Monthly Archives: November 2020

November 26, 2020 – Jesus In The Context of Evolution

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      The Word becomes Flesh in universal complexification

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus which an be perceived as both ‘divine’ and ‘human’.  Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human manifestation of ‘the Christ’, who was so integrally a part of God that ‘he’ had coexisted with ‘him’ through eternity.   As we will see, this evolution continues further as Christianity begins to understand God as ‘triune’: the ‘trinity’.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ undergoes a distinct evolution in the New Testament.  The synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a teacher who believed that he was living in the end of times, and insisted on preparation by way of correct moral behavior.  Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, summarized and expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatises on Love and the Fruit of the Spirit), and goes on to see him tasked with and rewarded for the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with judgmental God.  The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result of completion of this task.  Jesus is born a human, but raised to a divine level by God because of his sacrifice.

John goes one step further, as he identifies Jesus as the human face of the fundamental basis by which creation was effected.  Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.  From this perspective, God can be seen as the ‘creator’ and Jesus as the ‘navigator’.

On the surface, these two facets of Jesus, the human and the divine, appear as just another type of duality, along with body/soul, this life/the next, good/evil, in which two opposing and orthogonal concepts are juxtaposed and contrasted, requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ on the part of the believer.  In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history by God to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that God intended, but failed due to Adam’s ‘original sin’.  In argument against the ‘theory of atonement’, Richard Rohr notes:

”The ‘substitutionary atonement theory’ of salvation treats Christ as a mere Plan B. In this attempt at an explanation for the Incarnation, God did not really enter the scene until God saw that we had screwed up.”

In the “cosmic Christ” insight of John that we saw last week, Jesus, as the Christ, is ‘co-substantial’ with God, and therefore had always been somehow involved in the creation process.

These two theories are, on the face of it, orthogonal.   The first posits a somewhat ‘deistic’ God whose creation process ends with the appearance of man, and man is a finished product free to turn against ‘Him’.  In the second, the ‘cosmic Christ’ is an agent essential to the raising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as God’s continuing presence in human existence.

The history of Christian theological development includes many disagreements among leaders of the early church on how Jesus could be man and God at the same time, with many different ‘heresies’ debated.  Was Jesus ‘only’ human, ‘only divine’ and appearing in human form, or both at the same time?

The final solution, that Jesus was indeed God and man, was presented as a ‘mystery’ to be believed, not to be understood.  Essentially, although it could not be explained, it became an article of faith, requiring a sort of ‘cognitive dissonance’, and as such introduced yet another duality.

We have seen how many such dualities can be resolved through application of our secular principles of reinterpretation, and this one is no exception.  As we have seen, many of the opposing concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can come into coherence, and the dualities healed, when we understand God as the ‘ground of being’.  Once God is understood as active in both the principles of being (physics, chemistry, biology) and the principles of becoming (increasing complexity), we take a step toward seeing God’s presence reflected in every manifestation of reality.  In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesus

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first secular thinkers to attempt such a relook.  Jefferson understood that the teachings of Jesus, stripped of their supernatural and miraculous content, had much to offer the construction of a secular set of laws which could underpin a new nation.  In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’ by ‘reinterpreting religion’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ but without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of Natural Selection that would later inspire such thinkers as Maurice Blondel and Teilhard.  Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing on after an initial creation, much less as an active agent which powers the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person and serve as a confirmation of his belief in the equality of the human person.

With the insights of Blondel and Teilhard in hand, however, we can begin to understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ever-active ‘agent’ of a universe which comes to be over long periods of time.  This agent powers evolution, first through the complexification of matter, then through the appearance of ever more complex living entities, and eventually to the appearance of conscious entities which are aware of their consciousness.

As history has showed, it’s not enough to be aware of our awareness, we must also seek to understand it well enough to cooperate with whatever it is that powers our being to be able to move our evolution forward.  To be able to continue to move forward, we must both understand the ‘laws of the noosphere’ and learn to cooperate with them.

And this is where Jesus comes in.

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 changes 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 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’.