Michael Horace Barnes hailed originally from Grand Rapids, Minnesota. He graduated from Saint Louis University in 1961 with a degree in philosophy and psychology, and the following year with a license in philosophy from the same university. Mike began teaching not long afterward, serving as an instructor in philosophy and theology at St. Ambrose College (1962–1963) and then at Webster College (1964–1965). He began studies in the doctoral program at Marquette University not long after that.
On January 3, 1967, Mike did something that would forever change his life. He applied for a job at the University of Dayton (UD). The reason that I know this specific date is because, when I was preparing a send-off for him when he retired in 2018, I found in his file, pretty much in its entirety, Mike’s original application for employment. The form was one sheet of paper, front and back. Filling it out with a ballpoint pen, Mike outlined his academic and teaching background, gave the names of references, and then noted on blank lines provided for the purpose that he currently had no salary and that, if hired, he expected to make $9,000 a year at UD.
I don’t know how much UD did pay Mike when they hired him the following year to begin teaching in the fall of 1968. I do know that it was an extremely wise investment. He served the university for fifty years, earning tenure in 1973 and promotion to associate professor in 1980, after completing his doctorate in 1976. Mike was promoted to full professor in 1986.
Dr. Barnes was a nationally recognized expert in the field of religion and science, a dedicated teacher—especially for first-year students—and a colleague deeply involved in the life of the university and the academy. He was the author of four books, including Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Science and Religious Thought (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the College Theology Society Award for best book by a member in that year. He also wrote In the Presence of Mystery: An Introduction to the Story of Human Religiousness (Twenty-Third Publications, 1984, revised 1990 and 2003); Understanding Science and Religion: Introducing the Debate (Continuum, 2010); and The Enduring Quest for Meaning: Humans, Mystery, and the Story of Religion (Anselm Academic, 2015). This last work is a substantially revised and expanded version of In the Presence of Mystery, both of which were introductory textbooks for the study of religion and theology.
He also edited three books, wrote dozens of articles and book reviews, and offered presentations at academic conferences around the country. The University of Dayton’s Alumni Association recognized Mike’s research by presenting him with its award for scholarship in 2002. UD’s College of Arts and Sciences followed suit by giving him its award in the same category in the following year. The Templeton Foundation, a national organization dedicated to promoting critical conversations on religion and science, also recognized his scholarship in 1996.
Dr. Barnes received both the college’s and the alumni association’s awards for excellence in teaching in 1992. The Templeton Foundation also honored his classroom teaching in 1996 and 1998. But even more telling than these awards are the comments from decades of students who found his Introduction to Religious Studies and his upper-level Religion and Science courses to be—often unexpectedly—the best class that they took in college.
Dr. Barnes complemented his excellence in the classroom with service to the university and academy. He was director of UD’s Core Program from 1991 to 1993 and its first Alumni Chair in the Humanities from 1997 to 2001. In addition to being president of the CTS in 2008–2010, he also served on its board of directors several times. During his fifty years at UD, he no doubt attended more meetings than can be counted. Nevertheless, as I can attest as his last department chair, down to his last departmental meeting in 2018, he retained his characteristic intelligence, humor, and collegial spirit.
As befits a scholar of Mike’s erudition and critical spirit, I think the best way to conclude this memorial is briefly to engage one of his works.
In his 2010 College Theology Society Presidential address, “The Spoils of the Egyptians: Borrowing from the Culture,” Dr. Barnes captured in a few pages many of the guiding themes of his long intellectual career.Footnote 1 These include the absolute necessity of critical engagement between theology and the sciences, physical and social; the calm but determined assertion of the modern scientific method as the surest way for establishing public and objective truth; the equally calm but determined defense of this claim to truth against both religious obscurantism and postmodern radical relativism; and, finally, the importance for Christian theology of cultural theories of development as a source for self-understanding and as a basis for interreligious dialogue.
Dr. Barnes began his address with a reference to the early church’s interpretations of “the spoils of the Egyptians” (Ex 12: 35-36) as memorably offered by Origen, Tertullian, and then Augustine. What “spoils of Egypt” that is, treasures of knowledge and wisdom, can the Christian church take from its surrounding, non-Christian, and sometimes hostile culture? How can such truths be reconciled with or used to interpret the Scriptures? From the differing answers offered by these figures, Mike then briefly traced the church’s response to the problems posed by cosmology for scriptural interpretation up through the pivotal Galileo affair. From the disastrous results of this controversy, Barnes drew “three rules for accepting the spoils of the Egyptians,” that is, three maxims for contemporary religion and theology’s relationship to modern, scientific culture. First, to paraphrase, “Do it, be consciously open to it.” That is, do not needlessly separate oneself from the advance of culture nor be closed to the possibilities that cultural change offers. Second, “Be cautious when doing it.” That is, recognize that knowledge drawn from outside sources may be in error and in need of correction at some later point. Third, “Do it with all due diligence.” That is, when examining the knowledge created in different cultures or through new discoveries, take care to draw on as many sources as possible. I note that this relationship in Mike’s thought is usually one directional, that is, how does religion adapt to or take in the results of cultural and scientific advances? It is rarer in Mike’s work that the latter needs to reflect on itself in the light of the former. On the other hand, Mike never dismissed the possibility that religion and theology can develop in conjunction with the expansion of the cognitive tools available to the human mind. Religion need not be a Comtean relic of the prescientific past.
With these principles in mind, Dr. Barnes then engaged four new types of “spoils of the Egyptians”; that is, four different kinds of “developmental theories” about the cosmos, biology, cognition, and culture. His address focuses on the latter two, as he did at much greater length in his earlier work, Stages of Thought. Mike argued that theology and religion in general have much to learn from a critical appraisal and incorporation of the insights of psychological theorists such as Piaget and Kohlberg and cultural theorists such as Bellah. Indeed, I would claim that Mike holds that, to avoid becoming that Comtean relic, theology and religion must engage these insights. And in distinction from both ahistorical fundamentalists and postmoderns leery of universal claims, Mike asserted that these social scientific theories cast light on universal patterns of the development of religions in all human cultures.
At the end of his address, Dr. Barnes turned his exploration from the relationship of the social sciences and theology to ask why his argument may not have found a ready reception in the audience sitting before him. Social science has shown, he argued, that human beings respond most strongly to values such as justice, compassion, community, boundaries, and authority but respond to them differently. So differently, the science argues, that these differences cannot be completely overcome. People are just different, including social scientists and theologians. I am sure that he appreciated the irony: the very evidence of science, the best means we have of ascertaining the truth, also tells us that we probably never can agree about the truth. He writes, citing Rodney King: “‘Can we all get along?’ Perhaps we can. But it will not be because we finally all agree on the same way of grasping what is ultimately important, nor on how to relate properly to the culture. It will be because we acknowledge the fact of differences and respect each other’s convictions, because we celebrate or at least accept the co-existence of the secular and the sacred, of thick local descriptions and cross-cultural generalizations, of different types of measuring individual development. The ultimate motto on both sides may have to be ‘we differ; let’s get used to it.’”
Dr. Barnes’s last intellectual quest sought answers to a question even more difficult than those of cosmology and cultural development. What is the soul? What can religions and theology maintain about this classic idea of human identity in the age of modern neuroscience? Mike argued that the real challenge that Copernicus and Galileo offered in the Renaissance was not the shift from a geocentric cosmos to a heliocentric one. Rather, they destroyed the barrier between the eternal world and the temporal; now there was no empyrean realm of pure and changeless quintessences above the sphere of the moon. Everything was made of the same messy, irregular, temporary matter. In a similar and even more striking way, Mike argued in a book prospectus which I read in 2016, modern neuroscience aims to make our identity reside only in the irregular physical processes of our brains. The final barrier between the spiritual and the physical is being overcome, as science threatens to draw the supposedly pure and eternal soul down into the messy material world and thereby eliminate it as a meaningful name for our identity.
Dr. Barnes had already adumbrated his interest in this topic in the last chapters of Understanding Science and Religion and in some earlier articles. He told me as he approached retirement that he had collected a mound of books on the soul and looked forward to getting up to speed on the subject in preparation for future writing. The theological community sadly did not get to see the fruits of his exploration; the articles and books from Mike’s pen never came forth. It remains an open and vital theological topic and an even greater challenge to the irenic hope Mike expressed in his presidential address. Can we just agree to differ even about the fundamental nature of our identity? Mike would have loved the difficulty of the questions; we honor his memory by not shying away from engaging them. May he rest in peace.
