World of Love Sess17 - Providence in the Age of the Spirit

God is not in the world, that is, not in its given factuality and its necessity, but in its setting of a task and in its freedom. ...God is present and God only acts in freedom. He is not present, nor does he act in necessity. God is to be found in Truth, in Goodness, Beauty and Love, but not in the world order. God shows himself in the world in truth and right, but he does not dominate over it in virtue of his power. God is Spirit and he can operate only in Spirit and through Spirit. Our ideas about power, about authority and causality are entirely inapplicable to God. The mystery of God's operation in the world and in man usually finds expression in the doctrine of grace, and grace bears no resemblance to what we understand by necessity, power, authority, and causality, our conception of these is derived from the world. For this reason alone grace cannot be set in antithesis to freedom -- it is combined with freedom. -Nicholas Berdyaev ²

A theology of history for the age of the Spirit recognizes the importance of the quiet dynamics in individuals and society which operate underneath the lusts, ambitions and violence of the events which dominate written history.

Moreover, there are events and structures in personality and society which interact to produce constant challenge to the demonic self-systems within us and the external principalities and powers which sustain those inner demons.

While good does not always triumph in banner headlines, neither does evil ever come out unscathed from the conflict.

Also, the demonic systems work against each other and often cancel each other out, both in individuals and in society.

Progress or Regress?

Are we progressing in world history or regressing? Is good winning against evil? How would we measure and how would we decide?

It is hard to beat Reinhold Niebuhr's answer. He pointed out how our efforts to change things for the better are hampered by our inaccurate word pictures with regard to meaning in history. History is not a circle, as in Platonism or certain Asian views; it is not a matter of cycles eternally recurring. There are real advances and real regressions, real change.

On the other hand, history is not to be understood either as an upwardly inclined plane, things getting better and better, social salvation awaiting around the corner after the application of more effective technology and education. This view, common around the turn of the century, was a fantasy, Niebuhr said, destroyed by two world wars and a major depression. 3

The pessimism arising from global catastrophes and unmanageable problems has helped fuel the popularity especially with American fundamentalists of still another image, that of the descending inclined plane. The world will get worse and worse until the Second Coming of Christ. Then, God will bring history to a resounding end, sending some to heaven and most (evidently) to hell. One frightening thing about this particular image is that some of its adherents often also believe that nuclear war is an inevitable part of God's plan, so they have no interest in arms control.

The best image, Niebuhr believed, is that of an on-going struggle between good and evil which will continue to the end of time, with no victory within history by either side. As advances are made in science, in techniques of education, even in embodying greater moral sensitivity in law and institutions, more power also becomes available to evil forces within each of us and to those institutionalized in society. More power for good means more power for evil. The conflict intensifies and continually broadens its scope. The supersonic aircraft which drops bombs can also bring food and medicine. Accurate knowledge of the central nervous system and brain has brought amazing relief from pain; it has also made possible new kinds of torture able to break any will.

A powerful example of this struggle is in the rise of Nazism in Germany and tradition-based militaristic oligarchy in Japan, which led to World War II. While worldwide depression was the precipitating cause, these ideologies found fertile soil of support in the anxiety of middle and lower middle class people shaken by political and cultural liberalism. This abrupt shattering of old mores had brought greater freedom and a frightening rebellion among the young. Many saw this as immoral and a threat to public order. The very forces working for liberation of the human spirit helped to produce dictatorship and world war.

This picture of on-going and escalating struggle is certainly a much more accurate image than a circle or an ascending or descending line. There is a final victory in God's hands, Niebuhr believed, but it lies beyond history and is ours here only in faith and in energizing hope.

This image of on-going struggle is only a picture, a bare outline. We can say much more about what God's strategy for victory is, and we must if we are to see clearly the part each of us is to play.

God's On-going Action in the World

Here again, Nicholas Berdyaev shows us the way. Berdyaev believed that God acts in the world only through human freedom, only through a delicate but vital communication with the free, creative core at the center of the individual human personality. This core existing at the deepest part of the self he called the God-man. I refer to it as the god-self. He wrote:

In history we have the conflict of freedom with necessity, but God may exist only in freedom. He is not present in necessity. This leads us to a complete change in the doctrine about Providence. Grace is not a power acting from without, grace is the revelation of the divine in man. There is no conflict between grace and freedom; grace transfigures freedom. ⁴

God's direct operation in history is not in the whirlwind or the storm, but rather in the quiet small voice speaking in nudges of approval or disapproval to the god-self within, in feelings rather than in words.

It is this one kind of personal entrance upon our consciousness, this small aperture for influence, which makes it possible to say the Deists were wrong. God did not set the universe running and go away. God is as close to human beings and as active in history as it is possible to be given the demands of nonviolent, nonmanipulative love which can work only through freedom.

What I have referred to as nudges could be interpreted as intervention. But we must remember that the god-self within is also the god-structure. It is the string within us which is tuned to God's frequency -- that of wholistic agape -- therefore it naturally resonates to God's presence always.

The problem is not God's attempt to communicate; S/He always is communicating. The problem is that the weight of the demonic self-systems dampens the vibration we should be experiencing. When some Quakers speak of attempting to "center down" they mean sinking all the way through the clutter of idolatrous distraction of the other self-systems to where the god-self sings a duet with God. Or, as sometimes seems to happen, for a whole Quaker or other gathering reaches a level of sensitivity which becomes a shared revelatory experience of oneness and peace and joy.

This group experience is the one occasion when God's direct influence reaches beyond the individual, as at Pentecost, when a community's togetherness in love and common purpose brings about a bonding with one another at the level of the god-self. This creates a larger aperture for God's entrance and influence. Then we have an orchestra rather than a single string.

Apparently, this produces, temporarily, a focusing of truth within each of us, as well as a release of power, the nature of which we do not yet understand well because we experience it so infrequently. It is infrequent because we do not seek it, and in many cases do not believe in it.

This is not the same ecstasy we see among charismatic Christians when they work themselves into a kind of trance state. There are demonic forms of ecstasy as well as spirit-releasing forms. A trance state isolates each of us from the neighbor; it is a turning inward, a kind of emotional masturbation.

This is my hypothesis to be examined. This touch by God in and through the god-self is the only direct way God's self-revelation can take place, and it is the only way God influences individuals and, through individuals and small groups, brings about significant changes in society.

There are many events which show evidence of God’s influence and we call them God’s action. But they are indirect, through people, and not direct.

When the early Christians said "Jesus is Lord!" it was also another way of saying (whether they realized it or not) that God's providence operates directly only through freedom and through nonviolent love. Therefore, the only entrance God has into the world is into the god-self within each individual, and into the life of a gathering only as they experience a spiritual oneness, a momentary and fragmentary uniting of their god-selves.

Does this not limit God? Only to the extent God has purposely limited the use of divine power. God is free and may have other channels through which to work. My hypothesis is, however, that God communicates almost always in this world as described above.

Does our prayer and meditation in groups activate the nudges of God? No. The divine pressure is always there, uniformly, pressing from all around and from inside. We only are able, helping one another, to open a channel through touching our own god-selves.

It is not so much a work we do as a lack of work, a letting go and sinking down to the center (as Eckhardt liked to put it) and a sharing of grace with one another.

If the divine pressure is always there, how do we account for what the mystics call the "dark night of the soul?" These are the occasions when prayers seem to rise no higher than the ceiling and God appears to be utterly absent from the universe. It is perhaps easier to think of these as resulting from two other phenomena: (1) They may represent plateaus where we rest between stage movements, for a time in chaotic darkness, or (2) they perhaps express our trying to reach God by striving, by our own activity. Centering down more a matter of emptying oneself of idolatrous distractions than a matter of crying, "Lord, Lord!"

Unless we keep this matter of God's constant nearness straight, we are not likely to understand anything correctly about providence in history and about real progress.

Critique

Berdyaev's view of providence in history has been called subjectivist and Gnostic. We have to consider these criticisms here before we can go further.

Milton Friedman lumps Berdyaev together with three others and calls them all modern Gnostics: philosopher Simone Weil, psychoanalyst Jung, and the novelist Hesse. Like the original Gnostics, Simone Weil, Friedman believes, puts God so far above humanity that there can hardly be any relationship. At the opposite extreme is another kind, he says, speaking primarily of Jung:

The second type of Modern Gnostic replaces Weil's transcendent God by an emphasis on the divinity of the self. This type is not found as such in ancient Gnosticism, but two of its most important elements are. One of these is the focus on the knowledge of the divinity at the inner self. ... Another element already present in ancient Gnosticism is the antinomianism of this latter type of Modern Gnostic. The Gnostic hostility toward the world led to two seemingly opposed forms of Gnostic morality, the ascetic and the libertine. ⁵

"Only an immature or enslaved mind," writes Nicholas Berdyaev, "would deduce from the doctrine of the importance of evil that one should choose to follow the path of wickedness 'in order to enrich our consciousness and profit from a new experience.'" But this is exactly what the second, and perhaps most widespread type of Modern Gnostic does -- the one who contrasts the evil of the social world with the good within. In doing so, of course, he no longer thinks of "evil" as really evil. The old moral conceptions of good and evil are relativised in favor of a new conception of good as the integration, or individuation, of the person and real evil as anything which stands in the way. ⁶

Suffice it to take a few notable examples which illustrate a new sense of dualism between history and God's activity, and the sole locus of that activity in the incarnation, and in personal "existential" individual life of men and women. Perhaps the most extreme case is that of Nicholas Berdyaev. Here, apparently, God's activity has no relation to the general course of history, and so there is no doctrine of providence. ... "This world into which we are thrown is not God's world, and in it divine order and divine harmony cannot hold sway. God's world only breaks through into this world, the light of it shines through in that which really exists, in living beings and in their existence. ... There is nothing of God in the dull and prosaic normality of the objective world." N. Berdyaev, The Beginning and the end, pages 152-7. ⁷

It seemed inevitable to Berdyaev, that until all is caught up in unity within the Godhead at the end, there is an inescapable dualism between good and evil. The evil arises out of human freedom in the our alienated state. It takes place as the perversion of God-given capacities of human freedom, of creative power. It is a corruption of something good and parasitic upon that deeper good within the human personality. In this respect Berdyaev is certainly in structural harmony with many from Augustine through Karl Barth who saw evil as non-being.

Berdyaev certainly never reached Jung's extreme, that of seeing evil merely as a shadow side of the larger personality which needed to be integrated.

Contrary to both Friedman and Gilkey, Berdyaev was quite clear that there were good and evil in both society and individuals. Perhaps the concept of sub-selves and how they operate is paradigm easier for us to understand. It puts the distinction more sharply between the wholistic gestalt of the god-self on the one hand and the demonic self-systems on the other. It puts the dualism between good and evil where it belongs, and should be an interpretation more hospitable to the modern mind than the one Berdyaev used.

Berdyaev didn’t have access to the recent studies of developmental psychology and biology. He reached back into an obscure idea from the 14th century mystic, Tauler, to find a paradigm for his intuition about the fountainhead of human evil, what Tauler called the Ungrund. This Abyss, according to Tauler and Berdyaev, appeared prior to and somehow separate from God the Creator. It seems to have some kinship to the primordial matter (hule) of Plato. Or perhaps it has more in common with Whitehead's “primordial nature of God” which is the reservoir of all possible choices and all possible futures. These, in a sense, preexist before specific choices actualize some possible futures thus cutting off others.

We can see the relevance of this to the way in which the fall into evil takes place. Children move from "dreaming innocence" (Paul Tillich) into the making of moral choices from among a bewildering variety of alternatives, without prior experience and in a state of anxiety. This combination of anxiety and multiple possibility plus the presence of evil all around them is what causes, psychologically, the inner fragmentation we call a fall.

Evil assumes different shapes in the demonic self-systems. These reflect the forms the "principalities and powers" take in society. The inner sub-selves reinforce and/or are reinforced by the social ideologies and values of the age. The inner demons arise from and also worship the external social powers. These are thus continued generation after generation. The content may change but the structures remain the same. The Byzantine Christian Emperor Justinian said it was okay to kill German barbarians in the name of God. And the Christian President Johnson sends the troops off to Vietnam to murder Asian communist, atheist barbarians. Today as then the external structures of prejudice and violence reinforce the inner sub-selves organized around a narrow stage 3-4, we-they world view.

How Does God Act Directly?

I have asserted, going beyond Berdyaev, that the paradigms of the god-self and of stage development make it possible to say a lot more about the way God acts and does act in history. This view helps enormously, I believe, to clarify for us both the nature of revelation and our own responsibility.

Mine is clearly a left-wing Protestant view. It falls roughly within the "Christ against Culture" category of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture. ⁸ This position, I believe, expresses best of all the alternatives what the position of the Christian and the churches should be vis-à-vis the world. Here, Berdyaev and I are with the letters of John and the other parts of the New Testament which see society as the kingdom of the Beast, held fast in the grip of evil. All our social institutions are corrupt and even the best of them tend to freeze human beings at one or another of the Kohlberg stages, stunting our growth. So, it is hard to improve on Berdyaev's paradigm of objectification through socialization (call it brain-washing) which we all experience. This creates depersonalized, herd people. Only the spirit, the god-self within, has the wholistic power to free itself from this control.

The battle between good and evil continues within the depths of each individual. God works directly only there. Social structures may incarnate to greater or lesser degree freedom, justice and love, and the struggle to change these structures in the direction of the kingdom of God is vitally important. But God doesn't work directly with social structures because God works only with freedom and through nonviolent love. God works in history only through people, institutions and ideas which incarnate to some extent the way of agape, indirectly, that is. Read again the quote from Berdyaev at the opening of this session.

At any rate, neither Berdyaev's viewpoint on providence and history, nor my own, is Gnostic.

Nor are we individualistic in our view of salvation. It is especially important to point out that whatever Berdyaev says about the God-man within being the locus of God's revelation and of full freedom, creativity and truth, he puts a parallel emphasis on community, sobernost to use the Russian word. This sets Berdyaev sharply apart from the so-called gnosticism of Simone Weil, Jung and Hesse, a point Freidman seems to have missed.

Salvation is not first and mainly individual because it involves becoming like God. Becoming godlike is a communal process requiring countless transactions of grace. For another thing, the individual's struggle for social justice in society is essential to the crossing from stage 5 to stage 6 and the integration at that level.

Stages in History

Now we must look at how stages of development in individuals relate to stages of development in history.

The fragmentation of wholistic love in history parallels the fragmentation within the individual. Any one of the four movements necessary for spiritual development, when it is taken off into isolation and to extreme, becomes demonic, out of control, and immensely destructive. Two examples:

Expansion

The first example is the way in which expansion itself, while good and necessary, becomes demonic. Expansion has been one of the most consistent movements in history, from tribe/clan to city to nation state to empire. The retreat to the primacy of the nation state in modern history is an exception, but only a temporary one. Modern communications and transportation and international economic interdependence assure that our future is internationalization, though the forms it threatens to take may be more demonic and destructive than we now imagine.

Expansion of human consciousness to encompass the whole of humanity is a part of the divine plan for making us over into the image of God. Yet, as expansion has taken place, it has usually been through brutal violence rather than by treaty, compromise and cooperation.

Psychological adjustment in every age to institutionalized violence, often blessed by religion, has helped cause internal fragmentation in every individual. Caring, rooting in the family, has had to be set elsewhere in the self, in a separate gestalt in the brain, apart from the rationalizations making possible the murder of fellow human beings.

In session 6 I traced Ernest Becker's analysis of how the dynamics of the development of empires derived from the inner drive of anxiety with regard to death and finitude.

This is, he thought, the psychological root of evil in individuals and society. I carry his analysis a step further and relate it to the development of the god-self and the demonic self-systems within each of us. Without this, it becomes next to impossible to explain the survival of compassion and caring among peoples in the world at all.

Autonomy

The second example is that of individual autonomy. Like expansion, this is one of the poles of the wholistic self as well as the healthy society. The tearing free of the psyche from the cultural umbilical cord has been a long process with many set-backs.

We trace modern individualism to the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. In the battles associated with these movements some of the power of the collective to determine the shape of the psyche was broken. The freedom won is incomplete, but significant.

This movement is an essential part of God's plan. But, as with expansion, movement toward autonomy brought a different but equally deadly kind of inner fragmentation. The "autonomous" individual of America is haunted by loneliness, feels cut off from human warmth and companionship. The social consequences of an undervaluing of communal interdependence are seen daily around us in the unemployed, people on welfare, the neglected children and homeless families, hunger and illness untended, and greater and greater holes being torn in our already inadequate safety net.

Berdyaev wrote that the movement to individual autonomy is necessary in God's purpose but the extreme form it takes in the modern world is terribly destructive. To autonomy, he opposed the principle of sobernost, the Russian word for community in the Spirit. He also set sobernost in contrast to all forms of oppressive collectivism such as Nazism and Communism. He contrasted it also to the economic oppression and spiritual bondage he saw in modern capitalism. He wrote:

Community is a spiritual quality of persons, a being-together, a brotherhood of men, and it never means some sort of reality which is above men, or which can order them about. Community leaves judgment and conscience in the depths of man's heart. ...Religious community is also called sobernost, something directly opposed to any authoritarian concept of the Church. ⁹

To expansion there must be the counterweight of the opposite pole of internal unity and harmony. This is true of social units as well as individuals. And to individual autonomy there must be added the loving community wherein people are related to one another internally through real compassion and justice and not just by external sanctions of custom and law.

The god-self does not live by a balance of these opposites, nor any Aristotelian mean. The god-self is by its very nature a fusion of all four of the poles of wholeness into a new and higher unity. It is a seamless garment. In any particular decision of the individual, we may opt for greater freedom or greater relationship but the god-self empowers us to do so quite free of any necessity to move one way or another. This is true freedom.

God will succeed, eventually, because evil is self-destructive and short-lived in its particular expressions. When the god-self is realized, the demonic self-systems must shrink away and perish. Evil also provokes a reaction, in the form of a longing for health and wholeness. This is one of the booby-traps God has placed in us and history. As Kenneth Boulding wrote, truly love is weak and hate is strong, but hate is short and love is very long.

Questions for Thought

vjross22@hotmail.com

1. "Nor to Avenge Any Wrong," There is a Spirit, The Naylor
Sonnets, Fellowship Publications, Nyack, NY, 1945, 1979, page 3
2. The Beginning and the End, page 152
3. Faith and History, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949, page 14ff.
4. The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, NY, 1952, page 44
5. To Deny Our Nothingness, Contemporary Images of Man, page 146
6. ibid., page 147
7. Reaping the Whirlwind, The Seabury Press, NY, 1976, pages 492, 403
8. Harper & Row, NY, 1951. H. Richard Niebuhr never intended that his five categories of relationship of Christ and culture should be rigidly understood or applied. Subsequent writers have helped clarify this by noting that while one kind of relationship may be the predominant paradigm by which a person or group thinks and operates (Christ against culture, Christ above culture, Christ transforming culture, and so on) it is nevertheless true that in other parts of the life of the group or person, or in relation to a particular issue he or they may operate for a time on a quite different paradigm. All of us, at different times, embody each of the Christ-Culture relationships, as appropriate. The operational primacy of "Christ against Culture" in my system is the corollary of the New Testament assertion that the kingdoms of this world are the kingdoms of the Beast.
9. The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, op cit., page 123

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