World of Love Sess13 - Religions in the Age of the Spirit

The God who was unending love and sustained creative power, who had made man in his image and bidden him to become holy like his creator is hypostacized and adored and ceases to be a challenge, a commandment and an imperative. The law is abrogated and supplanted by faith; and with the conception of hell, cruelty is projected into a mien that had never been cheerful, and the divine countenance is surrounded with an aura of magic, miracles and superstituion. In the end, man lies in the dust before his own graven image. -Walter Kaufmann ¹

The Coming of Christ into the world is the central fact of anthropogony, the flowering time of humanity. But man's self-consciousness was not immediately revealed in Chrstianity and it had to pass through stages of development, nor is there any reason to suppose that this process is finished. ... Christianity has not been finally actualized and has immense potentialities. The conservative element in Christianity cannot tolerate even the idea of a potential creative energy because, as far as it is concerned, everything has been finally actualized. Thus the content of Christianity is impoverished and it almost looks as if men wanted to limit it for fear of its possibilities. Our task is certainly not to adapt Christianity to modern naturalistic evolutionism, as certain "modernists" do, but rather to discover in its depths a principle independent of development. -Nicholas Berdyaev ²

A faith for the age of the Spirit should be able to show how the world religions can establish peace with one another and provide a basis for fruitful dialogue among themselves as a basis for contributing to peace and justice in the world at large. This end is implied in Teihard du Chardin's Omega Point.

So much in comparative religion has been off course because it was are based on a least common denominator approach. This papers over differences. It tends also to reduce religion to ethics and then to search until teachings are found which appear to be similar.

What is required, rather, is dialogue based upon a frank acceptance of differences.

The most promising path is to center on a question of common concern to all religions: What is healthy, whole, strong joyous humanity, and how do we produce it?

The corollary is: What kind of society nurtures such people and how can we achieve it? This is the way suggested in this course.

This should be accompanied by joint projects in feeding the hungry and eliminating disease and poverty and strife. Only this can give urgency and realism to dialogue.

Crisis and Response

Religion, especially in its relationship to human personality and society is undergoing a basic crisis. The main crisis for all faiths is posed by what might be termed the acids of modernity. This is the challenge of science, secularization, modern technology, materialism, democracy, and other secular ideologies and trends.

Science, in its various manifestations, challenges the truth of many religious claims, while the other forces call into question the personal and social values of any religion except a religion of humanity.

The way in which each religion reacts to this multi-faceted crisis determines its relevance to the emergence of a new humanity of loving, joyous people.

It would be encouraging if we could simply conclude that those religions which don't move with the signs of the times will just fade away. Unfortunately, as we see from the maneuvers of fundamentalist rightists in the United States and Iran, there are demonic and destructive dimensions to the defensive writhings of religious communities which feel themselves undercut by modern trends.

Reactions to the crises in the religions often breeds fanatical extremes, theocratic dictatorships and genocidal violence.

Religions in History

Looking at religions and their role in history, this student concludes reluctantly that over 90% of the manifestations of religion in history have been reactionary rather than progressive so far as the encouragement of human freedom, justice and compassion are concerned. Most religions through most of history have bound humankind in taboos, self-torture, and self-denial.

In addition, as critics from Nietzsche through Walter Kaufmann and Ernest Becker have pointed out, religions have acted to leach the creative energy and initiative out of humanity by ascribing the glory and worth all to God.

Religions have also, in every generation, entered into collusion with ruthless rulers to maintain social control and supported use of torture, imprisonment and judicial murder.

This has been the story of Christianity from the time of Constantine and of Judaism in Israel since 1967. Christianity is, of course, the religion which is most guilty, because it claims to be based upon faith in a God who is self-sacrificing and all-inclusive love.
In this session we look at the signs of the times relating to religion in two respects: (1) The crises in religion and the kinds of reaction we see in them; and (2) an analysis of each major religion in terms of the specific crises and decisions it faces.
I do not discuss secular ideologies which have performed the role of religion for many, such as Nazism and Communism.

Stage 6-7 Religion

To stand outside the religions and judge them requires criteria against which we can measure each one objectively. To attain such a perspective we'll look through the lenses of Kohlberg's stages and the god-self, by asking again our two basic questions:

1. What would a religion be like if it taught that salvation is more to become like God than to go to a place called heaven?

In this course, godlike is defined as becoming the four-fold structure of agape with its wholistic power of being.

2. What would a stage 6-7 religion look like?

What kind of religion cherishes and produces all the dimensions of human wholeness, including individual freedom, compassion, universal content and concern, and internal integrity?

What kind of religion considers each individual to be as valuable and beloved as any other, regardless of age, education, possessions, level of moral maturity or kind of behavior?

What kind of religion refuses to hold meditation or celibacy or personal piety above the feeding and healing of children or the establishment of justice in societies?

In passing, let's note that a good rule of thumb for judging religions is the way they counsel their nations to treat the poor, the weak and helpless and the ideological outcast. Look at what a religion says about the right and wrong of who prosper economically and who do not, who get health care, education, housing, who have some control of their destiny and who do not, who are warm in winter and who are cold, who are abused and cannot find judicial relief and who are automatically defended within the system. Take into account also the nation's wealth, its comparative ability to care for the poor, children, the aged, the mentally ill, and culturally handicapped. Look at what the religion says about war and about the right of people to kill and for what reasons.

This is admittedly something of a western and Christian definition of religion and its goals. But I believe it opens up the questions of concern to all humankind, the immediate, important issues with which all the religions must wrestle.

Perhaps more important, they are questions which judge as deeply and critically the Christian churches as they do any other of the other religions.

Hans Kung's Criteria

Catholic theologian Hans Kung's book, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View, presents an important set of hypotheses on the basis of which denominations and religions may enter into dialogue toward an ecumenical theology, or, in the case of religions, a basis for cooperation and peace.

He suggests, as I do, that the basis for inter-religious dialogue is the question of true humanity. What preserves and enhances human life at its highest, individual and social?

Kung also attempts his own definition of human and humane and sets up criteria for true and untrue (good and bad) religion:

According to the basic norm of genuine humanity, good and evil, true and false, can be distinguished. We can also distinguish what is basically good and evil, what is true and what is false in any individual religion. This criterion might be formulated with regard to religion as follows:

a) Positive criterion: Insofar as a religion serves the virtue of humanity, insofar as its teachings on faith and morals, its rites and institutions support human beings in their human identity, and allows them to gain a meaningful and fruitful existence, it is a true and good religion.

In other words:

Whatever manifestly protects, heals and fulfills human beings in their physical and psychic, individual and social humanness (life, integrity, justice, peace), what, in other words, is humane and truly human, can with reason invoke "the divine."

b) Negative criterion: Insofar as a religion spreads inhumanity, insofar as its teachings on faith and morals, its rites and institutions hinder human beings in their human identity, meaningfulness, and valuableness, insofar as it helps to make them fail to achieve a meaningful and fruitful existence, it is a false and bad religion.

Whatever manifestly oppresses, injures, and destroys human beings in their physical and psychic, individual and social humanness (life, integrity, freedom, justice, peace), what, in other words is inhumane, not truly human, cannot with reason invoke, "the divine." ³

Kung is clear that his is a post-modern post-liberal form of Christian theology, and does not represent all forms of Christianity, certainly not the fundamentalist Protestant, the classical Reformation, the Neo-Scholastic Catholic, and so on.
This is the form of Christianity which is most open to dialogue with other religions on an equal basis. Perhaps Kung's way of defining human good is too Christian and western, but then presumably the other religions also come to the table with their own definitions and criteria. The results of such dialogue can only be good.

Four Deadends

Every major religion seeking to cope with the challenge of science and technology, secularism, pluralism and the other acids of modernity finds four contradictory movements struggling within itself. Each of these is a deadend. By deadend I mean that none of them results in genuine religious renewal.

They are strategies of survival, each of which tends to undercut any truly creative response to the crises. They are efforts to save religion rather than to allow it to follow the guideposts God has planted along the historical trail. Each of these strategies is an attempt to evade the hard, narrow path of agape.

Each is an attempt to pull in the walls of religion to confine the Spirit within the blinders of one of Kohlberg's lower stages of development. Religion then continues to operate to protect our laziness, fears and prejudices, not to mention our class economic self-interest.

Stage Level and Religion

When a society or individual remains trapped at a lower stage level the condition is not morally and psychologically neutral. As other people and societies are changing and opening out, the closed person or society is led by the outside threat to often severe defensive reactions.

We should note that people who remain at the preconventional levels (stages 1 & 2) basically want to be followers, to be taken care of, to trail after some leader on a white horse. They do not want to think or decide. They usually don't care much who gets killed or tortured in the process of securing a stable and supportive environment for themselves.

Those at the conventional levels (stages 3 & 4) tend to feel a compulsion to find an interpretation of life which is clear, firm and unchanging. They have a need for a strong supportive shell of faith around them. As we saw in session 6, when the boundaries are threatened by other faiths, those at stages 3 & 4 tend to circle the wagons and either isolate themselves or strike out against the threatening heretics. They see and picture themselves more and more as the good faith defending itself against evil.

Such a faith shell always defines itself by excluding others: We are Christians and capitalists; we distrust Moslems and hate communists. Because it is dogma, handed down by the leaders, such Christians find themselves simultaneously trying to outlaw abortion and at the same time advocating capital punishment and threatening to use nuclear weapons all without sensing any contradiction.

With this as background let's move on to look at the four deadends religions come up against as they attempt to neutralize the acids of modernity mentioned earlier.

The four deadend movements are: modernism, fundamentalism, ethno-political religion, and new sects and syncretism.

1. Modernism

Modernism is the attempt to adapt traditional beliefs to modern science, technology and cultural-political trends.

Religions are eroded by the acids of modernity. Science explains many of the mysteries of nature and contradicts the pseudo-science of the scriptures. The ties of dogma are loosened. In an increasingly secularized and pluralistic world, religious communities cannot insulate their young people from other ways of life. So some reach for new interpretations of scripture and draw new lines of acceptable and unacceptable behavior which take in and baptize secular beliefs and styles of life.

First, Christian modernists said that Creation took six days, but the days were thousands of years long. Then, in the next stage, they say the whole story is just a myth anyway; the Bible is not a book of science but of faith. Demythologization explains away miracles. Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes; he just gave an example of love and the people all got out their lunches and shared them. That's a great sermon but it's not the point the gospel writer was making.

Modernism is appropriate to stage 5, the age of pluralism, democracy, individualism and a permissive view of life.

Modernism undercuts the controlling power of scripture, dogma and religious authorities.

Most forms of modernism are no antidote to the crisis of the acids of modernity because they go over to the enemy. Modernism concedes too much. It is essentially a negative process. It erodes authority but cannot replace it with a viable substitute. It tends to replace religious feeling with arid philosophy, the warm emotions of pietism with the cold atmosphere of a lecture hall. It is strong for social justice but is not at home with the end called death.

Modernism and the stage 5 churches tend to stop spiritual growth short at stage 5 and to keep people suspended there.

Modernism encourages a permissive society, but gives little clear guidance on what the new morality is and what it aims to produce. It pushes a vague stage 5 liberal permissive God.

The most frequent religious reaction to the vagueness and coldness of modernism is fundamentalism. Keep in mind that while our examples largely come from Christianity, the same dynamics are at work in Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic communities and nations.

2. Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is an attempt to return to the oldest, most primitive roots of the faith and to cling to them as an anchor in an age when everything seems to be loose and flapping in the wind. If you can return to the point where the spring emerges from the mountain you find the purest water. This core of irreducible and absolute truth is then supposed to be something everyone can agree upon.

Fundamentalism also cannot succeed. The origins of all religions are too obscure and pluralistic. No unassailable foundation can be found. Christian fundamentalists, for instance, are at war with one another and also with evangelicals who tend to believe that while the Bible is literally true it is not infallible in its every word and concept.

Fundamentalism's critical flaw, from the point of view of wholeness and the god-self, is that it is reductionist. In defining an official body of doctrine and limiting good behavior to a narrow list of permissible enjoyments, it truncates human development and limits divinely ordained creativity and enjoyment of the world the Creator declared good.

Fundamentalism tends to freeze human development at stages 3 and 4. It is sexist, so it tends to freeze female development in a dependent, home-bound, husband-dominated stage 3. (Even by the post-Gilligan grading criteria. See Appendix B.) Fundamentalist men get out into the world of business and politics, so may be stimulated to advance to a very narrow stage 4 perspective.

Every negative thing which I have said about fundamentalism, and will say about other religious movements, represents a major characteristic or trend in that faith community. However, it is important to point out that there are notable individual exceptions and significant reform minorities in every religious community. This qualification must be made in order to avoid distortion.

Fundamentalism is based on external authority, on scripture and dogma backed by the power of charismatic authority figures. You believe because you trust those who tell you it is true.

Dependence on authority figures blocks the advance to stages 5 & 6 where authority is of necessity centered in internalized, self-chosen standards formed in an dialogic atmosphere of creativity and an open future of many possibilities.

3. Ethno-political Religion

Because of the failure of both the modernist and fundamentalist alternatives, some turn to other solutions: ethno-national religion, new sects or syncretism.

Ethno-political religion is religion in the service of politics.

The authorities are ostensibly religious but are actually interested in social control, using religion to unite the people behind their policies and rule. Emperor worship in Rome was one example. The superficial capitalist God to which American politicians appeal is another.

Ethno-political religion is folk religion. Its rubrics are the "In God We Trust" on American coins and the "Gott mit uns" on German army belt buckles in World War I. Gott mit uns has the same happy ambiguity as America's cultural icons. It can mean either, "God is on our side!" or "We pray that God is with us!" The vast gulf between the two is conveniently papered over.

We see this operating to some extent in every country where one religion is represented by a political party consolidating its power.

In Uganda, Idi Amin sided with Islam and Christians were massacred. In Iran believers in Bahai and other minorities have been executed or imprisoned.

Islam is not the only religion which has factions that assume they should totally control the state and dictate the morality of the nation. In India Hindu fundamentalists seek laws restricting other religions and especially their evangelistic outreach. In Thailand and Burma, the Buddhist majorities assume their right to work their will on the Karens, Kachins and other hill tribes, many of whom are Christian. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Islamic majorities have substantial, organized factions which want to totally control public policy and to restrict the rights of Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and others.

Fundamentalists and other conservatives often give themselves to such alliances between religion and state power, as with the Christian Coalition in America.
This is the death of religion as religion. The religion loses its ability to speak to the modern world; it packs religion away in a box where it cannot change and cope realistically with the modern world and its devastating issues.

Ethno-political religion is dragged along at the tailgate of national policy. It forfeits the possibility of universal appeal.

Universality to these movements means to convert all peoples to their beliefs.

Ethno-political religion, as with fundamentalism, tends to freeze the development of individuals and society at stages 3 and 4.

4. New Sects and Syncretism

Modernism, fundamentalism and ethno-political religion fail. Many people prefer to try a new start through some sect offering a new revelation and/or a syncretism of the best and highest in all religions.

This happens in a variety of ways. Often it is a new prophet, who declares a fresh and certain word of God.

Nichiren, in the 13th century, came down from Mt.Heiei near Kyoto proclaiming all the other forms of Buddhism false. The only true scripture, he said, was the Lotus Sutra, and only as interpreted by him. So the most aggressive and powerful sects of modern Buddhism in Japan were born, also the ones which claim they will become the religion of all humankind.

We know of the Book of Morman and the distinctive beliefs of the Seventh Day Adventists, both based in the work of a new prophet. These are only three examples of many.

Some sects are syncretistic, claiming to take the basic truths from all religions. But usually each is based in one religion (Islam in the case of Bahai) while drawing on ethical teachings from others.

None of the new sects born in the last hundred years can succeed in becoming a major religion. Each runs against obstacles which cause it to become a small, embattled minority. None can attract a majority of the people in even one nation.

There are good psychological and historical reasons why this is true. Some sects draw tight boundaries of belief and practice which confine the human spirit and truncate its freedom and creativity. Other sects are broad and inclusive. Both ways leach out religious power ultimately.

The broad and inclusive sects lose all boundaries, the boundaries which produce in stage 3 and 4 people that narrow, intense passion required for aggressive evangelistic effort. They are weakened by their lack of specificity beyond vague appeals to universal love and brotherhood.

The new religions which have grown rapidly and developed political clout (as with the Nichiren sects in Japan which has the powerful Sokkagakkai as its lay arm) have been especially narrow, exclusive and proselytizing. In this they are like the fundamentalists of the major religions. This is their strength and also their ultimate weakness.

New religions and sects go through a period of rapid growth, reach a certain peak, and then start to fall off. As they decline they become more and more ingrown and less and less influential. The prophet dies and then they fragment. They are eventually pressed and hemmed in on all sides. They are resisted by those who represent established religions and sects and also by atheists, agnostics and those who want to use religion for political ends.

Syncretisms fail for the same reasons sects do; in fact, they become sects.
A true religion, someone remarked, is a seamless garment, a internally united pattern of faith and action. The new sects and syncretisms tend to be quilts, made up of scraps and pieces which are roughly sewn together and lack an coherent pattern around which an appealing unity can be built. They tend to repel those many who find any one of the scraps unacceptable.

These, then, are the four deadends and the reasons why each fails to create vital religion or to become universal.

An Alternative

Each of the four deadends poisons religion, preventing its becoming a kind of faith and system which promotes growth into the godlikeness of freedom, integrity, cosmic expansion and nonviolent love.

None of them offers believers a workable way out of the crisis posed to religion by the corroding acids of modernity.

Those religions which claim a huge percentage of humanity as believers are actually collections of religions; they are not unified within themselves. Christianity is not only divided into denominations, but churches tend to be spread theologically and ethically across Kohlberg's stages.

There is no majority religion, and nothing approaching it. Moreover, none of the religions shows any promise of becoming a majority religion, much less a power which can unite all of humanity in a single faith.

Is there another alternative? Yes, that suggested in the first seven sessions of this study. I do not mean that it can unite humanity, certainly not in the forseeable future. Rather, it can perform a necessary function in the process. It can bring into the mix witnessing communities dedicated to boundless human growth, creativity, justice and specifically effective love. These will offer an alternative for those who need the stimulus and example required to advance beyond stage 5 to stages 6 and 7. This in turn opens up for all humanity a possibility whose time has come, a communal example in a time of confusion and darkness of a form of faith which promises to advance us decisively toward total liberation.

This, understood properly, I think, is the way God has intended us to go from the beginning. In every level of individual life and at each stage in history, we are posed with decisions each of which is a specific turning toward life or toward death.

If humanity had taken the right turnings at each point in history we would have moved more quickly and with less destructivness through the stages of development into godlikeness. Humanity usually chose the direction of spiritual death, of selfish domination, of violence and hate and greed, instead of the way of a creative life of mutual self-giving, nonviolent love. So religions are necessarily in disarray along with all other aspects of our lives. We did not follow the red thread of nonviolent love, so we got lost in smoky mazes of alienation and violence.

Let us look now at each major religion, raising only one or two key questions each with regard to that faith's central dilemma.

Christianity - Giving up Winning

Christians are the most guilty of all the believers of all religions, because we have done the poorest job of all of living to the highest we profess to believe.

We claim to believe in an all-powerful, compassionate and just God, who loves each person in the human family equally and who stands for a humble, self-giving love in opposition to all forms of violence, coercion, manipulation and deceit. Not only do we not conduct ourselves that way, but we have twisted our faith to conform to our deviation from the Gospel.

Christians, to represent our God, must give up what is called triumphalism. We must give up the hope of winning all people to Christ through evangelism, as most of us have, thank God, given up the notion that we should convert them by sword or cultural pressure.

Instead, individually and collectively, we must try to live the way of agape in and before the world, letting our words and actions carry the message of the out-going, nonmanipulative love of God. That is all the evangelism (proclamation of the Good News) which is needed. Anything which is not based upon this communal reality tends to make people, as Jesus said of the converts of the Pharisees, "twice as much sons of hell as themselves."

Since most of this course is a critique of Christianity and suggestions for change, there is no need to develop the subject further here.

Judaism - To fulfill II Isaiah's Vision

The crisis in Judaism is whether it will become a universal religion proclaiming
of a God of justice and compassion as preached by II Isaiah, or will remain an narrow, exclusivist, ethnic sect dedicated to self-preservation.

This drama is played out in Israel in the specific decisions facing the Jews as to how they will treat the Palestinians. The political choice involves a theological decision of ultimate import for the religion. If they choose to establish a theocracy, a nation of Jews for Jews, they will have to give up the dream of Zionist founders of being a modern, pluralistic, democratic state. However humane their treatment of the Arabs within the country and around them may be, they will of necessity reduce those peoples to third class citizenship, as the South Africans did with the black people.

The Arabs in Palestine have fully as ancient and valid a claim to the land as the Jews. They are stateless and homeless people in their own land.

The Jews must choose. If they decide God gave them the land of Palestine forever and their main job is to survive as a people within these boundaries, this is spiritual suicide. It involves victimizing another people and defining God's purpose in narrow, sectarian, ethnic lines. God becomes again the tribal God of his chosen people.

If Judaism should decide, on the other hand, as II Isaiah called them to do, to become the suffering servant of Yahweh, witnessing to God's nonviolent love through the marks of their suffering, they have the scars to make themselves heard and believed. If they should open their hands and hearts and land to the Palestinians and welcome them as equal and beloved children of one God, then all the peoples of the world would rally to help the Arab and Jewish children of Abraham (Semites all!) establish a nation or nations in Palestine which can live in peace and prosperity and become a beacon of reconciliation and community for all peoples everywhere.

Hinduism and Buddhism - Self, No Self or Communal Self

Both Hinduism and Buddhism are collections of religions, from polytheism through monotheism to forms of atheism. Buddhism is a reformed Hinduism. Both have been subject in the past century to all four of the movements cited above: modernism, fundamentalism, ethno-political use of religion, and new sects and syncretism.

The concepts of the god-self and of stages of development are a new and potentially fruitful opening to the Eastern religions. In a sense, in this transformation of the faith we already meet them half way.

There are two questions Christians must raise for dialogue with Hindus and Buddhists. The first is: Do not both religions focus on the unreality (illusion in Hinduism) of this life and its character as suffering to be escaped (Buddhism), and so leach much of the optimism, sensuality, joy and play out of this world and its existence?

The second question is usually expressed somewhat as follows: When one emerges into oneness with the Absolute, achieving moksha (salvation) or enlightenment, does the individual self survive in awareness and fulfillment? Or is it, as a lot of the language of Hindu and Buddhist mysticism suggests, like a drop of water vanishing into the ocean or the flame of a candle losing itself in the infinite Flame of the Absolute?

Following certain lines of development within both clusters of religion would allow a closer rapprochement between the kind of Christian faith I am describing and these religions. Some of the following points which Christians might raise at the table would challenge but others would sound unusually compatible:

(1) Affirm that there is a personal loving God and not just an impersonal structure (Dharma) or undifferentiated Absolute at the end of the trail. It might be best to describe God as supra-personal, which would indicate that S/He is not less but more personal than we are.

(2) Affirm that reincarnation with forgetfulness between rebirths undercuts both the gracefulness of the Creator and the moral responsibility of the individual. Rather, we are perfected in future lives in other dimensions in full awareness of our previous lives through accepting specific responsibility for our sins and by continuing to give and receive grace in loving, redemptive relationship with other individuals.

(3) Affirm that the god-self within, our God-gestalt, is indeed the Atman and the Buddha nature which is one in structure with the supra-personal God.

Some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism already have a firm grasp upon the truth that godlikeness is something we must become rather than a place to which we go.

The Mahayana sects of China and Japan encourage people to believe that upon death they go to a sort of heaven, the great Eastern Paradise. In this sense, they are like medieval Catholicism which preached a crude popular form of the faith, peopled with demons, relics and saints, while allowing mystics and monastics and theologians to have a more mature faith. The theory is that you must manipulate people into heaven by preaching what you believe they can understand and once there they will learn the larger truth. This is condescension and paternalism.

(4) Affirm that, while there are many word pictures for salvation, in the end it means becoming like God and, as a result of that likeness, one with God in a communion of common enjoyment among personal centers, and not an extinguishing of the Atman or Buddha nature within an undifferentiated One. Enlightenment, beatitude, escape from maya (illusion) into moksha or release from the suffering of fate into the bliss of Nirvana, all of these images can be complementary aspects of one reality if salvation is understood as the emergence and fulfillment of our God nature and its unity with God.

In Christian mysticism, as a rule, the ultimate relationship with God has been described as a communion in love and purpose and spirit rather than a union. The latter suggests a loss of individual identity.

In the light cast by Kohlberg's researches we can see a whole new aspect of the monistic/atheist forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, those which deal with God as Absolute in a way similar to Neoplatonism. They, it now appears, are trying to leap over all the intervening stages of development to stage 7n without going through them.

It is as though all the rungs of the ladder have been removed except the top one and people are expected to leap clear to the top in one jump. This is like trying to park the apex of a pyramid in the air with nothing underneath to hold it up. The passage through the early stages provide the substance which fills and provides form to the eventual cosmic expansion of the self. Otherwise, it is like a balloon full of hot air, and just as unstable. The practical result of such a projection of the ultimate is that people are not able to live by the ideal. They instead fall back into polytheism or other forms of religion which are stage-appropriate. Christians do the same thing in relation to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

There is no particular reason to believe that the Hindu and Buddhist vision of the ultimate end of humanity is any more accurate than any other, since we are unable to envision clearly what stage 7 is like until we are approaching stage 6, assuming that Kohlberg is correct in contending that no one can see clearly more than one stage beyond where she is operating.

In the relation of the human self to the Absolute, both Hinduism and Buddhism have had some of the same problems Christians had in the early centuries in describing the relationship of Jesus Christ to God. A primitive, almost physical, notion of substance in both cases prevents the paradoxical relation of self to absolute from being properly defined to show how individual differences are preserved and enrich a complex whole.

If oneness is defined rather as sharing the same basic gestalt, the structure of agape, then it is clear how the ultimate unity preserves and treasures the particular, specific and concrete experiences of individual lives.

A Communal God

A possible meeting point on this issue involves recognizing that God or the Absolute is and will be a community. This powerfully challenges the western idea of autonomous individual selves. The fulfilled god-self is, in itself, a collective or communal personality in two senses: (1) So much grace will have been poured into each of us by other people that we will be intertwined with all of them in loving relationships in our memories. Parts of them are in us and parts of us are in them. We have no wish or need to pose as or to pretend to be a self-made person. (2) We will surely, in future existences, be in much closer communion mentally with one another, in something like what we call telepathic communication but perhaps within a network of greater intimacy than we can now imagine.

This assertion forms a solid meeting point between East and West halfway between the two extremes of individual autonomy and being extinguished in the One. It is indeed a union of sorts, a genuine oneness, but without losing the individual flavor and unique contribution of each personal center.

(6) Affirm that karma (the destiny or fate which arises from our past sins) binding us to the wheel of suffering or to illusion is one of the characteristics of the demonic self-systems. They are fragments and so do not have power of being sufficient to conquer anxiety, illusion, and the defensive measures which lead to struggles for power and security, violence and other evil.
The dynamics of the demonic self-systems can indeed be described as a kind of fate, since they are fixed in form and cannot be changed. They can only be put to death.

(7) Affirm that salvation does not come through austerity or denial of the sensuous enjoyment of body and world. The pleasures of the flesh are not incompatible with the highest life of the spirit. Celibacy is not superior to a life in which sexual communion plays a large part. Rather our salvation or enlightenment involves liberation from control by the world of things in terms of no longer worshipping them idolatrously. Or, to put it differently, we no longer need any of them but rather are freed to enjoy them all.

Islam - Going Beyond the Book

The crisis in the religious world of Islam also is a reaction to the acids of modernity. Many devout Muslims feel goaded to justify the absolute truth of their faith once and for all. Some conservatives are tempted to go back to the theology of jihad, holy war.
That is the same dilemma as has had to be faced in Christianity: triumphalism.

If Islam is to take a peaceful place among the family of religions and nations, and engage in dialogue rather than shouting, it must transcend the belief that the Koran is verbally inspired. There is too much inhuman and cruel in the Koran, as there is also in the Bible. (Recall the story of God's sending the bears to eat the children who mocked the prophet.)

If this can be done, as the mystics of Suffism have, then a number of good results occur: Islam will be able to give up both the psychology and the practice of jihad, the belief that Allah wants the conversion of others at the point of a sword or by political pressure.

Islam must learn to walk upon the mountain peaks in the Koran, as Christians have to learn to do within the Bible. Then, both religions will find it possible to affirm that the highest attribute of God is love. This is to emphasize the images in the Koran which speak of Allah as merciful, forgiving, caring as a parent, and so on. By this route, too, Islam will be freed of the compulsive need to control all of society in accordance with the most narrow-minded and punitive Islamic version of natural law.

There is historical precedent in the history of Islam for such behavior. After Islam had established its first empire, from Turkey and Spain through northern India, it settled down into a period of liberalism, openness, scientific investigation and thirst for education and knowledge in all fields of human endeavor. Muslims were often more tolerant of Christians and Jews in their midst than the nations of Christendom were of adherents to other faiths.

What ended this openness to creativity and change, in a real sense, was the behavior of Christendom. The poisoning of relationships began with the Crusades. Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries there were new invasions and pressures from the West which caused a defensiveness and stagnation in Islam.

This was followed by the conquest of the Islamic countries and their domination by the West. So, the current resurgence of fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world is a reaction to the militarism, domination and cruelty of the so-called Christian nations. It is also a crying out of the human spirit for meaning, some way to make sense of life and what may lie beyond it.

We of the West helped create the fundamentalist theocracies of Islamic countries as we did Hitler. This is a lesson we must learn from history and learn well.

Confucianism - The Humanistic Family Way

Confucianism, with only tiny exceptions, is not an organized religion. It is a philosophy of human relationships and social organization.

People tend to underestimate the enduring power of Confucianism in the modern world. Perhaps it will be clearer if we point out that the dramatic economic success of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore and the amazing changes in the Peoples Republic of China are a result more of the residual power of Confucianism than either the influence of Marxism or capitalism. None of these societies is significantly either Marxist or capitalist. But they all share a deeply ingrained devotion to the belief that society should be structured at every level on the model of the family, an essentially patriarchal, authoritarian family at that.

It is this deeply felt need for peace and order in society, for knowing one's place in the hierarchy of power and for societal enforcement of conformity, which make it possible to direct economic development from the top, without stifling the emotional support and contribution of individuals and groups within the community.

This is the genius of the Confucian system, that it has built in restraints on arbitrary power alongside the pressure on everyone to accept a responsible role and make a social contribution while bending to authority from above. This is why in these countries it is possible for the government to call in the leaders of banks, industry, science and universities and cause them to work together to engage in long-range planning and development of radically new products, to get them financed and to market them throughout the world. The Confucian countries do not really believe in the virtues of competition, except in a very limited sense of the word. They believe in and practice working together, submitting individuality to the collective.

Dr. T. Hsu, then a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, wrote an article in 1973 which suggests that societies had better take the way of Confucius if they are to survive. ⁴

It is a persuasive article. Dr. Hsu contends that societies can hold together, survive and have peace and harmony only by achieving what he calls Psychosocial Homeostasis, a system which balances authority and freedom. Hsu contends that people are bound together by social role and affect. The individualism and overemphasis on freedom in our western societies, he contends, have destroyed our homeostasis, our balance. We have lost our sense of social role within a whole and we have lost our emotional links to others which are found and expressed within the family.

As a result, Hsu says, the expanding individualist becomes diverted to trying to convert or change others to be like himself, to educate them, uplift and improve them, and in other ways to manipulate them. Mission and conquest become an effort to prove manhood (sic) and adequacy (to fill an inner vacuum of meaning and feeling). This encourages competition and conflict, staking out territories and defending them, trying to get an advantage over others rather than living together in peace and harmony.

Hsu accepts the fact that his way has negative consequences, a curtailing of individual freedom and creativity, but he still favors such reduction, considers it essential:

... my justification is that another name for creativity is deviation, and that uncontrolled development may lead not to social and cultural progress but to social and cultural destruction. When role relationships drive out affect relationships, all humans will treat each other as things (which) will lead to so much more mutual distrust, suspicion, and hatred that our society will find it hard to stay together. ... I feel strongly that our society has already gone too far, and that we need to retrace some of our steps. ⁵

Hsu's analysis of the destructiveness of modern extreme individualisms is as devastating as that of Nicholas Berdyaev. In contrast to Berdyaev, however, he counsels taking a step backward from freedom and creativity, at least temporarily. This sounds like good advice but is neither practical nor, I think, the right response:

1. It is too late to step back; the wine of infinity bubbles in our veins. We are set on a course, sails full spread, and we will ride it out either to destruction or fulfillment. The fires of creativity may be channeled to a greater degree, but not confined to the hearth.

2. It does not seem to me to be the will and purpose of God that we should turn back from expansion of the self and individual autonomy (freedom), only that these be accompanied by a full development of the other two aspects of wholistic power of being: compassion and inner integrity.

The answer is not to go backward to less freedom but on to control and liberation by the realizing the structure of agape.

If we truly believed that there is no God or expansive future beyond this life, then the way of the expanded family, Confucianism, might be our best choice for a religion, Confucianism melded with a kind of Stoic mysticism like that of Marcus Aurelius, a safer religion, that is, if safety is what we really seek.

Within such a social/ideological framework we could have the best of democracy and socialism and family love. There could be gradual extensions of individual freedom and political democracy within a stable framework of social control and responsibility.

Certainly we are headed for a massive and perhaps permanent crash if we neglect the development of small communities of love and loyalty within our emerging universal community. The church was always intended to be an extended family, but one where we learn to make intimacy work beyond the nuclear family. This it must become, or else.

Many Roads, One Peak

There is a lot of sentimental nonsense written by people who should know better about all religious roads leading by different routes to the top of the same peak of salvation.

All roads do not lead to the same peak. Some roads lead into torture chambers and genocidal wars, or to burning widows alive on funeral pyres. Others end up in swamps where people wander endlessly in a fog. Some religious movements cast up big landlords and generals to the top of an exploitative system within which the poor go hungry and die young.

We could say with more hope of accuracy that each religion takes us part way up the mountain, but none, including any existent form of Christianity, goes all the way, as yet. This is true whether we think of salvation as becoming godlike or primarily in terms of producing stage 6-7 people living in a stage 6-7 family of humans.

The religions will meet and come to fruitful harmony only as they begin to measure themselves by what enhances the health and wholeness of human beings and society, as Hans Kung suggests.

Most of them will be able to find this criterion somewhere in their scriptures and history.

They will meet and agree sooner if they join one another in projects of making peace, winning human rights, feeding the hungry, establishing justice and equality.

Questions for Thought

Consider or discuss: The key question here is whether the representatives of the religions can agree on some criteria for judging what is good religion and bad, what is true and false. Read again Hans King's argument. Compare this to Gordon Kaufman's views on theologizing in Appendix A. Does this really represent an imposition of Western democratic and Christian viewpoints on other religions?

Contact the author at: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1961, page 358
2. Freedom and the Spirit, London: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1935, pages 313,4
3. Hans Kung, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View , Doubleday, New York, 1988, pages 243-4
4. T. Hsu, The Center Magazine, November-December, 1973, pages 11-15
5. ibid., pages 13, 14

[top |prev |index |next]