Ilia DELIO. The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2023. pp. 269 + xxxiii. $30.00 pb. ISBN 2023007213. Reviewed by Calvin MERCER, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858.

Science and its applications, e.g., radical human technological enhancement, are having increasing impacts on humans and their natural environment. The stakes are high and will only increase with fast-developing potent artificial intelligence and, eventually, a giant leap forward with quantum computing.

Thoughtful input by all sectors of society, certainly including faith traditions, is a moral imperative, avoided at great peril. Ilia Delio is a seasoned guide in the religion and science conversation that will grow in importance. She has authored a number of books that help chart the path forward: Christ in Evolution; The Emergent Christ: Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe; The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love; From Teilhard to Omega: Co-Creating an Unfinished Universe; Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness; Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion; and The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey.

A Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, Delio is currently Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University. While a formal background in science is not a necessary condition for engaging the science and religion debate, it certainly helps. Delio began her academic career with a doctorate in pharmacology. Her interesting journey (detailed in Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian) let her to Ewert H. Cousins, a leading Bonaventure scholar at Fordham University. Cousins introduced her to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and that introduction began a phase of her professional life working to reconcile religion and science. Teilhard occupies center stage in her thinking and this latest book.

Delio is uncompromising in her insistence that “The old God of the starry heavens, the sky God, has been falling since the twentieth century; at the same time, a new God has been rising up from the strange world of matter.” (p. ix) She posits a new myth of “relational holism” as her “theohology” (literally “God whole”) path forward in reconciling religion and science and saving religion from irrelevancy. God and matter are divinely entangled, borrowing a term from quantum physics.

While she adeptly draws upon many thinkers to flesh out her theological program, Teilhard and Carl Jung provide the most help. Teilhard provides insights into the evolutionary nature of persons and deity. Jung explores the depths of consciousness and the unconscious.

With the foundation of relational holism laid in the early chapters, Delio sketches what she sees to be the implications for the trinity, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology. Consciousness is an important theme in this book. The topic is certainly worth attention when constructing a theology for this new century, but the lack of consensus on the topic can lead to an unstable foundation for developing a doctrine.

Both Jung and Teilhard espoused a pantheism of sorts. Delio recognizes the pantheistic tone of relational holism and addresses that issue. God-world is a relational whole and God is interpreted in terms of the depth dimension of matter. Yet, Delio tries to distinguish deity from matter. Critics may charge she is trying to have it both ways.

Delio is current on technologies like AI, tissue engineering, and genetic engineering to radically alter individual human beings as well as the species. I appreciate her devoting several pages to these developments and how her theological program might relate.

I applaud attempts at constructive theology that embrace science. My concern with Delio’s program, not a concern peculiar to her, is how to reconcile religion—or God—with science without making religion—or God—so malleable that they become inconsequential accessories to science. Relatedly, adjusting one’s theology to science entails risk; the history of science strongly suggests that today’s theories will be eclipsed tomorrow. No one studies a 1910 physics book, and someday today’s physics may very well be of historical interest only. Attaching theology to shifting scientific theories may yield relevance today, but at what costs? It is a difficult time for theologians, and we can thank Delio and others for facing the challenge head-on and creatively.

Delio’s corpus, and this most recent book in particular, are well worth attention from scholars interested in the religions and science debate. Well documented, the book addresses complicated questions, but in a way accessible to theological students and advanced undergraduates.