothing of sublime beauty and intrinsic worth in these mucky puddles. You see, the Kingdom of God, is like a vernal pool ecosystem…empirically unremarkable but intrinsically stunning.

Careful attention to these glorified puddles tells the story of a subtle but astonishing reality. They are home to one of the most remarkable aquatic ecosystems in the world. I expected an invertebrate sample of one of these pools to turn up some wormy things and some beetley things and a few squirmy things (I am still cultivating my entomological vocabulary). Instead, the samples told the story of a complex and intricate food web dominated by creatures that look like they should be from another planet and the oldest living animal found on our own.

Vernal pools are dominated by fairy shrimp and tadpole shrimp.[9] The fairy shrimp is aptly named. It is a sublime, translucent back swimmer (we saw one, but I didn’t get a good picture - so I borrowed). It is unlike anything I have ever seen. If I saw it on a nature show I would guess that it lived in an eccentric brackish estuary of Brazil or Malaysia, not in a glorified cow puddle 25 minutes from my house.

But the real shocker was the tadpole shrimp. Triopsidae have been around for 300 million years, giving them the title of ‘oldest living animal.’ They are found in temporary waters on six continents. Our most ancient organism, our oldest living fossil, makes its home in temporary waters around the earth, but almost no one knows about them because transient puddles are perceived as unremarkable.

So that is my yeast parable. The Kingdom of God is like a vernal pool, it does not appear to be much, but it is infused with a truer, more sublime, reality that can break through into our mundane existence if you are looking for it. But the Jepson Prairie vernal pools that we visited also work as a parable of the ‘treasure in the field.’ The way this parable goes, when you find a field that has buried treasure, you sell all you have to buy the field, because it is worth far more than it seems. That is what the Nature Conservancy did with Jepson Prairie. Realizing that vernal pools were being tilled at an alarming rate, they went out and bought these (at, presumably, a huge price). To most people they looked like big puddles, but the TNC realized that they had far more value than the vast majority of people perceived. That is what the Kingdom of God is like.

This post was prepared while listening to Brother Sun, Sister Moon by mewithoutyou

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[1] That is ecologically important. I have always liked the detail in this passage that the mustard plant “so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches."
[2] And the theme that God often inhabits the empirically unremarkable is a broad theme in the larger text. The tabernacle housed ‘the glory of God’ (whatever that means) but was essentially a tent of cow hides. And in 2 Cor 4 Paul translates Jesus’ agrarian peasant analogies to a more ‘urban’ context: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” (Note: I love referring to Paul as ‘urban.’ It is historically correct. Jesus was small town (another way in which God consistently chose to inhabit the empirically unimpressive) and Paul was thoroughly cosmopolitan. If it calls to mind the Apostle listening to hip hop and decked out in ‘bling,’ well, that is just bonus.)
[3] Or, in Matthew, ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’ Matthew will often tell exactly the same stories but with just one word replaced. The standard theory on this is that Matthew was writing to Jewish background Christians who were exceptionally careful about how they used the word G-d on second commandment grounds.
[4] This phrase is often used derisively to deconstruct religious hopes in a future better world…essentially mocking their lack of present utility. Here’s the thing, though. I LOVE pie. If you want to deconstruct Christian eschatology, you may want to choose a less compelling word picture.
[5] My Ecology graduate program does not start until the fall, but I have been taking classes to get up to speed all year. I have found each of them entirely satisfying and so full of wonder and intrigue that ‘thrilling’ is the only word that seems to consistently capture how I have felt about them. Now, you don’t accumulate the number of degrees I have without having a pathological enjoyment of learning…but this is different. I simply like biology better than math or engineering. Only my theology degree was comparably enjoyable. I finally think I know why. Because biology is a narrative in a way that math and engineering are not. By the end of a quantitative class, you know how to do something, but by the end of a biology class, you have another clue to the grand narrative of life. Each class is like an episode of Lost, leaving you desperate for the next piece of information that might move the story forward (though, like Lost, new insight usually opens more questions than it resolves).
[6] But, in retrospect, maybe I could have predicted it…since I find the rocks themselves so compelling.
[7] For those of you who were not science majors, lab classes are extraordinarily bad deals, credit wise. I never understood how 3 extra hours in class and almost 100% more work somehow only added one credit to a 3 credit class. I call it the science tax…but I digress.
[8] Here is my first insect collection (mostly Bietiae Ephemeroptera, with one very cool Placoptera and a water mite) and a Megaloptera (the most bad ass of all the aquatic insects) that someone else found in the same trip.

[9] It is their temporary nature that provides this unique niche…as the invertebrate communities of most fresh water are dominated by insects. The shrimp can survive the dry season in a cyst form, hatch before insects can colonize, and out compete for the pools resources. But they do not do well elsewhere because they are especially vulnerable to fish predation…which is conveniently absent in the temporary waters. It is a rare convergence of conditions that make being a crustacean an unqualified plus in fresh water.

My Problem With Religion: A Quantitative Inquiry

A common objection to the unique value of any particular religion is that all religions essentially teach the same things. This is deeply mistaken. For example, Christians are trying to gain eternal life, while Hindus teach that they have eternal life and are trying to get rid of it. In so many ways, the major religious world views could not be more different. But there is a sense in which I resonate with this objection. There does seem to be a basic ‘religious’ way of looking at the world (that many hold regardless of whether or not they actually believe in a cosmic god figure). It goes something like this: the ultimate outcome in this life or in eternity is the result of your moral achievement in this life. Religions differ wildly on what constitutes a good outcome and what constitutes moral achievement…but this is not my point here.

Computing Goodness

I’d like to look carefully at this basic line of thought: ultimate outcomes are based on our temporal moral achievement. I think the first interesting question is how does a god score morality? Let’s assume that it would be some sort of equation of the form:

A*x+B*Y+C*Z[1]…

Where A, B and C are weighting factors, the sum of which would be 1 and
X, Y and Z are certain moral behaviors or transgressions (in which case the weighting factor would have a – sign).

For example, if Muslims are right, if X=eating pork, A = a significant, negative multiplier. However, if Hindus are right, if Y = give grain oblations to Ganesh, then B = a non-trivial positive multiplier. And if yuppie liberal Christians are correct, if Z = driving a Prius then C = close to 0.9

But would every one use the same equation? Would there be a constant added for overcoming poor environment or propensity genetics? A degree of difficulty multiplier if you will?

Setting the Grades: To Curve or Not to Curve

But let’s assume that a god is good at math and can come to a univariate quantitative evaluation of our lifetime moral performance. Let’s assume that global, historic morality is normally distributed.[2] So below, I have plotted an arithmetic scale of human goodness (from 1 to 0, with 1 being the best person ever and 0 being the worst) versus the rate of occurrence of each of these moral states.

So, how does god decide where the cut
off is between the positive religious outcome and the negative religious outcome? Does he/she/it grade on a curve? Does he have a percentile that he is shooting for? If so, does it suite me to sabotage the moral state of others in order to augment my relative position? Or, by helping those close to us (say, those in our church/mosque/synagogue/neighborhood) pursue moral goodness, are we damning others by allowing those we care about to surpass them? It doesn’t make much sense to me that God would grade on a curve.

So maybe God has an absolute standard for a positive cosmic outcome. But where is it? Most people place it above Hitler, Stalin, Sadam and abortion clinic bombers, and conveniently below themselves. Consider any placement of the demarcation[3] that is neither 100% nor 0%. Let’s place it at 50% for argument (i.e. ‘heaven’ is a lot like lake Woebegone). Consider someone who comes in at the 50.000001 percentile and someone who comes in at the 49.9999999 percentile (represented by the small circles in the plot below). These people lived remarkably similar moral lives. The difference between them would be a single lie or a single malicious thought or eating a single doughnut during Ramadan or buying a car with slightly worse gas mileage, yet there is a dramatic non-linearity in consequence for a minor difference in achievement.[4]


Two Attempts to Smooth the Outcomes

Purgatory is a doctrine that was developed that seems to mitigate the non-linear outcome. There is a zone of graded consequence between the good and bad outcomes, such that consequence is more of a smooth function of lived morality. But purgatory doesn’t really work on a number of levels. It only appears in Christian sects and is so foreign to the Christian worldview that even the sitting Pope doesn’t accept a classic version of it.[5]

Reincarnation is another form of mitigating the non-linear outcome. But I find it morally deplorable and politically dangerous to suggest that people deserve their lot in life because of unseen, presumed moral failures from previous existences.[6] Shoot, I don’t even believe that someone’s lot in life is entirely (or even mostly) the result of the moral choices they made in THIS life.

A Stochastic Approach

The Muslim worldview handles this differently. They say that the sovereign will of Allah is not predictive in this way. Righteousness is a factor in who goes to paradise and who does not. In fact they get quite quantitative about it. For example, some teach that prayers during Ramadan are 30X more valuable than prayers offered at other times. In an honest moment one of my Muslim friends admitted to me that he spent a significant amount of time worrying about if his life was sufficient to avoid hell.

But in the final analysis Allah can do whatever he wants so it is more of a stochastic approach. Your goodness can only buy more balls in the proverbial NBA lottery.[7]
Being higher on the moral continuum increases your chances of ‘getting in’ but it is not a deterministic function. It is more like a quantum state than a Newtonian mechanic. So you could, theoretically get a situation like the one below (where the yellow dot indicates a good comic outcome and the red dot indicates a bad one).


Two Types of People

Another approach would be to group the ‘goodness’ data the same way a college professor would group academic achievement. Professors often look for achievement ‘groupings’. There is a cluster of 3 students at the top, they get the A’s. The next cluster gets the B’s. You can’t do this if the data is normally distributed, but, since there are only two consequences, you could do it with a bimodal distribution (below). This is actually a surprisingly common view of the world. One republican friend said to me once ‘the world is full of good people and bad people.’[8] This is the polemical approach taken by ‘The Dark Knight[9].’ Heath Ledger’s brilliantly disturbing turn as the Joker was simply described as a fundamentally different mode of human existence.

It is common to look at crass villains and say, ‘whew, I may do occasional bad stuff, but at least I’m a good person’. Even Imus, after the Rutgers basket ball team debacle claimed ‘I’m a good person who did a bad thing.’ But repentance is the burden of the self aware. My response to my republican friend was ‘I am bad people.’ I reject this idea of a bimodal distribution. We all carry the divine image and the scar of a cosmic corruption. Plus, even with a bimodal distribution, you have the same problem in the shared ‘tail’ (see enlargement in the figure above). You still have the non-linear consequence for the incremental difference.
The Special Cases of 1 and 0

So let’s finally consider the two special cases. You can put the line at 0 saying that all surpass it (universalism) or you can put it at or above 1 saying that none achieve it (the gospel). Both of these approaches get away from the problem of non-linear consequence for incremental differences in morality. I prefer both of them to religion. Many people find the former (see figure below) to be more palatable, more just. They tend to be comfortable suburban westerners who have never had a cause for vengeance.


Consider what Miroslov Volf says about the idea that a just God would finally accept all and judge none: “If God were not angry at injustice and did not make a final end to violence-that God would not be worthy of worship…The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God…My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many in…the west…(But) it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence (results from a belief in) God’s refusal to judge. In a sun scorched land, soaked in the blood of innocents, it will invariably die…(with) other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.”[10]

Volf grew up in Croatia and experience the violence of the Balkan crisis. He will not worship a God who does not judge the horrible atrocities of human villainy. And neither will I. I will not worship a God who embraces evil…including mine. Only a God who judges me and my dark heart and wicked propensities with those of Hitler, Stalin, St Francis and Mother Teresa can be completely other…what the Bible likes to call Holy.

So I am left with the final alternative. I, with Jesus and Paul, put the line light-years to the right. That we each are good and valuable beyond measure but are also vial beasts unworthy of God’s presence. This is why Christianity does not teach moral performance…heaven as a cosmic reward for moral performance …it teaches unilateral, cosmic rescue. It teaches grace and mercy and, in this way, is not, fundamentally, religious.

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[1] I suspect it would be far more complex than a simple multi-variate linear regression (which I am not even quite doing)…but you’d stop reading if I went into some sort of anthropological dimensional analysis or set up a big old matrix.
[2] Scientists are famous for assuming phenomena are normally distributed. I suppose I could use a Gumble or Lévy distribution (I’d love to hear someone make a case for either of these), but the argument would progress in the same way, so let’s just assume a normal distribution for now.
[3] Based either on a curve or an absolute standard.
[4] This, somewhat comically, disintegrates into the BCS/Playoff debate from college football. The debate invariably goes like this: “Let’s just have a 4 team playoff.” “Well what about that year when the best team in the nation was #5.” “Ok, lets have an 8 game playoff.” “Yeah, but this team had one fluky loss and was playing really well. Do you really want them out of the playoff?”
[5] See NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope
[6] This comes up from time to time in a careful watching of ‘My Name is Earl.’ They have trouble navigating this consequence of their Karmic vision that everyone deserves their current state because of past actions. But it is still a hilarious show.
[7] To discourage teams from tanking their season for draft position the NBA decides draft position by a lottery. But they still want to give the worst team the best shot at drafting good players. So all of the teams that did not make the playoffs get balls in the lottery. The worse you are the more balls you get. So badness increases the chance of a good outcome but does not assure it. This strikes me as similar to Islam where goodness increases your chances of a good outcome but does not assure it.
[8] Why are the bad people bad? Is it the result of poor moral choices on their part? Is it a big loss in genetics roulette? Assigning culpability for innate badness is fundamentally problematic.
[9] Incidentally, Leger’s role was the single redeeming quality of this epic train wreck. Let me be the first one on the internet to say ‘This movie sucked.’
[10] From Tim Keller’s Reason For God