World of Love Sess2 - God Chose to Grow Us

It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun. There would not be enough "I" in us to make it possible to surrender the "I" for love's sake. -Simone Weil ¹

The divine power should be conceived as ... the infinite power that springs from creative love. It is the power of sacrificial love. God does not control his creatures, he graciously lets them be. That need not mean he exercises no providential care over them. What is does mean is that the divine almightiness consists, not in God's unlimited ability to do as he pleases but of unlimited capacity for creative love, so that not only does he bring creatures into being to let them be; he creatively restores whatever seeks such restoration, so that the redeemed might indeed well be called a new creation, that is, a re-creation. -Geddes MacGregor ²

A 21st century view of God and faith poses anew the question why we were created in the first place. The answer suggested by our most mature understanding of God is this: S/He wants us as friends, companions, lovers and co-creators. Nicholas Berdyaev, the great Russian Orthodox philosopher-theologian, emphasized that our divinely appointed destiny is to be "engoded" or "divinized." As God is by nature creator, so shall we be.

It is clear, though, that to create loving companions who give unselfish love freely and are innovatively creative is far from easy.

Programmed Possibility

Create persons, create a language, and program it into people. You have given them a history they personally did not live and have produced preprogrammed robots. You could program your robot to rebel and it will rebel until you tell it to stop. Robots were not what God sought, so He has used a long and costly process to grow persons, who because of their distance from the divine beauty and power, have their own history and content, but who are enabled by grace to put on God's own nature, that of free creative love.

Thus far, I've said nothing really new. I'm suggesting, however, that two new and different root word pictures help us explain how this growth into godlikeness takes place. The presence of the god-self within explains how the divine power enters history and is effective here. Growth through expansion of the boundaries of the self by stages helps us understand how we become increasingly universal, taking in more and more reality until we become like God in the sense Berdyaev meant when he called us “microcosmos” and “microtheos.” We find the created sources of this godlikeness in the biological functioning of the brain and the interpersonal forces which shape us all. Otherwise we would be forced to rest the case for our faith on the supernatural or to declare it a mystery beyond human penetration. There is indeed mystery, but we must not imagine mystery where explanations exist. God does indeed act directly in the world, constantly, but as we shall see, it is not by crude intervention in the human psyche and in history. God acts only in ways compatible with the fullest freedom.

In the next session, Kohlberg's research project and the results are more fully introduced. These are important to everything that follows. This system is presented as a paradigm, a model, and not as a Procrustean bed to which people and societies must be cut or stretched to fit.

Lawrence Kohlberg was, until his untimely death in 1987, a professor of developmental psychology at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Over more than thirty years he did research on what he called the stages of moral development. His research is being carried on by colleagues and students. The results have been incorporated in studies and textbooks on child development and are being applied and tested in schools and prisons as a method of teaching moral reasoning.

I suggested in the Introduction that humanity actually worships seven different gods, defined roughly in terms of Kohlberg's stages.

This over-simplified outline of seven ego stages of our gods on the Kohlberg scale helps us see how the stages of development picture successive surges of expansion of the borders of the self-system, and how they lead (though not inevitably) to the radical and repeated transformation of the understanding of God.

Feuerbach was right in saying that we make gods in our image. This is inevitably true insofar as it is not possible to relate realistically to a god greater and more moral than one stage above our own functioning level.

When a greater god is described to us, we manage to twist that deity around to fit comfortably within the arc of our blinders. For instance, stage 4 religionists say they believe in universal love. But their version reads, "Of course we must love everybody, but the world will be saved and united only when everyone converts to my kind of faith."

Kohlberg was a scientist, not a theologian. He did not deal with stages in our understanding of God. He was testing hypotheses about how moral reasoning develops. He believed that the first five stages he had postulated are firmly supported by the research results. He was forced by friendly critics to admit that stage 6 is less firmly established, but he never ceased to believe it exists. Stage 7, in his mind, was an extrapolation from his research, just a hypothesis. His picture of stage 7 was based partly on intuition and partly on his observation of persons of excellence.

Few people have reached stage 6 and Kohlberg and other students of the phenomenon of stage development aren't sure anyone has fully reached stage 7. This is why stages 6 and 7 remain so impervious to scientific testing. How, some developmental psychologists ask, can people operating at stages 3 to 5 devise tests for the higher stages which they have not yet experienced?

For a treatment of stages in relation to faith see James Fowler's Stages of Faith, Harper & Row, 1981. I have preferred to start with Kohlberg, because I wished to deal with stage development first as science and psychology and then to move to its implications for religious faith. Also, to give Fowler his due would require more space than this course offers.

Seven Valentines

One more exercise before we plunge into a more formal look at Kohlberg's stages:

Stage 1: Be my valentine or I'll kill you!

Stage 2: Be my valentine and I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine and we'll stay together as long as we please each other.

Stage 3: Be my valentine, you marvelous, gorgeous, "once in a lifetime" lover for me.

Stage 4: Be my valentine and I will stay with you, be faithful and love you and our children as society tells me my role must be as a legally wedded mate.

Stage 5: Be my valentine and you can have whatever career, hobbies and independent development you wish without losing my love and I will follow my own drum-beat.

Stage 6: Be my valentine and we will expand the circle of our love to enclose our neighbors here and all over the world and so be enriched in our relationship to one another.

Stage 7: Be my valentine and we will together conquer fear of death and be one in a cosmic relationship which embraces all beings and all of time and space.

God chose to grow us, by stages, and will succeed, in part because this expansion of the boundaries of the self is one dynamic built into the processes of human history and personality. Our ascent cannot take place without our assent, but mature wholeness is a gift we will, by sharing graceful love back and forth, eventually give to one another in this or future lives.

In the next session we see how Lawrence Kohlberg's researches in developmental psychology help us understand what godlike expansion means.

Questions for Thought

1. What is the difference between this view of God and the traditional view which reads the Bible literally and thinks the human goal is to attain heaven? What are the problems with an all powerful God who "runs" things? Read ahead in Session 18 if you wish.

2. Look again at the seven views of God in the Introduction and the seven humorous "valentines." Where do you find yourself on these scales?

The author is most interested in your questions, criticisms or comments: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Gravity and Grace, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1952, 1972, page 28
2. He Who Lets Us Be, A New Theology of Love, Paragon House Publishers, NY, 1975, page 15

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