From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

Today’s Post

When we took a first look at religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we viewed it as a potential tool for making sense of things and therefore as a resource for managing human evolution.

We went on to address traditional Western concepts of God and saw how using Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ permits the concept of God to be reinterpreted from its ‘supernatural’ hermeneutic into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ that his ‘lens’ shows to be active in each of us.

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, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to infuse religious concepts with insights which are more relevant to human life.

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

The Duality of Christianity

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 ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘New’ testament) as well as 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 Northern Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West and, as we saw a few weeks back, 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 Luther’s Protestant duality between ‘man as the image of God’ and ‘man’s sinful 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 Evangelical fundamentalism and 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 Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the novel 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.  We don’t seem to know much 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.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the 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 perspective to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms, such as:

• Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
• What, specifically, was his relation to God?
• Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?

The writings of Paul 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.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored 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 Erhman, biblical historian, 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, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  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, Paul introduces a unique facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.     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 surface a perspective on Jesus that is only lightly addressed in the synoptic gospels.  These 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’.

The Next Post

Next week we will how this perspective, first posed by Paul, was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’.

   What can it mean to ‘love God?’ 

Today’s Post             

In the past several weeks we have focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘ground of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘love’.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as the principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ‘ground of being’ can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

In today’s culture, it seems clear that few things are less tangible but more ubiquitous than ‘love’.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books.  Nearly all these perceptions understand love primarily as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active as the basis of our lives.

Even our Western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it unites us.

Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity, and thus greater in its potential for union.

Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as

“Fuller being results from closer union, and closer union emerges from fuller being.”

   Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons which emerge from the initial pool of undifferentiated energy to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life.  In its focus on biological evolution as ‘replication’ the theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things.  Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate.  This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago.  In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian with the distinct increase in brain capacity found in the later reptiles.  After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals.  This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that

“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”

    As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person.  There is every reason to recognize this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolutionary products that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion of simple atoms by gravity, atoms evolve into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to influence evolution until particles acquired mass.  This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms which in turn enabled molecules.  The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, is therefore the latest manifestation of this energy: the one which effects human ‘complexification’.

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness.  This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

John Haught provides a very succinct insight into this phenomenon.

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the human person) 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.”

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships.

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species.  Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘becoming persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are more able to allow our relationships to mature.

We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy.   Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

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

   As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective, and more holistic vision of ourselves.

This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming.  As we become more adept at self-management, we are more able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus, the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as

“Fuller being from closer union.  Closer union from fuller being.”

    This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well.  Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us.  Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (as described by Rogers) of the individuals involved.

Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution.  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.

Loving God

So, how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us?  What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’?  How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?

In the past few weeks, we have been exploring how our recognition of this inner agent of evolution is only the first step.  To flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it.  We must learn to trust it.

If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the activation of the energy of love, the answer is simple.  As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego, the ‘false self’.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected in ourselves to protect us.  The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.

This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable.  This inner realization is our connection with ourselves.  It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves.  Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but is more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy, gratuitous, and ever-present, combined with the decision to trust and cooperate with it.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life, patiently awaiting our participation.

To love God therefore is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.

Seen thusly, God isn’t engaged as a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but rather in the recognition of the action of a universal force in each of us as clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of

 “…hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

              “It is I, be not afraid.”

Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives within us:

”..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

The Next Post

Having seen over the past few weeks how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects our beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to see at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.

   Finding God through secular meditation

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, a process that 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 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, complete with the ‘red tooth and claw’ predisposition that this entailed.  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 identified these roots and how they affect us, they don’t consider another perspective on such evolution.  Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ identified the many ‘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 emergence of the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as ‘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 differentiated 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 flee, breathe, eat, and procreate according to their basic, instinctual brain stimuli.  Mammals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections, and improved adaptation 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 neocortex provides the capability of modulating them.  The key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neocortex 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 consider 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 fuller 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 assume a new, secular, meaning, but one more relevant to human life.  His approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means of 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 are not only active in the human as a species but 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 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: ‘Loving God’