He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change. Praise Him! 

From Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

A LIFE PHILOSOPHICAL

“Becoming….?”

Decades of rediscovery, have rescued, renewed and re-formed my spirituality from the alienation and rejection of the dysfunctional Church of my youth. The purpose of this post is to reveal the major academic, theological, experiential and spiritual influences that influence me today. They include Buddhism, Anthropology, Christology, Cosmology, and Liberation Theology. As I became a student of theology I drew on my own experience and that of others under the rich indicators of culture: “literature, movies, the daily news and analysis, the visual arts,   the natural and human sciences… these two general sources for theology have been termed ‘the Christian fact’ and ‘human experience’.” (Knitter, 2011, p. 98)

I was attracted to Buddhism in India in the seventies. Being inveterately curious, and although nominally Christian, I took every opportunity (and there were many) to imbibe the culture of the sub-continent. Hinduism rejected me because I was not born into a Caste. Buddhism, although no longer widespread in the land of its inception, was appealing. The rejection of, a personal Saviour, an omnipotent deity, and the doctrine of Original Sin, et.al. was attractive given my early experience of Catholicism. I took up meditation seriously and studied Theravada Buddhism.  It is still part of my spirituality. Recently, a book by Paul F. Knitter, author of Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, (2011) has crystalised and echoed my experience of the practices of Buddhism incorporated into my Christian spirituality, but more of Buddhist influences later.

The Christological understandings I now hold have little to do with the belief structure taught to me at school. However, as the saying goes, ‘You can’t take the Catholic out of the boy’. Their Jesus may have been ‘meek and mild’, but their God, as intimated by Marcus Borg, was “the internalized overseer, the policeman who never sleeps.” (The God We Never Knew., 1997, pp. 65-69) As Borg says, “When this happens, the Christian life becomes confused with life under the punitive superego.” I agree with his statement that it is ironical that the Church’s monarchical model reinforces the superego.

The inconsistencies of the Gospel accounts, and the Letters of Paul fueled my early skepticism as to the “truth” of the New Testament. This problem with the seeming misogyny, heterosexism, and support of slavery in Paul was resolved when I read The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. (Borg & Crossan, 2009). These authors described a Paul, (vital to the understanding of Christ and Him Crucified, and the co-founder of Christianity) to whom some late Epistles have been probably wrongfully attributed.[i] I felt drawn to the scholars who sought to discover the ‘real’ Yeshua behind the Christian statements of faith (propaganda) that are the Gospels. This Yeshua is more easily discovered when we read the scriptures in chronological not canonical order. Seeing the writings in this order, beginning with the Letters of Paul, reveals a Christology becoming, struggling to interpret the meaning of the person Yeshua, from whose life and teachings, transmitted to them in oral form, all the writers receive their inspiration. (Borg 2012, Chapter 2)

The historical approach taken by G. Vermes, (The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, 2003) seems eminently sensible, as it is vital to know, as much as modern scholars can, the socio-cultural and historical milieu in which the scriptures were written. The Three Worlds of the Text Model is a useful paradigm for biblical critique. Allied to Textual criticism, Source criticism, Redaction criticism, Form criticism and its offshoot Rhetorical criticism, and even Feminist critique, scholars have been in search of the Historical Jesus. The real Yeshua who lived and died in Palestine two milennia ago is lost in time. The Jesus we see construed by scholars, both Christian and non-Christian could be prophet, God’s Shaliach, teacher, magician, Messiah, or the Rider on the white horse come to do battle with the kings of the earth and their armies. (Rev.19 – 21) Jesus is many of these, but is much more. The fact that the Jesus Movement continued and flourished is testament to the power and effect of Jesus on those who followed him. (Ben Witherington, 1990, pp. 3834-3839) We see him through the eyes of those who had “seen the Risen Jesus”. As Gerald O’Collins, S.J. (Believing in the Resurrection: The Meaning and Promise of the Risen Christ, 2012, pp. 1219-1222) elucidates, the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances, apart from being ordinary (not accompanied by ecstatic visions)  utilise the language of human vision. So the appearances of the Resurrected Jesus do not lie in the realm of wish-fulfilment or an interior vision or epiphany, except perhaps that of Saul/Paul.

I disagree with the late Geza Vermes (The Resurrection, 2008, pp. 1917-2008) in his interpretation that the resurrection was merely an uplifting of the disciples spirits and Jesus was resurrected in their hearts. Such a tame experience does not account for the passion with which the Apostles procclaimed Jesus Resurrected, even in the face of deadly opposition from the Sanhedrin. Later when the Gospels and Acts came to be written, each evangelist interpreted the Historical Jesus experientially as developed by that ecclesia during the troubled times in which the Gospel spread through the Roman world and beyond. (Crossan, 2012)

Jesus’ Death and Resurrection is the central doctrine of Christianity. If it is metaphor, is it no less true than a literal statement? Although metaphor uses imaginative words to describe and elucidate a statement, that statement is no less true. Our language is full of metaphor. Jesus language is full of metaphor and simile. How did Jesus see himself? Was he aware of the Divinity within? According to Ben Witherington (The Christology of Jesus, 1990, pp. 3840-3841) the language Jesus used to speak about God, his awareness of his power and authority as God’s mashiach, God’s Royal Son, makes Yeshua unique among all the teachers and religious figures of his or any other epoch. Roman emperors may attribute divinity to themselves and call themselves Son of God and Savior, but only Jesus revealed the special relationship he enjoyed with his and the Christian Abba.

My studies have led me to a deeper understanding of the man, Yeshua, and the imminent in-breaking of the Reign of God that he preached and for which the ruling powers executed him.  What does this ignominious end signify in the light of our understanding of own humanity and of God? At the center of a Christian understanding of God is the abandoned, crucified Jesus, as that poor Hindu was abandoned to death and destitution and whose body I washed and anointed in Calcutta those decades ago. If I was a believer I would argue for the following…

As Richard Bauckham (2001, pp. 133-268) says in his preface to Moltmann’s The Crucified God, (1973), “(…) God is not only the authority responsible for the world, to whom protest against meaningless suffering can be directed, but also the fellow sufferer who enters the hell of abandonment and suffers it in love for the godless and godforsaken, in order to reach them with God’s love and overcome their abandonment. In Jesus dying cry of god-forsakenness, God the Divine Son not only shares the god-forsakenness that is at the heart of suffering, but also himself takes up the  protest against it” and later, “(…)The Cross is the event of divine solidarity, by both Father and Son, with all who suffer.”

We cannot speak of the Cross and Resurrection without understanding the implications for the Trinity. The sin we see in the execution of God’s Son, the sin we see in the poverty, degradation, and evil that humans visit upon each other and upon Creation itself, reveals that God has allowed us great freedom; and God withdraws God-self to create creatures in Imago Dei with freedom of will to be or not be co-creators with God. That withdrawal allows us to experience god-forsakenness, which existential sense of utter aloneness, can lead to rampant social sin as we ignore our interconnectedness in favour of self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. Jesus, the Messiah initiated the great becoming, the Eschaton. In order to bring about the Reign of Love, God became incarnate in Jesus to conquer death, the result of our human inability to real-ise the true purpose of our relatedness, which is to share the life of the Trinity.

As Tony Jones (A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin, 2012, pp. 657-658) expresses it, “Our call is to identify with Christ’s suffering and death, (…) as he has identified with us… In the crucifixion, God opens the Trinity to us. The eternal love of the trinity is made available to us in the ultimately humbling act of death on a cross, and our experience of god-forsakenness is overcome, for we are now welcomed into the relation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” We often delude ourselves that what we do as individuals has no consequences, but this self-centered illusion leads to sin, analogous to a cancer cell in the human body, which disregards the need of the whole organism in a consuming proliferation at the expense of all other cells. The Cross symbolizes the altruistic act of self-sacrifice, which opens the way for the harmony of the Body of Christ to be reconstituted whole. The process continues through us as we surrender our will to the wishes and invitation of the Trinity to become relational, loving, self-sacrificing members of the Cosmic Body of God. (Ninan, Cosmos: The Body of God, 2012, pp. 2390-2399) As Metropolitan Paulos Gregorius of the Orthodox Syrian church writes, “Nature, man and god are not three distinct disjunctive realities on the stage with a space-interval between their respective boundaries. (…) Christ has become part of creation, an in his created body he lifted up the creation to god, and humankind must participate in this eternal priesthood of Christ.” (Ninan, 2012, pp. 2749-2750) In this panentheistic understanding of creation, the interrelational oneness of the Trinity extends and encompassess all, and we sentient humans have a special invitation to co-create through the Word made Flesh. In Theosis terminology, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, given to us as children of God and brothers and Sssters of Christ, guarantees our resurrection when the power of sin, which is entropy, is overcome in the completion of the Reign of God when we will see face to face.

A formative influence on my spiritual development has been Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[ii] His Christological understanding of evolution, and his conception of the sanctification of action, as deliberated in two books, The Human Phenomenon, (Chardin P. T., 1999) and Le Milieu Divin, (Chardin P. T., 1970) both engaged me. Teilhard was a panentheist and a profound philosopher.[iii] His Christological writings give us a consummately expounded theological development of Christ as the Cosmic Omega towards which the evolving the universe is inevitably speeding. The Human Phenomenon (Chardin P. T., 1999) explains the divine evolution of matter through consecutively more complex forms to the self-aware human of which Christ is the Divine Revelation. God becomes Omega in the Cosmic Christ. The process of evolution from Alpha point through non-sentient matter and energy under the direction of the immanent Spirit of God is now becoming in the sentient beings (who know2) whom we are. In this sense the cosmos is a living created entity which is still evolving.   Both Teilhard and his disciple Thomas Berry posited a Universe (or Multiverse) inseparable from sentient humanity. Our experiential and existential connection with the creative process of the Universe is at the heart of Teilhard’s spirituality and theology. Following from Teilhard and a love of cosmology, the implications of Mathematics and Physics for Theology have been a major interest.

The Quantum theological implications of Frank Tipler [iv] (The Physics of Immortality, 1994) are quite intriguing.

According to Tipler, “(…) life is essentially accumulation of information. On its path towards the Omega point life has to pervade and finally dominate the entire material universe. The Omega point itself, however, will be a place of maximal accumulation of information, and therefore it will be immanent as well as transcendent with relation to each point in spacetime. Therefore, the Omega point will have the properties of personality, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence and eternity.” (Ninan, 2010 pp. 3329-3333).

Tipler, in another book, The Physics of Christianity, (2007. Chapter One) asserts that, as with Christianity, God (Singular) consists of Three Persons so in the structure of the Cosmological Singularity, which is the Alpha point of creation, there are three “parts” analogous to personhood.[v] There is insufficient space here to expand on his theories, but they bear analysis. Of course, Tipler has his critics. Not all scientists agree with his mathematics let alone his attempt to marry science and religion. However, we Christians acknowledge God’s omniscience. Tipler is not alone in being both a cosmologist and a convinced Christian. Nevertheless, physics has a way to go before the Theory of Everything.

Theologians like Matthew Fox (The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance, 1988) approach from the religious end of the dialectic and incorporate the discoveries of science to speculate about the Eschaton. As to Eternity, we humans are physically existent in this time-space dimension and we act in the present as we move to the future, which as Christians we hope where God awaits and all will be divinised.  Therefore, we pray with Jesus, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done…” (Luke 11:2-3)

There are more aspects of Quantum physics that bear on theology.  At the quantum level; non-locality, the effect of the observer on the state of electrons i.e. wave or particle, entanglement, and the possibility that an electron can be simultaneously here and at the end of the universe, all  point to a Cosmos more complex and more beautiful than anything we have so far imagined. [vi]

Liberation Theology is a most influential aspect of my current spirituality. Buddhism also has left its mark on my ethics and morality, especially in the area of Social Justice. The interconnectedness of all sentient beings is central to Buddhism and the consequences of this knowledge move us to compassion and to empathy for all beings whether human or animal.[vii]

Initially, my knowledge of Liberation Theology came from my friendship with the late Fr. Tom O’Brien who, as an Australian Columban priest, spent ten years in Peru in the parish next to that of Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez.  Tom opened my eyes to the duty of all followers of Jesus to both personally exercise, and to call on the church to exercise, a preferential option for the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed and the dispossessed.

As the Prophet Amos proclaimed:

11 Therefore, because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 12 For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. (Amos 5: 11-12)

Liberation theologians follow these words and challenge the church to act justly, to love tenderly, to advocate for those who are voiceless and to work toward reform in a nation, state, or authority.  The Catholic Church, which the sexual abuse scandals have so tainted, needs to accept that challenge more openly and transparently. Pope Francis’ refusal to continue Benedict XVI’s taste in sumptuous clerical costume and pomp and circumstance, and his origin in South America where Liberation Theology began are both encouraging signs. I will let Knitter (2011, p. 72) have the final word. “The Gospel vision of a society based on honesty, justice, and compassion makes eminent, urgent sense. Not do I have major problems with the controversial ethical or practical teachings of my church (most of them having to do with what one Catholic theologian has called “the pelvic issues”) dealing with matters such as birth control, divorce, the role of women, homosexuality, clerical celibacy, episcopal leadership, and transparency. Certainly, these are matters of grave concern, but with many Catholics I have realized that, as has often been the case in the history of our church, on such issues the “sense” or “voice” of the faithful has a few things to teach the pastors. It’s a matter of time.” I find myself in complete agreement. [viii]

All Biblical quotes from Catholic Scripture Study Bible: RSV-CE. (2008).Charlotte, NC: St Benedict Press.

[i] The so-called Deutero-Pauline Epistles: 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, though the authorship is disputed, these Letters are canonical and reveal the later development of early Christian practice and theology. The Epistle to the Hebrews is not acknowledged as Pauline. (Borg & Crossan, 2009, pp. 40-48)

[ii] It was inevitable that I, a student of anthropology, read him, despite his peripheral association with the “Piltdown Man” hoax. (Thackeray 2012).

[iii] The poet in me is in thrall to his Hymn of the Universe (Chardin 1961).

[iv] Tipler is a Professor of Mathematical Physics who used to be an atheist. He accepted the standard scientific view that the universe was a cold, impersonal place that neither required nor provided evidence for a superior or ultimate reality. But modern physics has been changing rapidly. It has become obsessed with big questions of beginnings and endings, and has swayed into realms previously occupied by philosophy.

[v] The universe started with a singularity.  From that Singularity arose the rest of the development.  Tipler associate this singularity with the Creative Power of God – the Holy Spirit.  This is the Alpha Singularity.  In the multiverse system there are infinite universes that come into existence which allows for all the possible probabilities.  Ultimately it all converges into one final Omega Point which Tipler associates with God the Father.    The initial and final singularities are outside space and time, but they are connected by worldlines within space-time associated with the histories of all the universes in the “multiverse” that is implied by quantum mechanics. Quoted in Ninan, Prof.M.M. (2010-10-21). Quantum Theology (Kindle Locations 3362-3367). Kindle Edition.

[vi] As the late Cosmologist Karl Sagan was fond of saying, “We are all made of star stuff.”

[vii] “The reconstruction of a spiritual, green and just society begins with this clarity in the individual mind. By awakening ourselves to suffering, we can work to change it. We can (my words) reconstitute consciousness about the interconnectedness of all sentient (note: conscious) beings. Realizing interconnectedness, we would then be moved to act with wisdom and compassion to end suffering and all forms of structural violence. …Through helping others understand the meaning of freedom, the individual learns to embrace the reality of interdependence, the state of “interbeing” described by the well-known Buddhist monk, Thich Naht Hanh as the awareness that one is made up wholly of non-self elements. ” (Sivaraksa, 2002)

[viii] John Henry Newman (On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, 1859) supports his argument. “…the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and because their consensus (my emphasis) through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible Church. I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church in its various constituents and functions per modum unius, manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect (my emphasis) (…)”

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