World of Love Sess8 - Liberation in the Age of the Spirit

The third creative revelation in the Spirit will have no holy scripture, it will be no voice from on high, it will be accomplished in man and humanity -- it is an anthropological revelation, an unveiling of the Christology of man. -Nicholas Berdyaev ¹

Berdyaev's vision of the "Third Age" has implications for personal spirituality as well as for the evolution of Christianity. In respect to the individual, he claims that a higher creative being is unattainable when God is seen as transcendent to man, and that it is only possible in another stage of religious life, "when God in man is immanent." In cultural terms, the "Third Age" will mean the exodus of humanity from religious guardianship, from a Church that has been more intellectual and physical than spiritual, concretizing itself in institutional structures and dogmatic codes. He insists that the first task of a Christian rennaissance, of religious maturity, is "to overcome this heteronomous consciousness." In the new age, humanity will turn "not to the physical but to the spiritual body of the Church." -Modonna Kolbenschlag ²

Part II of this study is about faith and life in the age of the Spirit.

The age of the Spirit has two strategic meanings for this course: (1) The term symbolizes that theology has to change as we change, as society changes, and as history brings new challenges. God hasn't changed; rather, we have to continually play catch-up.

God precedes us in history, like a cloud or pillar of fire, leaving signposts, hints and clues which we must interpret. And the only way we catch up is to become more like God and to reflect on the changes in and around us.

(2) In a slightly narrower focus, the age of the Spirit indicates that religion centered on justification, redemption and forgiveness is too narrow. This has been the limitation of the old Catholicism and the Protestantism of the Reformation. It could take growth and change only so far in the right direction.

Before law and redemption comes thanksgiving for the creation and celebration of it. Otherwise, nothing about law and justification fall happily into place. Beyond law and redemption is creativity, the flowering of human freedom and creative response to
God's love.

+ Thanksgiving/Celebration
+ Justification/Forgiveness
+ Creativity/Co-creation with God

There has been qualitative change in history. It can be traced and defined and analyzed. The long-term trend is toward greater freedom, away from heteronomous authority, rules and laws and customs which control us arbitrarily and seek to compress us into little socially approved boxes.

Liberation, Freedom and Wholeness

Liberation, as in Liberation Theology, has become a code word for the total liberation of humanity from all forms of bondage, inner and outer. It is in this course..

More often, I use the word wholeness, but in a way which includes all the senses of liberation. Total liberation presupposes the inner wholeness which has power at all the four poles of agape, and it is such liberated people who most effectively accomplish the social liberation of equality, justice and peace.

This is not to say that social restructuring must await the individual fulfillment of all. Not at all. In fact, the struggle for justice is an essential part of our process of arriving at total liberation as individuals.

The word liberation is broader and more inclusive than freedom. Liberation is the freedom granted by power at all four poles of the structure of agape: that is, freedom, inclusiveness, compassion and inner unification.

Godlike freedom is one dimension of the new strong person we are intended to become. To fulfill God's plan for every individual it is necessary for all of us eventually to be liberated from the brain-washing we undergo in any culture. We have to cut the umbilical cord of dependence upon society and other people in order to float free and attain godly autonomy. We must come to autonomy, but unless we come to it in unity with the other three dimensions of wholeness, including compassion, it is a false kind of freedom and highly destructive.

What Berdyaev and Kolbenschlag call the age of the Spirit awaits the emergence of such children of God. See the eighth chapter of Romans.

The age of the Spirit does not mean, as in Joachim of Fiores, that there are three successive ages which correspond to the three persons of the Trinity. This is only a bit of poetic fancy. What is important is rather that there is change and development in history following the trajectory of the Omega Point, toward a culmination in which the unity of all beings is accomplished in harmony with the ultimate in individual freedom and creativity. It is oneness enclosing a fecund variety and complexity.

The sessions following this deal with various aspects of the age of the Spirit as it is expressed in faith, life and social organization.

Autonomy to Theonomy

Kolbenschlag sees a movement from heteronomous to autonomous and calls us beyond that theonomous.

Heteronomy is control by outside authority imposed by sanctions and social conditioning. Autonomy is freedom from such authority, but one which may eventuate only in devastating loneliness and new forms of bondage. Theonomy means the rule of God, but a rule in the form of an inner self-control based upon a perception of the higher satisfactions and joy of godlike wholeness. It is a self-chosen inner rule.

Kolbenschlag's interpretation of theonomy draws upon Kierkegaard and Tillich:

Tillich's notion of theonomy, like Kierkegaard's concept of the religious existence, is a synthesis and equilibrium sustained between the tendency to self-sufficiency and to self-transcendence. It is "autonomous reason united to its own depth," to the ground of its own existence, God. Human relations and personal fulfillment are not surrendered to the destruction of the will-to-power or libido, and at the same time they are not sacrificed to social, ecclesiastical or political norms. ³

We must go beyond radical individualism. We transcend the false autonomy into a fullness of being which liberates us into community, into the free giving and receiving of compassion and caring.

Berdyaev pointed out often in his writings that while the modern trek into radical individualism has been necessary in the movement of God's purpose in history, it is also tremendously destructive, socially and individually.

Theonomy is the opposite to theocracy. Theocracy, either in ancient Israel or modern Iran, means that religious absolutes are legislated into law and enforced by the state; one religion is united with the government and dominates all of life in the name of God. Theonomy means the rule of God, but through an inner gyroscope which is liberating rather than stifling to human creativity.

Theonomy does not mean the individual moral judgment is sole monarch. Individual opinion is put to the test of the religious and secular communities. The age of the Spirit inevitably affirms some form of democracy wherein laws are enacted according to the will of all the people with due respect to right of dissent and the rights of minorities.

A democracy which was made up of a majority of persons with a stage 6-7 perspective, note in passing, would be a much more effective and compassionate form of government. It would be undergirded by strong individual convictions about the equality and rights of all people.

Summary

Let's summarize here the various directions from which we have looked at and defined this liberating fullness of God’s immanent power in the previous six seven sessions:

Kohlberg's Stages

1. Kohlberg's stages of moral development help us understand the dynamics and direction of qualitative change in individuals and in history. We see how laws, customs and mores have served as scaffolding. The external forms have held us in being and held people together in tribes and nations while we advanced through the early stages of our cultural childhood.

Mature freedom is made possible eventually as we come to incarnate the more inclusive, complex and wholistic structures of the post-conventional stages 5, 6 and 7. From the exalted perspective of these stages we see that our institutions and mores must be rebuilt around the universal/cosmic perspective of stages 6 and 7, where morality becomes increasingly a matter of internalized, self-affirmed principles and social perspectives based on the equal rights of all people. It is also where the right of every individual to become the fullness of the four-fold agape redefines the inner meaning of every law, rule and other form of social restraint.

Agape

2. The Structure of Agape: In session 7, we defined the transformation and fulfillment of individual freedom and why it comes with stage 7n. 7n indicates stage 7 and all the unimaginable stages which may lie beyond it. It is here for the first time we float free from lusts, desires, ambitions, needs, and dependencies and become determiners of our fate rather than having our wills controlled by internal or external demonic powers.

Wholistic freedom is the autonomy which is proper and possible only in the form it takes as one corner of the four-fold structure of agape. This is freedom integrally related to and a part of a higher synthesis with the other three corners of full being: empathetic compassion, cosmic inclusiveness, and internal unity. These four dimensions define the inner wholistic pattern which alone sustains healthy autonomy.

Those who approach the subject from a nonreligious point of view can find common ground with what here is called theonomy through the direct experience of the four-fold structure of wholeness.

Emptying and Idolatry

3. Meister Eckhardt and the via negativa. There are two paradigms in the Christian tradition which help define godlike autonomy. The one is the image of emptying or denying oneself, and the other is the image of freedom from idolatry.

The freedom which arises at stages 6 and 7 correlates with what Meister Eckhardt teaches about emptying ourselves to make room for God, the negative way. This is the truth in the egolessness urged by both eastern and western mysticism.

This seems to advocate that we extinguish the ego in order that God may be all. What it actually means is that we empty out the egocentrism of the demonic self-systems. We do this by refusing to live in them and instead live only in the wholistic god-self. In this way, the immature and destructive wants and needs within us cease to intrigue and tempt us with their neurotic non-solutions to life's problems.

This is also the truth behind the assertion in the letters of John in the New Testament that no one who loves the world can also love God. It underlies Jesus’ radical command to hate father and mother for the sake of the kingdom.

This negative way involves leaving behind the wants, dependencies, needs, desires, lusts and ambitions of the demonic self-systems. We choose to live rather in the inner god-self, the self-system which incarnates the fullness of God's agape. We become that love, which is to be like God and one with God.

Superficially, the negative way sounds like a depreciation of the body and the sensuous pleasures of body and mind. Actually, the opposite is the case. Only as we are freed from control by immature and self-defeating wants, desires, lusts and ambitions are we liberated to the full enjoyment, without guilt, of all sensuous and aesthetic pleasures. This is the truth behind Jesus’ command, "Seek the kingdom of heaven and its justice first and all these other things will also be added to you." We lose all to gain all. We die to the dull painful monochrome of the humdrum world to live to the Technicolor of God's sensuous, good creation.

Idolatry

The other biblical image is idolatry. Idolatry for us moderns is not worship of other gods, literally. It is dependence for power of being upon anything which is weaker and less loving than God. Idolatrous attachments reshape us in the image of the lesser power and bind us to its truncated and demonic values.

Kolbenschlag helps make these images of emptying and idolatry clearer to modern people through the example of a woman's freeing herself from dependency. She must pass through nothingness (no-thing) when she sheds all the forms of identity society has fixed upon her, most of them forms of dependency. There is an emptying out of the old selves (the demonic, deficient fragments) to make way for a new strong identity of her own. In the time of passage there is a devastating experience of nothingness, of being no one.

Finally, liberated from all dependencies and the self-hate and insecurity which accompany them, she passes through autonomy to the full flowering of freedom in a new powerful self-sustaining identity. ⁴ One of the elegant passages in this beautiful book is this:

One cannot love another until one has properly loved oneself. One cannot lover others or God unless one has power over oneself, the power to choose and act. A sense of self-worth and a sense of self-creation are fundamental to spiritual maturity.
The kiss that Sleeping Beauty waits for is not that of any Prince, but the embrace of her own being. ⁵

The God-self

4. This course contends that there is within each of us the pattern of a whole or core self. As we identify with and live in this self, we rob the demonic self-systems within us of their strength and eventually put them to death.

When we understand theonomy or the rule of God in this way we see how it is a different kind of control from all others. It is an inner self-control of godlikeness. We have to voluntarily make that free, creative, expansive, loving self and destiny our own.

Liberation from the Past

We are in a time when social authority must arise through the participation and free consent of all the members. No longer may the long-faced custodians of wisdom and revelation give us a pat on the head and tell us, "We know best. We speak God's Word!" This is as true of the churches as it is of the state.

We are in an age of radical freedom, moreover, because the customs, laws and mores of the past no longer speak to our problems and certainly do not give us definitive guidance as to how to seek and find the wholeness and open-ended creativity which is godlikeness.

People are unsettled by the thought of this much individual freedom. Of course, there must continue to be laws regulating morality, for instance, those protecting people against exploitation and violence. There will also continue to be social mores. But these must not be established by arbitrary authority from above, especially any form of theocracy which imposes some human view of God's laws on everyone as though God were a stifling law-giver rather than a parent full of liberating love.

Society must not refuse to move on to greater freedom. As the power of the higher stages begins increasingly to be released into history, it is not possible to go back again into the bondage of the past without such retreat taking the form of something far more destructive than past forms of oppression.

Prime examples of the demonism of such regressions are Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. The new freedom presses powerfully from underneath. The modern state, to keep such control over people, finds it necessary to become more cruelly repressive than any tyranny of the past.

People who are engaged in what Erech Fromm called the "escape from freedom" support such regimes out of fear of chaos. They also support them, as we saw in session 6, in the frustrating search for a kind of glory fix which can allay the numbing fear of death and psychological insult of finitude.

Two Religions

We see here the confrontation of two kinds of religion. The one is a religion of law and dogma. The other approaches life characteristically with compassion, justice, openness, creativity, playfulness, freedom and joy, because it is intuited that these express God's own inner nature. God did not create the world to see a few people to heaven and to discard the multitudes into hell. God's creation is loving, creative play. Christian faith should imitate this in doctrine and practice.

This is what Berdyaev means by the age of the Spirit. It is the time when human beings are to make their creative contribution to God's plan.

Paul Tillich, quite independently from Berdyaev, referred to three ages in terms of the dominant forms which anxiety takes in each age. These three forms of anxiety correspond in a fascinating serendipitous way to Berdyaev's three ages. In the classical period, Tillich suggested, the dominant problem, spiritually and psychologically, was death and the anxiety related to dying. In medieval Europe, it was fear of hell and the anxiety related to punishment. In modern times, both of these are transcended and the dominant anxiety relates to loss of meaning. None of the three forms of anxiety passes away, but two are submerged in the dominant form.

These three anxieties tend to be re-lived in the same order by each of us in our development from childhood to adult. Maslow would probably have called the anxiety relating to loss of meaning a meta-anxiety. It is linked to age and development, arising from the more complex structures of stages 4 and above.

Creativity is seen to be central to salvation, then, at this stage where meta-anxiety of meaning comes to the fore.

In terms of morality and motivation, only the challenge of human creativity can enable us to rise above and finally conquer sin, death and the law (to use Paul's trio of ultimate enemies).

The fire of creativity propels us beyond ourselves as neither the cold commands of law nor the liberating warmth of forgiveness can. To use a modern analogy, freedom and creativity fuel the third stage of our rocket, after law and redemption have burned out.

Of course, as Berdyaev notes in the quote at the beginning of this session, neither law nor redemption have completed their work; they are still at work among those who have not yet resolved the challenges they raise. That includes myself and everyone I know. But God has far more in store for us and we have far more to contribute than is dreamed of within the narrow confines of law and redemption.

Creativity answers the questions of our age, the questions related to meaning: What are we saved to? What is the content of our lives supposed to be after we have been forgiven and have accepted that forgiveness? What could possibly be interesting enough to keep eternal life from being hellishly boring?

In traditional theology, what is being termed here the age of the Spirit comes under the heading of sanctification. This is the growth into holiness or godlikeness which follows upon repentance and forgiveness of sins. The difficulty in living with the traditional definitions is that they assume that with forgiveness and justification one is eligible to get into heaven. Thus sanctification becomes desirable but not necessary. I have suggested, rather, that salvation is becoming like God not mainly understood as going to a place called heaven. This puts sanctification, becoming godlike, in a pivotal place.

Creativity as Redemption

In our age, it seems to be increasingly true that creativity is the power which will save even those who have not yet fully recognized the desirability of being law-abiding.

An example: In working with street boys who were caught up in crime and violence, a man found that he could reach and change them by forming a club dedicated to repairing and operating motorcycles. The creativity and challenge involved in this activity began to lift these boys, for the first time, above issues of law and order, right and wrong, self or others. It created space in their lives for relationships and caused them to see something more to life than thrill-seeking. Creativity properly operates in the form of exploration and play at the beginning of our lives as well as later. The age of the Spirit is at the beginning of the human race and of each life as well as at the end.

At this point we must clarify the question of what is natural, both as the word is used in the term natural law and in everyday life.

Natural Law

Natural law is the main form of seductive bondage which is hidden in the religions in our day. Our liberation from the strictures of natural law becomes a high priority in our quest for godlike freedom and creativity for all.

From the earliest times, practices which seemed detrimental to social order on the part of the rulers of society were taboo, forbidden by the gods. Violation of the taboos brought sanctions ranging from acts of penance to exile or execution.
The content of some taboos made sense. Prohibition of incest protected the tribe from the dangers of inbreeding. Draining blood from slaughtered animals dealt realistically with the health threat of rotting meat in a hot climate.

Other taboos were based on superstition. They were at first a psychological survival mechanism, a primitive means of decoding and controlling a dangerous environment. Then, taboos became a primary means by which shaman and chief kept control of all the aspects of the life of the tribe and eliminated potential revolutionaries.

There is a sly wisdom in this system. Taboos, as with the structure of Christian natural law, are based on the prejudice of Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor. He really believed that people don't want freedom and have to be controlled for their own good. To keep people in line, the theory goes, it's a good idea to put them under discipline by denying them most of the pleasures of life. Or at least you allow fun only within prescribed bounds for those who conform. Along with this goes the senseless commonsense intuition that unless medicine tastes bad it is no good. Redemption and social order require superimposed suffering. If something feels good it must be bad for you. This religiously imposed suffering gives the poor something to struggle with and think about instead of rebelling to improve their lot.

Paul declared that Christ sets us all free from the Mosaic law. That left the job of redefining right and wrong, natural and unnatural to the church leaders. Paul and the other leaders had to struggle from the beginning against the antinomians who taught that freedom in Christ meant there are no more laws or rules, that anything and everything goes for Christians. At the other extreme were the Judaizers who wanted to bring back legalism.

New moralities are always built on the old. Paul borrowed from Stoicism as well as from Judaism. The rules and regulations of such moral reasoning is inevitably time- and culture-bound, reflecting the dominant prejudices of the age.
From the time of Constantine, the churches became chaplain to the nations of Christendom, advising the secular powers as to what is natural and unnatural. The sword of the state enforced a morality which the church defined.

Unfortunately, to keep its status in the Roman Empire, the church accommodated its morality to existing empire practice. Gradually the church moved from pacifism to allowing members to participate in war, and from there to blessing "just" wars. Having once gotten in bed with the state, the church found itself hard-pressed to gather up the tatters of its virginal moral indignation on any issue.

Aquinas

In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas came along with his definition of the relationship of nature and grace, laying the foundation for modern natural law theory. Humanity had indeed fallen and required God's intervention, he contended. But the God-given human faculty of reason had not been so distorted in the fall that it could not function to show the difference between right and wrong, natural and unnatural, in most matters. The Angelic Doctor turned to Aristotle for examples of reason observing nature and digging out a universal morality. Aristotle was an exemplar of how the divinely created reason of humanity, even operating in a pagan, could see and develop God's own natural law.

Unfortunately for the credibility of the presuppositions, Aristotle required considerable correction and emendation from the scriptures.

To control behavior the church leadership felt it necessary eventually to be specific on all moral issues. The goal was to give every believer a simple yes or no on every moral alternative. Inevitably, there was disagreement among authorities. The Bible is not all that detailed and has outright contradictions in it. Just as few dogmas have been "always and everywhere believed," so few moral principles are universal or will even stand up to the test of reason, given different cultural perspectives. There is a wide degree of divergence of belief and practice as to what is natural and unnatural across the human race and across history. It was necessary to appeal to authority and to have such differences resolved by the magisterium.

Aquinas's definition of natural law became largely normative for the Catholic Church until the early 20th century. A great deal of its content had also spilled over into the churches of the Reformation, as a matter of unexamined common assumptions.

With the Enlightenment, large cracks began to appear in the natural law system. Substantial parts of it were simply cast out, especially with the rise of capitalism and democracy.

Two examples: usury and kings. Aquinas's formulation of the natural and unnatural had assumed, with parts of the Bible, that taking interest on money loaned was against the will of God. He also supported earlier authorities who contended that there would always be kings and always should be.

Mercantile capitalism knocked the first in the head and the American Constitution and French Revolution did in the other.

It is interesting to speculate what would have occurred if the church had followed the contemporary of Aquinas, Meister Eckhardt, instead. Eckhardt was condemned as a heretic. Aquinas was first condemned and then exonerated. In this century, interestingly, Eckhardt is being resurrected while Aquinas has fallen into great neglect.
The theology of Aquinas is like a formal English garden, all diamond shaped and round plots of flowers separated by orderly graveled paths of uniform width and carefully trimmed hedges. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place. It is clear where every boundary is and what is outside the bounds.
In Eckhardt, however, we have the sense of entering a dark forest, where each turning brings something new and amazing, where we are on dry ground at one moment and up to our ankles in mud the next admiring a water lily. Eckhardt is open to the ecstasy of new discovery, enjoyment, play, freedom and creativity. In comparison, Aquinas is pretty dull.

Berdyaev saw the overthrow of natural law as part of a larger process of human liberation which God had set in motion from the beginning. Humanity becomes directly involved as a co-creator only in the age of the Spirit:

Authority, any form of authority, is in essence a relative thing, it is not sacred, there is nothing noumenal about it, it has merely a transitional and functional importance in the life of society. ⁶

The religion of the Spirit will be the religion of man when he has come of age; it will constitute his emergence from childhood and youth. ⁷

Real development and progress in the world are the result not of a regularly-working and necessary process, but of creative acts, of the invasion of the realm of necessity by the realm of freedom. There is nothing more untrue and enslaving than to invest with a sacrosanct character all those concrete forms which have found embodiment in history, those solid bodies of history, in which men are wont to see either the direct action of the Divine Spirit or a manifestation of objective spirit
The truth is that all these "sacred" historical embodiments have been relative forms of objectification, an adjustment of the spirit to the weighty burden of the world in its disintegration and at the same time shackled condition. ⁸

One of God's objectives seems clearly to be getting us out from under external control and into inner control under the guidance of the joyous, playful community of the Spirit. This is essential to God's project to make us godlike in the pattern of creative love. The taboos of the past are to be reexamined. Some are to be eliminated and others totally redefined, under the guidance of the Spirit

Conclusion

Natural law, in all its traditional senses, is dead. We are cast, evidently by God's will and intention, on a new search for what is natural and what is unnatural. This opens the way for exciting, liberating experiment, which I am certain is crucial to our growing into godlikeness.

Our fall into sin, into distrust, anxiety, hatred, lust for power and security, has twisted beyond recognition whatever human nature was originally. Our way out is not back to original nature, but rather forward toward the realization of what Berdyaev and others have called a “transformed nature”, a new being. Its corollary is a new society, crafted intentionally with justice, compassion and creativity.

Some believe this opens the way to moral anarchy. It need not at all! We have the whole history of successes and failures of all the human race. We all know enough of good and of justice to create a utopia if we only lived the highest we know. We have the intuitions and conscience of the god-self within. Within the inner sanctuary of each individual we have the steady pressure of the sensed Yes and No of the Holy Spirit.

And finally we have one another in the community of the Spirit.

The first seven sessions of this study attempt to show how to transcend a shallow, unguided pragmatism by defining what is meant by agape both in terms of the four-fold structure of wholeness and the enrichment of this definition by the results of the researches of Abraham Maslow and the insights of developmental psychology both in Kohlberg's work and Robert Kegan's.

It is only necessary for us to follow at each turning the highest way, the clearly charted pathway of the structure of agape.

As the god-self emerges from under oppression by the anxiety- and resentment-ridden demonic self-systems, we are guided individually and collectively toward a healthy, creative freedom in all areas of life.

As Berdyaev taught, God waits with eager anticipation for the new and beautiful wonders humanity will create as we emerge from the sheltering scaffold of law and custom into the glorious freedom of a transformed and transforming new nature.

The next session discusses the implications of our rejection of natural law for human sexuality.

Questions for Thought

Consider or discuss: Try to list other taboos or assumptions which fall under the category, roughly, of natural law? Which should be eliminated? What would replace them in ethics or morality? By what criteria or principles would you establish the morality of the replacement? Read ahead in sesasion 14 if you wish.

Contact the author with questions or comment: mail to: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Quoted by Madonna Kolbenschlag in Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-bye , page 179, from The Meaning of the Creative Act, pages 107, 320
2. ibid., pages 178-9
3. op. cit., page 25
4. op. cit., page 200
5. op. cit., page 28
6. The Beginning and the End, page 150
7. The Spirit and Reality, page 195
8. ibid., page 147

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