How the ‘ground of being’ can be understood from from three perspectives once seen throughTeilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’

Tooay’s Post

Last week we summarized the history of the last facet of the complex God that emerged in just a few hundred years after the death of Jesus: the ‘Trinity’.  We also noted how this concept emerged at the same time that the new church began to become part of Roman society and how it began to evolve into a hierarchical institution which became increasingly dependent on adherence to dogma.  As its teachings became more articulated, truth became more ‘an object of faith’ required to assure salvation than a collection of insights for living.  It didn’t help that the new church was now becoming an essential part of the Roman structure which in turn required a new level of adherence to dogma to ensure a unified and therefore stable society.

Yet, as we saw from Karen Armstrong’s observation, the teaching of ‘Trinity’ was “simply baffling”, and from Richard Rohr that this teaching seems “furthest from human life”.

With all this, what sense can be of an assertion that God is “Three divine persons in one divine nature”?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

Once the Trinity is put into Teilhard’s evolutionary context it becomes possible to see it as not only much simpler but more importantly, more relevant to human life.  From Teilhard’s perspective we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards, and punishes; to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution by way of its increase in complexity over time.  In applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant judgmental God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through the human person: a ‘signpost to God’.  In the same way we can see a third manifestation of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, in the energy which unites products of evolution in such a way as to effect this increase in complexity.

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the becoming of the universe in general, understood as the potential of the ’stuff of the universe’ to ‘make it make itself’

‘Son’ as the manifestation of the potential for the products of evolution to eventually become increasingly complex, and thus ‘conscious’, and therefore ‘personal’; a potential which is active in every step of evolution

‘Spirit’ as the ‘energy’ by which particles of matter unite in such a way as to result in increases in complexity

   As we have noted frequently, Teilhard describes this third ‘person’, this third manifestation of the ground of being as it exists in the human, as love:“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

And, as he sees it, the essential function of the rise of complexity in the convergent spiral of cosmic evolution:“Fuller being results from closer union and closer union from fuller being”

In addressing this last agent of becoming, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”

Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of increased complexity.  We have seen in physic’s ‘Standard Model’ how the energies which are manifest in forces such as the atomic strong and weak forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy at the ‘Big Bang’ to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life.  With the addition of the concept of the ‘Spirit’ we can now see how this enterprise continues to raise reality into manifestations of complexity which are aware of their consciousness.

A purely empirical approach to ‘spirit’ can be seen in the new scientific subject of ‘information’.  To Paul Davies, information is simply the quantum in each particle of matter which guides its unification with other particles.  His analogy is that this ‘quantum’ can be seen as the ‘software’ contained in each grain of matter, the ’hardware’.

An example of this action can be seen in the potential of Hydrogen to unite with Oxygen to form the molecule of water.  The ‘information’ of the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms is not simply passed on to the new offspring, water, it itself is enriched by becoming more complex in the process.  The evolved quantum of information contained in the molecule of water has a new and enriched potential of unifying with many other molecules, and the resultant molecules also have new characteristics and potentials not found in their less complex components.  Thus, the three ‘triune’ aspects of evolution are evident in this simple example:

A component of matter has the potential to unite with other components (quantified by its ‘information or ‘software’’)

The process required to perform the connection is mapped in the ‘information’

The resultant new component (with new characteristics and potentials absent in its predecessor components) emerges with its new and more complex quantum of ‘information’

   In this very simple but purely empirical example we can see a reflection of the Trinity:

The ‘Son’ is reflected in the ‘information’, effectively the ‘software’ of the component

The ‘Spirit’ is reflected in the ‘energy’ necessary to effect unification according to the ‘information’

And the ‘Father’ is reflected as the ‘potential’ of the components to unite

   In addition to how the Trinity can be seen in these examples, we can also return to Teilhard’s image of the ‘convergent spiral’ of cosmic evolution.   As we saw when we looked at Teilhard’s model of the structure of universal evolution, the three aspects of the Trinity can be understood as the human manifestations of the three basic steps by which the universe proceeds at all stages in its journey toward increased complexity.

We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection.  Natural Selection, first identified by Charles Darwin, offers a partial explanation of how species change as they move from one stage of evolution to another.  It does not address how the products of evolution at latter stages show evidence of increased complexity, but it does explain how the ramification of species offers many avenues of for ‘complexification’.

Human persons are clearly located on one of these avenues of evolution.  Understanding the ‘Spirit’ at the level of the human person is simply understanding how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (these human persons) can consciously cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their maturity) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

We have noted many times that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing hierarchy and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its essential message.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we can now see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms relevant to personal life.

Rohr offers a reinterpretation of the traditional Christian trinitarian terms as an integrated understanding of the Trinity which is directly relevant to human life:

“I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the Big River of God’s providential love, which is to trust the visible embodiment (the Son), the flow (the Spirit), and the source itself (the Father). This is a divine process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow it and enjoy it.  Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river.”

The Next Post

This week we saw how adding the concept of ‘Spirit’ to those of the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general.  More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world to its current level of complexity” (Richard Dawkins) is active in our individual lives, as we begin to understand ourselves as personal offspring of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Over the past several weeks, we have addressed three of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity: God, Jesus, and The Trinity, by seeing them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  The ‘reinterpretation’ that results from this perspective can refocus their relevance to human life.

Christianity, however, piles many layers of belief and practices on top of these three precepts.  In order to, as Richard Dawkins suggests, ‘divest them of the baggage’ that they carry, is it possible to use our principles of reinterpretation to achieve a similar refocus on them?

Next week we will begin to do this, first addressing the underlying concept of ‘spirituality’, and how it can be seen in the light of such ‘reinterpretation’.

   How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ clarify the concept of ‘three persons in one God’?

 Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at Jesus through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, noting how quickly the highly integrated understanding of John became a victim of the endless human trend toward dualism.  From Teilhard’s perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of God in human life and how Jesus can be seen as the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming.

From Teilhard’s insight, this spark, found in all the products of evolution, is only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.  In our final look last week, we saw how easily the labyrinthine statements emerging from the pronouncements of theologians can be ‘reinterpreted’ into statements about the human person, and by doing so increase their relevance to human life.

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

The History of the Trinity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Post

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

Next week we will consider this concept of a ‘triune’ God from the perspective provided by Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ aid in 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 new 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 them through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.

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 the 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 latest 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 the 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 so that we could live 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 which evolved 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.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, 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’.

Next week we will once again employ Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to see how 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.’