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’.