Tag Archives: X Reinterpretation of Religion

July 6 – So, Who and What Was Jesus? – Part 3

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to look at Jesus from our secular point of view.  We saw how John, for the first time in human history, opens the door to understanding God in a truly universal context, and Jesus as the ‘personization’ of that concept.  As we saw last week, Jesus is the point in human history in which the key agent of evolution begins to be understood as ‘love’.  This week we will continue to look at Jesus from this perspective.

Jesus and the Axis of Evolution

Addressing Jesus from a secular point of view is not unlike the approach we took in addressing God.  We saw God as the sum total of the universal agents of evolution, in which the thread of evolution can be seen in the increase in consciousness that leads to increased awareness of consciousness.

At the same time, we have proposed a simple basis for the continued thread of evolution as it rises through the human person.  We have suggested that the key aspect of human evolution is manifested in the increasing skill of using the neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains.

The thinkers of the ‘Axial Age’ were the first to offer practical tactics which would contribute to this skill.  One of the earliest was Confucious, with these insights:

“..You needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process.”

“In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others.  In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others”

   And finally, the first expression of the Golden Rule

“Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you”

   If we parse this simple adage in terms of our definition above, we can see that it summarizes a simple tactic for employing the increased human capacity for thought to modulate our instinctual reactions.  Using the Golden Rule requires us to consider how another’s aggressive action affects us, and strategize how to respond if we were to forego replying in kind in favor of replying in a way that mirrors our own desire to be treated fairly.

In general, the appearance of the Golden Rule in history is an example of understanding that human interactions can be channeled in a way that supports the stability of society.  We have also seen how the Roman Empire leveraged the new Christian religion’s universal acceptance of all (even those outside the near and familiar) and insistence on fairness in law, to support its continued expansion into new and less civilized parts of the world.

What Jesus brings to this evolution of human behavior is a new, more fundamental understanding of human nature and human relationships.  Not only does he bring a clearer and deeper understanding of the tactics of developing the skill modulating our instincts, he articulates the kinds of behavior that strengthen this skill.

Examples of such tactics can be seen in Jesus’s teachings (the Sermon on the Mount, for example) and in Paul’s expansion on Jesus’ teachings on love.  We can see the articulation of this tactic in this expansion:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs”

In this passage, Paul is going well beyond the insights of Confucious, some five hundred years earlier.  He is building on Confuscious’ insights on behavior, such as the divesting of ego and identifying additional tactics necessary to our personal growth.

As we have seen, these tactics, while contributing to the stability of society, are also those that are essential to our personal evolution.  They are not performed to appease God or merit salvation, they are the tactics that guide our neo-cortex brain in choosing to override our many instincts and hence contribute to our personal growth.

So, just as we saw God as the basis for existence and the continuation of the thread of evolution that emerges as ‘persons aware of their consciousness’, and how meditation can be seen as a search for this spark of life within us, we can now see how Jesus represents the action that must be taken if we are to cooperate with this spark.  It’s not enough to be aware of its existence within us, we must also develop tactics for cooperation with it if we are to continue our personal evolution.

As Richard Rohr puts it:

“It is not that Jesus is working some magic in the sky that “saves the world from sin and death.” Jesus is redefining the common pattern of human history.  Jesus is not changing God’s mind about us because it does not need changing (as in various “atonement theories”); he is changing our mind about what is real and what is not.”

The Next Post

This week we saw how Jesus can be seen from the secular perspective as the basis for development of the human neocortex brain’s skill of modulating the lower brains: the basis for our continued evolution at both the personal and cultural level.  Next week we will look at how this secular perspective can be seen to offer insights into the concept of Jesus as God, and how these insights inform religion’s traditional treatment of Jesus.

June 23 – So, Who and What Was Jesus? – Part 2

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Today’s Post

In last week’s post, we began to move from the scriptural depictions of Jesus to seeing him in the light of the insights of Teilhard.  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 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’s teachings certainly address how it is that we should behave, and Paul goes on to describe such proper behavior, John sees Jesus’ teachings as addressing how we should be if we would be whole.  This moves from 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 God manifests himself in human form to show us how we should be if we would be whole.   By insisting that ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them’, 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 principle of life that flows 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’, essentially to immerse ourselves in the fundamental energy of the universe, which is now seen as love itself.  This requires openness, trust, and effectively 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 born by a current towards the open seas.”

   So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, 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 before the 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 ‘religious’ understanding of Jesus into one which fits into our ‘secular’ perspective?  The heart of evolution finally pulled from the shadows and revealed ‘in full light’, is less a group of metaphors than a recipe for human evolution.

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, evolution must constantly find new ‘modes of being’ in which extraordinary changes in form and function occur.

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 awareness

– awareness to consciousness

– consciousness to awareness of consciousness

To this progression we can now add another critical point: from awareness of consiousness to evolution become aware of itself.  In Jesus, through the insights of John, we see the beginning of the awareness that our personal growth is the continuation of the agent 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 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 a recipe for human evolution.

We have seen in several posts 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 them to grow.  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 universal set of agents which, as Dawkins observes, “raises the world to an increasing level of complexity”.

So, just as we offered a reinterpretation of God from a ‘divine person who rewards and punishes’ to the cohesive agent which underlies evolution as it progresses from pure energy to the human person, we can reinterpret Jesus from the holy person, even divine person who shows us how we should love 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 is first recognized as such.

The Next Post

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

June 13 – So, Who and What Was Jesus? – Part 1

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Today’s Post

In the last two posts we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus.  Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the Christ, who was so integrally a part of God that he had coexisted with him through eternity.   As we will see, this evolution continues further as Christianity gets to development of God as ‘triune’: the trinity.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the secular God.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ evolves 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 moral behavior.  Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatise on Love), and goes on to see him tasked with the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with divine God.  The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result 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 part 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.

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.  In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that was 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” theory of John, Jesus, as the Christ, is co-substantial with God, and therefore had always existed as part of the creation process.

These two theories are orthogonal in that 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 rising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as the recognition of God’s continuing presence in human existence.

Church history describes 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 God’ 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’, with the appearance of yet another duality.

We have seen how many such dualities can be resolved through application of our secular principles of reinterpretation, and this one is no exception.  As we have seen, many of the concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can fall into coherence, and the dualities fall away, by understanding God as the ‘ground of being’, active in both the principles of being (physics) and the principles of becoming (evolution via the ‘axis of evolution’).  In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesuswere

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first 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 to underpin a new nation.  In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ and without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of natural selection.  Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing as an active agent to power the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person.

With the insights of Teilhard in hand, however, we can understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ‘agent’ of a universe which comes to be over long periods of time.  This agent powers 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 who are aware of their consciousness.

As history has showed, 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 posts 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 take a look at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for a secular God.

May 11 – Jesus: Part 1- Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

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Today’s Post

In recent posts we have addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and reinterpreted them to illustrate how the concept of a God can be understood from a secular perspective.  We have seen that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of these traditional expressions of belief.  In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these secular reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in the traditional statements.

We have also looked at the ‘Perennial Tradition’, which sees all religious expression as inclusive of such basic fundamental insights.

This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone of Western theology: 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 appearances of duality can be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in Western society.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can be seen as late as the twentieth century in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were discussed in the post on the history of psychology (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201611) which pointed out how Freud’s negative theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the European Protestant emphasis on ‘man’s sinful nature’,  while mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis.

These contradictions can be seen today in the ongoing tension between protestant fundamentalism and mainstream 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 in a universal context, and how this new dimension gave rise to the 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 churches 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.  Much of this diversity reflected the duality which was 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 dualism of their Jewish history, 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 scripture “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by the teachings of Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms:

–          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’ are lists of instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three Gospels, known as the synoptic gospels, by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, seem to have been written some ten 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 Ehrman 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 followed the ancient myths.

The Next Post

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death, but as we will see next week, many years later a radically different picture of Jesus was to appear.  Next week, we will take a look at this new picture.

Reinterpretation, Part 3 – Reinterpretation Principles, Part 1

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the need to reinterpret our traditional beliefs and identified the need for guidelines, ‘principles’ which can be applied as we begin this journey.

The Teilhardian Approach

The insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have provided a basis for our search for “The Secular Side of God”.  Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence are at work in the continuation of evolution through the human person.  His insights compromise neither the theories of Physics in the play of elemental matter following the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential theory of Natural Selection in the increasing complexity of living things, but rather brings them together in a single, coherent process.

While expanding and integrating these two powerful explanations of nature into a single vision, his was one of the first to include the undeniable phenomenon of ‘reflective thought’, the ‘knowledge of consciousness’ which makes the human person both unique in the biological kingdom and yet rooted in the cosmic scope of evolution.  This uniqueness, unfortunately, has been often addressed by science as an ‘epi-phenomenon’ or just as a pure accident.  Teilhard instead places it firmly on the ‘axis of evolution’, that of increasing complexity, thus affording us a lens for seeing ourselves as a natural and essential product of evolution.  Understanding evolution, therefore, is an essential step toward understanding the human person, how we fit into the universe, and how we should react to it if we would maximize our human potential.

Principles of Reinterpretation

Teilhard’s unique approach to evolution is addressed in more detail in the eight posts, “Looking at Evolution” January-April 2015”.  His approach offers a basis for principles which will be valuable in our search for reinterpretation and relevance of traditional religious thought:

–          Evolution occurs because of a fundamental characteristic of matter and energy which over time organizes the ‘stuff of the universe’ from very simple entities into ever more complex forms.  This principle continues to be active in the appearance and continued evolution of the human person.

The Principle: We grow as persons because of our potential for growth, which comes to us as a particular instantiation of the general potential of the universe to evolve

–          All things evolve, and the fundamental thread of evolution is that of increasing complexity

The Principle: The increasing complexity of the universe is reflected in our individual increase in complexity, which in the human manifests itself as personal growth

–          The basic process of physics by which evolution occurs consists of elements of matter pulled into ever more complex arrangements through elemental forces.  When added to the elements and forces described in the Standard Model of Physics, the phenomenon of increasing complexity completes the Standard Model by adding the characteristic which makes evolution possible. This process continues to manifest itself today in the evolutionary products of human persons and the unitive forces of love which connect us in such a way that we become more human.

The Principle:  Just as atoms unite to become molecules, and cells to become neural system, so do our personal connections enhance our personal growth

–       Adding the effect of increasing complexity to the basic theories of Physics also unites the three eras of evolution (pre-life, life, conscious life) as it provides a thread leading from the elemental mechanics of matter through the development of neural systems in Natural Selection to the ‘awareness of awareness’ as seen in humans.

The Principle: This ‘thread’ therefore continues to be active in every human person in the potential of our personal ‘increase in complexity’, which of course is our personal growth.

–          This addition points the way to understanding how evolution continues to proceed through the human person and his society.  The neurological advancement in living things evolves the 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-Cortex: Appearance of the potential for mental processes independent of 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.

–          This skill is the subject of nearly every religious and philosophical thought system in human history.  Understanding the nature of the reality which surrounds us is a critical step, which must be followed by decisions of how to react to it if we are to fulfill our true human potential.

The Principle:  Finding the core of a religious teaching involves understanding how the teaching can lead to increasing this skill.

–          “We must first understand, and then we must act”.  If our understanding is correct, then an action appropriate to the understanding can be chosen.  If we act in accordance with what is real, our actions will contribute to both our personal evolution (our process of becoming more whole, more mature) as well as the evolution of our society.  As Teilhard puts it,

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

Or, As Richard Rohr puts it, “Our lives must be grounded in awareness of the patterns of the universe.”

The Principle:  Authentic religion helps us to be aware of and cooperate with the creative energies which effect the universal phenomenon of evolution

Richard Rohr sees our growth as human persons as taking place in a series of Order > Disorder > Reorder. As he sees it, “Most conservatives get trapped in the first step and most liberals get stuck in the second”. His insight is that healthy religion is all about helping us get to the third, ‘Reorder’.  In this third stage we begin to demand that teachings must be both relevant and capable of helping us find the basic human threads of growth, the

 “ tides in the affairs of men, which, when taken, lead us to new life, but when omitted, all our voyage is bound in shallows and miseries” (apologies to Shakespeare)..

The Next Post

This week we looked at principles of reinterpretation that were derived from Teilhard’s insights.  Next week we will consider other principles that we will employ as we examine religious teachings for their relevance to human life.