Tag Archives: Reinterpretation of Religion

January 7, 2021 – The Cryptic Concept of the ‘Trinity’

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 What can ‘three persons in one God’ mean?

 Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at Jesus from our secular perspective, noting how quickly the highly integrated understanding of John became a victim of the endless human trend toward dualism.  From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of God in human life and how Teilhard sees Jesus as the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming.  From Teilhard’s insight, this spark, found in all the products of evolution, is only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.  In our final look last week, we saw how easily the labyrinthine statements emerging from the pronouncements of theologians can be ‘reinterpreted’ into statements about the human person, and by doing so increase their relevance to human life.

The evolution of the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, did not end with the pronouncements of the Council of Nicaea, but set the stage for a following inquiry into the ‘nature’ of God.  This week we’ll take a look at this third stage of the theological evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God, Jesus and ‘the Christ’, the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.  The idea of God as the supreme supernatural creator somehow intertwined in human life is a common thread of the Jewish scriptures (the ‘Old Testament’).   As we have seen, the understanding of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ evolves over time in the New Testament into the early days of the new Christian church, but the concept of a third ‘person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of its existence.

Richard Rohr relates the history of the idea of ‘the Trinity” as it began in the Eastern Church and later moved to the West:

“The Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century first developed this theology, though they readily admitted the Trinity is a wonderful mystery that can never fully be understood with the rational mind, but can only be known through love, prayer, and suffering. This view of Trinity invites us to interactively experience God as transpersonal (“Father”), personal (“Christ”), and even impersonal (“Holy Spirit”)—all at once.”

   The idea of something (or someone) involved in the formation of the universe, and in how this process is reflected in human life, shows up even in the Old Testament.  It is strongly suggested by Jesus, for example, in his statement to the apostles that a ‘Spirit’ (an ‘advocate’) would be sent after he was gone.

It wasn’t until the early days of the church’s theological development that this agent began to be considered ‘God’ in somehow the same way that the relationship between Jesus and ‘the Christ’ was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three separate but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in reality was reflected in three separate facets.  The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are of little use in making sense of this complex concept.  Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding (as we saw in the final determination of Nicaea that Jesus was both God and Man) as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation, it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated up until the Nicaean council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated.  As the Arian controversy over the ‘nature’ of Jesus began to dissipate following the Nicaean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the ‘equality’ of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’.  A key facet of this controversy lay in the lack of scriptural clarification of the ‘Spirit’ as a person of God in the same way as was the ‘Son’.  On one hand, some believers declared that the Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son, emerging as a result of the ‘love between the Father and the Son’.  On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Spirit was a third person fully equal to the Father and Son.

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was of the same substance and nature of God, but like Jesus, a separate person. Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over this council offered this erudite but ultimately vacuous explanation:

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me”.

  As Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

   Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity can seem furthest from human life and thus can tend to reduce the relevance of Christian teaching to human life.  The church didn’t make it easier with Nazianzus’ cryptic statement, or by declaring such statements to be ‘objects of faith’ which must be believed without understanding even though such belief was a prerequisite for salvation.  But as we saw last week, faith is much more than adherence to precepts, it is an essential aspect of human existence.

So, what secular sense can be made of this strange teaching?

The Next Post

This week we saw how the new Christian church expanded its concept of God from the Jewish ‘Father’ to a complex triune but difficult to grasp concept.

Next week we will consider this concept of a ‘triune’ God from the perspective of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

December 31, 2020 – Jesus: The Rest Of The Story

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 Reinterpreting the Theological Language of Jesus

Today’s Post

Last week we took a sixth look at aspects of Christianity’s traditional treatment of Jesus and ‘the Christ’, noting how our principles of interpretation permit a secular insight into religious concepts such as the relation between the two.  We have also seen how such reinterpretation can not only increase the relevance of ancient beliefs to human life but also decrease their distance from the findings of science.

This week we will take a last look at Jesus, focusing on the theological concepts that evolved along with the concept of Jesus and ‘the Christ’ in the many years of Western theological development, and explore their ‘secular’ content.

The ‘Incarnation’

In our look at Jesus from the perspective of the New Testament, we saw how the subject of Jesus evolved in a few short years from a holy man preaching about preparation for the immanent end times, to the human manifestation of an agency by which the universe can be seen to unfold.  In John’s vernacular, Jesus was ‘the word made flesh’, introducing a concept of this universal agency by which it finds human expression in the person of Jesus.

The traditional Christian approach to the appearance of Jesus in human history saw him as ‘the Son of God’, suggesting a unique manifestation of divinity among the human species.  But if we understand Jesus from Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ as the ‘fruit’ of universal evolutionary growth, the sap of which is the rising of complexity (‘the Christ’), then Jesus is simply one of such flowerings.  From this perspective, this ‘sap’ makes itself known in all humans who rise above their circumstances to see things in a more integrated, and hence more efficacious way.  Confucius is a good example, with his insights into human unity and behavior which unites us in such a way that we mature.  Thomas Jefferson is another such example when he asserts the existence of a common wisdom in a human society which is capable of self-government.

Teilhard carries this insight one step further.  He painstakingly documents the rise of complexity in universal history in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”, calling attention to its many ‘changing of states’ of complexity.  Such changes illustrate how if complexity is to rise in the universe it must always find new and more complex ways of doing so.  These changes of state can be seen in such phenomena as the arrival of matter from pure energy, the emergence of ‘matter which makes itself’ in the form of complex molecules such as DNA, the appearance of the cell, then neurons, then brains then consciousness.  The final (to date) change of state can be seen in the new ability of conscious products of evolution to be aware of their consciousness.

Each change of state is indeed an ‘incarnation’, a flowering of capacity and capability resulting from the rise of complexity from their predecessor states.  As we have seen, Jesus is the manifestation of this rise which has most effected the continuation of evolution through the human species.

Jesus, as the manifestation of this agency of increasing complexity, ‘the Christ’, also shows us how matter and spirit (as understood by Teilhard as the two essential properties of ‘the stuff of the universe’ and by Paul Davies as the ‘hardware and software’ of matter) are more clearly understood as being combined in the human.  As Richard Rohr puts it

“Incarnation literally means enfleshment, yet most of Christian history has, in fact, been excarnational–in flight from matter, embodiment, physicality, and this world. This avoidance of enfleshment is much more Platonic than Christian. Incarnation means that the spiritual nature of reality (the immaterial, the formless, the invisible) and the material (the physical, the forms, that which we can see and touch) are, in fact, one and the same!”

Redemption and Salvation

A critical area for reinterpretation of religion is the understanding of ‘redemption’ as essential to ‘salvation’.  In the development of Christianity through medieval history, the structure of heaven was seen as an ideal of human structure: hierarchal, static, orderly and predictable.  God was recognized as the underlying creator and ultimate regent, all powerful and all knowing, humanlike and judgmental.  Even after the assertions of John, the association of the idea of ‘love’ with God was diminished with the increased understanding of ‘him’ as supernatural and remote.  The idea of salvation became based more on escaping from our natural milieu to living in a supernatural one which was more suitable to our longings.

With this perspective, religion was seen, as Richard Rohr phrases it, as a “high premium fire insurance for the afterlife”.  In this mindset, most liturgical prayers were less “a lifting of the mind and heart to God”, as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, and more focused on how to get to heaven or how to get what we want in this life.

Again, from Rohr

“If it is true that lex orandi est lex credendi, “the way you pray is the way you believe,” then it is no wonder Christians have such a poor record of caring for the suffering of the world and for the planet itself, and the Church has fully participated in so many wars and injustices. We have been allowed to pray in a rather self-centered way, and that fouled the Christian agenda, in my opinion.”

  Thus, as goes the traditional approach, if we are going to be ‘saved’ we must first be ‘redeemed’ from sin.  The traditional church teaching has been that, therefore, salvation is denied to those who die ‘in the state of sin’.  This belief can be seen in the flocking of congregations to church seeking the sacrament of ‘Confession’ when rumors of the ‘end of the world’ have been announced.  Going one step further, church teaching has included the belief that not only sinners, but all humanity, is at birth denied salvation due to the ‘sin of Adam’, better known as ‘original sin’.  As we saw three weeks ago, this view crept in during the controversy over the humanity/divinity arguments of Jesus which required the Council of Nicaea for resolution.  Although the final resolution decided that Jesus was both, the rationale for the resolution required Jesus to die to ‘atone’ for Adam’s sin and thus open the door to salvation closed by God due to the failure of his creation.

But if Jesus was to be the ‘door’ to salvation, the process itself was still open for debate.  Thus the teaching that for humans to benefit from Jesus’s sacrifice, to be ‘saved’, the elaborate Church teachings required Baptism to open the door for babies, and Confession to reopen the door closed by sin.  This in turn led to many dualisms, such as the beliefs that there was no salvation outside the Church, and that dead unbaptized babies were not saved.

The recognition introduced by John that God is active in each one of us sheds new light on the idea of ‘sin’.  In it, sin can now be seen as a refusal to acknowledge and cooperate with this spark, and the whole of religion therefore seen as attempt to articulate how this spark can be seen and what human actions will enlarge this perception.  This is not a modern concept, as it can be seen clearly in the sayings of Jesus and the writings of Paul and John.

Reflecting Teilhard, Richard Rohr offers his insight:

“I am convinced that the reason Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus’ teachings is because we did not understand his pedagogy. Jesus’ way of education was intended to situate his followers to a larger life, which he called his “Father,” or what we might call today God, the Real, or Life. When we could not make clear dogma or moral codes out of Jesus’ teaching, many Christians simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. For this reason, the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—seems to be the least quoted by Christians. We sought a prize of later salvation, instead of the freedom of present simplicity.

   Going to heaven is not the goal of religion. Salvation isn’t an evacuation plan or a reward for the next world. Whenever we live in conscious, loving union with God, which is eventually to love everything, we are saved.

   Salvation is not a magical transaction accomplished by moral behavior or joining the right group. The only salvation worthy of the name is a gradual realization of who we are already in this world—and always have been—and will be eternally.”

   Thus the facets of incarnation, redemption and salvation can be seen as active in the human journey of human life from birth to death.  Life is ‘incarnated’ in human birth, gratuitously implanted in each human person as the potential for greater ‘possession of self’, then not only ‘redeemed’ from the failures that befall in this search for fullness, but moved forward, ‘saved’ in the success which occurs as such fullness is seen to unfold.  These three steps are recursive, as the wisdom that can emerge from the failures of experience fosters the confidence that new experience will lead to fuller being.

But they are not unique to human evolution.  As we saw when we looked at the structure of universal evolution, they are human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds in its journey toward increased complexity.  The religious term, ‘incarnation’ references the evolutionary aspect by which matter comes into being with the potential to grow, ‘Redemption’ to the reaction to this potential by which increased complexity is accomplished, and ‘Salvation’ to the increased potential for growth which results from the increase in complexity.  Religion simply glimpses these underlying currents in human life, and ‘intuits’ how they are active long before science can begin to address them.

And this completes the picture of Jesus as the human manifestation of this energy of complexification.  As our principles of reinterpretation can be brought into play, as seen in the last several posts, the subject of Jesus indeed can be seen as a ‘signpost to the future’.

The Next Post

Next week we will move to yet another historically new perception of God, one that is to be found in the concept of ‘the Trinity’.  We have seen how the subject of Jesus can be reinterpreted into a signpost to a human future filled with the potential of ‘fuller being’.  We will see now the concept of ‘the Trinity’ effects a synthesis of our reinterpreted Jesus with the other two Christian concepts of the three facets of ‘the ground of being.’

December 17, 2020 – The ‘Evolution’ of Jesus

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How does the understanding of Jesus evolve? 

Today’s Post

Last week we continued a fourth relook at Jesus in the light of our ‘secular’ perspective.  In the last two weeks we outlined how in Jesus can be seen the first human awareness of how we should cooperate with the spark of universal being endowed by evolution in each of us if we would become more complete.

While the awareness that each person is intimately connected to this cosmic spark was stated unequivocally by John, the beliefs about such a God and the nature of Jesus continued to evolve in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.  This week we will address a fifth perspective of Jesus: how this theological evolution unfortunately led to a continuation, even a strengthening of dualities which have plagued religion from its ancient beginnings.

Jesus, Religion and Duality

As we have seen, the dichotomy between orthogonal concepts, such as this world/the next, natural/supernatural, Judgmental God/Loving God, and sacred/profane can be seen in all philosophical and religious systems going back to the earliest written records.  In most cases, these dualities prevail, even though they are in opposition, in a somewhat ‘cognitive dissonance’.  In some cases, the level of dissonance fades as one side of the dichotomy slowly becomes paramount as society evolves.

For example, Thomas Cahill, reading Jewish scripture as “a documentary record of the evolution of a sensibility”, notes the evolution of the scriptural voice of God from the thundering apparition to Moses to the “still, small voice” of Kings.   Nonetheless, even though many of the dualities have evolved toward eventual cohesion, others still persist in both religion and society today.

We have seen how the Gospel of John, for example, would seem to offer such a cohesion by declaring an ontological basis of unity between God and the human person.  However, many of the beliefs that emerged as a result of the three hundred years of strife that plagued the Christian church as it fought amongst itself to define orthodoxy, resulted in a strengthening of one of the most deep-seated dualities in Christianity, that which underlies the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’.

Substitutionary atonement is the teaching that was eventually invoked to bring an end to the most basic controversy of the early church: how could Jesus be God and Man at the same time?  There were many beliefs on this subject to be found among the diverse Christian communities that made up the early church, but they all boiled down to three:  Jesus was divine and not human, human and not divine and both human and divine.  Each side held strong reasons for their beliefs, and offered many diverse ‘models’ of reality to support them.  The controversies were of such strength as to threaten to divide the new Christian religion.

At the same time, Christianity was poised to play a significant role in the expansion of the Roman Empire.   The emperor Constantine understood that its unique and unprecedented beliefs offered a potential basis of stability to the Roman Empire as it expanded into increasingly diverse cultures.  A division within Christianity, however, would undermine this potential, prompting Constantine to step into the controversy.  As Bart Ehrman relates it in his book, “How Jesus Became God”,

“The empire was vast and was culturally, politically and religiously fragmented.  In contrast, Christianity emphasized oneness: there is one God, one Son of God, one church, one faith, one hope and so on.  Christianity was a religion of unity that Constantine believed could be used to unify the empire.

But the problem was that this religion of unity was itself split; thus he saw the need to heal the split if the Christian church was to bring real religious unity to the empire.”

As a result, Constantine ordered a ‘Council’ (The Council of Nicaea) to be called to establish a consensus on the ‘orthodox’ teaching of how Jesus could be both God and Man.  At this council, it was decided that the beliefs that Jesus was totally divine or was totally human were declared as ‘heretical’.  The belief that he was both at the same time was declared ‘orthodox’.

The deciding argument, however, put the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ squarely into the heart of Christian belief.

Against the belief that Jesus was totally divine or totally human, the argument was presented that neither of these states were possible if Jesus’s ‘sacrifice’ was to be successful in insuring salvation (or as one theologian has said, “Accomplishing his mission”).  Jesus had to be divine, for a human sacrifice would not suffice to atone for an offence against a divine God, and he had to be human because suffering was required for a sacrifice to satisfy the conditions for such an ‘economy of salvation’.

Thus the teaching of ‘substitutionary atonement’ was inserted into Christian belief.  This is a truly profound dualism, between a God so intimate that “He who abides in love abides in God and God in him” and a God so distant that a painful and bloody sacrifice is necessary for ‘Him’ to ‘change his mind’ about man.  It has given rise to many dualistic threads in Christian expressions.  Two such dualities which persist to this day are:

  • As opposed to the teachings of Paul and the gospels, Jesus is seen as ‘closer’ to man than is God, more intimate, and necessary for humans to have a relationship with God. In many Christian expressions, (and in opposition to Paul and the Gospels) Jesus is prayed to, even adored, as a necessary intermediary to a distant God.   In some, even Jesus himself requires intermediaries, which is where the ‘intercession’ of saints comes in.  In others, reflecting Medieval royal hierarchies, such anachronistic terms as kings, queens and princes still can still be found today to describe the hierarchy of the ‘heavenly kingdom’, and thus continuing to dilute the potential relevance of religion to human life.
  • The goal of human life is seen as ‘heaven’, a reward which only happens after death, leading to further distance from human life. As Brian McLaren sees it, “We made the Gospel largely into “an evacuation plan for heaven.” ”

Another duality which can be seen in the theological process exemplified by the Council of Nicaea is that of deciding the theologically correct ‘words of belief’.  Articulating correct belief into theological acceptable terminology is frequently seen as the ‘ticket to heaven’, and many wars have been fought over their expression.  This has been especially the case in the Christian West, and contributes even today to the decreasing relevance of religion in Western culture.

As a result of Constantine’s political enlistment, Christianity quickly found itself installed as a structural hierarchy, rooted in society and government, in which adherence to doctrine was of increasing importance.  There’s no doubt that this ‘enlistment’ played a strong part in the phenomenal spread of Christianity, but there was a price to pay.  As Karen Armstrong sees it:

 “Later Christians would set great store by orthodoxy, the acceptance of the “correct teaching”.  They would eventually equate faith with belief.  But Paul would have found this difficult to understand.  For Paul, religion was about ‘kenosis’ (the emptying of self, the dismantling of egotism) and love.  In Paul’s eyes, the two were inseparable.  You could have faith that moved mountains, but it was worthless without love, which required the constant transcendence of egotism.”

   Also from Armstrong:

“It is frequently assumed that faith is a matter of believing certain creedal propositions.  Indeed it is common to call religious people “believers” as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity.”

The Next Post

 

This week we saw how the traditional dualities found in all religions developed new and sharper demarcations with the new Christian religion.  As we addressed in the series on psychology as secular meditation, such dualities have persisted even as the West became more secular, and can be seen, for example, to have flowered in the orthogonal approaches of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers.  We also saw how their conflicts play a part in the diminishment of the role of religion in Western life.

November 19, 2020 – Paul, John and the ‘Cosmic Christ’

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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 points out 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 commencing 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.  (We will see, however, how Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution offers an approach to resolving this duality.)

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 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”) says:

“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 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 in light of our search for the Secular Side of God.

November 12, 2020 – Jesus

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November 12, 2020 Jesus

                From the earliest perspectives

Today’s Post 

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution.  We followed this with a look how John Haught, employing Teilhard’s hermeneutic, suggested how science and religion could evolve toward a synergism in which the best of both could emerge from conflict to collaboration.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a ‘God’ can be reinterpreted by a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each particle of the universe, and therefore also in each of us.

Last week, 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, we saw how such secular reinterpretations can be seen to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to recover those religious insights which are relevant to human life.

This week, we’ll continue to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, moving  beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

Christianity’s Dualities

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 evolved theology at the heart of Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in 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 Northward into Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and 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 Christian Protestant duality which saw ‘man’ as both the ‘image of God’ and  ‘sinful by 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 Protestant fundamentalism and mainstream 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 the universal perspectives of Paul and John, and how this new dimension was to give rise to the 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.  Not much seems known 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 introduced by Christianity.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the legacy 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 collection of human insights to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus and Hillel?

The emerging Christian religion introduced new dualisms, such as:

  • Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
  • What, specifically, was his relation to God? Faithful follower?  Offspring?  Co-creator?
  • Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins and thus restore ‘fallen’ man to angry God?
  • Is belief in Jesus necessary for salvation?
  • Are only Christians saved?
  • Will he ‘come again’? How?  When?

The letters of Paul to the early churches 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 as well as summaries of Jesus’ teachings.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted (‘canonical’) by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored first 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, 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.  They appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He notes that such stories would have been familiar to the early Christians.  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, Ehrman documents how Paul introduced a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

The Next Post

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 introduce a perspective on Jesus that is only vaguely addressed in the synoptic gospels.  Paul’s 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’.

Next week we will address Paul’s new idea, and how his perspective was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’

November 5, 2020 – Rethinking the ‘Attributes of God’

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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’.

October 29, 2020 – A Relook at God

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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.

October 1, 2020 Where Do Science and Religion Fall Short?

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Finding the way for Science and Religion to reinforce each other

Today’s Post

We have moved from seeing the need to reinterpret both science and religion to an understanding of God from Teilhard’s more ‘science-friendly’ viewpoint, and science as way of making sense of things which offers religion a door to an understanding in which it can recover its relevancy.

With such a reinterpretation, religion emerges as a new, more relevant and more immediate referent for personal growth, while science’s field of regard expands to encompass the energies of personal life.

This week we will take a look at how these two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can not only move toward increased resonance, but toward higher synergy as they become more relevant to human life, more comprehensive, and collaborate as agencies which foster continued human development.

Telling The ‘Cosmic Story’

We have seen how an integrated understanding of the cosmos affects both of our lives and our participation in the larger society.  We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate traditional principles of wholeness into our lives.  Science and religion obviously represent rich sources of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions as well as concepts neither helpful nor relevant to human life.

John Haught, Research Professor at Georgetown University, offers a way to look at this situation from the center of what we have been referring to as ‘the terrain of synergy’.  In his perspective, outlined in his book, “The New Cosmic Story”, science and religion represent our two traditional ways of doing this.

In this book, he critiques the ‘stories’ traditionally told by science and religion, and argues for a third story which offers an integrated perspective on what is clearly a single, integrated cosmos.

He stands well back from the traditional stories, addressing them as two categories of lore which address the same thing: the cosmos.

  • The first category he labels as “archaeonomy” which is the traditional, empirically-based, left-brained story told by science.
  • The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based, right-brained religion, which he labels, “analogy”

He also envisions a third story, slowly emerging today, as we learn more about the universe on the one hand, and become less patient with the dualisms of traditional religion on the other,  He labels the third perspective, which offers a synergistic reinterpretation of both, as “anticipation”.  This story is told from the perspective of the ‘whole brain’.

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it.  He notes that any story which purports to address the universe is by definition incomplete if it does not address the human person.  In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr, all of whom we have met in previously.

The ‘Archaenomic’ Story

We have looked in some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science, so obviously adept in building technology and increasing our creature comforts,  seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person.  In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies and Teilhard,

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature- continues to elude human inquiry as long as it follows archaeonomic naturalism in reducing what is later-and-more in the cosmic process to what is earlier-and-simpler.   A materialist reading of nature leads our minds back down the corridor of cosmic time to a state of original subatomic dispersal- that is to a condition of physical de-coherence.”

And, recognizing this ‘corridor’ as Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, he goes on to say

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (eg consciousness aware of itself) 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.”  (Parentheses mine)

He goes on to comment how such an ‘archaeonomic’ story avoids the very human characteristics that have emerged in evolution:

“…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

And, I would add, how little illumination on human happiness.

Not only, as he notes, does the archaeonomic perspective fall short of addressing these very human manifestations of life, but adds a dystopian outlook as well:

“The typical scientific materialist…takes decay to be finally inevitable because the totality of being is destined by what-has-been to end up in a state of elemental, lifeless disintegration.”

He sees this pessimistic perspective as one which ignores the very basis of science: that of evolution:

“(Science) professes to be highly empirical and realistic, but leaves out of its survey of nature the fact that the cosmos is still in the process of becoming.  …the fullness of being, truth and meaning are still rising on the horizon.”

The ‘Analogic’ Story

He is neither sparing of the traditional religious story.

“Analogy has appealed to religious people for centuries, but it remains intellectually plausible only so long as the universe is taken to be immobile.”

He proposes Teilhard’s method of making sense of religion by putting it into the context of evolution:

“Once we realize that nature is a gradually unfolding narrative, we cannot help noticing that more is indeed coming into the story out of less over the course of time, and that it does so without miraculous interruptions and without disturbing invariant physical and chemical principles.  It is intellectually plausible only as long as the universe is taken to be immobile.  The wrongness in religion is a signal that the universe is still far from being fully actualized.”

Next Week

This week we took another look at the human enterprises of science and religion, this time from the insights of John Haught.  In doing so we saw that even though both have played a critical part in the evolution of human society, and in understanding our individual lives, neither perspective is without need of further evolution if the whole of universal existence, and our part in it, is to be better understood.

Next week we will see how Haught sees a path to synergy of both systems that can facilitate such a journey.  In addition to these two ‘stories’, he also sees a third story as slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe and become increasingly dissatisfied with traditional religion  He titles this third ‘story’, “anticipation”.

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of insights into the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it.  In this endeavor Haught echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr.

September 17, 2020 – The Search for The Core of self

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Freud, Teilhard and Rogers

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we have followed Carl Rogers as he described his observations of a client in the process of finding his kernel of person-ness: what we have referred to as “secular meditation”.  He also describes what emerges when we begin to trust and cooperate with this fundamental energy which Teilhard identifies as the ‘thread of evolution’, and Karen Alexander as the ‘cosmic spark’, as it rises in us

This week we will take a summary relook at the three approaches we have addressed in the past few weeks, those of Sigmund Freud, Teilhard and Carl Rogers, as they relate to the process of ‘secular meditation’ in search of a ‘core of personness’.

From Freud: the Dark Side

Even the most casual study of human history reveals a ‘dark side’ of humanity.  All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against a turgid undercurrent which thwarts our ‘better nature’.  To make things worse, with the explosion of popular media in our time, we are awash in the hyperventilating but financially rewarding reports of dystopia.

Sigmund Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to a study of the human person, and as we saw a few weeks ago, assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems.

Unfortunately, as we also saw, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain for organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human was seen to evolve from a non-human animal ancestor.  Freud held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’.  The “taming of ourselves” required the “taming of the ancestral animal within”.

While Freud (and Darwin) accurately identify these roots and how they affect us, they don’t take into account another perspective on such evolution.  Teilhard remarked on the ‘transitional’ states of evolution, such as the formation of particles of matter from raw energy, atoms from subatomic particles, cells from highly complex molecules, and self-aware persons from otherwise conscious animals.  He points out that in every case the first manifestations of each of these ‘new’ entities initially are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessor.  He refers to the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as emerging ‘dripping in molecularity’.  If it were possible to see them in a population of highly complex, non-living molecules (such as amino acids), it would be very difficult to distinguish them.  In contrast, at the evolutionary level of, say, neurological cells, the uniqueness of living tissue has become obviously different from complex molecules.

Teilhard sees the same thing happening with the human.  Were it possible to see the first homo sapiens individual in a jungle filled with pre-humans, how would we tell them apart?  Today there would be no problem with such an observation.

We humans have indeed emerged as animals with more complex brains, but that makes all the difference.  The pre-humans, with only their reptilian and limbic brains, are at the mercy of their instinctual stimuli.  The reptiles fight or fee, breathe, eat and procreate according to their basic, instinctual brain stimuli.  Mammals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections and improved adaption to environment changes.  These new behaviors, due to their new limbic brain, are in addition to the stimuli from their reptilian brains, and endow them with more instinctive evolutionary fitness.

Even though we humans have a third layer to our brains, the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains is still active, but the neo-cortex provides the capability of modulating them.  I have suggested that the key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neo-cortex to ‘ride herd’ on the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains.

So, even though Freud correctly recognizes the ‘dark side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from the emotional immaturity of the child toward the personal wholeness of the mature adult.  It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that its growth towards maturity is incomplete.

From Rogers: Toward the Light

As we have seen, Carl Rogers assumes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud.  He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being.

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular.  His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test.  They require no adherence to religious belief (and are often antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

While there might not be a universally accepted list of the characteristics of human happiness or articulation of human potential, Rogers’ list of the characteristics displayed by a person in the process of growing is not only an excellent beginning but universally applicable.

Combined with the unique (and universal) nature of Rogers’ therapeutic relationship, ‘religious’ concepts such as belief, faith and love not only take on a new, secular, meaning, but one more relevant to human life.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery.

From Teilhard: The Light Itself

As we have frequently seen, Teilhard starts from the ‘other end’, describing how the ‘ground of being’ is manifest in the very basic manifold forces which power the evolution of the universe itself.  He describes how these forces combine to effect all that we can see, and not only the human as a species but active in individual human persons as well.  In his view (and that of Blondel, Rohr and others), it is impossible to distinguish where these forces leave off and where we begin since each act of such distinguishing requires the action of this force as it rises in us.

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

 Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is myself, I am trustworthy”

Teilhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

   As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the thread of universal evolution as it rises in ourselves.  As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as our basic human human birthright can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being.  God can not only be found, ‘He’ can be embraced.

 The Next Post

After identifying God as the agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution: even in our individual lives,

with which we can come into contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

the next post will now go on to the final stage of Relating to God: the secular side of ‘Loving God’

September 3, 2020 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 3

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What is found as we find ourselves?

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how psychology has evolved from Freud’s analysis and diagnosis to a guided inner search for the authentic self and hence can be seen as a secular meditative experience.

This week we will explore one of the pivotal practitioners of such psychology to see how this ‘guided inner search’ can unfold and what can be expected from it.

Carl Rogers

Dr. Carl Rogers was one of the psychologists who was key to the evolution of psychology from Freud’s analysis and diagnosis to a very personal level of psychotherapy which focuses on the inner search for self.  Rogers was one of the earliest psychologists to depart from the then-traditional viewpoint that sees the therapist as a clinically objective analyst, sitting above and against the analyzed, translating the patient’s feelings and actions into prepackaged characteristics derived by Freud such as libido, ego, and superego.

Rogers’ goal was to uncover hidden motivations and use the clarity of such insights to motivate clients to change their behavior, taking a decidedly different approach from Freud.  He speaks of his perspective in the introduction to his book, “On Becoming a Person”:

“It is about a client in my office who sits there by the corner of the desk, struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself- striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience, and yet deeply fearful of the prospect.  I sit there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as deeply and sensitively as I am able.  I try to perceive his experience, and the meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavor that it has for him.  I bemoan my very human fallibility in understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place.  I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality- as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part.”

   Obviously this is quite different from the relationship that Freud formulates, as can be summarized by Rogers’ understanding of the role of the therapist:

“How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

    instead of,

“How can I diagnose, treat, cure, or change this person?”

   The goal of both approaches is treatment of the individual, but the methods and the implicit assumptions are clearly different.

Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

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

   He states his overall hypothesis:

“If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change, and personal development will occur”.

   In Rogers’ approach, the therapist’s role changes from “analyst” to “facilitator”.  His approach changes from assuming that the person to be found is “dangerous” to seeing it as “a reliable base for human growth”.

Rogers expands on this approach:

 “The individual has within himself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward to maturity.  In a suitable psychological climate this tendency is released, and becomes actual rather than potential.  He sees this potential as evident in his capacity to understand those aspects of his life and of himself which are causing him pain and dissatisfaction.  This is an understanding which probes beneath his conscious knowledge of himself into those experiences which he has hidden from himself because of their threatening nature.  As a result, the person who emerges tends to reorganize his personality and his relationship to life in ways which are regarded as more mature.”

   Further,

“It is my hypothesis that in such a relationship the individual will reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

   So against the Freudian belief that man is basically irrational, and that his impulses, if not controlled will lead to the destruction of self and others, Rogers sees the human person as capable of becoming freer, less defined by the past and more open to the future as he grows.  Since the basic nature of the human person is constructive and trustworthy, as the person matures he will become more creative and live more constructively.

How Is This ‘Meditation’?

    We can see how the process described by Rogers is highly resonant with Teilhard’s description of his meditation from a few weeks ago.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

“…understanding those aspects of his life and of himself which are causing him pain and dissatisfaction.”

This is exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears but provide a degree of emotional safety.  Rogers describes how this difficult task can be facilitated by the therapist.

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

Moving past those “experiences which he has hidden from himself because of their threatening nature”.

Once the client begins to become aware of these ‘scaffoldings’, Rogers shows how the therapist can provide a safe way of exploring both the ways that the client is being inhibited by them as well as tactics to be employed in overcoming them.

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

“…the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth,”

In Rogers’ insight, this process leads a client to realize that at his core, he is a trustworthy agent who can safely experience, own and trust his emotions and insights.

Step 4: Using this insight to live a more complete life

“the individual will reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

As Karen Armstrong puts it, such a person ‘inhabits his humanity more fully”

The Next Post

Having established the perspective of seeing the basic human self as constructive and trustworthy, and the role of the therapist as ‘facilitator’, Rogers went on to observe how these characteristics precipitated positive changes in the lives of his clients.  Next week we will see how he saw such growth taking place.