Star of wonder and beyond

From the Christmas star, humankind has been fascinated by astronomical possibilities.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Tarantula Nebula, by the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021. After hair-raising maneuvers to unfurl its tennis-court-sized mirrors, it has been sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos since July of last year.

Christmas was a good day for the launch, given its astronomical connections. ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven’, the angels sang to the shepherds, ‘and peace to his people on Earth.’ Meanwhile, the wise men were above all diligent observers of the heavens. ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’, they ask, ‘For we observed his start at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’

Quite what that ‘star’ might mean there is open to debate. Comets have been popular with artists. Giotto painted one, for instance, in his Adoration of the Magi in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. It is almost certainly Halley’s Comet, which had appeared just a few years before, in October 1301. But why would anything in the heavens be interpreted as a birth in Judea? It would probably involve something in a constellation associated with the nation of the Hebrews. Pisces seems to be favoured, for some reason. A nova of some kind is one possibility: what would look like a temporary new star because, in fact, a previously invisible star was undergoing a spectacular death. Chinese records suggest a nova in 5 BC, which fits the likely date for for Christ’s birth of 7–2 BC.

The problem with both comets and novae is that they were more likely seen as harbingers of doom than good news. The better candidate for suggesting something joyful is a planetary conjunction, and there would have been a rather spectacular conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars at the right time. None of that, admittedly, explains what it means for the star then to have led the wise men. Coming up against that challenge, we might think that looking into the astronomical detail is the wrong way to approach the story. Nonetheless, Matthew had something in mind when he wrote about a start in his gospel, and it’s worthwhile to ask what that might have been.

It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours.

More recently, the Christmas story has intersected with astronomy in questions about how to think about Christian theology now that we are aware quite how big the universe is, especially if it may contain a great deal of other life. We don’t know whether that’s true, of course, but given we now know that planets common around stars, and there are billions of billions of stars in the universe, the probabilities seem to tilt towards other life, at least as I see it.

Suggestions surfaces from time to time that the world’s religions have arrived late to the party, when it comes to thinking about life beyond Earth. The astronomer and broadcaster Carl Sagan made that claim, for instance, in his best-selling book Pale Blue Dot. In fact, the earliest discussions of life beyond Earth I know about from Christian writers come from the mid-fifteenth century (and they stretch even further back in Judaism and Islam, to give two other examples). Christian writers have written on the subject ever since. If few gave us more than a paragraph here or a page there, that’s usually because the prospect of other life did not worry them enough to warrant more. They noted the prospect cheerfully, and moved on.

Until the twentieth century, the prospect of parallel Nativities on other planets was rarely in view. In a sense, it didn’t need to be. It’s a consistent Christian position to say that God joined his life to all creation in joining it to one species of rational animal on Earth, just as God joined his life to all humanity in being born in a stable, in a wayside town, in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.

One erudite early exploration of multiple Incarnations comes in a poem from the 1920s by the Roman Catholic poet Alice Meynell, entitled ‘Christ in the Universe’. More recently, Meynell’s topic has become perhaps the central theme in thinking theologically about life beyond Earth. My own book (Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, 2023) looks at the prospect of life beyond Earth from the perspective of all of central topics in Christian doctrine (creation, sin, redemption, revelation, the Trinity, and so on), but the largest section is on Christmas and possible parallels. I am sympathetic to the idea that God would also unite himself to another natures, alongside the human nature he took up in Christ: not because I think that would be necessary, but because it might be fitting. It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours.

Hiding in plain sight in the Nativity stories is another key to Christian thinking about life beyond, namely the angels. It’s not that I think that angels are aliens, or that alien life is angelic. In fact, being a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas, I’m inclined to view angels as entirely immaterial, and so very much not examples of biological life. But angels are useful for thinking about other biological life beyond Earth nonetheless, because of what they mean for the Christian imagination. The angels show that there’s always been space in that imagination for rational creatures other than human beings. They show that Christianity has never imagined that we’re the sole object of God’s love, or even the most glorious of species.

The Christmas story has its cosmic elements: the star, glory in the highest heavens, and the angels, reminding us that wonderful though humanity is, it has no monopoly on rational life. My hunch, as much as my hunch matters, is that if there is other life then they too may see God face-to-face in their own Incarnation. Even if we find evidence of life beyond Earth, however, it’s not going give us much detail. The balance of gases in the atmosphere of a planet around another star might indicate life, but not much else about it. The prospects for interplanetary comparative religion are far off indeed. Alice Meynell had the right idea, when she recognised that one of the joys of the life of the world to come will be learning the stories of God’s dealings elsewhere:

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared, my soul!

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Alice Meynell

Article

Belief

Creed

Spiritual formation

3 April 2025

6 min read

The young are sold jumbled nonsense in exchange for their spiritual birthright

Is our religious Compare the Market selling us short?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A perplexed looking woman hold her cheeks up with her fingers.

Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash.

There is an old joke that goes around the Church of England. It concerns a parish that was having problems with bats who had nested in the roof of the local parish church. The vicar calls up the Archdeacon to ask for advice on how to get rid of them. The Archdeacon replies drily: “Just get the bishop to confirm them. They’ll leave the church pretty soon after that.”

This joke came to mind when reading of a recent report by the Pew Research Centre which suggested that 36 per cent of those raised as Christians in the UK now no longer self-identify as Christian.

As a bishop, I regularly go round parishes leading confirmations, a service where people make a public commitment to living as a Christian. With adults or older teenagers, I'm usually fairly confident they are serious about their faith because it takes some swimming against the tide to make such a counter-cultural move. When I confirm younger children - 10- or 12-year-olds, perhaps - I confess to a little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. I’m sure some have a sincere faith. Yet in many parishes or even schools it can be a bit of a rite of passage, the kind of thing everybody does, which ironically takes more courage to resist than to go with the flow. The joke stings when I meet adults who were confirmed as kids, yet who left the church as adolescence kicked in, never to darken its doors again.

The detail of the Pew report reveals a more complex picture. In a list of countries where adults have changed religious categories from the one they grew up in, the UK comes sixth, behind such countries as South Korea (where the number is 50 per cent), Spain and the Netherlands. It’s about the same in the UK as in Australia, France Germany and Japan, which all come in at 34 per cent.

In other words, what we have here is a global trend of people, mainly in western, or western-influenced countries, exploring different religious options from the one in which they were brought up. Two factors lie behind this trend. The first is that in countries like the UK, where religion is in decline, you’re unlikely to face ostracism if you change faith, as you might if you stopped being Christian or Muslim in certain parts of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan or Indonesia. In the west, the pressure to remain is just not there. In places like India, Nigeria, Israel and Thailand, places where either religion is core to national identity, or where there is severe religious tension, 95 per cent of adults say they still belong to the religious group that they were raised in.

The second factor is that in western cultures, individual autonomy, the right to choose, is paramount. We are used to shopping as one of our primary activities. The right to shop around for spiritual alternatives, in a kind of religious version of Compare the Market, is hardly surprising.

Put this survey next to another recently published by OnePoll, suggesting that Gen Z people (in their teens and twenties) are much less likely than their parents to be atheists, and more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’, and a more interesting picture emerges.

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs.

Most of the switching, says the Pew report, involves people moving to the ‘unaffiliated’ category. Rather than changing from Christian to Muslim, they're changing from Christian to, well, nothing. Or perhaps everything.

People are moving away from fixed forms of religion to a more general and diffuse sense of spirituality. The 20-something, brought up nominally Christian, now feeds her own inner life by enjoying nature, reading Tarot cards, shopping for crystals or buying a mindfulness app on her phone rather than going to church. It’s do-it-yourself religion, perfectly fashioned by an acquisitive age that wants us to be restless and dissatisfied so we buy more things that we think will make us happy. As Dan Kim has persuasively argued elsewhere on Seen & Unseen, there is a whole industry out there waiting to exploit our openness to the spiritual and mystical to sell us their stuff.

It‘s common to find forms of ‘spirituality’ these days that choose the bits it likes from a number of spiritual traditions of the past, while leaving saside the less attractive parts. It’s like a fruit smoothie mixed in a blender – a statue of the Buddha, a little Native American wisdom, a touch of feng shui, a whiff of incense, all mixed together to make you feel peaceful and more in tune with the world. The goal of all this is usually some sense of personal serenity or calmness. Yet this is typically far from what the spiritual traditions of the past had in mind.

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. You might prefer French nouns to Latin ones, but the result will be highly idiosyncratic and not make a great deal of sense. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, religions operate like a language in having a set of practices that make sense in relation to one another and to the underlying beliefs that hold the thing together. Each spiritual path has an integrity within itself which doesn’t work if you try to blend them all together.

To think we know better than the ancients who over centuries developed the spiritual traditions of prayer found in the different methods of religious practice is, not to put too fine a point on it, a trifle arrogant. Whatever we come up with might bring us a sense of momentary peace, but it is unlikely to have the long-term effect that the deeper traditions of spirituality were meant for.

Prayer was never meant to be a technique to de-stress, to find personal tranquillity. It was not a way to find yourself, but to find God, and then you might find yourself – and the tranquillity - as a by-product. It was not a way to reassure you about your familiar ways, but to disturb you into new ones.

If spirituality is about finding personal peace, confirming us in our own individuality, endlessly stimulating new desires and longings, then swapping a Christian upbringing, with its insistence on attending church, and sitting next to awkward people who aren’t like you, confessing sins and learning to pray, for this kind of jumbled, personal spirituality seems very attractive. But what if spirituality is about learning practices that focus your mind and heart not on the trivialities of TikTok videos or Candy Crush, but on the true source of all goodness, beauty and truth? What if it is about learning the counter-intuitive skill of loving your neighbour as much as you love yourself? If so, then the kind of communal practices lying right under our noses, learned in a place like Church with all its flaws - a tried and tested spiritual path laid out for us by those experienced in the spiritual life in generations gone before, might just offer the most benefit in the long term.

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