Faith & Spirit Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne is doing something slyly ambitious here: he smuggles a high-voltage theological claim into the calm cadence of someone trained to talk about how reality hangs together. The phrase "However, as the Eastern churches have always maintained" functions like a methodological footnote in prose form. It signals that he is not freelancing metaphysics; he is appealing to an older intellectual tradition (Eastern Christianity’s theosis) as if it were a well-tested framework, not a devotional add-on. That "always maintained" is a quiet flex: longevity as a kind of peer review.

The engine of the quote is the preposition "through". Polkinghorne isn’t saying creation merely admires God from a distance or gets rescued from itself; he’s arguing for an ontological conduit in Christ, a bridge that makes participation possible. That’s why "intended eventually" matters. It reads like teleology, not crisis management: the universe has an arc, and redemption is not Plan B but baked into the project. Coming from a physicist, "eventually" carries extra weight, echoing cosmological timescales and the patience of processes that unfold rather than erupt.

The subtext is a reconciliation pitch. Against a modern instinct to keep matter and spirit in separate rooms, he insists creation’s destiny is not annihilation or mere moral improvement but "share in the life of God" - participation, not proximity. In a culture comfortable with spirituality as mood, Polkinghorne reasserts it as destiny: not self-actualization, but transfiguration of the whole created order.