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)
Academic studies have found that Christianity, along with other religious traditions, has undergone paradigm shifts every five hundred or so years. As insights arise that do not fit with old data, new paradigms emerge over time. This article draws 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.”
God is not human, but many persist in describing God with human characteristics. We project onto God human behaviours and expectations (anthropomorphism). 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 our 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 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 reflected in our liturgy and prayers.
To be meaningful, our concepts of God need to be founded in good psychology and science and be reflected in good theology. 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 which led to the science revolution. While this led to a deepening of human powers of reason and knowledge, it assumed a world model that behaved like a giant mechanism, literally a machine composed of separate and externally interacting parts.
However, Einstein’s mathematics pointed to the laws of relativity better fitting reality than did Newton’s laws of absolute space and time. The subsequent development of quantum physics further challenges this foundation. Quantum physics is the study of extremely small particles or waves and establishes the interrelationships between matter and energy, even time. Scientific experiments have confirmed the principles of quantum physics including that an observer of an experiment can influence the outcome of the experiment.
Contrary to the expectations of Newtonian physics, 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, the Franciscan theologian and scientist, 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.” Quantum physics leads us to consider the world in a way that is radically different from our past education and preconceived ideas.
Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, developed his ideas from a theological point of view. Ilia Delio, credited as the foremost authority in the world on Teilhard’s writings and their consequences, writes: “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.”
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 writes: “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 which 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.”
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.”
So, 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.”
According to 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. 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.
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? Is this our response to God’s call? If so, wouldn’t that lead to changes in our view of “God”, our outlook, our liturgy, our hymns, and prayers?
Robert van Mourik is a Moderator of the St Lucia Spirituality Group which seeks to support those who wish to develop a more mature understanding of what lies at the core of spiritual beliefs.
This article is an abridged version of a discussion paper available upon request – slsg4067@gmail.comls
oOo
Exactly!
We need a new way to explain existence. A new way to explain both the wonderful and the wicked.
We need a new story… one that binds together the best of the secular and the best of the sacred.
It is becoming clearer every day.
I reckon that is because human consciousness is evolving.
Human beings are responding to the chaos and meaningless that a reliance on Scientific Materialism has inadvertently brought about. We are on the verge of recovering the ‘sacred’ as a necessary component of our world view.
This being an edited version of Robert’s recent paper to the Spirituality in the Pub group, I thought I mention a citation to Tomas Halik a Czech theologian who has recently visited Australia, made by Robert’s confrere John Scoble and which I think complements Robert’s piece. The citation is taken from an introduction to Halik made by Frank Brennan SJ and which is apposite to this conversation.
“Halik does not write for those certain in their faith or for those certain in their antipathy or indifference to faith. He reaches out to those who find kernels of truth and seeds of doubt in both. He imagines the reader who is ‘prepared to suspend for the time being the moment of agreement or disagreement’. He delights in appealing both to believers and non-believers perplexed and tantalised by the mystery and paradox of life. In ‘Night of the Confessor’, he recalls (Lutheran pastor) Oskar Pfister’s response to Sigmund Freud wondering if a Christian could be tolerant of atheism: ‘When I reflect that you are much better and deeper than your disbelief, and that I am much worse and more superficial than my faith, I conclude that the abyss between us cannot yawn so grimly.’
(In winning several international awards, Brennan notes from one of them: ‘As physician, pastor and writer he gave thoughtful attention equally to his own flock and to those wandering outside it; and thus his ideas have spread far and wide.’ It also noted that he dedicated his Templeton prize ‘to those priests who perished in prisons, mines and concentration camps. He himself endured long privations because of his active part in what was known as the Underground Church: for many years he was banned from university teaching and from travel abroad.’
Explaining the purpose of Halik’s new book, Brennan says: ‘If Christianity is to overcome the crisis of its many previous manifestations and become an inspiring response to the challenges of this time of great civilisational change, it must boldly transcend its previous mental and institutional boundaries. The time has come for Christianity to transcend itself.’ He repeats many times his conviction that ‘a distinctive feature of postconciliar (Catholic) Christianity will be an increasing ecumenical openness.’
He says: ‘there is a need for dialogue between the different psychological types of faith within Christianity: between faith as a way and faith as a certainty, between the Church as a community of pilgrims and the Church as a home, between the Church as a community of memory and narrative and the Church as a field hospital.’ He asks: ‘Will the church of the future be able to be a common home for these different aspects and forms of religiosity?’
Attentive particularly to the young inquiring minds he encounters at university, he insists that ‘The Church needs to create spiritual centres, places not only of adoration and contemplation, but also of encounter and conversation, where experiences of faith can be shared.’
He has this compelling image: ‘While the traditional institutional forms of religion often resemble drying riverbeds, interest in spirituality of all kinds is a surging current undermining old banks and carving out new channels.’ He sees the church as an expansive all-inclusive community of listening and understanding. He recounts a Czech legend:
‘[T]he builder of one of the Gothic churches in Prague ordered the wooden scaffolding to be set alight after the construction was finished. When the fire ignited and the scaffolding tumbled thunderously to the ground, the builder panicked and committed suicide, thinking that his building had collapsed. It seems to me that many Christians who are in a panic at this time of change are succumbing to a similar error. What is collapsing may be only wooden scaffolding; when it burns down, the church building will certainly be scorched by fire, but the essentials, which have long been hidden, are yet to be revealed.’
Since he won the Templeton prize, Halik has been quite a globetrotter being able to converse with some of the world’s leading theologians in places like Oxford, Harvard, the University of Notre Dame and Boston College. He puts out this challenge to those of us in long-established parishes:
‘When, in much of the world, the network of local parishes collapses like the scaffolding of the church in the legend I quoted …, spiritual strength will have to be derived from centres of communal prayer and meditation, where celebration takes place, as well as reflection and the sharing of faith experiences.’