Thy Kingdom Come…

In her book, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle observes that religion often undergoes dramatic shifts during precisely the same eras in which society experiences similar turmoil. In recognizing this truth, she concludes that, “religion is a social construct.”[1] As we have pointed out through both the modern and postmodern paradigms, humanity’s view of the divine is always reflective of the nature of developments in culture. Hence, with the rise of scientific reason and rationality, religion adapted by reducing faith to an apologetic discourse in which faith was equated to reason. Likewise, with the implosion of modernity and the emergence of global technologies, a sense of diversity and interconnectedness within the universe has led to an understanding of God that is flexible, characterized by inclusivity and pluralism.

Like Tickle, Ken Wilber suggests that these shifts in humanity’s understanding of truth and meaning in the universe are neither spontaneous nor random. Rather, they are progressive stages of evolution. To explain this, Wilber proposes there to be “a broad orienting map of the place of men and women in relation to Universe, Life, and Spirit.”[2] He parallels this map with matter or cosmos, life or the biosphere, and mind or the noosphere, collectively forming the Kosmos. Because each of these spheres exist together as a collective unity, as evolutionary parts of a greater whole, Wilber makes some general assumptions about the nature of the universe. Basically, he suggests that all of reality is composed of whole/parts or “holons.” For instance, he states

“… a whole atom is part of a whole molecule, and the whole molecule is part of a whole cell, and the whole cell is part of a whole organism, and so on. Each of these entities is neither a whole nor a part, but a whole/part, a holon.”[3]

According to Wilber, everything is a holon of some sort or another. And there is never an “ultimate Whole.” Because, “Even the ‘Whole’ of the Kosmos is simply a part of the next moment’s whole, indefinitely. At no point do we have the whole, because there is no whole, there are only whole/parts forever.”[4] But there is direction. Remember, the broad orienting map consists of matter, life, and mind. Each represents a “whole/part” and participates in an evolutionary process – matter to life to mind (to soul to spirit). It is in this unified process that “the Kosmos hangs together… It is a universe, one song.”[5]

This leads us to a postmodern view of the divine in relationship to being or existence. Wilber calls this “one song” Spirit-in-action or God-in-the-making. The presence of a divine entity is not described here, as a being that exists apart from the creative process, but rather, as that which exists both within the process of an unfolding universe and as that which holds the process together as unity. And the unfolding of the universe is nothing but an emergence of creativity. It is only fitting that Wilber links this creativity with Spirit. After all, the emergence of the universe as it continues to unfold and evolve does not do so out of thin air. To the contrary, emergence is only possible through a creative energy or Spirit that gives birth from within the process itself.

Gordon Lynch, in his book The New Spirituality, describes progressive spirituality as a belief in the divine as “an ineffable unity [that is] both the guiding intelligence behind the evolutionary processes of the universe, and (within) the material form and energy of the universe itself.”[6] Because this unfolding is perceived to be a process that is sustained by a creative energy and/or Spirit, there is a desire on the behalf of many postmodern spiritualists to seek to work in conjunction with the divine. Some even talk in terms of God needing humans to be partners in the process of creation. The enlightenment or awareness of such a task is what is often referred to as the evolving consciousness.

The evolving consciousness, it is important to note, is not a matter of evolution from a Darwinian perspective. After all, similar to the creative emergence and unfolding of the universe, there are not higher stages of consciousness that result due to chance mutations or natural selection. Instead, each stage is a necessary part/whole. Therefore, the possibility of higher stages of consciousness is dependent upon and inclusive of the stages that precede them. Wilber describes these levels or stages as egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric.[7] The progressive development eventually lends itself to the awakening of our true nature – “a total embrace of the entire Kosmos.”[8]

But this process of creative unfolding does not emerge apart from human culture and development. Instead, it works in continuity with the stages of human development and with the major stages of technological/economic development. Wilber draws on the work of researchers such as Robert Bellah, Jurgen Habermas, and Peter Berger as he summarizes the stages of human development as “archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential.”[9] These of course are correlated with stages of cultural development that he identifies as “foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, and informational.”[10] This process of evolution is not, as Wilber suggests, a matter of there being a predetermined world that we simply look at differently with the unfolding of “higher stages” of being. Conversely, this is a process in which “the Kosmos comes to know itself more fully.”[11]

This thought is not unique to Wilber. We find the essential framework of his thought in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest in the early-middle twentieth century. In his work, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard rejected Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” and instead proposed a “’cosmic law of complexity and consciousness,’ which means that there is a pull in evolution towards the more complex and the more highly conscious.”[12] He pioneered the notion that the evolutionary unfolding of the universe was organized in three stages of development – the geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere. Wilber has certainly gone further to articulate what Teilhard set out to identify as the evolutionary nature of existence. But it was Teilhard himself, a Christian mystic, who first attempted to merge faith and evolution, paving the way for a return to a this-worldly spirituality that is firmly rooted in humanity’s participation with the divine in the shaping of history.

What if the relationship between the divine and humanity is an unfolding process rooted in the evolution of being? Furthermore, what if this is an evolution that continues to lead to higher levels of consciousness or awareness in humanity? These questions certainly set the stage for the future landscape of spirituality in the West. But how might Jesus, along with Christian tradition, fit into this conversation?

Stay tuned.