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Questions and Comments
1. Introduction (you are here) Part I: What God is Doing 3. Becoming Like God through Expansion 4. Our Job is to Become the God-Self Within Us 6. Evil and the Ultimate Enemy Part II: Life in the Age of the Spirit 8. Liberation in the Age of the Spirit 9. Sex in the Age of the Spirit 10, Death in the Age of the Spirit 11. Love in the Age of the Spirit 12. Radical Reformation in the Age of the Spirit 13. Religions in the Age of the Spirit 14. Ethical Decisions in the Age of the Spirit 15. Social Justice in the Age of the Spirit 16. The Bible in the Age of the Spirit 17. Providence in the Age of the Spirit 18. Tracing God’s Trajectory in the Age of the Spirit |
by Vern Rossman vjross22@hotmail.com
This first session (following a table of contents, bio of the author and Preface) describes the approach and content of the course and defines the key terms. There are twenty sessions in the course, each with questions for thought at the end. Eventually, there will also be some suggested additional readings, besides the works cited in the text. There are no examinations, but the author is available at his email address and will welcome your questions or discussion. This course attempts to bring together into a new unity disciplines which have divided the human race: biblical and systematic theology, philosophy, biology, psychology, mysticism, insights from other religions, and social theory and practice. Part I: (What God is Doing) lays out what is unique about this course: the restructuring of theology around two germinal ideas or paradigms: (1) growth by stages both in individuals and societies on the model of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development; and (2) the recognition that we all have sub-selves, some immature and open to evil and one which is mature and capable of God’s love; how this is possible is described scientifically through the ability of the brain to code the same material, simultaneously, in linear (left brain) fashion and in wholistic gestalts (right brain). Part II (Life in the Age of the Spirit) deals with the critical individual and social issues and crises which we must face in the 21st century. Please make use of the advantages an online course offers. Under
a lecturer you have to wait for the next lecture and the conclusions. Here,
you can jump ahead and read any session which interests you. Please do it.
This course is dedicated to the memory of About the Author Vern Rossman has wide experience as a writer in the religious field. He is co-author of a study book, Called To Mission and Unity and has written two plays and many articles for the religious press. He was for four years editor of a national newspaper, The Social Action Newsletter . After graduating from Phillips University (BA 1948) and Yale Divinity School (BD cum laude 1951), he spent two decades in church communications, including nine years as associate director of AVACO, the audio-visual production center of the National Christian Council of Japan; and seven years as director of Intermedia, the overseas communications and literacy arm of the National Council of Churches in the USA. His work has taken him to thirty countries. At the same time he has pursued a second career in action for peace and justice. He served five years as a director in the national social action department of the Disciples of Christ, and three years as head of a statewide, interfaith organization to combat racism in Indiana; participated in voter registration and marches in Mississippi in 1964 and 1965, being arrested in Greenwood during those campaigns; served three years as the national executive director of Accountants for the Public Interest; was three years a ward chair for the Democratic party in Indianapolis; established two innovative prison visitation programs which still continue in New Jersey and Indiana; and spent almost two years in prison himself for his part in the Griffiss Plowshares action in 1983 when he and six others hammered and poured their blood on a B-52 bomber being converted to carry nuclear tipped cruise missiles. Formerly an ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and member of the Society of Friend (Quakers), he is now a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church. He currently lives in Columbia, MO. From his sabbatical year at Union Theological Seminary in New
York (STM 1960), he has been seeking to bring together the findings of a
variety of disciplines in a more adequate "space age" understanding of God's
purpose for humanity. His research draws upon Lawrence Kohlberg, Abraham
Maslow, Ernest Becker, Nicholas Berdyaev, Matthew Fox, Paul Tillich, Ched
Myers, Walter Wink and others. He participated in a seminar under Kohlberg
and knew him personally as a friend.
This course is for those who are seeking a faith perspective they can believe in without trampling on their intelligence. It is also addressed to those who feel instinctively that life should be directed more by creativity, compassion and celebration than stolid exertion of the will or unquestioning loyalty to tradition. It is for those who seek power to ride on top of the battering waves life sends, rather than being bowled over by them. It is for those who want to know what a truly just and compassionate society would look like and what they can do to help bring it about. It is for those who long to actually experience the transcendence, ecstasy and joy they have heard about.. I have tried to keep the technical jargon to a minimum and to explain those terms I feel it necessary to use. I have also tried to avoid phrases like "I believe" or "it seems to me." This course represents convictions of mine. They are to some degree true and no doubt to some degree need correction. If, however, the tone at any point sounds pretentious or insulting to other points of view, it is due to this style of writing and not to the author's arrogance. At least I sincerely hope so. In order to help undo the insult to women implied in our language customs, I attempt to use non-sexist language where possible. This is particularly hard in speaking of God as one gets tired of saying the Deity. So on occasion I use the odd term "S/He" to indicate that God is beyond our divided sexuality, and is certainly not masculine. So many have helped me along the way that it is impossible to thank everyone. I am especially grateful to my teachers who opened to me the riches of Bible, theology, ethics and church history, especially H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, Roland Bainton, Albert C. Outler, Paul Tillich, Liston Pope, John Bennett, Robert Calhoun, and Eduard Heimann.. Then, I owe a special debt to the Christian Church (Disciples), the National Council of Churches and the Atlantic Life Community. The Disciples sent me to work in Japan, to live and work with migrants and in the ghettos of our cities and to Mississippi during the civil rights struggles. The NCCC gave me the rare privilege of traveling to 30 countries, of meeting the leadership of those churches and their people. Special thanks go to the Atlantic Life Community and Liz McAllister and the other five beloved co-conspirators of the Griffiss Plowshares action for the action, trial and the months in prison. Without these experiences I do not think I would dare to write theology in our day. Even with them I find it a daunting task.
If there is a God, how can we know what that Being is like? Which of the gods pushed at us is closest to the true God? There are new discoveries in biology and developmental psychology which may give us more satisfying answers to these questions. Over the life span of the person who moves to greater and greater maturity, there is an opening out to belief in a series of gods each one closer to the real God. If we grow far, we are likely to worship seven different gods, each corresponding to a stage in our development: Stage 1: God is a deity of magic, taboos and unpredictably dangerous behavior. Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark of the Covenant and is struck dead. This corresponds to the young child's magical interpretation of events in the world she does not yet have a cognitive structure to understand. Stage 2: God is one who rewards and punishes and can be bargained with. If there are ten righteous ones in Sodom, the city can be spared. Abraham negotiates. (Genesis 18) Or, as it is put later: "If it is the Lord who has turned you against me, an offering to him will make him change his mind." (I Sam. 26:19) God keeps a big book in heaven into which he enters all our good and bad deeds. This god is very real to the seven year old whose favorite phrase is, "It's not fair!" Stage 3: God is a very personal deity who takes special care of me and mine. This teenager's god is seen as tolerating young love in the back seat of the car because he knows their love is special. King David's special relation to god as protector made his enemies god's enemies: "Do I not hate them that hate thee? ... I hate them with a perfect hatred." (Psalm 137:8,9) This god (inconsistently it must be admitted) sends misfortune down on evil people and protects the righteous. Stage 4: God is the deity of the law and order people, sustainer of my country "right or wrong." This god floats three feet above the flag in the Fourth of July parade and justifies killing those "lesser breeds without the law.” It is a god who still has a most favored nation policy. Stage 5: God is a rather liberal deity, a tolerant grand fatherly sort. Like the stage 5 person, god is confused by conflicting systems of values and is not sure how to relate to his old autocratic exclusivist self. Stage 6: God now has a universal perspective, embraces and loves all humanity. Where once people thought God distinguished between good and evil nations and between good and evil persons, now it is clear that good and evil are in each individual. There are no good kingdoms and evil kingdoms; there are no purely good people and evil people. This god finds it impossible to choose sides in wars and weeps over killing and cruelty to any person. From stage 6 on, god is inevitably a suffering parent, crucified on the divisions and violence of the children. Stage 7: God has a cosmic and transcendent perspective. This is the god of the saint, mystic, prophet and seer. This is the god of those who have overcome the power of death in this life and who live in eternity, which is to live in the wholistic power of the divine love. People at this stage are aware that the true God has designed them for a glorious eternal destiny of loving creativity. The Cosmos is their living room and workshop. These are the gods of atheists also, because the one who doesn't believe can only reject the god which goes with his stage of development. Those who know developmental psychology will recognize that these seven gods are defined according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development. These are not, of course, stages in the life of the Deity but rather stages in our growth in maturity of understanding of God. Stage development also helps draw a kind of road map through history. Understanding these stages in depth allows us to track a curve through history and then project it into the future. We can perhaps then see a little more clearly where we have been and also what our farther destiny looks like. The Omega Point Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great paleontologist, philosopher and priest, tried to understand what the destination of human personality and human history will be like. He looked to the beginnings of life and drew a line of meaning through history. Then he projected that line to what seemed to him to be the logical end. He called this end the "Omega Point,” omega being the last letter of the Greek alphabet. The Omega Point, as he saw it, is the logical conclusion of a process going on through history which was producing simultaneously a greater and greater complexity and richness, on the one hand, and a greater unity on the other. He believed that ultimately harmony would triumph but in a way which would celebrate and conserve interpersonal compassion and the creative contributions of individuals. This course also draws a line and extends it into the future, but in a way which seeks to fill Teihard de Chardin's insights with more specific content.. Part I of the course attempts to define and describe what God is doing and how. Part II, then, spells out what this means in the important areas of our lives. To Become Like God Meister Eckhardt, the 14th century preacher and mystic, wrote, "All the names which the soul gives God, it receives from the knowledge of itself." 2 He was saying that we must remember how far God is beyond us, but also that any real understanding of God, which is not just a projection of our own inner needs and hopes, arises from our becoming more like God. 3 I believe Eckhardt is right on this and also on another vital point: Salvation is to become like God. A main purpose of this course is to try to describe more clearly what godlikeness looks like in a human being and how we become like God. As we become more mature, that is, more loving, more expanded in our concerns, more free of social control, and more united within, yesterday's god turns out to be too small. As individuals pass through stages in their development, so also have human institutions in history. We can discern patterns in our growth, both individual and social. These patterns make it possible to see to some extent beyond where we are to what we must become. When we talk of God's purpose it is also necessary to say something about the divine strategy for saving and perfecting all peoples. This course spells out where the quiet and hidden resources of God are, the ones which tip the balance against evil and in favor of good, where they come from, how they exist within the personality, why evil cannot overwhelm them, how God works within them now, and in what ways they make the difference between God's success and failure. Two Pivotal Paradigms This understanding of God's purpose and strategy is held together by two linchpins. These are: (1) the movement of individuals and society through stages of growth and development, and (2) the god-self within each person, sometimes referred to as the image of God. These two concepts as understood scientifically, and their interrelation, form a new paradigm, a new basis for faith and a revised methodology for truth verification. Stages of Development Stages of development appear in various forms in history. They are implied in our commonsense distinction between immaturity and maturity. Theologians have found it necessary to speak of dispensations or historical stages in God's self-revelation in order to explain vastly different levels of morality in the Bible. God, they say, had to deal with primitive peoples as adults deal with children, to bring them along bit by bit. Mystics, building on their spiritual experience and the logic of bridging the enormous gap between humanity and God, have constructed ladders of the four to thirteen steps on the way to Enlightenment or Beatitude. Now, we have Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development to work with. This structure describes the process of potential development in the life of the individual. It rests on over thirty years of research by the late Harvard professor of developmental psychology and his associates and students. It can help us enormously to understand God's educational process, the meaning of history and the nature of progress and moral lag in societies. I recognize that there are criticisms of Kohlberg’s system and I deal with these in detail. I could have used stages of faith development (Fowler) or ego development (Kegan and others) and established what is important to this course. I believe it has been scientifically established that there are stages in our development and the movement from one to another is often a kind of little death and resurrection, so painful that many turn back and do not go on to maturity, and that each stage has a markedly different viewpoint, kind of relationships and ethics and morals. The God-self The other main idea to be tested is that we have within us a number of sub-selves, each organized around a different system of values, one of which is wholistic, the one I call the god-self. The god-self is an inner reality of pivotal psychological and spiritual power. This sub-self is that into which is gathered all the goodness and love and affirmation which we have experienced as we grow up. Also feeding this wholistic core self are experiences from the very beginning of our lives of ecstasy (laughter, play, dancing, sex, mystical sense of oneness with all being, creating, etc.) and transcendence (the awesome "starry heavens above"). In this way, Kohlberg's stages 6 and 7 are already being formed within us as patterns long before we are able to consciously affirm those advanced values or live by them for more than fleeting moments. The true self or god-self is the inner individual expression of what philosophers call the ground of being. Some psychologists describe it as the true self, the wholistic self, the core self, or true being. Quakers and mystics have called it the Inner Light, the Seed, or "that of God in us.” In the Old Testament it is the image of God. It is what St. Paul calls the new person in Christ or putting on Christ. Thomas Merton called it the true self which he saw as opposed to the false self. It seems to be what Eastern sages intuited when they spoke of Atman-Brahman and the Buddha nature. I am not suggesting that all of these people describe the same reality in the same way, but there are striking similarities suggesting intuitions of something of God’s Being within each of us. The god-self is the one self-system that has the structural power
to pull together and knit up into a unity the basic polarities of life expressed
throughout the course in this diagram:
This diagram expresses what the Omega Point -- unity with rich diversity -- looks like in the individual. The god-self is the unity of the highest of the human and the depth of the divine in us. It is our fulfilled humanity and also the pattern of our likeness to God. This inner, powerful sub-self is, at the same time, God's hidden rock on which evil founders and breaks apart. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis describes how the god figure, the lion Aslan, takes on himself the punishment of the little boy who has violated the law of the White Witch's world. Aslan rises again from the dead and the witch's perpetual winter is overthrown. Aslan explains that the White Witch did not know of the older, deeper magic, by which is meant the saving power of sacrificial love which encloses but transcends law. The deeper magic is hidden because we think and live mostly within the narrow blinders of self-centered anxiety belonging to the self-systems of the lower stages in our development. But there is also within each of us the god-self, the inner influence which continually offers us choices based upon the deep magic of God's creative, unselfish, unanxious love. Left Brain/Right Brain How should those of us who do not consider ourselves mystics think of the concept of the god-self? How might we understand it scientifically? Over the last couple of decades, the scientific hypothesis of
bicameral (left/right) brain has been introduced and much discussed. The
right hemisphere of the brain, the theory has had it, does not record material
in words and numbers. It receives and organizes material in patterns (gestalts),
feelings and pictures. It operates as an unconscious reservoir for innovative
intuitions. Bob Samples calls this side of the brain the "metaphoric mind"
and says of it:
This division of function, whether it is localized or operates throughout the brain, suggests that there may be a scientific basis for the god-self, that of God in each of us. This provides an inner source, as Nicholas Berdyaev believed, of true revelation and genuine freedom, formed as a wholistic pattern with its own special sources and boundaries. This unconscious, pattern-forming function of the brain means that we have the biological capacity for the formation of various sub-selves. The same emotion-laden experience may be simultaneously and unconsciously recorded in different sub-selves with quite different codings. We will see in sessions 4 and 5 how this may take place. The god-self is the inner reservoir of greatest maturity. Its hidden and unanalyzed impact throughout our lives may be the best way to account for the astonishing bursts of sacrificial altruism on the part of little children. It may explain the insights of prophets, saints and seers through history who seem to stand out like mountains above those around them, ethically and morally. Taken together, the god-self and stages of development bring into focus more clearly than any other set of lenses how God's love has been able to appear and act in history, how S/He has built in the power necessary for love's victory over evil, both in human beings and human history, and how this victory is achieved without overriding the individual freedom of will essential to our godlikeness. The Age of the Spirit Part II of the course is unified around the theme, the age of the Spirit. The age of the Spirit symbolizes and sums up a central point of the course, that how we see God changes in step with the growing maturity of our understanding of God. It has, in addition, another more specific implication, that law and forgiveness (justification) are too narrow to sum up what God is doing and wants from us. If we obey the law and are forgiven and justified by faith, this only leads us to the vital questions: We are saved to what? What are we meant to become and to do? Beyond law and justification is creativity. God expects from us a creative response to his love. We are not destined to sit on clouds and play harps. We are to be co-creators with God into eternity. This theme was first made central to a theology by Nicholas Berdyaev's The Meaning of the Creative Act published in Russia in 1916. To him it meant that God's purpose is not primarily to get some individuals into a place called heaven. God in the third age of history, the age of the Spirit, is looking forward to the flowering of human initiative and human creativity. Humanity is not the passive recipient of God's grace. Humanity is destined to participate in and help complete the divine creation. A faith for the age of the Spirit shows how the contradictions which torment us daily are destined to be knit up in a higher synthesis, into a unifying, believable, redemptive and exultant way of life. It is theology which stimulates the formation of new kinds of community that actively press people to grow and celebrate and create. It is designed to inspire, motivate and empower people to go on to wholeness, to mature, healthy, joyful lives. This is a Christian faith, based upon the deepest and highest strands in the Bible and the Christian tradition. But it is a system which is also rooted in modern science and psychology in ways which open it out for fruitful, reconciling dialogue with those who are atheists, agnostics or adherents of other religions. It is a way of life, moreover, much of which can be put to the test, both in scientific research and in daily life. Such a wholistic, liberating and unifying faith is essential if Christianity is to have continuing relevance in our world. It is the energizing and unifying kind of Good News which speaks clearly to 21st century people. It is a faith which could fuel a meaningful reformation in the church. It is perhaps the only kind of new vision which is powerful enough to cause people to rise above narrow ethnic and nationalistic self-interest sufficiently to tackle effectively the global challenges of genocidal wars, nuclear weapons, famine, abject poverty, environmental pollution and chronic injustice. Some of the points I make are from Matthew Fox's The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. 5 He calls for a rediscovery of mysticism. And the way he defines mysticism looks remarkably like the stage 6-7 personality I describe in session 7. I am also indebted to Fox for luring me into the depths of Meister Eckhardt. However, this course goes beyond Fox in that it attempts to describe links and transmission belts between God and humanity, elements not dealt with directly in his work. The stages of development and the god-self contribute substantially to our understanding of the origin and nature of evil and the sources and power of good in us. These two root metaphors also help us solve more adequately the problem of how the gulf between God and humanity is crossed and how the manner of the crossing fully affirms God's initiative and grace but also accords full participation, dignity and freedom to humanity. Wholeness and Liberation These two paradigms, moreover, enable us to define the terms wholeness and liberation in a way which show how both are interrelated and both relate God, good and evil to the biology of the brain and the scientific researches of developmental psychology. It gives the renewal of mysticism, for which Fox calls, a biological and psychological grounding which should make the idea more hospitable to 21st century people. Ultimately, there is no full liberation without wholeness. Liberation as the struggle for social justice finds harmony with the truths in Christian mysticism within the wholeness of the god-self. There, both social justice and mysticism are also unified with a devotional piety and a life style of creativity, sensuousness and celebration. All of these belong to each other within the larger framework of what God is doing in us and in history. The many conservative, minimalist, reductionist theologies try to restore some original nature or to fulfill some past human vision of what God intends humanity to become. The task of theology is rather to unriddle God's intended goal for human nature and humanity. We are to do our best to read the trajectory of God's grace as it has acted in the past and then to draw that line on into the future as far as we can meaningfully project it. And the criteria for evaluating the past and envisioning our future are to be taken from the best pictures we have of wholistic, healthy, joyful, maturely loving people and the kind of society which produces them and which they produce. For Christians this means establishing our baseline in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God's nonviolent, noncoercive love was with us personally in history. From this firm peg driven in history we cast our lines seeking understanding both into the past and the future. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus we are led, not only from behind but from the future, as with a pillar of fire by night and a shining cloud by day, into our destined godlikeness. The natural question at this point is which of the many Jesuses that are offered should be followed. Session 16 offers very specific answers to this question. It utilizes one of the most provocative and wholistic approaches to biblical study to come on the market in a long time: Binding the Strong Man, A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus (Orbis Press, 1988) by Ched Myers. Myers transforms our traditional flat, monochrome interpretations of the gospel into tri-dimensional Technicolor. He reveals how Mark speaks to us with as much relevance as he did to his own struggling minority community of believers a generation after Jesus. Two Questions To get at the meaning of the Omega Point and the age of the Spirit, I repeatedly raise two questions. These questions draw out and elaborate dramatically what is different about this theology. The questions are: 1. What does the Christian faith look like if salvation is believed to mean becoming like God rather than going to a place called heaven? 2. What would a stage 6 and 7 faith look like? Or a stage 6-7 church, or ethics, or personality? These questions and their answers give us a pragmatic definition of what Berdyaev called the age of the Spirit, though they certainly do not exhaust the subject. The answers to both questions converge in the end. And the implications of these answers help us to a uniquely clear understanding of our own age and the ways in which we must respond to its enormous challenges. Questions for Thought 1. Read again the descriptions of the seven gods we worship and write down or discuss which views you have held during your life and where you are now. 2. Consider or discuss the two questions listed immediately above? How would you answer them at this point? Again, feel free to read ahead if you feel like and and to email
the author your comments or questions: at 1. The Phenomenon of Man, Harper and Row, Publishers, New
York, 1965, page 233. First published in 1955 in French. © Vern Rossman
vjross22@hotmail.com
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