Robert van Mourik
“Unless religion changes and adapts to the evolving world, it cannot do what it has the capacity to do: enkindle a zest for life.” (Ilia Delio on Teilhard de Chardin) [1]
Introduction
In her 2012 landmark work, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle focuses on the ways Christianity has undergone paradigm shifts every five hundred or so years. Others have noticed similar patterns in other religious traditions.[2] A paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or theories that characterise phenomena or field of study such as science or religion. Paradigms can change in the light of new data. As insights arise that do not fit with the old data, new paradigms emerge over time. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to potential changes to our concepts and paradigms of God.
John D Caputo, an American religious philosopher, is blunt:
God deserves better. God has fallen into the wrong hands. Religion has made itself unbelievable, an enemy of common sense, science, and democratic life, and is well on its way to shaming God out of existence.[3]
Augustine and Aquinas
Augustine (CE354-430) and Aquinas (1224-1274), perhaps, two of the most widely recognised doctors of the church, held divergent views on God. Caputo[4] distinguished two kinds of theologians, the first, bridge-builders, think we must build a bridge from the world to God and hope the world can provide enough support to hold up the bridge. The second, ground-diggers, think we do not have to build a bridge because God is the very ground on which we already stand, but we must do a little digging (thinking) to see that.
Quoting the theologian Paul Tillich, Caputo considered Aquinas to be a bridge-builder, whereas Augustine was a ground-digger. The God that is the outcome of Aquinas’s view is a Supreme Being transcending space and time, who sees all, knows all, and can do all. A God, “up there”, who is watching every move we make and is coming to get us if we do not behave ourselves, to whom we turn when things take a turn for the worse.
Augustine thought that we are alienated from God because we do not realise that God is that in which we already live and move and have our being. The bridge-builders think we must find some way to attain the truth. The ground-diggers think we are already in the truth, that God is truth, and that the task is to unearth its truth. Augustine said: Do not go out and about looking for God. God is not far. God is right here — God-within-us or we- within God — waiting to be found.
Are you a bridge-builder or a ground-digger in your view of God? Do you see God as “up there” separate to yourself, or intrinsic to yourself?
Man made in God’s image or God made in man’s image
God is not human, but many persist in describing God with human characteristics. Personhood is the deepest expression of our consciousness as human beings. We describe everything in terms of this reality and tend to think of God after the analogy of a person. The same may be true for every other creature. Xenophanes said it in the fifth century BC, “If horses had Gods, they would look like horses.”
We project onto God human behaviours and expectations (anthropomorphism). Nations go to war with God on their side to affirm the rightness of their cause. And our expectations of God can be naïve and ill-founded. Bad stuff happens and God is often blamed for it. The eruption of volcanoes, for example, are an essential part of the renewal of the earth and important for our eco-system, and not a godly judgement on humankind’s behaviour.
Does anthropomorphism contribute to a co-dependent relationship with God, thereby hindering mature spiritual development?
If we are to have a credible religion, do we need a concept of God that goes deeper and is more encompassing than a personalised Supreme Being?
The Originating Spirit
The concept of God we have from long established theology is founded in a worldview prevalent at the time of Jesus, subsequently refined through later centuries. These views influenced doctrines, such as original sin and the belief that Jesus died to save us from our sins, views that are reflected in our liturgy and prayers. However, our understanding of the universe, science and many other fields of knowledge has expanded significantly over two thousand years. Brian Swimme, an evolutionary cosmologist, was inspired by the works of Thomas Berry, who in turn was a student of Teilhard de Chardin. Consider his reflection on the “cupped hands”:
Cup your hands together and imagine what you are holding. First in quantum terms would be the molecules of the air, the molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases. There would be many more than a billion trillion. If we imagine removing every one of these atoms, we would be left holding extremely small particles such as neutrinos from the sun. In addition, there would be radiation energy in the form of invisible light, such as photons from the original flaring forth of the universe. In other words, to get down to nothingness we would have to remove not only all the subatomic particles; we would also have to remove every one of these invisible particles of light.
But now imagine you have somehow done this, so that in your cupped hands there are no molecules left, and no particles, and no photons of light. All matter and radiation have been removed. No things would be left, no objects, no stuff, no items that could be counted or measured. What would remain would be what we modern peoples refer to as the “vacuum” or “emptiness” or “pure space”.
Now for the news: careful examination of this vacuum by quantum physicists reveals the strange appearance of elementary particles in this emptiness. Even where there are no atoms, and no elementary particles, and no protons, and no photons, suddenly elementary particles will emerge. The particles simply foam into existence... The particles emerge from the “vacuum”. They do not sneak in from some hiding place when we are not looking. Nor are they bits of light energy that have transformed into protons. These elementary particles crop up out of the vacuum, itself – this is a simple and awesome discovery. I am asking you to contemplate a universe where, somehow, being itself arises out of a field of “fecund emptiness.” [5] (Italics added).
Could this be God at work?
Framing a new paradigm
To be meaningful, our concepts of God need to be founded in good psychology and science and be reflected in good theology. No one accepts the sun, the planets, and Greek mythological creatures as gods anymore, so it is appropriate to consider imagining a God that is more meaningful to us today. The West has lived with two prominent paradigms for the last several hundred years: the mechanistic worldview and the medieval worldview, and the underlying basis of these worldviews is increasingly being questioned. The mechanistic worldview relies on the certainty of Newtonian physics, yet Einstein’s mathematics pointed to the fact that the laws of relativity better fit reality than did Newton’s laws of absolute space and time. [6]
Paul Levy writes:
The Scientific Revolution, now commonly associated with Newtonian physics, led to a deepening of human powers of reason and knowledge. However, it assumed a world model that behaved like a giant mechanism, literally a machine composed of separate and externally interacting parts. The modern scientific attitude, seeing the world as objectively existing somehow outside of and separate from itself leads to a deluded view, a blind spot in the very centre of the predominating scientific vision of the world. A pervasive blindness of which modern society seems mostly unaware. A strictly materialistic understanding of human beings and our place in the cosmos is not part of the solution but part of the problem. The materialistic worldview, which is based on the idea that things (including ourselves) are free standing, existing independently on their own and separately from each other, is simply untrue.[7]
We are not separate, rather we are relational to everyone, everything, everywhere, “entangled” in the language of quantum physics. We must conceive our place in the world differently. Regarding physics, Ilia Delio writes:
Modern physics is, in a sense, a mystical science that stands in opposition to the notion that “science explains everything” or that “science gives us the truth.” Physics is, in fact, a description, not an explanation. The laws of nature are concisely integrated descriptions of our observations and experiments, descriptions that use creative abstract concepts like “charge” or “spin” and the abstract language of mathematics. Physics is an abstract description of nature, although there are no abstractions in nature. What you see is not necessarily what is there. The map is not the territory.[8]
Similarly, a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.
Quantum physics leads us to consider the world in a way that is radically different from our past education and life experience. For example, scientific experiments have proven that the mere existence of an observer in an experiment can change the outcome of the experiment. Levy again:
According to quantum theory, observers play no minor part, but rather an indispensably creative role in the genesis of the universe while at the same time being a product of the very universe that they are helping to create.[9]
Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, developed his ideas from a theological point of view. He was forbidden by his Jesuit superiors and the Catholic Church from publishing his books and he died in New York in 1955 nearly friendless. However, his friends published his works after his death and they are now acknowledged by the Catholic Church. Ilia Delio, a Franciscan, scientist, and theologian has been described by Diarmuid O’Murchu as the foremost authority in the world on Teilhard’s writings and their consequences. She writes:[10]
The fact is, we have been on a rapidly accelerating trajectory of evolution since the last century. It is time to get on board with where we are going and stop leaning on history as our sole support. Teilhard de Chardin gave us a new paradigm of cosmic evolution, an entangled whole of God and world in evolution which continues to grow with complexifying consciousness. Humanity is part of a mysterious cosmic unity that has an inner active power persistent through birth and death, an unfolding of greater complex life in which God is emerging. Despite the massive forces of destruction, both natural and human, evolution insists on greater consciousness because something in the cosmos escapes entropy and does so increasingly. Teilhard called this active presence the Omega principle, an energetic presence of love opens to future fulfillment.
Consequences
Extraordinarily, Teilhard and the scientists who separately developed the ideas surrounding quantum physics during the twentieth century had much in common in their views. We are all observers as described above, and we can influence the development of the world. Ilia Delio again:
We live in a world of infinite potential, and we must choose whether we will create a world of love or settle for a world of hate and violence. If love is our deepest reality, then every breath of every day we must choose to love. In our highly charged world of political opposition, fake news and sheer hate, love seems antiquated or irrelevant. But love is the reason we are all here to begin with and it is this truth alone that makes us desperate for God.
Each one of us contributes to the completion of God. Love is no longer an option but a responsibility; it is not about personal fulfillment but contributing to the world soul. We may struggle with love, fail in love, or feel loveless but Saint John of the Cross gave us a very simple way forward: where there is no love, put love and you will find love.[11]
Caputo uses the language of quantum physics:
The Entanglement of God and Me. As opposed to classical theology, we and God are entangled like a pair of particles in quantum physics. God’s call calling and our responding are like two particles spinning in the same field, or, more simply, two sides of the same coin. God’s being is not necessary but needy, in need of our response. This is a scene of mutual entanglement.
God is not a plenitude who empties the divine being into the world, who dies into the world..., but an emptiness seeking fulfillment in the world, who comes to life in the world. There (here) God hopes to find life, existence and reality, a place to stretch the divine limbs and relieve the divine loneliness. God’s relationship to the world is not kenotic (death of God) but pleromatic (life of God). [12]
Levy quotes the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart:
Man cannot live without God, but God cannot live without man either. Without man, God wouldn’t know he existed.
and comments:
In becoming conscious, we become instruments through which whatever we call “it” – God, the universe, the creator, the universal mind, etc. – becomes aware of itself. Speaking about the divine service that humanity can render, Jung writes in his autobiography it is so “that light may emerge from darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself.”[13]
A final word from Ilia Delio:
Both Jung and Teilhard attempted to relocate the God question on the level of human experience and growth, understood in terms of modern science. God is the name of the transcendent psyche, the collective unconscious, the depth, and ground of matter.
Any idea of a supernatural God is an abstraction and unhelpful, diverting our attention away from our divine depth toward a projected other-worldly realm. Jesus of Nazareth entered into a unitive Christ consciousness and lived from the centre of his own divine reality. Jesus is the model of Christ consciousness, according to Jung, because Jesus was fully human like us. Jung summed up the root reality of incarnation this way: the many gods become one God, the one God becomes human, and the human is to become God. Every human person has the capacity to be divine, holy, and sacred. God is seeking fulfilment in human life, as human life seeks fulfillment in God. Teilhard fully agreed and saw the ongoing event of incarnation as the impulse of evolution. [14]
Remember Jesus’s wish for us that we might live abundantly (John 10:10). Is the message of Jesus, as interpreted by Teilhard and Ilia Delio, one of empowerment? That we are empowered, enlivened by the Spirit within and meant to embrace that power, own it and, in fact, become co-creators with God?
If so, wouldn’t that lead to changes in our view of “God”, our outlook, our liturgy, our hymns, and prayers?
Reflections
What are your expectations of religion? Caputo writes:
God is a spirit who calls, a spirit that can happen anywhere and haunts everything insistently. As to the big picture, the large course the Spirit traverses, the large circle it always cuts, there is no may be about it; it must be what it must be... God is an insistence whose existence can only be found in matter, space, and time. Where else could God be God?... There is grace, grace happens, but it is the grace of the world. My entire idea is to reclaim religion as an event of this world, to reclaim religion for the world, and the world for religion.[15]
If we accept that quantum theory enables us to understand our place in the evolution of the world, could we accept that we can individually contribute to change? Is this our response to God’s call?
Consider the doxology prayer:
Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours almighty Father, forever and ever.
Could it be rephrased, perhaps?
Through me, with me, in me, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, if it is to be, it is up to me!
Fr Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and one of the founders of the Centering Prayer meditation, wrote:
A creative vision releases an enormous amount of energy and can transform society beyond our wildest dreams. The power of the stars is nothing compared to the energy of a person whose will has been freed from the false-self system and who is thus enabled to co-create the cosmos together with God.[16]
James Finlay, faculty member of the Centre for Action and Contemplation, introduces his meditations using this verse from Psalm 46, it is an appropriate introduction to discerning our own path:
Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know
Be still
Be
1 Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, 41
2 ibid, ix
3 John D Caputo, What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology, 13, Kindle edition
4 Ibid 16-17
6 Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, 2
7 Paul Levy, The Quantum Revelation, 29-30
8 Ilia Delio The Not-Yet God, 2
9 Paul Levy, The Quantum Revelation, 51
10 See Towards the Metahuman, Ilia Delio, Center for Christogenesis, Dec 31, 2023
11 See footnote 912 John D Caputo, What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology 144-145 13 Paul Levy, The Quantum Revelation, 76
14 Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, xxxii
15 Quoted in Diarmuid O’Murchu, Doing Theology in an Evolutionary Way, 199
16 Thomas Keating, The Mystery of Christ
April 2024
Comments