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.