Faith & Spirit Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne, the rare physicist-theologian who never pretended those vocations were politely separable, is naming theology’s double bind: its subject is not one object among others but the condition of intelligibility itself. If God is “the ground of everything that is,” then theology is cursed and blessed with limitless jurisdiction. Everything becomes relevant; nothing becomes manageable. The line “grist to the theological mill” is doing sly work. It’s domestic, almost folksy, a way of deflating grand metaphysical ambition into the image of a machine that will chew up any raw material you toss in. Theology can metabolize cosmology, ethics, history, neuroscience, personal sorrow. That appetite looks like intellectual imperialism from the outside; Polkinghorne frames it as an inevitability baked into the definition of God.

Then comes the check on theological hubris: “Obviously, no theologian can know everything.” The “obviously” is a physicist’s tell, a nod to the way scientific seriousness is signaled by acknowledging constraints, error bars, the impossibility of total data. Subtext: theology is at its most credible when it admits its epistemic limits, not when it talks like it owns reality. Context matters here. Polkinghorne wrote in a late-20th-century climate where “science vs. religion” became a mass-market sport. He’s refusing both the scientist’s caricature of theology as ignorance dressed up, and the theologian’s temptation to treat God-talk as a master key. If theology wants to speak about the deepest structure of being, it has to practice intellectual humility with the same discipline it demands of faith.