Part 2: Principles from Maurice Blondel, Jonathan Sacks, Karen Armstrong, Richard Rohr, and John Haight

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the task of reinterpreting religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, extracting six principles which we will employ as we move on to reinterpreting religious teaching for their relevance to human life.  This week we will look at additional principles from other sources.

Reinterpretation Principles From Maurice Blondel (Man Becoming)

As seen earlier, in his book, Man Becoming, Gregory Baum describes the work of Maurice Blondel as he addressed the traditional teachings of Christianity in the light of science’s increasingly universal perspective.  In summary, Blondel saw the Catholic Church’s approach to theology as diminishing today in relevance to human life.  Blondel was one of the first Catholic philosophers to call for ‘reinterpreting’ church teachings to reverse this trend, and in doing so proposed several ‘Principles of Reinterpretation’.  Some of these are:

• Since we cannot know ‘God as He (sic) is apart from man’, we must understand that each statement that we make about God carries with it an implied assumption about humans and the reality in which they live. By applying that implied assumption, we can reinterpret a teaching in terms of our lives.

The Principle:  “Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”

• As Teilhard was later to expand upon, the energies of evolution which have effected ‘Man’s Becoming’ continue to be active in his continued personal evolution. The onset of complexity that began in the ‘Big Bang’ continues to be present in human life and manifests itself in our potential for increased understanding and becoming.  Most religious teachings seek to put us in touch with this current of energy by which we grow.

The Principle:  “There is no standpoint from which a human person can say, “I am here and God is there”.  The presence of God is an essential agent in his saying of it”.

The Principle:  “(Religious teaching) is not a message added to our life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is fundamentally operative in our life.”

• Any teaching must be relevant to be able to be pertinent to our lives.

The Principle:  “A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind”

The Principle: “Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind”

• Our response to reality is a necessary factor in our personal growth

The Principle: “A person is not a determined being, defined as it were by its nature.  A person comes to be, in part at least, through his own responses to reality.”

Reinterpretation Principles From Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation)

• In keeping with Blondel’s insistence on elements of existential value in religious teaching, Karen Armstrong also offers principles for reinterpretation.

The Principle:  “Instead of jettisoning religious doctrines, we should look for their spiritual kernel.  A religious teaching is never simply a statement of objective fact: it is a program for action.”

• Echoing both Teilhard and Blondel, she criticizes attempts to make sense of God on human terms, which can introduce anthropomorphism into the concept of God. She agrees with both the Jewish and Eastern approach to understanding God differently.

The Principle:  “It was unhelpful to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable”

Reinterpretation Principles From Jonathan Sacks (The Great Partnership)

• All religions contain dualisms that in their inherent contradiction undermine their ability to map the road to human growth.

The Principle:  “Any teaching that departs from the underlying unity of the universe will be detrimental to successful application to human life”

• This principle points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and society. Sacks notes how science quantifies this observation by showing that human evolution has evolved our central neural system (the brain) in three stages:
  • Reptilian: Basic instinctual life sustaining functions: breathing, vascular management, flight/fright reaction
  • Limbic: Appearance of instinctive emotional functions necessary for the longer gestation and maturation of mammals
  • Neo-Cortic: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of and capable of mediating the stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

The Principle: Human evolution can be understood as the increasing skill of employing the ‘higher’ neocortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the ‘lower’ brains.

Reinterpretation Principle from Richard Rohr

• Good religion always acts as a unifying principle in our lives.

The Principle:  “Whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not.”

Reinterpretation Principle from John Haight (The New Cosmic Story)

• Religion needs to be consistent with the ongoing insights of the universe discovered by science.

The Principle:  “…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

An Overarching Principle

• And finally, a principle which is echoed by each of these thinkers:

The Principle: ”The underlying truth of a teaching, and the key to its relevancy, can be found in its power to bring opposing points of view into a cohesive whole”

 The Next Post

This week we completed our collection of ‘principles of interpretation’, nineteen principles that we will use as we examine the insights, concepts, and teachings of Western religion for their relevancy to human life.  It should be noted that these principles are not derived from traditional religious thought.  They are general principles, secular in nature, which can be applied to religious thought.

Next week we will continue our exploration of religion by addressing the basic cornerstone of all religions, the fundamental ground of being, the ‘first cause’ which underlays the universe: God.