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 reflects Teilhard’s ‘lens’ 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 proceeding 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.

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 three 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”) states:
“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 ‘the 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 as we employ Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

      From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

Today’s Post

When we took a first look at religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we viewed it as a potential tool for making sense of things and therefore as a resource for managing human evolution.
We went on to address traditional Western concepts of God and saw how using Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ permits the concept of God to be reinterpreted from its ‘supernatural’ hermeneutic into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ that his ‘lens’ shows 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 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.
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 Dualities in 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.
Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘New’ testament) as well as 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 Northern Europe.
These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West and, as we saw a few weeks back, 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 Luther’s 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.
These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Evangelical fundamentalism and 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 Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the novel 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 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, biblical historian, 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 unique facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’. 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’.

The Next Post

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’.

What can it mean to ‘love God?’

Today’s Post             

In the past several weeks we have focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘ground of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘love’.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as the principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ‘ground of being’ can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

In today’s culture, it seems clear that few things are less tangible but more ubiquitous than ‘love’.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books.  Nearly all these perceptions understand love primarily as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active as the basis of our lives.

Even our Western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it unites us.

Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity, and thus greater in its potential for union.

Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as

“Fuller being results from closer union, and closer union emerges from fuller being.”

   Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons which emerge from the initial pool of undifferentiated energy to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life.  In its focus on biological evolution as ‘replication’ the theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things.  Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate.  This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago.  In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian with the distinct increase in brain capacity found in the later reptiles.  After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals.  This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that

“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”

    As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person.  There is every reason to recognize this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolutionary products that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion of simple atoms by gravity, atoms evolve into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to influence evolution until particles acquired mass.  This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms which in turn enabled molecules.  The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, is therefore the latest manifestation of this energy: the one which effects human ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness.  This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

John Haught provides a very succinct insight into this phenomenon.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the human person) 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.”

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships.

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species.  Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘becoming persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are more able to allow our relationships to mature.

We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy.   Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

“Change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.

   As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective, and more holistic vision of ourselves.

This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming.  As we become more adept at self-management, we are more able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus, the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as

“Fuller being from closer union.  Closer union from fuller being.”

  This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well.  Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us.  Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (as described by Rogers) of the individuals involved.

Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution.  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.

Loving God

So, how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us?  What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’?  How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?

In the past few weeks, we have been exploring how our recognition of this inner agent of evolution is only the first step.  To flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it.  We must learn to trust it.

If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the activation of the energy of love, the answer is simple.  As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego, the ‘false self’.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected in ourselves to protect us.  The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.

This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable.  This inner realization is our connection with ourselves.  It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves.  Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but is more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy, gratuitous, and ever-present, combined with the decision to trust and cooperate with it.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life, patiently awaiting our participation.

To love God therefore is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.

Seen thusly, God isn’t engaged as a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but rather in the recognition of the action of a universal force in each of us as clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of

 “…hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

              “It is I, be not afraid.”

Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives within us:

”..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

The Next Post

Having seen over the past few weeks how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects our beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to see at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.