Today’s Post
In the last two posts we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus. Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that he had coexisted with him through eternity. As we will see, this evolution continues further as Christianity gets to development of God as ‘triune’: the trinity.
Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the secular God.
The Second Dimension of Duality
As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ evolves in the New Testament. The synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a teacher who believed that he was living in the end of times, and insisted on preparation by way of moral behavior. Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatise on Love), and goes on to see him tasked with the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with divine God. The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result of this task. Jesus is born a human, but raised to a divine level by God because of his sacrifice.
John goes one step further, as he identifies Jesus as part of the fundamental basis by which creation was effected. Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.
On the surface, these two facets of Jesus, the human and the divine, appear as just another type of duality, along with body/soul, this life/the next, good/evil, in which two opposing and orthogonal concepts are juxtaposed and contrasted. In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that was intended, but failed due to Adam’s ‘original sin’. In argument against the ‘theory of atonement’, Richard Rohr notes:
”The ‘substitutionary atonement theory’ of salvation treats Christ as a mere Plan B. In this attempt at an explanation for the Incarnation, God did not really enter the scene until God saw that we had screwed up.”
In the “cosmic Christ” theory of John, Jesus, as the Christ, is co-substantial with God, and therefore had always existed as part of the creation process.
These two theories are orthogonal in that the first posits a somewhat ‘deistic’ God whose creation process ends with the appearance of man, and man is a finished product free to turn against him. In the second, the ‘cosmic Christ’ is an agent essential to the rising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as the recognition of God’s continuing presence in human existence.
Church history describes many disagreements among leaders of the early church on how Jesus could be man and God at the same time, with many different ‘heresies’ debated. Was Jesus ‘only’ human, ‘only God’ and appearing in human form, or both at the same time? The final solution, that Jesus was indeed God and man, was presented as a ‘mystery’ to be believed, not to be understood. Essentially, although it could not be explained, it became an article of faith, requiring a sort of ‘cognitive dissonance’, with the appearance of yet another duality.
We have seen how many such dualities can be resolved through application of our secular principles of reinterpretation, and this one is no exception. As we have seen, many of the concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can fall into coherence, and the dualities fall away, by understanding God as the ‘ground of being’, active in both the principles of being (physics) and the principles of becoming (evolution via the ‘axis of evolution’). In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.
Making Sense of Jesuswere
Thomas Jefferson was one of the first thinkers to attempt such a relook. Jefferson understood that the teachings of Jesus, stripped of their supernatural and miraculous content, had much to offer the construction of a secular set of laws to underpin a new nation. In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’.
As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ and without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of natural selection. Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing as an active agent to power the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person.
With the insights of Teilhard in hand, however, we can understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ‘agent’ of a universe which comes to be over long periods of time. This agent powers evolution, first through the complexification of matter, then through the appearance of ever more complex living entities, and eventually to the appearance of conscious entities who are aware of their consciousness.
As history has showed, it’s not enough to be aware of our awareness, we must also seek to understand it well enough to cooperate with whatever it is that powers our being to be able to move our evolution forward. To be able to continue to move forward, we must both understand the ‘laws of the noosphere’ and learn to cooperate with them.
And this is where Jesus comes in.
The Next Post
We have seen in the last two posts how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction changes over the three (Paul, Synoptic Gospels, John) groups of texts. Next week we will take a look at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for a secular God.