World of Love Sess19 - Theology in the Age of the Spirit

As far as the futures goes only one thing is certain. At the end both of human life and the course of the world Buddhism and Hinduism will no longer be there, nor will Islam nor Judaism. Indeed, in the end Christianity will not be there either. In the end no religion will be left standing, but the one Inexpressible, to whom all religions are oriented, whom Christians will only then completely realize -- when the imperfect gives way before the perfect -- even as they themselves are recognized: the truth face to face. -Hans Kung¹

This peroration from Hans Kung's book on ecumenical theology suggests a culmination in history like Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, a coming together of all things into harmony without the elimination of beautiful variety.

Kung also suggests a methodology to match. He recommends an open and dialogic approach to theology which lies along the way to this unification. This is in essence a stage 6-7 kind of theologizing. It is method which trusts that what is important in Christianity, what belongs to the inner nature of God, is not risked at all by a complete openness or frank dialogue centering on what constitutes true humanity, how to define healthy, whole, loving, creative individuals and a kind of society which will produce and sustain them.

Such dialogue requires a sharp look at the Christian faith and its historic beliefs. I contend that the perspective of stages 6-7 and the god-self transforms our approach to all the traditional hotly contested issues of theology and philosophy. When we apply these new paradigms and follow out their implications, we find new doors of enlightenment opening. We will, I believe, be empowered and our thinking clarified so that we can do more mature theologizing. This will be true if we are, as the hypothesis puts forward, becoming more and more like God, more and more able to live in and appropriate the viewpoint of our god-selves.

This session offers answers to several of the most perplexing problems of Christian theology. These are answers which I see arising out of or fully compatible with the system outlined in the first seven sessions. They move us in the direction of a kind of faith which discovers truth around us outside and beyond the traditional channels. These answers are also hopefully more fruitful for dialogue with representatives of other religions and no religion.

True and False Mystery

When theologians feel unable to explain something so it appeals to human reason, they declare it a mystery or a paradox. This forwards the problem to the next thinker. They are unwilling to abandon the problem or declare it unimportant because (1) it is a historical link to the roots of our faith, and/or (2) it is seen as still important to salvation.

In the first case if we rule out such dilemmas we partially sever links to our historic roots in the Bible and early Christian community. In the second case, we may be unclear as to what it is we do to be saved. At the very least, any theology must state a position on these issues and justify it.

One kind of answer is that matters such as the two natures of Christ or the Trinity are not central to faith and life. This may be true, but it may also suggest that we are trying to take the easy way out by down-grading theological struggle and reducing religion to ethics. We may throw up our hands and just give up trying to understand God's nature and purpose. This leads to a truncated life with a minimum of transcendence and ecstasy. And it certainly makes Christianity less interesting.

Electrons have to be described as acting sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves. This is a genuine paradox and a mystery because we don't know why. But presumably someday we will. And we will express that more inclusive truth through some other word picture which will sum up and unify the characteristics we now see as resembling either particles or waves.

When theologians say that the oneness of the two natures of Christ is a mystery, they are saying something like the second example. They are saying that all the solutions which have been tried so far lead only to answers with contradictions which reason cannot resolve. But this does not mean that with more adequate paradigms and a deeper penetration into the actual methodology of divine/human action in the world, we might not be able to reach more correct and intelligible answers. By that I mean answers which are confirmed by our mature reasoning and our experience, answers which simplify and unite our lives instead of complicating and dividing them. See Appendix A for the discussion of truth and verification in theology.

Jesus Christ as Center

We are talking about a theology which is Christian and yet which is open outward to all those who are not Christian. It is, moreover, a theology which insists that the logic of a God of love demands that ultimately all people will become godlike, that all will be saved.

This means that we have to deal directly and at first with the issue of christocentrism. This theology centers in Jesus the Christ. It is necessary from the beginning to be clear as to both what this does and does not mean.

For some christocentric has meant that a theology is not Trinitarian and so neglects God's activities as creator and governor. That is not how I am using the word. For me to be christocentric means that we are able to see the inner nature and purposes of God clearly only in the nonviolent, out-going, sacrificial life and death of Jesus. This becomes the one place in history where the inner nature of God is most purely revealed, where it appears so vividly that we who are Christians return to this life continually as the central reality in terms of which we interpret everything God has done from the beginning, is doing now, and intends to accomplish in the future.

To look at faith and all reality through Jesus' nonviolent, noncoercive love offers us a special and important view of God: (1) God is Creator, but creation is seen to be the work of God's noncoercive love. God refuses to run things, rather letting us be. (2) God is Governor of the world and Lord of history, but refuses to exercise this sovereignty by force, coercion, manipulation or seduction. God’s influence is subtle and indirect, as we saw in the previous two sessions. (3 God is Savior and Redeemer, but only through the wholistic love we see embodied in Jesus and its continual re-creation in the loving community of faith.

God will save us through such love however long it takes and however much suffering lies along the way for her and for us. And God is Spirit, comforter and sanctifier and empowerer, but in a special way described later in this session.
This is the way Jesus' life and death for the pattern of God's inner nature. The implications of this view imply stage 6-7 understandings of God's action in history.

One Way, One Truth, One Life

Now it remains to interpret those two seemingly most narrow and exclusive passages of scripture about christocentrism: Jesus: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."² Peter: "There is no salvation in anyone else, and no other name under heaven given among men by which we have to be saved."³

I understand these to mean that if we are to be saved, to become godlike, then we must take the same road of nonviolent, sacrificial love which Jesus took. We must become that love in order to end up godlike. And presumably, if a Buddhist or Muslim or atheist takes that road and becomes that love, whether she knows of or believes in Jesus or not, then she will also become godlike. This way has been open to all persons from the beginning of our existence as human beings.

The Nature of Jesus Christ

The creeds have Jesus wholly divine and wholly human with no discernible seams between the two. The effort to resolve this paradox without skimping either the divine or the human has led to incredible convolutions of logical sounding illogic.

If Jesus is divine with human overtones, then we have a sort of Gnosticism, where Jesus only appears to be one with us in our ignorance, temptations and suffering. He is only an actor on a stage, not living a real life.

If Jesus is human with divine overtones, then God has not come fully among us in him and Jesus’ power to represent fully within himself the unification of God and humanity and to lift us up to participation in the divine being falls into question.

Most often, within the churches, Jesus' humanity is sacrificed to his divinity because (1) perfection is considered essential to the efficacy of the Atonement: only a spotless lamb's blood can wash out all the sin; and (2) it is his unity with the Godhead which empowers his role as Savior.

Once we have redefined salvation to mean becoming like God then the paradox can be unriddled. Jesus is human and divine in the complete unity of one personality in the same sense that we potentially are, through the divine-human god-self within. It is "begotten not made" by the supra-natural process of grace I have described previously. Jesus, the elder brother, is not the first the have a god-self but the first to enable it to become the whole of his thought and life.

Irenaeus taught that Jesus "recapitulated" the faith which went before him. Jesus summed up all the goodness of his ancestors, by a process of distillation and concentration. This was not all of Irenaeus’ christology, but it gives us a clue which takes on greater importance as a paradigm today.

The historical process through which the god-self is "begotten" from generation to generation by the underground stream of grace in history was uniquely effective in Jesus’ case because of the mediating power of Mary and perhaps an unsung village rabbi in Nazareth.

History came to focus in Jesus in a unique way. He embodied the faith of Abraham, the devotion and penitence of David, the willingness to sacrifice for love of Jonathan and Esther, the sense of justice of an Amos, the personalizing of God's parental love in Hosea, and, in a particularly important way, the understanding of sacrificial love and servanthood from II Isaiah.

All this divine-human action through history came together in Jesus and was fused into one unified self by the fire of his calling and vocation. His unified divine-human god-self may be said to have been born of the Holy Spirit and Mary. Thus, whether Jesus said the words or not, they were true: "Before Abraham was, I am." Jesus preexisted in the unity of human and divine both in the imagings of the divine love in the Godhead and as incarnation of fragmentary meldings of the divine and human which had taken place in previous history.

The god-self of Jesus is not different from ours. What is different is the way, in him, the demonic self-systems were vacated and put to death, in the process summed up by his response to the three temptations at the beginning of his ministry and confirmed in the kenotic leadership he exercises during Holy Week climaxing with the washing of the Disciple's feet. Here God's inner nature of nonviolent, creative, down-reaching love is dramatized convincingly. God and humanity are fused.

The Work of Jesus: Atonement

The doctrine of the atonement is the point at which the most furious battle must be joined between the forces of rigid tradition and our stage 6-7 theology. In what sense did Jesus die for each of us? In what sense did his death atone for our sins, pay a debt, or otherwise accomplish the righting of our relationship with God, our cleansing, or our redemption?

In seminary, my generation at Yale was fortunately to be able to study systematic theology under Albert C. Outler. When dealing with the atonement he gave us a very liberating idea right out of the New Testament. He pointed out that in the Gospels and Epistles there are several recurring word pictures by which the meaning of the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross is interpreted. The atonement, he taught, is a whole which is more than the sum of its parts. It is a truth so grand and complex that no one of the images is sufficient to describe it adequately. These images arise from everyday life and religious practice of the time.

There is the picture of a slave being bought free or a debtor whose debt is paid by someone else (from bondage to redemption). There is the picture of a leper being healed and a ritually unclean person being cleansed (from filth to acceptable cleanness). There is the image of one in bondage to powers beyond her control, inside and outside the self, who suddenly finds those powers defeated (salvation as deliverance, in the sense of the Old Testament word). There is the picture of the blind person who is made to see (from ignorance to the deeper wisdom of the Spirit, from the blindness of hate and alienation to the clear sight involved in love). There is the image of the dead person being restored to life (as one who has no meaning and lives as dead to one whose life is vibrant with meaning and joy). There is the picture of the one alienated from family and community being forgiven and accepted again (reconciliation). There is the picture of one who is disobedient to God's law having someone else take upon himself the burden of punishment (atonement). This is illustrated by analogy to the liturgical practice of animal sacrifice and the sending of the scapegoat into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people. There is a picture of a final victory over cosmic powers of darkness, salvation for the individual being transferred from the kingdom of darkness over into the victorious kingdom of light.

Each of these presents one facet of the whole. It is as though a great diamond were suspended on a thread and spun in the light, so that first one facet and then another is exhibited, while the beauty of the whole can never be seen at one time. It is like the elephant and the blind men, where the strange animal is experienced by one as like a snake, by another like a wall, and by another like a tree trunk.

It is no accident as history and theology have moved through stages of development certain images have emerged as more able than others to sum up what is involved.
Reconciliation and liberation, especially, have come in our time to be the dominant word pictures. There is good reason for this to be so.

Stage Development and Atonement

As pointed out in the introduction, there are at least seven stages through which our understanding of the nature of God passes as we mature. And the stages of our understanding of atonement also correspond to those stages in our understanding of God. For instance:

Stage 1: God is seen as mystery, magic, unpredictable and dangerous. Atonement at this level is understood mainly as magical or ritualistic cleansing or the diverting in other ways of God's anger at our disobedience or transgressing of taboos.

Stage 2: God is seen as one who cuts deals. I sacrifice this or give that to gain points. If my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds, I may make it to heaven. If Jesus pays it all, then that is even better.

Stage 3: This teenage and young adult picture of God resonates with Abelard's theory which sees Jesus primarily as example from which we learn of God. But at heart the stage 3 person can't accept this without anxiety. There is no depth to the conviction. Moreover, there is not yet a concern for or understanding of the social consequences of sin and its communal nature. The stage 3 person loves the story of the Prodigal Son and Jesus’ forgiveness of the thief on the cross, but has not yet set this in the context of a universal love reflecting a mature power of being.

Stage 4: This view of God on the part of adults taking their place in the larger world of responsibility and serious consequences, finds meaningful the Hugo Grotius governmental theory of the atonement. This suggests that God, as just, cannot overlook sin, must punish it, as otherwise no one would take justice or law seriously.

The whole fabric of morality would collapse if those who break God's laws are let go Scot free. Therefore, God takes on himself the burden, sacrifices his own son, and so gains the moral leverage to forgive the sins of those who repent, but only if they really repent.

Stage 5: This is the stage of confusion and skepticism, which finds each theory inadequate. This liberal stage finds comfort in Outler's theory of a reality larger than any of the particular word pictures used. However, stage 5 has great difficulty being more specific than that. It is not yet broad enough to be comfortable with the universal/cosmic perspective of a God who has no interest in punishment at all. Stage 4 and 5 people are still deeply afraid of social anarchy and believe that somehow a dangerous God who punishes is necessary to keep people in line, to prevent society from disintegrating.

Stages 6 and 7: I lump these together because stage 7 is still pretty much beyond all of us. We can see it only in wavering outline. The stage 6-7 person is aware, from experience rather than rumination, in gut intuition when not in reasoned form, that every sin, every wrong-doing, every hurt to self or another is inevitably punished, always and without exception. She sees that God does not punish; God does not have to punish. There is no place called hell because we bear hell and suffering within. Every hurt we give to others, every cruelty and deception, fragments us further and alienates us further from God and others, which is to say it buries our own wholistic god-self deeper within us.

The stage 6-7 person understands instinctively that what Jesus did, in his life, death and resurrection, was to live in his own god-self and show us not only what that means but how to do it. Jesus didn’t do it to change God’s mind.

The stage 6-7 person also understands clearly and deeply the interpersonal and graceful nature of human community, how Atonement rests upon the exchange of grace (including sacrificial love) in the community of faith, without which the one-time sacrificial death of Jesus would be without substantial power.

Salvation - Our Work or God's Work?

One of the oldest hot battles in theology has been the question of whether God does it all in salvation or human beings make a contribution through their works. This is the question of the so-called heresy of Pelagianism.

This would not have been so crucial a question if the stakes were not so high: heaven or hell. The question of whether the fires of hell are literally painful or not is unimportant here. It is the finality of the acceptance or rejection which counts.
the believer had to get right the answer to the question in Acts: "What must we do?"

If salvation is redefined as in this course, if it means "to become like God" rather than to go to heaven or hell forever, then the question of Pelagianism is still important but not so immediately vital.

Be that as it may, this course offers, I believe, a more adequate answer to the question as to how much of the work of salvation is God's and how much is ours.

The answer is this: Indeed, salvation is God's work beginning and end. Every advance in our lives toward wholeness, health, strength, love, autonomy, ability to give and receive love is opened to us initially by a gift of grace from some other person or group of people. And, to carry the argument to completion, their ability to give this gift traces in an unbroken chain back to God.

We are powerless to move toward God at all except as others open gates for us and nudge us through. We can build on the insights we have received, and have the joy and responsibility of doing so. But we know that even our ability to use words and relate to people at all we owe to relatives, teachers and friends at the beginning of our lives.

The studies relating to the Kohlberg stages of moral development reveal yet another dimension of how it is true that we grow by grace or not at all. Our ability to move from one stage to another can come to us only, if it comes, from the example of others who have already arrived at least, at the one stage beyond where we are.

So, the only power to initiate new advance we have is to thrust ourselves into a new environment where grace may be found and allow ourselves to be acted upon by it.
Once the novelty which breaks us open to new growth is assimilated and made our own, then we may then by ourselves practice the new level of freedom, love, cosmic awareness and inner unification, and help others along.

The Holy Spirit and the New Communal Being

Jews and Muslims have pointed out repeatedly that a Trinitarian God makes nonsense of monotheism. There is another interpretation of the Trinity.
As we have seen, the godlikeness represented by the god-self within is "begotten not made" in the process of God's action with us in history. This is true of Jesus as well as ourselves. Jesus is child of God, our elder brother; we are destined to be children of God in the same sense, divine in the same way.

When God is thought of as infinite, omniscient, perfectly good, then we are left with an absolute gulf between God and humanity, symbolized by Barth's term "Wholly Other." It is then inevitable that the Incarnation -- any fusion of the divine and human -- is an insoluble mystery. However, if we understand the god-self within to have a shape, a form, a gestalt of wholeness in the image of God's freedom, inner unity, expanded content and ability to love specifically and intimately, then the possibility is no longer impossible. The problem becomes manageable.

This still leaves us with the seemingly insoluble problem of the Holy Spirit. In the Hebrew Bible the Spirit of God comes and goes infrequently and with unpredictable results. The Spirit drives King Saul mad, for instance. In the New Testament, on the other hand, the Holy Spirit is a permanent gift to the Christian community through the crucified and resurrected Christ. It comes of, by and for the love called agape. The New Covenant is a new relationship of greater intimacy between God and humanity.
But the problem remains: How are we to think of the Holy Spirit as different from any other manifestation of God's personal presence and power?

A workable answer may lie in the relationship between God and the god-self within and the relationship of both to Christian community.

The Holy Spirit is not a different aspect of God under the New Covenant but rather a new reality which appears in the midst of that greater intimacy between God and the community made possible by the uncovering of the god-self and its energizing in the communal life of out-poured mutual love. This intense oneness is a relationship in theory possible everywhere and from the beginning, but only realized where the god-self emerges from under the crushing weight of the demonic self-systems to a greater degree. This takes place first in the community at worship because the worshippers at Pentecost are caught up together in an ecstasy, a standing apart from self-consciousness and in oneness of love to one another. In the united power of their god-selves in communion with God directly the Holy Spirit appears. This is, at this time and place, the first fruits of the new Reality of God-plus-humanity. That is, it is first except for the incarnation in Jesus, as symbolized by the descent of the Spirit at his baptism.

If we understand this God plus humanity to be supra-personal, a communal personality, analogous to the way in which each of us as we mature becomes increasingly a community, then this is not so hard to understand. The Holy Spirit is the momentary appearance of the communal God who will yet be.

The manifestation of the Holy Spirit is at the flash point where there is a fusing, a foretaste, of the ecstasy of Beatitude between the god-self and God, between human spirit and Holy Spirit. At this point a third reality is created, that of God-enhanced-by-human-lover. This enrichment of the Godhead is the aim of the Creation from the beginning. The Holy Spirit is, then, the unity of Parent, Child and Holy Community, a new reality in history.

The Trinitarian God, then, is summarized thus: God going forth in creation (Parent), God incarnate in Jesus (Child) and God returning to God (Holy Spirit) bearing all humanity within the holy community of agape into the divine Being, into the eternal Honeymoon.

We need to continually remind ourselves that we swim in the sea of God. With the divine Being pressing in continually, there need be only a momentary parting of the cloud cover of the demonic self-systems for the Light to strike fire with our inner light.

Meister Eckhardt speaks of the onefold unity of love which appears when we emerge from that which conceals God from us and God meets us emerging from the Godhead:

In this unity the Father generates his Son in his most spiritual source. The Holy Spirit comes to flower there, and a will that belongs to the soul originates there in God. As long as this will remains undisturbed by all creatures and all creation, it is free.⁴

There is "that of God in each of us." When that love and that piece of being are added to God's being then God also becomes a new being, a new and evermore new and greater God. Our participation is required to make God more fully what God wishes to be.

In the above quotation, Eckhardt speaks of the will as becoming free only when it is liberated from the power of idolatry of created being and is lost in God. This perfect freedom is that of the god-self which is unburdened of the futile distracting desires of the demonic self-systems. It is also the freedom Berdyaev speaks of as arising from the depths of the self. It is this creative loving freedom of the god-self which, joined to God, creates the new reality "God plus perfected humanity." This then is the fulfilled but eternally growing and changing Trinity.

This session has touched only a few of the contested theological dilemmas of history. They are presented as illustrations of theological reasoning opened up by stage development and the god-self. If our theology is indeed more true and more mature today it will be due, in part, to the progression of a larger number of people and institutions (including the churches) to higher stages of development.

This emergence to a more mature view of God enables us to express theological truth which is (1) humane (and so not insulting to God); (2) truly comprehensive and inclusive; and (3) intellectually more respectable, insofar as the madness of agape can ever seem respectable to the people of the world we live in.

Questions for Thought

1. Read again the seven views of God in the Introduction and compare them to the views of the Atonement above. Do they fit together? If so, why?

2. What are the consequences in personal life if one holds one of these views as literal truth? In politics? Look at stage 4 and the Hugo Grotius governmental theory? Consider this and the issue of capital punishment.

Contact the author at: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Hans Kung, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View, Doubleday, New York, 1988, page 255
2. John 14:6. My translation.
3. Acts 4:12. My translation.
4. Breakthrough, op. cit., page 202

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