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December 31, 2020 – Jesus: The Rest Of The Story

Reinterpreting the Theological Language of Jesus

Today’s Post

Last week we took a sixth look at aspects of Christianity’s traditional treatment of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, noting how our principles of interpretation permit a secular insight into religious concepts such as the relation between the two. We have also seen how such reinterpretation can not only increase the relevance of ancient beliefs to human life but also decrease their distance from the findings of science.

This week we will take a last look at Jesus, focusing on the theological concepts that evolved along with the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ in the many years of Western theological development, and explore their ‘secular’ content.

The ‘Incarnation’

In our look at Jesus from the perspective of the New Testament, we saw how the subject of Jesus evolved in a few short years from a holy man preaching about preparation for the immanent end times, to the human manifestation of an agency by which the universe can be seen to unfold. In John’s vernacular, Jesus was ‘the word made flesh’, introducing a concept of this universal agency by which it finds human expression in the person of Jesus.

The traditional Christian approach to the appearance of Jesus in human history saw him as ‘the Son of God’, suggesting a unique manifestation of divinity among the human species. But if we understand Jesus from Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ as the ‘fruit’ of universal evolutionary growth, the sap of which is the rising of complexity (‘the Christ’), then Jesus is simply one of such flowerings. From this perspective, this ‘sap’ makes itself known in all humans who rise above their circumstances to see things in a more integrated, and hence more efficacious way. Confucius is a good example, with his insights into human unity and behavior which unites us in such a way that we mature. Thomas Jefferson is another such example when he asserts the existence of a common wisdom in a human society which is capable of self-government.

Teilhard carries this insight one step further. He painstakingly documents the rise of complexity in universal history in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, calling attention to its many ‘changing of states’ of complexity. Such changes illustrate how if complexity is to rise in the universe it must always find new and more complex ways of doing so. These changes of state can be seen in such phenomena as the arrival of matter from pure energy, the emergence of ‘matter which makes itself’ in the form of complex molecules such as DNA, the appearance of the cell, then neurons, then brains then consciousness. The final (to date) change of state can be seen in the new ability of conscious products of evolution to be aware of their consciousness.

Each change of state is indeed an ‘incarnation’, a flowering of capacity and capability resulting from the rise of complexity from their predecessor states. As we have seen, Jesus is the manifestation of this rise which has most effected the continuation of evolution through the human species.

Jesus, as the manifestation of this agency of increasing complexity, ‘the Christ’, also shows us how matter and spirit (as understood by Teilhard as the two essential properties of ‘the stuff of the universe’ and by Paul Davies as the ‘hardware and software’ of matter) are more clearly understood as being combined in the human. As Richard Rohr puts it

“Incarnation literally means enfleshment, yet most of Christian history has, in fact, been excarnational–in flight from matter, embodiment, physicality, and this world. This avoidance of enfleshment is much more Platonic than Christian. Incarnation means that the spiritual nature of reality (the immaterial, the formless, the invisible) and the material (the physical, the forms, that which we can see and touch) are, in fact, one and the same!”

Redemption and Salvation

A critical area for reinterpretation of religion is the understanding of ‘redemption’ as essential to ‘salvation’. In the development of Christianity through medieval history, the structure of heaven was seen as an ideal of human structure: hierarchal, static, orderly and predictable. God was recognized as the underlying creator and ultimate regent, all powerful and all knowing, humanlike and judgmental. Even after the assertions of John, the association of the idea of ‘love’ with God was diminished with the increased understanding of ‘him’ as supernatural and remote. The idea of salvation became based more on escaping from our natural milieu to living in a supernatural one which was more suitable to our longings.

With this perspective, religion was seen, as Richard Rohr phrases it, as a “high premium fire insurance for the afterlife”. In this mindset, most liturgical prayers were less “a lifting of the mind and heart to God”, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, and more focused on how to get to heaven or how to get what we want in this life.

Again, from Rohr

“If it is true that lex orandi est lex credendi, “the way you pray is the way you believe,” then it is no wonder Christians have such a poor record of caring for the suffering of the world and for the planet itself, and the Church has fully participated in so many wars and injustices. We have been allowed to pray in a rather self-centered way, and that fouled the Christian agenda, in my opinion.”

Thus, as goes the traditional approach, if we are going to be ‘saved’ we must first be ‘redeemed’ from sin. The traditional church teaching has been that, therefore, salvation is denied to those who die ‘in the state of sin’. This belief can be seen in the flocking of congregations to church seeking the sacrament of ‘Confession’ when rumors of the ‘end of the world’ have been announced. Going one step further, church teaching has included the belief that not only sinners, but all humanity, is at birth denied salvation due to the ‘sin of Adam’, better known as ‘original sin’. As we saw three weeks ago, this view crept in during the controversy over the humanity/divinity arguments of Jesus which required the Council of Nicaea for resolution. Although the final resolution decided that Jesus was both, the rationale for the resolution required Jesus to die to ‘atone’ for Adam’s sin and thus open the door to salvation closed by God due to the failure of his creation.

But if Jesus was to be the ‘door’ to salvation, the process itself was still open for debate. Thus the teaching that for humans to benefit from Jesus’s sacrifice, to be ‘saved’, the elaborate Church teachings required Baptism to open the door for babies, and Confession to reopen the door closed by sin. This in turn led to many dualisms, such as the beliefs that there was no salvation outside the Church, and that dead unbaptized babies were not saved.

The recognition introduced by John that God is active in each one of us sheds new light on the idea of ‘sin’. In it, sin can now be seen as a refusal to acknowledge and cooperate with this spark, and the whole of religion therefore seen as attempt to articulate how this spark can be seen and what human actions will enlarge this perception. This is not a modern concept, as it can be seen clearly in the sayings of Jesus and the writings of Paul and John.

Reflecting Teilhard, Richard Rohr offers his insight:

“I am convinced that the reason Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus’ teachings is because we did not understand his pedagogy. Jesus’ way of education was intended to situate his followers to a larger life, which he called his “Father,” or what we might call today God, the Real, or Life. When we could not make clear dogma or moral codes out of Jesus’ teaching, many Christians simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. For this reason, the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—seems to be the least quoted by Christians. We sought a prize of later salvation, instead of the freedom of present simplicity.

Going to heaven is not the goal of religion. Salvation isn’t an evacuation plan or a reward for the next world. Whenever we live in conscious, loving union with God, which is eventually to love everything, we are saved.

Salvation is not a magical transaction accomplished by moral behavior or joining the right group. The only salvation worthy of the name is a gradual realization of who we are already in this world—and always have been—and will be eternally.”

Thus the facets of incarnation, redemption and salvation can be seen as active in the human journey of human life from birth to death. Life is ‘incarnated’ in human birth, gratuitously implanted in each human person as the potential for greater ‘possession of self’, then not only ‘redeemed’ from the failures that befall in this search for fullness, but moved forward, ‘saved’ in the success which occurs as such fullness is seen to unfold. These three steps are recursive, as the wisdom that can emerge from the failures of experience fosters the confidence that new experience will lead to fuller being.

But they are not unique to human evolution. As we saw when we looked at the structure of universal evolution, they are human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds in its journey toward increased complexity. The religious term, ‘incarnation’ references the evolutionary aspect by which matter comes into being with the potential to grow, ‘Redemption’ to the reaction to this potential by which increased complexity is accomplished, and ‘Salvation’ to the increased potential for growth which results from the increase in complexity. Religion simply glimpses these underlying currents in human life, and ‘intuits’ how they are active long before science can begin to address them.

And this completes the picture of Jesus as the human manifestation of this energy of complexification. As our principles of reinterpretation can be brought into play, as seen in the last several posts, the subject of Jesus indeed can be seen as a ‘signpost to the future’.

The Next Post

Next week we will move to yet another historically new perception of God, one that is to be found in the concept of ‘the Trinity’. We have seen how the subject of Jesus can be reinterpreted into a signpost to a human future filled with the potential of ‘fuller being’. We will see now the concept of ‘the Trinity’ effects a synthesis of our reinterpreted Jesus with the other two Christian concepts of the three facets of ‘the ground of being.’

December 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

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December 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

Will Jesus ‘come again’?

Today’s Post

In the last six weeks we have addressed the subject of Jesus from five perspectives, seeing how this subject itself evolves from the somewhat conventional understanding found in the three synoptic gospels in which Jesus is seen as one of the many ‘holy men’ that would have been familiar to the Jews of the time, to the unprecedented understanding of him as somehow ‘one with the Father’: divine, eternal and yet still human.

We then saw how such an audacious claim matured from one requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ to one which falls naturally and cohesively into the concept of an evolving universe in which the key aspect can be seen as ‘increasing complexity’.

We then saw last week how the evolution of thinking about Jesus, found in the theological development following his death, eroded the immediacy of both Jesus and God, as well as minimizing the concept of ‘the Christ’ as the ‘axis of evolution’ found in Paul and John.

This week we will look at a sixth facet of the ‘Jesus story’, that of the idea of his ‘second coming’, one which appears several times both in the Old Testament as well as the New. Can this cryptic forecast also be re-interpreted into a secular perspective via our principles?

The ‘Coming’
The idea that Jesus would literally return is found in several places in the Old Testament. Many read Isiah’s prophesies as suggesting not only the coming of Jesus, but a later literal appearance by God in which ‘He’ would assume control over humans who will have once again lost their way.

Matthew seems to address this concept more than the other synoptic gospel authors, citing Jesus as saying in Chapter 12

“For the Son of Man will come in His Father’s glory with His angels…. Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”

In Chapter 24, he follows with a description of the event

”At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory”

Of course, the most famous treatment comes in Revelation, which provides a colorful and dramatic description upon which many of the more conservative Christian expressions focus as they frequently see ‘signs’ of this coming in reports of today’s events. Some, disgusted with the state of the world as seen in these events, are reported to engage in activities which they believe would stimulate this event, effectively ‘forcing God’s hand’.

Much argument has ensued in the history of Christianity on how such lines of scripture are to be understood, with the Liturgical expressions leaning toward a metaphorical understanding, and the Evangelical expressions toward one which sees them as literal forecasts.

How can they be seen to fit within our secular perspective?

Teilhard, the Noosphere and the ‘Second’ Coming

The approach we have taken thus far is to consider making ‘sense of things’ from Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution. In keeping with our secular insights into Jesus as the human face of the rising sap of complexity in the tree of universal evolution (‘the Christ’), Teilhard offers his concept of the ‘noosphere’. As we have seen, the noosphere is simply the accretion of insights and inventions which occurs as humanity evolves. Beginning with the transmission of oral traditions thousands of years past, signs of the continuation of evolution can be seen today in the tight swaddling of data contained in, for example, our educational systems and global communication media. In such things our evolution as a species is escorted beyond the instinctual trappings of our mammalian ancestors into ever new ways to ‘be human’. As we evolve, this ‘noosphere’ evolves in a way that continuously fosters the growth of our understanding and in doing so refocuses our navigation of human life.

As we saw in our series on the evolution of human welfare last February, Johan Norberg documents examples of such ‘growing of understanding’ and ‘refocusing of navigation’ in nine distinct and empirically articulated facets of life on our planet. Each one of these reflects a facet of how the noosphere both becomes enriched by and in turn enriches the human species. How can such examples be seen in the light of in our discourse on the ‘secular side’ of Jesus?

A clue to such insight can be seen in Luke’s report of Jesus’ reply to queries from followers of John the Baptist.

“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”

The signs that Jesus chooses to identify himself to John are ones which are focused on human welfare. He makes no reference to ‘salvation’ or to ‘right behavior’, but instead identifies those things in which benefits to human welfare can be seen. This suggests that a manifestation of the ‘presence of Jesus’ can always be found in instances of increased human welfare.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s insight that that the appearance of Jesus in history, as the human manifestation of the underlying spark of creation by which the universe ‘complexifies’, constitutes a turning point in history. As we have seen from his perspective, Jesus focusses on the twin concepts of the importance of the human person and the value of relationships, and hence their function as cornerstones of human evolution. This turning point initiates a slow accretion in human history of the painful but inexorable rise of the human desire for an autonomy which is ballasted by harmony and which therefore eventually leads to the concepts of person and equality so critical to Western society.

As we have seen in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, he carefully and objectively documents nine facets of human welfare which have significantly improved in just the past hundred fifty years. As he points out, this exponential increase did not spring from thin air, it was presaged by the long, often agonizing, efforts of humans when, as Karen Armstrong says, “Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world”. And, as Norberg points out, it required a collective valuing of two critical aspects of humanity: the importance of the person, (requiring the formal codification in civil legal systems of ‘human freedom’} on the one hand, and the necessity for viable and productive ‘human relationships’ (enforced by objective and efficacious laws) on the other. All of Norberg’s improvements in human welfare appear more frequently in countries which embrace democratic civil norms, and the number of such countries has increased by large amounts during this period.

So, how does this data reflect a ‘coming of Jesus’? As the passage from Luke suggests, the presence of Jesus can be found in the things he lists. Citing Norberg’s list of worldwide human improvements, we might paraphrase Jesus:

“Go back and report to what you have seen and heard: More of the hungry are fed, they have less disease, they are more educated, they live longer and are less destitute, they are subject to less violence and fewer wars, they are becoming more sensitive to their environment and more subject to laws which grant them more autonomy while fostering increasing harmony.”

Thus, the ‘coming of Jesus’ does not constitute a single event, but is tangible in the rise of human complexity which is manifest in its improvements in human welfare.

The Next Post

This week we addressed Jesus from a sixth perspective, that of the ‘Second Coming’. We have seen, through John, Paul, Teilhard, and now Norberg, how ‘the Christ’ is a continually active agent in the evolution of the cosmos, present in the ever continuing increase of complexity seen in all stages of the universe’s coming to be, and Jesus as the manifestation of this agency as it flowers in the human person. The ‘Second Coming’ is less an event than it is a process, and the fruits of this process can be seen in the increase in human welfare which springs from its acknowledgement.
Building on this new view of Jesus, next week we will look at Jesus from a seventh and final perspective: That of the traditional church concepts of Incarnation and Redemption.

December 17, 2020 – The ‘Evolution’ of Jesus

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How does the understanding of Jesus evolve?

Today’s Post

Last week we continued a fourth relook at Jesus in the light of our ‘secular’ perspective. In the last two weeks we outlined how in Jesus can be seen the first human awareness of how we should cooperate with the spark of universal being endowed by evolution in each of us if we would become more complete.

While the awareness that each person is intimately connected to this cosmic spark was stated unequivocally by John, the beliefs about such a God and the nature of Jesus continued to evolve in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church. This week we will address a fifth perspective of Jesus: how this theological evolution unfortunately led to a continuation, even a strengthening of dualities which have plagued religion from its ancient beginnings.

Jesus, Religion and Duality

As we have seen, the dichotomy between orthogonal concepts, such as this world/the next, natural/supernatural, Judgmental God/Loving God, and sacred/profane can be seen in all philosophical and religious systems going back to the earliest written records. In most cases, these dualities prevail, even though they are in opposition, in a somewhat ‘cognitive dissonance’. In some cases, the level of dissonance fades as one side of the dichotomy slowly becomes paramount as society evolves.

For example, Thomas Cahill, reading Jewish scripture as “a documentary record of the evolution of a sensibility”, notes the evolution of the scriptural voice of God from the thundering apparition to Moses to the “still, small voice” of Kings. Nonetheless, even though many of the dualities have evolved toward eventual cohesion, others still persist in both religion and society today.

We have seen how the Gospel of John, for example, would seem to offer such a cohesion by declaring an ontological basis of unity between God and the human person. However, many of the beliefs that emerged as a result of the three hundred years of strife that plagued the Christian church as it fought amongst itself to define orthodoxy, resulted in a strengthening of one of the most deep-seated dualities in Christianity, that which underlies the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’.

Substitutionary atonement is the teaching that was eventually invoked to bring an end to the most basic controversy of the early church: how could Jesus be God and Man at the same time? There were many beliefs on this subject to be found among the diverse Christian communities that made up the early church, but they all boiled down to three: Jesus was divine and not human, human and not divine and both human and divine. Each side held strong reasons for their beliefs, and offered many diverse ‘models’ of reality to support them. The controversies were of such strength as to threaten to divide the new Christian religion.

At the same time, Christianity was poised to play a significant role in the expansion of the Roman Empire. The emperor Constantine understood that its unique and unprecedented beliefs offered a potential basis of stability to the Roman Empire as it expanded into increasingly diverse cultures. A division within Christianity, however, would undermine this potential, prompting Constantine to step into the controversy. As Bart Ehrman relates it in his book, “How Jesus Became God”,

“The empire was vast and was culturally, politically and religiously fragmented. In contrast, Christianity emphasized oneness: there is one God, one Son of God, one church, one faith, one hope and so on. Christianity was a religion of unity that Constantine believed could be used to unify the empire.

But the problem was that this religion of unity was itself split; thus he saw the need to heal the split if the Christian church was to bring real religious unity to the empire.”

As a result, Constantine ordered a ‘Council’ (The Council of Nicaea) to be called to establish a consensus on the ‘orthodox’ teaching of how Jesus could be both God and Man. At this council, it was decided that the beliefs that Jesus was totally divine or was totally human were declared as ‘heretical’. The belief that he was both at the same time was declared ‘orthodox’.

The deciding argument, however, put the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ squarely into the heart of Christian belief.

Against the belief that Jesus was totally divine or totally human, the argument was presented that neither of these states were possible if Jesus’s ‘sacrifice’ was to be successful in insuring salvation (or as one theologian has said, “Accomplishing his mission”). Jesus had to be divine, for a human sacrifice would not suffice to atone for an offence against a divine God, and he had to be human because suffering was required for a sacrifice to satisfy the conditions for such an ‘economy of salvation’.

Thus the teaching of ‘substitutionary atonement’ was inserted into Christian belief. This is a truly profound dualism, between a God so intimate that “He who abides in love abides in God and God in him” and a God so distant that a painful and bloody sacrifice is necessary for ‘Him’ to ‘change his mind’ about man. It has given rise to many dualistic threads in Christian expressions. Two such dualities which persist to this day are:

As opposed to the teachings of Paul and the gospels, Jesus is seen as ‘closer’ to man than is God, more intimate, and necessary for humans to have a relationship with God. In many Christian expressions, (and in opposition to Paul and the Gospels) Jesus is prayed to, even adored, as a necessary intermediary to a distant God. In some, even Jesus himself requires intermediaries, which is where the ‘intercession’ of saints comes in. In others, reflecting Medieval royal hierarchies, such anachronistic terms as kings, queens and princes still can still be found today to describe the hierarchy of the ‘heavenly kingdom’, and thus continuing to dilute the potential relevance of religion to human life.
The goal of human life is seen as ‘heaven’, a reward which only happens after death, leading to further distance from human life. As Brian McLaren sees it, “We made the Gospel largely into “an evacuation plan for heaven.” ”

Another duality which can be seen in the theological process exemplified by the Council of Nicaea is that of deciding the theologically correct ‘words of belief’. Articulating correct belief into theological acceptable terminology is frequently seen as the ‘ticket to heaven’, and many wars have been fought over their expression. This has been especially the case in the Christian West, and contributes even today to the decreasing relevance of religion in Western culture.

As a result of Constantine’s political enlistment, Christianity quickly found itself installed as a structural hierarchy, rooted in society and government, in which adherence to doctrine was of increasing importance. There’s no doubt that this ‘enlistment’ played a strong part in the phenomenal spread of Christianity, but there was a price to pay. As Karen Armstrong sees it:

“Later Christians would set great store by orthodoxy, the acceptance of the “correct teaching”. They would eventually equate faith with belief. But Paul would have found this difficult to understand. For Paul, religion was about ‘kenosis’ (the emptying of self, the dismantling of egotism) and love. In Paul’s eyes, the two were inseparable. You could have faith that moved mountains, but it was worthless without love, which required the constant transcendence of egotism.”

Also from Armstrong:

“It is frequently assumed that faith is a matter of believing certain creedal propositions. Indeed it is common to call religious people “believers” as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity.”

The Next Post

This week we saw how the traditional dualities found in all religions developed new and sharper demarcations with the new Christian religion. As we addressed in the series on psychology as secular meditation, such dualities have persisted even as the West became more secular, and can be seen, for example, to have flowered in the orthogonal approaches of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers. We also saw how their conflicts play a part in the diminishment of the role of religion in Western life.

December 3, 2020 – Jesus As “Evolution Become Aware of Itself”

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to move from the first three facets of Jesus, Paul and the Synoptic gospel scriptural depictions to John’s intuition of Jesus as “The Word made flesh”. Last week, we saw how Jesus can be seen from Teilhard’s perspective as the personization of the essential core of universal evolution by which the cosmos becomes more complex over time. We saw how the scriptural treatment of Jesus shows a distinct evolution, as he is shown first as a very human teacher of wisdom, then as ‘the Christ’, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human face of the Cosmic Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that ‘he’ had coexisted with ‘him’ through eternity.

John’s Bold Step

As we have seen, John sees Jesus in a way that is quite different from Paul and the authors of the synoptic gospels. While Jesus’ teachings certainly address how we should behave, and Paul goes on to articulate such proper behavior, John sees Jesus’ teachings as addressing how we should be if we would be whole. This moves from seeing Jesus as a prescription for salvation to one for being fully human. John then goes on to explore God from an ‘ontological’ perspective.

The idea of ‘The word made flesh’ is much more than a ‘metaphor’, and goes well beyond seeing God using Jesus to communicate to us what we must do to get to heaven. In his innovative insight, John is showing us how Jesus is the manifestation of God in human form so that we can better understand how we should be if we would have ‘abundant life’. By insisting that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in him”, John is not saying that we should love God because ‘he’ loves us, or as a prerequisite for salvation. Effectively, John is saying that when we love we are cooperating with the key principle of life by allowing it to flow through us when we love, and thus are borne onward to amore complete state of personhood.

John does not tell us to love God, he tells us that we must ‘abide in love’, which Teilhard understands is to immerse ourselves in the fundamental energy of the universe, which is now seen as reflected in humans as love itself. This requires openness, trust, and ultimately cooperation with the basic energy of the universe that even an atheist such as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge, raises the world to an increasing level of complexity.

In Teilhard’s words:

” Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, a blink in the evolution of the universe, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was in place at the moment of creation of the universe. At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘love’.

So, Who and What Was Jesus?

So, how do we reinterpret the traditional ‘religious’ understanding of Jesus into one consistent with our ‘secular’ perspective?

When viewed through Teilhard’s lens of universal evolution, Jesus can now be seen as the human face of the heart of evolution finally pulled from the shadows and revealed ‘in full light’; less a group of metaphors than a recipe, a blueprint for the increase in complexity that is no less present in human evolution than it has been constant in the fourteen billion years of universal becoming.

As Teilhard points out, the long sweep of evolution from the big bang to the present time, from pure energy to entities become aware of their awareness, is punctuated by ‘changes of state’. In order for complexity to increase, matter must constantly find new ‘modes of being’ in which unprecedented and extraordinary changes in form and function occur.

The findings of science have shown how this can be clearly seen in each such critical point of evolution:

– energy to matter

– simple granularities (bosons, quarks, electrons) to atoms

– atoms to molecules

– molecules to cells

– cells to neurons

– neurons to brains

– brains to consciousness

– consciousness to awareness of consciousness

To this progression we can now add another critical point: from awareness of consciousness to awareness of the evolution of consciousness. In Jesus, through the insights of John, we can now see the beginning of the awareness that our personal growth is the continuation of the agency of being that powers all evolution, from the big bang onwards. And as John points out, the energy which powers this growth can now be understood to have become manifest in the human as love. John pulls the heart of evolution from the shadows and reveals it ‘in full light’. In John, God, Jesus, personal fulfillment and love are less a group of metaphors than ingredients for a recipe for human evolution.

We have seen in several posts how Teilhard shows how the fundamental nature of love strongly differs from the romantic or sentimental emotional attraction so often celebrated in our culture. Teilhard calls it for what it is: the current manifestation of the universal attraction between entities that causes their continued evolution. And in Jesus, as chronicled by John, we can see the first stirrings of such an understanding of this basic principle.

God, to John, is not a ‘creator’, ‘out there’, ’over and against’ mankind, but the universally integrated set of agents which, as Dawkins observes, “.. raises the world to its current level of complexity”.

So, just as we have seen Teilhard’s reinterpretation of God from a ‘divine person who rewards and punishes’ to the cohesive agency which underlies evolution as it progresses from pure energy to the human person, we can reinterpret Jesus from the holy, even divine person who shows us how we should relate to God and each other in order to merit salvation, to the personal manifestation of the fundamental energy by which we come to be and grow as a result of this thread of evolution which rises in us.

Indeed, even as Jesus is ‘evolution become aware of itself’, he also represents the point in human history where the universal power of love as the creative force which powers our continued evolution first begins to be recognized.

If universal evolution can be understood as a tree, ‘the Christ’ can be seen as the sap which rises in this tree which produces a product, a ‘fruit’ that can be seen in the person of Jesus. Having seen the fruit of the tree of evolution, the whole of the tree can be seen more clearly, as well as our place in it.

‘Christ’ as the Name For Evolutionary Energy

The secular community, in general, is not in favor of using the term ‘Christ’ to label the rising thread of complexity which can be seen to rise in the universe. Materialists are prone to deny it as ‘allowing a divine foot in the door’. The term itself is tangled in the Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and is commonly associated with the person of Jesus. The problem, however, comes when another term is sought to identify this thread.
Science has only recently begun to address this evolutionary thread, and these beginnings can be seen in the areas of Complexity Science and Information Science, but other than beginning to quantify how this thread can be empirically identified, a generic name so far has been elusive. Thus Teilhard’s use of the term, even with its religious association, can still be understood in a secular context.

Another problem arises when Jesus is asserted as the single face of this universal trend towards complexity. If this thread rises in evolution, then any recognition of it is a manifestation of it, no matter where or when on our planet it can be found. As Karen Armstrong describes in her book, “Great Transformations”, during the ‘Axial Age’

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness. By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds. They were becoming fully “Self conscious” “

Thus any recognition of this elusive thread of ontology in the human person is effectively an awareness of ‘the Christ’, no matter what term we use to identify it

That said, however, it is important to see how easily such a secular aspect of reality as ‘the Christ’ fits into the ancient set of intuitions present in the Judeo-Christian belief system. In keeping with Richard Dawkins recommendation that religion needs to be ‘divested’ of the baggage that it has accumulated in its many thousand years of development, such a divestment (which we have referred to as ‘reinterpretation’) brings this ontological side of Jesus to the fore.

In doing this, the gap between empirical science and intuitive religion is narrowed, offering science a bridge to the treatment of the human person (Information and Complexity Science) , and to religion and increased relevancy to human life.

The Next Post

This week we took a fourth look at a way that the person of Jesus can be reinterpreted from traditional understanding to the secular understanding of him as the critical point in history in which evolution can be seen to become ‘evolution become aware of itself’. Next week we will look at a fifth way in which this secular approach can offer insights into the human condition and how evolution can proceed through both the human person and society at large.

November 26, 2020 – Jesus In The Context of Evolution

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The Word becomes Flesh in universal complexification

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus which an be perceived as both ‘divine’ and ‘human’. Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human manifestation of ‘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 begins to understand God as ‘triune’: the ‘trinity’.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ undergoes a distinct evolution 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 correct moral behavior. Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, summarized and expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatises on Love and the Fruit of the Spirit), and goes on to see him tasked with and rewarded for the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with judgmental God. The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result of completion 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 the human face 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. From this perspective, God can be seen as the ‘creator’ and Jesus as the ‘navigator’.

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, requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ on the part of the believer. In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history by God to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that God 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” insight of John that we saw last week, Jesus, as the Christ, is ‘co-substantial’ with God, and therefore had always been somehow involved in the creation process.

These two theories are, on the face of it, orthogonal. 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 raising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as God’s continuing presence in human existence.

The history of Christian theological development includes 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 divine’ 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’, and as such introduced 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 opposing concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can come into coherence, and the dualities healed, when we understand God as the ‘ground of being’. Once God is understood as active in both the principles of being (physics, chemistry, biology) and the principles of becoming (increasing complexity), we take a step toward seeing God’s presence reflected in every manifestation of reality. In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesus

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first secular 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 which could underpin a new nation. In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’ by ‘reinterpreting religion’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ but without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of Natural Selection that would later inspire such thinkers as Maurice Blondel and Teilhard. Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing on after an initial creation, much less as an active agent which powers the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person and serve as a confirmation of his belief in the equality of the human person.

With the insights of Blondel and Teilhard in hand, however, we can begin to understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ever-active ‘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 which 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 weeks 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 the Secular Side of God

November 19, 2020 – Paul, John and the ‘Cosmic Christ’

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From the evolving perspective of the New Testament

today’s Post

Last week we looked at the earliest writings about Jesus: the beginnings of the ‘New Testament’ as seen in Paul and the ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. We saw how these gospels did not necessarily depict a Jesus who considered himself divine, and instead reflected a teacher whose ‘millennialist’ beliefs led him to preach correct moral behavior in preparation for the ‘coming’.

This week we’ll take a look at Jesus through the perspectives of Paul and John, in which Jesus is depicted as not only divine, but in some way, eternal.

Paul’s ‘Cosmic Christ’

As we saw last week, the three synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a gifted teacher executed for his beliefs but ‘exalted’ by God after his death. While Paul’s insights seem to have preceded these authors, his ’letters’ focused less on stories of Jesus’s life and more on summarizing them and showing how Jesus was more than just a human person. Paul introduces the concept of ‘the Christ’.

As Richard Rohr points out in his book, “The Universal Christ”, ‘Christ’ is not Jesus’s last name but a recognition of the presence of a universal phenomenon which preceded Jesus in time, but which was ‘personified’ in him.

Bart Ehrman addresses this aspect of Jesus in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, starting with the insights of Paul and commencing through the development of Christian theology that was to follow. Ehrman notes how, as Paul introduces the concept of ‘the Christ’ he sees the ‘exaltation of Jesus’ by God occurring during his life, as opposed to after his death as claimed by the synoptic gospels. This suggests to him that somehow Jesus must have been present in God’s creation from the beginning. This insight is the beginning of the concept that Jesus was in some way “divine”, and represents Paul’s initial attempt to see how such an overlap between ‘human’ and ‘divine’ was possible given the traditional Jewish dualistic understanding of these two concepts. In this, Paul is addressing the contrast between ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, subjects which were to engage the new church for many years without successful resolution. (We will see, however, how Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution offers an approach to resolving this duality.)

The Second Perspective: John

John seems to have written the fourth Gospel as many as thirty years after Paul, and surely had access to both the letters of Paul and the synoptic gospels. We have seen how the synoptic gospels stressed the teachings of Jesus, his interpretations of the Torah and his millennialist beliefs, and how Paul summarized and expanded his message while seeing his presence somehow as eternal. John delves deeper into the nature of God and how it could be that Jesus himself could be understood as divine. In doing so, he carried Paul’s potentially dualistic insight one step further into the first integrated insight of God as both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’.

As we saw last week, Bart Ehrman doesn’t consider the concept of a ‘God-Man’ as necessarily audacious during Jesus’ time due to the many similar and familiar myths of the day. John, however, goes into unprecedented detail of how Jesus was divine, indeed co-extensive with God, laying the groundwork for the doctrine of ‘the Trinity’ which would emerge later in church history.

With John we see a significantly different depiction of Jesus’ life and death from that of the synoptic gospels. Some examples, as listed by Ehrman:

Jesus’ claims to divinity are much stronger, including self-identification with the ‘Son of Man’.
There are more stories of miracles, and the nature of the miracles is more supernatural
In the synoptic gospels, Jesus hesitates, often even refuses, to perform miracles as a sign of his identity. He even downplays miracles, and notes that they are also performed by others. In John, Jesus not only performs miracles frequently, but does so as signs to compel belief.
Where the synoptic gospels see divinity as ‘awarded to Jesus after death’, and Paul sees Jesus as a human who is ‘exalted by God’ during his life, John sees Jesus as having somehow been ‘one with the Father’ from the beginning of time. It is this aspect of Jesus, ‘the Christ’ that John asserts.
Where Paul and the synoptic gospels treat ‘love’ as the correct form of behavior necessary to earn salvation, John goes on to depict ‘love’ as an aspect of God ‘Himself’ and hence ‘ontological’.
Where Paul identifies Jesus as ‘The Christ’ prophesied in the Old Testament, John goes much further, stressing his eternal kinship with God. He introduces the concept of ‘The Word’, which is an aspect of God by which creation proceeds and which is ‘made flesh’ in the human person of Jesus.

John’s Cosmic Christ

This last new concept in John’s depiction of Jesus is the most significant of all. It goes well beyond positing a close kinship between Jesus and God: visualizing Christ as eternal, as having always existing even as God has always existed, and being present in the act of creation itself. To John, Christ is both ‘immanent’ as manifest as an aspect of God and ‘transcendent’ in Christ’s presence in Jesus.

John reflects the influence of Greek thinking with the idea of Jesus, as the human manifestation of ‘the Christ’, as “the Word”. As Ian Barbour (“Religion and Science”) says:

“The term word merges the logos, the Greek principle of rationality, with the Hebrew image of God’s Word active in the world. But then John links creation to revelation: “And the Word became flesh.” “

With this concept, John locates Christ as part of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected. Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation. Christ, in this context, represents the ‘blueprint’ for creation, in the same way that God represents the ‘act’ of creation. While the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are used to distinguish between these two facets, John doesn’t see this as reflecting a hierarchical ‘order’ in which one comes from the other, but an ontological ‘equality’ in which they are ‘co-temporal’. One is simply a facet of the same whole as is the other.

So, in John’s view, Jesus ‘the man’ is simply the inevitable appearance of the human aspect of the ‘word’, the personal aspect of creation as it unfolds. Jesus is indeed, The “Word become flesh.”

John, Love, God and Jesus

As we have seen, the idea of love has been generally addressed throughout history as a manifestation of emotion in human relationships. From this perspective, love is an ‘act’, or an emotion that underpins the act. John overturns this common approach by identifying love as the very nature of God. He does not say that God loves, nor even that God loves perfectly. John says that God is love; that the very nature of God is love itself. By distinguishing the phenomenon of love from an action of God (found in the many lines of scripture that describe God as ‘loving’), John goes one step further and describes God as love itself, which opens the door to an ontological engagement with God that occurs in the act of loving. From John’s perspective, we don’t love God so we can merit improvements in our life, or so that we can earn a position in the afterlife, we love God (and we love in general) because it is ultimately essential to our growth as human persons.

To John, we ‘become’ through a relationship with God which effects our personal growth.

We have seen this passage from John several times, but it’s worth reviewing in the light of his ‘Christology’:

”God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”

In this simple, succinct statement, John offers a highly integrated and intimate perspective on not only who or what God is, but how ‘He’ is active in human life.

This ‘hermeneutic’, while burning brightly in John, seems to have dimmed with the Church’s development of a Christology which concentrated on such things as rationalizing Jesus’s death, identification of rules for life that insure a ‘salvation’ after death, and building a complex hierarchy that could serve as a stabilizing agent to society as it continued its expansion into new parts of the globe. Instead of celebrating the incredible intimacy of ‘God’ as active in the very root of ‘Person’, God became further remote from life, first requiring Jesus as an intermediary to God, then saints as an intermediary to Jesus, and the Church as an intermediary to the saints. Today’s dilution of the influence of religion in Western society shows how dangerous such an evolution has become.

The Next Post

We have seen in the last two weeks how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction evolves 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 the Secular Side of God.

November 12, 2020 – Jesus

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November 12, 2020 Jesus

From the earliest perspectives

Today’s Post

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution. We followed this with a look how John Haught, employing Teilhard’s hermeneutic, suggested how science and religion could evolve toward a synergism in which the best of both could emerge from conflict to collaboration.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a ‘God’ can be reinterpreted by a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each particle of the universe, and therefore also in each of us.

Last week, we saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief. In fact, we saw how such secular reinterpretations can be seen to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets. In doing so, it also begins to recover those religious insights which are relevant to human life.

This week, we’ll continue to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, moving beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

Christianity’s Dualities

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity. Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the evolved theology at the heart of Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman Empire as it expanded into Northward into Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology. These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Christian Protestant duality which saw ‘man’ as both the ‘image of God’ and ‘sinful by nature’. We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Protestant fundamentalism and mainstream liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from the universal perspectives of Paul and John, and how this new dimension was to give rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death. All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death. Not much seems known about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings. Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking introduced by Christianity.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the legacy dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a collection of human insights to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus and Hillel?

The emerging Christian religion introduced new dualisms, such as:

Was Jesus God? Man? God and man?
What, specifically, was his relation to God? Faithful follower? Offspring? Co-creator?
Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins and thus restore ‘fallen’ man to angry God?
Is belief in Jesus necessary for salvation?
Are only Christians saved?
Will he ‘come again’? How? When?

The letters of Paul to the early churches clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing. He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations as well as summaries of Jesus’ teachings.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted (‘canonical’) by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels. Thought to be authored first by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some few years after Paul. They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Ehrman, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world. They appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven. He notes that such stories would have been familiar to the early Christians. He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Ehrman documents how Paul introduced a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

The Next Post

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death. However, the writings of Paul introduce a perspective on Jesus that is only vaguely addressed in the synoptic gospels. Paul’s writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

Next week we will address Paul’s new idea, and how his perspective was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’

November 5, 2020 – Rethinking the ‘Attributes of God’

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What can be said about God from this reinterpreted perspective?

Today’s Post

Last week we began to look at how God can be understood from the secular but integrated perspective suggested by John Haight, which finds God as the critical agency of the unfolding of the universe. This week we will address some of the traditional characteristics ascribed to God as Christianity evolved under the influence of Greek philosophy and offer a reinterpretation from the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Sacks, Haught and Rohr.

These traditional characteristics surface examples of the ‘dualisms’ discussed last week. As Jonathan Sacks observes, they exist to a lesser extent in Jewish thinking, which doesn’t speculates less on the nature of God and more on how ‘he’ is present in human affairs.

While this understanding is one of the clearest threads in the ‘Old Testament’, it led to many dualities (God ‘as he is in himself’ vs ‘God as he is to us’) that arose as Christian theology evolved under the influence of Greek thinking. Sacks sees such ‘other-worldliness’ as a factor in the failure to experience God in the here and now, and hence contributing to the decreasing sense of relevance in religious teaching seen in today’s Western culture.

Immutability and Divinity

A teaching of traditional Christianity is that God is “Being itself, timeless, immutable and incorporeal”. Augustine goes on to interpret the statement ontologically, seeing God as “that which does not and cannot change”. Aquinas, in his metaphysics, sees God as “true being, that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient and the cause and principal of every creature”. These teachings, although not in themselves antithetical to our secular perspective, have nonetheless led to the understanding of God as ‘supernatural’ and ‘external’ in contrast to ‘natural’ and ‘intimate’.

Sacks sees these traditional interpretations as the “God of Aristotle, not Abraham and the prophets”. For example, In reference to the Greek translation of God’s self-identification to Moses as, “I am who am”, Sacks contrasts the Jewish translation as, “I will be where or how I will be”. This inclusion adds a ‘future tense’ omitted in the Greek translation, and pivots the perspective from objective to subjective. Sacks contrasts the Jewish reluctance to conjecture how God is apart from ‘his’ creation against the increasing Christian tendency to treat God objectively. In the Jewish perspective, therefore, God is open to a future manifestation, and not bound by that understood thus far. It is not that God changes in this approach, but that our understanding of God changes as our capability to understand evolves.

As Sacks points out, the concept of the ‘purely spiritual’ does not exist in Judaism, which rarely speculates on the nature of God. The insight that God ‘will be’ is less a statement about God’s evolution than it is about our evolving understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as it is manifest in our lives.

The more secular insights of Blondel and Teilhard go a little further, and are more in line with the essential thinking of Augustine and Aquinas. As God can be found in the sum total of forces that, as Dawkins claims, “.. eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, God is not only not supernatural, but as the ‘ground of being’, is supremely natural. In being so, ‘he’ is therefore so intimately involved in evolving reality as to be virtually inseparable from it.

John Haught addresses this intimate involvement:

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

Omnipotentiality

This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-powerful’, and hence can do anything that ‘he’ desires. It forms the basis for the dualism at the root of much atheistic criticism: if God can do anything ‘he’ desires, and if ‘he’ is ‘good’, then ‘he’ should be able to correct all the bad things that are so obvious in reality. This points to all the suffering that can be seen, both human-caused and ‘acts of nature’ such as droughts, sickness and genetic evils. It asserts that the only conclusion possible is that either God causes evil (in which case he is not ‘good’) or that he is powerless to stop it (in which case he is not ‘all-powerful).

Both Sacks and scriptural scholar Bart Ehrman (‘God’s Problem’) acknowledge that traditional Western religion does not offer a solution to this dichotomy. In the story of Job, As Ehrman points out, all the traditional treatments of evil are addressed, but in the end none are held up as ‘the answer’.

Sacks goes on to address further the duality in such assertions of ‘God’s power’. If we assume that God does not create evil, then we must assume that it comes from somewhere (or someone) else. Assuming a second source, of course, moves belief from monotheism to polytheism. Sacks points out that both threads of thought can be found in scripture, and that a tendency toward seeing an independent source for evil is one of the bases for dualism. He sees the danger of such a dualism very strong in human history, with our ever-present tendency to demonize our opponents, which so often has led to victimization in the name of moral superiority. The Nazi “Final Solution” is one of the most striking examples of this thinking, and such trends are troublingly present in contemporary American politics.

Our secular approach, which sees the action of God in the thread of increasing complexity that rises in universal evolution, approaches the issue of power quite differently. As God is not perceived as ‘a person’, much less an incredibly powerful potentate, God’s ‘power’ lies in the inexorable lifting of the universe to Dawkins’ “present complex existence”. In order to become what it is possible for us to become, it is necessary for us to recognize and learn to cooperate with this very real universal force that lies at our core.

Omniscience

This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-knowing’. It presents another duality: If God knows everything in advance, how is it possible for humans to have free will? If he doesn’t know everything, and we do have free will, how can ‘he’ be God?

Our secular point of view does not understand God as a ‘person’ with ‘knowledge’ but rather as the ‘agent of person-ness’ which effects the eventual appearance of the ‘person’ in evolution. In doing so, the ‘complexification’ of the universe is eventually manifested in the form of ‘person-ization’ with the appearance of consciousness now become aware of itself,

Our secular perspective continues along this same path. As we saw with the clinical observations of Carl Rogers, cooperation with our legacy nature, the kernel of our persons, will always lead to our enrichment, our personal continuation of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Chance and Necessity

This brings up another perennial argument: that of the role of chance in evolution. As Einstein has famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.’ Although this quote was aimed at the indeterminacy of the theory of Quantum Physics, it has been used to support the theory of determinism promoted by Christian Creationists: God intended the specific creation of humans. Therefore, the question is asked, “If God intended humans, how can chance, with which we’re all intimately acquainted, play a part?”

Teilhard’s answer to this conundrum is that if evolution is to continue, it must continue along the fourteen billion year axis of increasing complexity. Therefore such an observable phenomenon as increase in complexity can be expected to continue despite random events. A distinct and relevant example can be seen in the history of our planet.

The Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction, some sixty-five million years ago, is a prime example of the evolutionary continuation of complexification despite chance events. The K-T extinction ended the long (one hundred fifty million year) primacy of reptilian animals. In this event, Earth is believed to have been struck by a very large asteroid, causing a giant cloud that ushered in a ‘global winter’ which the larger and more evolved reptiles, being cold-blooded, could not survive.

Archeological evidence clearly shows that the evolution of the dinosaur had resulted in a gradual enlargement of the brain cavity as a percentage of total body mass: evidence of the ‘thread of evolution’ as it rose through the reptilian entities. With their extinction, and the resulting enlargement of available ecological niches, the prevalent theory suggests that with the extinction of the dinosaurs the way was cleared for a rebound of evolution of mammals. As we know, the rise of complexity (measured in increase of the brain cavity as previously seen in the dinosaurs) then re-continued in the mammals.

The asteroid collision was clearly a random, chance event, but not such as to derail the rise of complexity at the heart of cosmic evolution.

Transcendence and Immanence

Traditional Christianity characterizes God as both transcendent and immanent. From this perspective, God is both ‘above’ but somehow ‘involved’ with creation. This characteristic has spurred much thinking since evolving Christianity, with its dualistic branches, understood God as both ‘supernatural’ (“timeless, immutable, incorporeal”- Augustine) and as deeply intimate with the ‘human person’ (“God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in him”- John). How is it possible to be both?

Jonathan Sacks, addressing the branch of belief which understands God as ‘supernatural’, cites the Christian theology of ‘atonement’. He sees it as the theory that Jesus had to die to reconcile such a distant (supernatural) God to his immanent (natural) creation. As Richard Rohr puts it:

“The substitutionary atonement “theory” (and that’s all it is) seems to imply that the Eternal Christ’s epiphany in Jesus is a mere afterthought when the first plan did not work out.”

This development of Christian theology stands in opposition to John’s statement about the nature of God:

“God is Love and he who abides in God abides in God and God in him.”

John provides the basis for overcoming the dualities that were to rise as Christian theology developed under the influence of Plato and Aristotle. He makes no complete distinction between the presence of God in the human and the presence of “God as ‘he’ is in ‘himself’”.

Gregory Baum sees Blondel’s understanding of the complete immanence of God as:

“It is impossible to conceptualize God as a being, even as a supreme being, facing us. Since God has entered into the definition of man, it would be an error to think of God as a being apart from man and superior to him.”

So, putting both God and ‘man’ into Teilhard’s integrated context of evolution permits an integrated understanding of both characteristics. God, understood as the basis of the sum total of the manifold principles of universal evolution, is indeed transcendent. From this insight, God ‘himself’ may be the underlying principle, but the play of these principles as experienced by us in our continued evolution is completely immanent.

If the insights of Teilhard (and the other thinkers that we have addressed) offer a way of reinterpreting the traditional Western religious teachings on the ‘ground of being’, how does this new light offer a way to rethink its cornerstone, Jesus?

Next Week

This week we have used the insights of Teilhard and others to rethink the prodigious teachings of Western theologians on the subject of God.

Next week will use these same insights to address the ‘secular side of Jesus’.

October 29, 2020 – A Relook at God

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Looking at God from the perspective of ‘anticipation’

Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we took another step in our secular search for the ‘principle of becoming’, this time from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests a third, synergistic, insight into human life. Haught suggests that what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: moving beyond the traditional approaches of science and religion to an integrated recognition of the uplift of evolution in human life. As he sees it this uplift offers us an

“.. awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon.”

But if we are to understand Haught’s suggestion that we evolve our religious thinking from ‘analogy’ (traditional religion) to ‘anticipation’, what needs to change in our legacy approach to religion?

Several weeks back we looked at approaches to reinterpreting religion, and applied them to an understanding of God that could be approached in human experience. But what about the traditional approach to God. How must that change as well?

This week we will look into traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’, to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.

A Brief History of God

Conventional Western religion, expressed in the form of Christianity, has evolved the concept of God from Jewish insights found in the Torah to those most explicitly articulated in the Christian Western Scholastic tradition. Thomas Aquinas is most associated with this theology in his association of Greek thinking with traditional Church teaching. His “Summa Theologica” developed a ‘metaphysics’ which explained reality as an association between the divine creator (God) and ‘his’ creation, blending scripture, Greek reasoning and Western theological development.

From Jonathan Sacks’ perspective, this development reflects what he refers to as ‘dualism’. A very basic dualism can be seen in the two parallel paths found in all the major expressions of religious thought. Both of these paths can be clearly be found in both the Jewish scriptures (The Torah) and those of Christianity (the ‘New Testament’).

In one thread, creation is ‘good’:

creation (including humans) is destined for ‘one-ness’ with its creator
humans are reflections of the divine (‘in His image’)
God is ‘father’

In the other, creation is flawed:

It is separated from its creator (requiring divine sacrifice to reconnect)
humans are sinful at their core
God is judgmental and vengeful

In Christianity, this dualism can be seen in such things as the tension between concepts such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’, ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’, ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’, and ‘this life’ and ‘the next’.

Once Rome capitalized on Christianity’s inclusive nature as a tool for social unity needed as Rome became an increasingly diverse empire, Christianity quickly became more legalistic than fraternal (another dualism). Its dogmatic statements and rules for attaining salvation increasingly replaced Jesus’ ‘law of love’ with the Church’s ‘laws of salvation’.

Sacks sees the dualism that could be found in Jewish beliefs becoming more pronounced in Christianity, as it began to incorporate elements of Greek philosophy. As Sacks sees it,

“Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel”.

In doing so, he saw it exacerbating the dualism that had its roots in Jewish teachings.

God, Reinterpreted

Our concept of the ‘secular side’ of God is quite obviously quite different from this conventional and traditional view. Here are three examples:

– As we saw earlier, in our reinterpreted view God is not ‘a person’. Teilhard understood God is the basis for person since ‘he’ is the sum total of all the universal forces by which the universe evolves from a formless quantum of energy to the highly articulated and multifaceted reality that we see around us, including ourselves. One of the threads of the tens of billions of years of universal becoming is that which eventually leads to ‘the person’. Since that evolution produced the entity that we refer to as ‘the person’, person therefore is seen as one of many evolved universal characteristics. As Gregory Baum relates Blondel’s insight

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

Our secular perspective, therefore, reinterprets God from being ‘a person’ to the much more profound understanding of God as the personal facet of the ground of being.

– God is not ‘supernatural’, if the term refers to something that exists outside, above and apart from nature. In Teilhard’s view, God, as the underlying principle of complexity, is so woven into the energy of universal evolution as to be ‘co-substantial’ with it. As Blondel saw it, there is no position that we can take which sees God as ‘there’ and we as ‘here’, since we require the evolutive action of God within us to be able to make the statement. As we have seen over the last several weeks, our very growth as persons requires us to find that spark of ‘person’ that exists in us all, that we did not create, and which is given to us ‘gratuitously’, unearned. Finding this spark is therefore the first step to finding God.

Finding God also involves the simple realization that what differentiates us from all other products of evolution is that humans have to become aware of what it is that got us to where we are, and how to cooperate with it, if we are to proceed further.

– God is, in a very real, tangible and unsentimental way, ‘love’. Once love is shorn of its emotional and sentimental aspects, it can be seen as the play of universal, integrative energy as it has manifested itself in the human person. Just as entities at every stage of evolution have capitalized on this integrative energy to unite in such a way as to effect more complexity, so can humans capitalize on the energy of love in the same way to increase their individual complexity, to grow.

Such a God as we have come to in our search thus far, while being understood so differently in many ways from our legacy Western beliefs, is not necessarily antithetical to the beliefs themselves. As we shall see, they can be re-examined for their relevance to human life and as such, ‘reinterpreted’.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue this reinterpretation by addressing some of Western religious teachings on God in the light of our secular approach.

October 22, 2020 – Religion As A Signpost to the Future

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‘Articulating the Noosphere’

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth. This week we will take a look at how such articulation at the level of religion slowly informs our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Managing Human Evolution

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘laws’. As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic. In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial, hierarchic, legalistic and power scaffolding, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which the delicate balance between personal and cultural civilization has successfully evolved.

Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism. While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the “Stories of Jesus” and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings. The result, of course, was a cornerstone for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.

Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values. It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West. He summarizes the ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it has emerged in the West:

- Each person exists with worth apart from their social position
- Everyone deserves equal status under secular law
- Religious belief cannot be compelled
- Individual conscience must be respected

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress” documents in detail how this formulation, initially rising in the West, has made its way into many ‘developing’ countries.

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common elements in all of them. He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

Translating this semi-theological assertion into the perspectives of our ‘Secular God’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming-to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.

Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully navigate our growth. The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness. The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, are our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them. By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies, we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.

Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

“The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.”

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential. It is obvious today that human activity also has the potential of contributing to our extinction. Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet. One example of the potential of such adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other. As we increasingly compress, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at bay, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share. Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness. Johan Norberg documents nine distinct examples of such strategy in his book, “Progress”.

In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to “use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”

These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’. Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of the ‘reinterpretation’ process that is the focus of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

Teilhard offers a concise description of the validity of a person’s belief:

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all expressions of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address them in the light of the perspectives we have developed thus far, then reinterpret them to find such kernels. Next week we will begin to apply our approach to the ‘Secular Side of God’ as we address the cornerstone of Christianity, Jesus.

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October 29, 2020 Jesus

From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

Today’s Post

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution.

Last week we began a second relook at religion, this time from the perspective as an attempt to ‘articulate the universe’ in such a way that we better understand the laws which guide the evolution of everything and how we can best work with them to insure not only our personal growth but the continued evolution of our species.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a God can be reinterpreted from a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each of us.

We saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief. In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these secular reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets. In doing so, it also begins to infuse religious concepts with insights which are more relevant to human life.

In doing this, we also looked at the ‘Perennial Tradition’, which sees all religious expression as inclusive of such basic fundamental insights.

This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

The Duality of Christianity

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity. Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology. These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Christian Protestant duality between ‘man as the image of God’ and ‘man’s sinful nature’. We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death. All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death. We don’t seem to know much about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings. Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms, such as:

Was Jesus God? Man? God and man?
What, specifically, was his relation to God?
Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?

The writings of Paul clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing. He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels. Thought to be authored by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some ten years after Paul. They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

Bart Ehrman, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven. He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Paul introduces a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

The Next Post

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death. However, the writings of Paul surface a perspective on Jesus that is only lightly addressed in the synoptic gospels. These writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

Next week we will how this perspective, first posed by Paul, was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’.

Science, Religion and Reality

Uncovering the confluence between science and religion

Author Archives: matt.landry1@outlook.com

December 31, 2020 – Jesus: The Rest Of The Story

December 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

December 17, 2020 – The ‘Evolution’ of Jesus

December 3, 2020 – Jesus As “Evolution Become Aware of Itself”

November 26, 2020 – Jesus In The Context of Evolution

November 19, 2020 – Paul, John and the ‘Cosmic Christ’

November 12, 2020 – Jesus

November 5, 2020 – Rethinking the ‘Attributes of God’

October 29, 2020 – A Relook at God

October 22, 2020 – Religion As A Signpost to the Future