Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been looking at the two great systems of thought that have emerged as humanity has attempted to ‘make sense of things”. In this series we have noted that both science and religion clearly have developed ‘tools’ for dealing with our evolution, but that these tools, effective as they have been shown to be, are still a work in progress.
Last week we addressed how the activities of our ‘left’ and ‘right’ modes of thinking, properly synthesized, can offer great potential to ensure our continued evolution. In the course of our discussion, however, we noted the necessity of both to continue to evolve from their current incomplete states to one in which this partnership can mature.

This week we will take a look at how religion’s side of this relationship must evolve if is to hold up its side of such potential synthesis.

Why Should Religion Evolve?

As Jonathan Sacks sees it, the secularization of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God, but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live life peaceably together. More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power.

– no religion relinquishes power voluntarily

– the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations and sects

– at some point, the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers

– it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God

What is needed, therefore, is for religion to continue to evolve, to recognize that many of the criticisms of the more well-spoken atheists are on target, and that most of the new findings of science only threaten the least reasonable aspects of religion as seen in such things as superstition, biblical literalism, dualism and focus on the afterlife. The fundamental belief in a principle of reality that is ‘on our side’ and an evolutionary process in which we can realize our potential and a recognition of the need for love are only found in religion, and need to be stressed anew for it to recover its relevancy to human life.

How can Religion Evolve?

What inhibits religion’s potential as a tool for ‘making sense of things’? It was only a few generations ago that religion was at the focus of all societies, but most respected polls today show a trend of decline in religion’s importance to society.

Although still clearly in the minority, the atheist voice has in contrast risen strongly in this same time frame. One consistent thread of this voice sees the religious viewpoint being completely replaced by an objective, materialistic and atheistic worldview in the near future. Popular, learned and eloquent voices, such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor of “Public Understanding of Science”, is one of many who have written copiously of the many contradictions and fantasies that can be found in Western religion as well as a signigicant lack of grounding in the physical sciences. Science itself contributes to this trend as modern medicine and technology continue to extend their power to improve human welfare.

So, given these trends, how can religion effect a move back to the center of human enterprise, equal to science in its application to the human need to ‘make sense of things’? Maurice Blondel, an early twentieth century French philosopher, addressed the problem of relevance in religion:

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

   With this succinct assertion Blondel not only identifies the heart of the problem, but also opens the door to a path to returning relevance to religion. His observation suggests that this path requires religion to understand and express its beliefs in terms of human life as opposed to providing information about the ‘supernatural’, that which is “wholly from the outside”.

We have discussed religion as a ‘tool’ for us to continue our evolution at both a personal and societal level. Blondel proposes a ‘tool’ by which religion can realize its potential to improve its capability of helping us do just that.

The tool is ‘reinterpretation’.

Reinterpreting Religion

Blondel is difficult to read today, but Gregory Baum offers a clear summary of his insights in his book, “Man Becoming”. He notes that Blondel saw an impediment to the relevance of Christian theology in its tendency to focus on ‘God as he is in himself’ vs ‘God as he is to us’. Jonathan Sacks echoes this tendency, noting that the main message of Jesus focuses on the latter, while the increasing influence of Plato and Aristotle in the ongoing development of Christian theology shows a focus on the former. Both writers point out that this historical trend in the development of Christian theology is reflected in a focus of what and who God is apart from man. This results, as Sacks notes, in the introduction of a new set of dichotomies which were not present in Judaism, such as body vs soul, this life vs the next and corruption vs perfection. Such dichotomy, they both note, compromises the relevance of the message.

An example of this dichotomy can be seen in the ‘Question and Answer’ flow of the Catholic Baltimore Catechism:

“Why did God make me?

God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life so that I can be happy with Him in the next.”

   This simple QA reflects several aspects of such dichotomy.

• • It presents the belief that ‘this life’ is simply a preparation for ‘the next’.   This life is something we have to endure to prove our worthiness for a fully meaningful and happy existence in the next. Therefore our purpose in life is simply to make sure that we live a life worthy of the reward of heavenly existence when we die.
  • As follows from this perspective, we can’t expect meaning and the experience of happiness in human life.
    • Ultimate meaning is understood as ‘a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved’. Understanding only happens in the next life.
    • Happiness is a condition incompatible with the evil and corruption that we find not only all around us, but that we find within ourselves
    • Life is essentially a ‘cleansing exercise’, in which our sin is expunged and which, if done right, makes us worthy of everlasting life.

As both Blondel and Sacks noted, the increasing Greek content of this perspective in Christian history slowly moves God from the intimacy reflected in Jesus, Paul and John into the role that Blondel called the “over/against of man”. It is not surprising that one of the evolutionary branches of Western belief, Deism, would result in seeing God as a powerful being who winds up the universe, as in a clock, setting it into motion but no longer interacting with it.

Dichotomy and Reinterpretation

So, where does this leave us? The majority of Western believers seem to be comfortable living with these dichotomies (not to mention the contradictions) present in their belief systems in order to accept the secular benefits of religion such as:

• • a basis for human action
  • a contributor to our sense of place in the scheme of things
  • a pointer to our human potential
  • a contributor to the stability of society

While these benefits might be real, many surveys of western societies, especially in Europe, show a correlation between increasing education and decreasing belief. Is it possible that (as the atheists claim) the price for the evolution of human society is a decrease in belief? That the increasing irrelevancy of religion is a necessary byproduct of our maturity?

Or is it possible that solutions to the ills of Western society require some connection to the spiritual realm claimed by religion? Put another way: is it possible to re-look at these claims to uncover their evolutionary values? How can the claims of religion be re-understood (‘re-ligio’) in terms of their secular values; to look at them, as Karen Armstrong asserts, as “plans for action” necessary to advance human evolution? Certainly, if so, religion has the potential to recover the relevancy that is necessary for any tool with the potential of moving evolution forward.

In order to move toward such re-understanding, we will look at the idea of ‘reinterpretation’ itself, to explore how we can best apply the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Armstrong, Rohr and Sacks to the process of re-interpreting our two thousand years of religious doctrine development.

The Next Post

Considering that our lives are built on perspectives and beliefs that are so basic as to be nearly instinctual, how can we come to see them differently? Our histories, however, contain many stories of such transformations, and the unfolding of our sciences and social structures are dependent upon them.

Next week we will take a look at some different approaches to how our perspective of the basic things in our lives can change, how we can ‘reinterpret’.