Monthly Archives: September 2023

September 28, 2023 – The ‘Second Coming’ of Jesus

How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help to focus the concept of the ‘second coming’ of Jesus?

Today’s Post

Over 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 by employment of Teilhard’s ‘lens’?

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 him 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. Cool

”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 when viewed through Teilhard’s ‘lens’?

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 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 from August, 2022,, 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 reinterpretation of the stories 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 distinct 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(February 10- February | 2022 | Science, Religion and Reality (lloydmattlandry.com). 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 nine of Norberg’s improvements in human welfare appear more frequently in countries which embrace democratic civil norms, and the number of such countries has significantly increased 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 yes

This week we addressed Jesus from a sixth perspective, that of the ‘Second Coming’. We have seen, through John, Paul, Teilhard, Rohr, 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.

September 14, 2023 – Jesus As “Evolution Become Aware of Itself”

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How does Teilhard see Jesus from an evolutionary perspective?

Today’s Post

Last week we began to move from the three facets of Jesus found in Paul, the Synoptic gospel’s scriptural depictions, and John’s intuition of Jesus as “The Word made flesh”. Applying Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we saw how Jesus can also be seen 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 as 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 a more 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 seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens?

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 constantly welling up 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 an 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 Teilhard’s recognition of him as the critical point in history in which evolution can be seen to become ‘aware of itself’.

Next week we will look at a fifth way in which the application of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ can offer insights into the human condition and how evolution can be seen to proceed through both the human person and society at large.

September 7, 2023 – Seeing Jesus Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens of Evolution’

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How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ see universal complexification in ‘the Word becoming flesh’

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 can 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 continued further as Christianity begins to understand God as ‘triune’: the ‘trinity’.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective provided by Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

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 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 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. Through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, this agent can now be seen as powering 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 shown, 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 see at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen through the focus of Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.