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.