Monthly Archives: December 2020

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 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

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December 24, 2020 – The ‘Second Coming’

Will Jesus ‘come again’?

 Today’s Post

In the last six weeks we have addressed the subject of Jesus from five perspectives, seeing how this subject itself evolves from the somewhat conventional understanding found in the three synoptic gospels in which Jesus is seen as one of the many ‘holy men’ that would have been familiar to the Jews of the time, to the unprecedented understanding of him as somehow ‘one with the Father’:  divine, eternal and yet still human.

We then saw how such an audacious claim matured from one requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ to one which falls naturally and cohesively into the concept of an evolving universe in which the key aspect can be seen as ‘increasing complexity’.

We then saw last week how the evolution of thinking about Jesus, found in the theological development following his death, eroded the immediacy of both Jesus and God, as well as minimizing the concept of ‘the Christ’ as the ‘axis of evolution’ found in Paul and John.

This week we will look at a sixth facet of the ‘Jesus story’, that of the idea of his ‘second coming’, one which appears several times both in the Old Testament as well as the New.  Can this cryptic forecast also be re-interpreted into a secular perspective via our principles?

 The ‘Coming’
   The idea that Jesus would literally return is found in several places in the Old Testament.  Many read Isiah’s prophesies as suggesting not only the coming of Jesus, but a later literal appearance by God in which ‘He’ would assume control over humans who will have once again lost their way.

Matthew seems to address this concept more than the other synoptic gospel authors, citing Jesus as saying in Chapter 12

“For the Son of Man will come in His Father’s glory with His angels….  Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”

In Chapter 24, he follows with a description of the event

”At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory”

Of course, the most famous treatment comes in Revelation, which provides a colorful and dramatic description upon which many of the more conservative Christian expressions focus as they frequently see ‘signs’ of this coming in reports of today’s events.  Some, disgusted with the state of the world as seen in these events, are reported to engage in activities which they believe would stimulate this event, effectively ‘forcing God’s hand’.

Much argument has ensued in the history of Christianity on how such lines of scripture are to be understood, with the Liturgical expressions leaning toward a metaphorical understanding, and the Evangelical expressions toward one which sees them as literal forecasts.

How can they be seen to fit within our secular perspective?

Teilhard, the Noosphere and the ‘Second’ Coming

The approach we have taken thus far is to consider making ‘sense of things’ from Teilhard’s perspective of universal evolution.   In keeping with our secular insights into Jesus as the human face of the rising sap of complexity in the tree of universal evolution (‘the Christ’), Teilhard offers his concept of the ‘noosphere’.  As we have seen, the noosphere is simply the accretion of insights and inventions which occurs as humanity evolves. Beginning with the transmission of oral traditions thousands of years past, signs of the continuation of evolution can be seen today in the tight swaddling of data contained in, for example, our educational systems and global communication media.  In such things our evolution as a species is escorted beyond the instinctual trappings of our mammalian ancestors into ever new ways to ‘be human’.  As we evolve, this ‘noosphere’ evolves in a way that continuously fosters the growth of our understanding and in doing so refocuses our navigation of human life.

As we saw in our series on the evolution of human welfare last February, Johan Norberg documents examples of such ‘growing of understanding’ and ‘refocusing of navigation’ in nine distinct and empirically articulated facets of life on our planet.  Each one of these reflects a facet of how the noosphere both becomes enriched by and in turn enriches the human species.  How can such examples be seen in the light of in our discourse on the ‘secular side’ of Jesus?

A clue to such insight can be seen in Luke’s report of Jesus’ reply to queries from followers of John the Baptist.

“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”

The signs that Jesus chooses to identify himself to John are ones which are focused on human welfare.  He makes no reference to ‘salvation’ or to ‘right behavior’, but instead identifies those things in which benefits to human welfare can be seen.  This suggests that a manifestation of the ‘presence of Jesus’ can always be found in instances of increased human welfare.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s insight that that the appearance of Jesus in history, as the human manifestation of the underlying spark of creation by which the universe ‘complexifies’, constitutes a turning point in history.  As we have seen from his perspective, Jesus focusses on the twin concepts of the importance of the human person and the value of relationships, and hence their function as cornerstones of human evolution.  This turning point initiates a slow accretion in human history of the painful but inexorable rise of the human desire for an autonomy which is ballasted by harmony and which therefore eventually leads to the concepts of person and equality so critical to Western society.

As we have seen in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, he carefully and objectively documents nine facets of human welfare which have significantly improved in just the past hundred fifty years.  As he points out, this exponential increase did not spring from thin air, it was presaged by the long, often agonizing, efforts of humans when, as Karen Armstrong says, “Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world”.  And, as Norberg points out, it required a collective valuing of two critical aspects of humanity: the importance of the person, (requiring the formal codification in civil legal systems of ‘human freedom’} on the one hand, and the necessity for viable and productive ‘human relationships’ (enforced by objective and efficacious laws) on the other.  All of Norberg’s improvements in human welfare appear more frequently in countries which embrace democratic civil norms, and the number of such countries has increased by large amounts during this period.

So, how does this data reflect a ‘coming of Jesus’?  As the passage from Luke suggests, the presence of Jesus can be found in the things he lists.  Citing Norberg’s list of worldwide human improvements, we might paraphrase Jesus:

“Go back and report to what you have seen and heard: More of the hungry are fed, they have less disease, they are more educated, they live longer and are less destitute, they are subject to less violence and fewer wars, they are becoming more sensitive to their environment and more subject to laws which grant them more autonomy while fostering increasing harmony.”

Thus, the ‘coming of Jesus’ does not constitute a single event, but is tangible in the rise of human complexity which is manifest in its improvements in human welfare.

The Next Post

This week we addressed Jesus from a sixth perspective, that of the ‘Second Coming’.  We have seen, through John, Paul, Teilhard, and now Norberg, how ‘the Christ’ is a continually active agent in the evolution of the cosmos, present in the ever continuing increase of complexity seen in all stages of the universe’s coming to be, and Jesus as the manifestation of this agency as it flowers in the human person.  The ‘Second Coming’ is less an event than it is a process, and the fruits of this process can be seen in the increase in human welfare which springs from its acknowledgement.
Building on this new view of Jesus, next week we will look at Jesus from a seventh and final perspective:  That of the traditional church concepts of Incarnation and Redemption.

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.

December 3, 2020 – Jesus As “Evolution Become Aware of Itself”

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to move from the first three facets of Jesus, Paul and the Synoptic gospel scriptural depictions to John’s intuition of Jesus as “The Word made flesh”.  Last week, we saw how Jesus can be seen from Teilhard’s perspective as the personization of the essential core of universal evolution by which the cosmos becomes more complex over time.  We saw how the scriptural treatment of Jesus shows a distinct evolution, as he is shown first as a very human teacher of wisdom, then as ‘the Christ’, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human face of the Cosmic Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that ‘he’ had coexisted with ‘him’ through eternity.

John’s Bold Step

As we have seen, John sees Jesus in a way that is quite different from Paul and the authors of the synoptic gospels.  While Jesus’ teachings certainly address how we should behave, and Paul goes on to articulate such proper behavior, John sees Jesus’ teachings as addressing how we should be if we would be whole.  This moves from seeing Jesus as a prescription for salvation to one for being fully human.   John then goes on to explore God from an ‘ontological’ perspective.

The idea of ‘The word made flesh’ is much more than a ‘metaphor’, and goes well beyond seeing God using Jesus to communicate to us what we must do to get to heaven.   In his innovative insight, John is showing us how Jesus is the manifestation of God in human form so that we can better understand how we should be if we would have ‘abundant life’.   By insisting that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in him”, John is not saying that we should love God because ‘he’ loves us, or as a prerequisite for salvation.  Effectively, John is saying that when we love we are cooperating with the key principle of life by allowing it to flow through us when we love, and thus are borne onward to amore complete state of personhood.

John does not tell us to love God, he tells us that we must ‘abide in love’, which Teilhard understands is to immerse ourselves in the fundamental energy of the universe, which is now seen as reflected in humans as love itself.  This requires openness, trust, and ultimately cooperation with the basic energy of the universe that even an atheist such as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge, raises the world to an increasing level of complexity.

In Teilhard’s words:

” Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, a blink in the evolution of the universe, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was in place at the moment of creation of the universe.   At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘love’.

So, Who and What Was Jesus?

So, how do we reinterpret the traditional ‘religious’ understanding of Jesus into one consistent with our ‘secular’ perspective?

When viewed through Teilhard’s lens of universal evolution, Jesus can now be seen as the human face of the heart of evolution finally pulled from the shadows and revealed ‘in full light’; less a group of metaphors than a recipe, a blueprint for the increase in complexity that is no less present in human evolution than it has been constant in the fourteen billion years of universal becoming.

As Teilhard points out, the long sweep of evolution from the big bang to the present time, from pure energy to entities become aware of their awareness, is punctuated by ‘changes of state’.  In order for complexity to increase, matter must constantly find new ‘modes of being’ in which unprecedented and extraordinary changes in form and function occur.

The findings of science have shown how this can be clearly seen in each such critical point of evolution:

– energy to matter

– simple granularities (bosons, quarks, electrons) to atoms

– atoms to molecules

– molecules to cells

–  cells to neurons

– neurons to brains

– brains to consciousness

– consciousness to awareness of consciousness

To this progression we can now add another critical point: from awareness of consciousness to awareness of the evolution of consciousness.  In Jesus, through the insights of John, we can now see the beginning of the awareness that our personal growth is the continuation of the agency of being that powers all evolution, from the big bang onwards.  And as John points out, the energy which powers this growth can now be understood to have become manifest in the human as love.  John pulls the heart of evolution from the shadows and reveals it ‘in full light’.  In John, God, Jesus, personal fulfillment and love are less a group of metaphors than ingredients for a recipe for human evolution.

We have seen in several posts how Teilhard shows how the fundamental nature of love strongly differs from the romantic or sentimental emotional attraction so often celebrated in our culture.  Teilhard calls it for what it is: the current manifestation of the universal attraction between entities that causes their continued evolution.  And in Jesus, as chronicled by John, we can see the first stirrings of such an understanding of this basic principle.

God, to John, is not a ‘creator’, ‘out there’, ’over and against’ mankind, but the universally integrated set of agents which, as Dawkins observes, “.. raises the world to its current level of complexity”.

So, just as we have seen Teilhard’s reinterpretation of God from a ‘divine person who rewards and punishes’ to the cohesive agency which underlies evolution as it progresses from pure energy to the human person, we can reinterpret Jesus from the holy, even divine person who shows us how we should relate to God and each other in order to merit salvation, to the personal manifestation of the fundamental energy by which we come to be and grow as a result of this thread of evolution which rises in us.

Indeed, even as Jesus is ‘evolution become aware of itself’, he also represents the point in human history where the universal power of love as the creative force which powers our continued evolution first begins to be recognized.

If universal evolution can be understood as a tree, ‘the Christ’ can be seen as the sap which rises in this tree which produces a product, a ‘fruit’ that can be seen in the person of Jesus.  Having seen the fruit of the tree of evolution, the whole of the tree can be seen more clearly, as well as our place in it.

‘Christ’ as the Name For Evolutionary Energy

The secular community, in general, is not in favor of using the term ‘Christ’ to label the rising thread of complexity which can be seen to rise in the universe.  Materialists are prone to deny it as ‘allowing a divine foot in the door’.  The term itself is tangled in the Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and is commonly associated with the person of Jesus.  The problem, however, comes when another term is sought to identify this thread.
Science has only recently begun to address this evolutionary thread, and these beginnings can be seen in the areas of Complexity Science and Information Science, but other than beginning to quantify how this thread can be empirically identified, a generic name so far has been elusive.  Thus Teilhard’s use of the term, even with its religious association, can still be understood in a secular context.

Another problem arises when Jesus is asserted as the single face of this universal trend towards complexity.  If this thread rises in evolution, then any recognition of it is a manifestation of it, no matter where or when on our planet it can be found.   As Karen Armstrong describes in her book, “Great Transformations”, during the ‘Axial Age’

 “For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully “Self conscious” “

   Thus any recognition of this elusive thread of ontology in the human person is effectively an awareness of ‘the Christ’, no matter what term we use to identify it

That said, however, it is important to see how easily such a secular aspect of reality as ‘the Christ’ fits into the ancient set of intuitions present in the Judeo-Christian belief system.  In keeping with Richard Dawkins recommendation that religion needs to be ‘divested’ of the baggage that it has accumulated in its many thousand years of development, such a divestment (which we have referred to as ‘reinterpretation’) brings this ontological side of Jesus to the fore.

In doing this, the gap between empirical science and intuitive religion is narrowed, offering science a bridge to the treatment of the human person (Information and Complexity Science) , and to religion and increased relevancy to human life.

The Next Post

This week we took a fourth look at a way that the person of Jesus can be reinterpreted from traditional understanding to the secular understanding of him as the critical point in history in which evolution can be seen to become ‘evolution become aware of itself’.  Next week we will look at a fifth way in which this secular approach can offer insights into the human condition and how evolution can proceed through both the human person and society at large.