Dr. Freeman

Does it strike anyone else a little odd that the violence and bloodshed perpetuated in the name of God in this post-911 age makes the New Atheism of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins look like a moral imperative for the 21st century?[1]

For centuries we have been told that without God we are nothing more than egotistical animals fighting it out for our own survival, and now – with the civilized world under increasing threat from religious fundamentalist of all flavors – the traditional equation of religion and the good life has been turned upside-down… In the present day it seems that our human dignity and self-respect needs to be asserted in no uncertain terms against those religious adherents who claim to be hard-wired to the will of God!

But the New Atheist’s rational critique of religion is nothing new - philosophers from Hume to Kant to Nietzsche have been saying this for about 500 years now… But what is new is that the New Atheists are not merely atheists in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. deny belief in the existence of God) – they are “anti-theists “– or as Christopher Hitchens argues in God is Not Great, his latest NY Times best-seller - the notion of God as a Cosmic Designer or a Celestial Dictator that is aware of our every thought and deed is a wicked, poisonous and evil idea - and  we cought to celebrate the fact that it is not true…

From an Integralist’s perspective the conventional wisdom is that Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris (and others) are just throwing out the baby with the bathwater – they want to demolish the archaic, magic and mythic versions of God but they will not allow the rational, post-modern and integral versions of God any legitimacy… But if we take a closer look this is not so!

Christopher Hitchens on Transcendence

A contrarian philosopher with a razor-sharp wit and a blatant disregard for all things sacred, Christopher Hitchens has made a career out of exploding liberal illusions (see his formidable critiques of pop culture icons Bill Clinton, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa). However, while he argues that the bad things innate to our species are strengthened and sanctified by religion, Hitchens does have an unexpected open-ness to what he calls “the order of the transcendent” or the mystical dimensions of human experience.

With a kind of `luminous” faith in humankind, Hitchens at least starts out by affirming the Socratic oath of ultimate Not-Knowing that launched the Western philosophical tradition, where his definition of an educated person is that you have some idea how ignorant you are.

But moreover, he also declares his appreciation for mystical dimension of human experience (i.e. higher states of consciousness) – what he calls “the numinous” or “the transcendent” – and gives examples of where this sublime dimension can be encountered in everyday life: the beauties of science, the extraordinary marvels of nature, the wonder and consolations of philosophy, the infinite splendors of literature and poetry – all of which have mystical and devotional aspects that Hitchens is quite prepared to honor and include in his otherwise dark and ironic view of the world…

In all of these pursuits, Hitchens claims that there may be found a sense of awe and reverence that does not depend at all on any of our man made religions – and he verges on an Integral (or second-tier) perspective here in so far as his openness to the transcendent dimension of life is also one that is often bored and sickened by what passes for spirituality in the New Age - ghost stories, UFO tales, tarot charts and the barely veiled narcissism of The Secret, etc…

Richard Dawkin’s Mysticism

Probably the world’s most steadfast and notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins was up until recently the professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

From this colorful writings on Darwinian evolution as a deeper, richer more astonishing account of human origins than what is offered by the Genesis myth, to his most recent interview-debate with Francis Collins[2] (See Time Magazine “God vs. Science” - Sunday, Nov. 05, 2006), Dawkins is also keenly aware of the perpetually surprising and astonishing nature of the world revealed by evolutionary biology and modern science.

As Dawkins states to Collins on the belief in God “But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea”, refutable – but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect… I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.”

Right there we have a statement that any Integralist can whole heartedly affirm, - God is bigger than our minds can contain - and furthermore, according to Dawkins: “There is mystery in the universe, beguiling mystery… There is mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.”

So Dawkins is no denier of the Mystery – he does accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. “To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.”

In his Un-weaving the Rainbow, the positive message throughout is Dawkins’ impulses to awe, reverence – the same impulse to and wonder that leads other scientists, philosopher and poets to mysticism… He claims that the scientist has the same wonder, the same sense of the profound, as the mystic, but with an additional impulse: let’s find out what we can about it… And in close parallel with the core driver of an Integral approach he concludes the final two paragraphs of this book by saying that human beings are the only animal with a sense of purpose in life, and that our true purpose should be to construct a comprehensive model of how the universe works, i.e. a Kosmology

And with that ultimate view of things, Dawkins would do well to read Ken Wilber’s latest work on post-metaphysical spirituality — a Kosmic Giga-glossary that spans the entire spectrum of humanities experience of the Divine – from volcano gods of primitive tribes to the post-conventional claims of the world’s most realized mystics such as Meister Eckhart or Sri Aurobindo…

Sam Harris on Buddhist philosophy

Another one of the most outspoken atheists in the world today, Sam Harris is also a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, as a tried and tested path to see clearly into the true nature of consciousness.

For Harris Buddhism is more a science than a religion, for a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religion, for which there is very little empirically tested evidence. In many respects, then, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious trappings, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to further develop humanities spiritual self-understanding. As Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith,

“Attentive readers will have noticed that I have been very hard on religions of faith–Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism–and have not said much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident. While Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense… the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma… it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its preeminence as a system of spiritual instructions.”

So where the conventional critique of the New Atheist movement is that it’s critique of religious myth and superstition throws out the baby with the bath water by denying higher, deeper forms of spirituality (based on direct experience not beliefs), it is actually the case that all three of the major authors driving this cultural phenomenon we call the New Atheism are mystics or one sort or another, and probably just lack a language that they can use to express their sheer astonishment that anything exists at all…

[2] Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, Collins headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint. In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), he laid out the arguments for belief in God. Collins believes that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God’s creation. If your mind is open about whether God might exist, Collins argues that you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

Jesus and the Kingdom of God

In a way that seems to go beyond the requirements of any other of the world’s religious faiths, Christianity stakes its truth-claims on certain historical events – particularly the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As the event of God’s most explicit self-communication to human beings, Christianity is about something that happened in world-history, where the person of Jesus is the Christ – the “Logos made flesh”, the embodied story of God in time.

So it is this Jesus, the one who absorbs evil with love, that one whois radically present in the tangible depths of human suffering and death, that we must turn to if we are to speak about God from a Christian perspective.

And when we begin to peel back the layers of literal-mythic Christianity (amber), with the tools of post/modern critical Jesus scholarship (orange science, green hermeneutics) the most uncontested fact today is that Jesus of Nazareth is the one who announced the Kingdom of God (basileia tou theou).

References to “Kingdom of God” are found more than one hundred times in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and so our ability to understand who Jesus is and the origins of his historical mission is intimately linked to his understanding of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom that is disclosed to us today in the enigmatic twists and turns of his recorded parables.

So with the tool of post/modern critical-historical scholarship, I want to briefly re-construct here what Jesus may have actually meant by the Kingdom of God, in order to isolate the Founder of Christianity from what was Founded in his name (the Church) in the hope of getting a discussion started on what an Integral Christianity might look like…

The Parable of the Leaven - Luke 13:20-21 (also see Matthew 13:33, Gospel of Thomas)

“What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount[i]of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

The parable of the leaven received the highest number of red votes of any parable among the participants of the Jesus Seminar, and is therefore considered (arguably) the most authentic of the sayings that have been attributed to Jesus in the gospels and handed down to us.

Leaven is made by taking a piece of bread and storing it in a damp, dark place until mould forms, and in the ancient world leaven was a well-known symbol or metaphor of moral corruption.[ii] So in 1st century Israel there’s an ancient association between leaven (moldy yeast) as “profane” and the un-leavened as “sacred”, e.g. the holy Jewish festival of the Unleavened Bread.

In this parable Jesus invokes a deliberate and unexpected reversal of the old standard, whereby leaven – which is held to be corrupt, is really the source of what is sacred. With Good News for those who are considered corrupt/sinful/degenerate by the established structures of power, the shocking reversal of expectation uttered with the simple word “leaven” would have thrown Jesus’ audience utterly off guard.

And just as the process of leavening is worked through until everything is corrupted[iii], those relegated to the outside of the Jewish socio-religious code would have been are astonished and overjoyed, while those inside the Temple would have been perplexed and confused, as Jesus overturns and abolishes and the boundary between the sacred and the profane and offends the deeply held religious sensibilities of the status quo.

For this itinerant Jew is essentially saying the last thing that people want or expect to hear about the Kingdom of God: it is in the concealment of something small and corrupt that the revelation of the Kingdom becomes manifest.[iv] The parable of the Leaven is typical of many of Jesus’ many pronouncements[v] and it provides a very good indication of precisely what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. It is a decidedly “un-kingly” kingdom, one that explodes our assumptions about the very meaning of Kingdom, and one that offers a permanent challenge to our religious and political convictions about precisely who or what is sacred and profane

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

Mark 4:30-32 (also see Matthew 13:31-32, Luke 13:18-19, Thomas 20)[vi]

30Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? 31It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. 32 Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”[vii]

In this parable Jesus again reverses a 1st century symbol for the Kingdom, this time the mighty cedar of Lebanon, which was widely regarded to be a central guiding metaphor for Israel’s messianic hopes. However Jesus “lampoons the whole apocalyptic tradition”[viii] by comparing the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds while finishing with images of ‘trees’ where ‘birds made their home’ in the same breath to conjure up conventional associations with the mighty cedar of Lebanon (in Ezekiel and Daniel).

But it not simply that the mustard plant starts as the smallest of seeds and grows into a large tree for the birds of the air, it’s arresting impact is further witnessed in that the mustard plant is a relatively short lived shrub or tree that tends to take over domestic agricultural areas[ix] and grow out of control precisely where it is not wanted.

As Crossan describes it, the mustard plant is a “pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties, something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses - if you could control it”[x] while also attracting birds within these cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired.[xi]

Moreover the mustard plant is a weed, and in ancient Jewish times the planting of mustard seeds in a garden is prohibited by Mosaic Law (Leviticus 19:19).[xii] So the paradoxical shock of Jesus metaphor is not simply that the mustard seed starts small and becomes the largest of all garden plants (which is true enough) but that its bigness is dangerous, deadly and illegal.[xiii]

We can therefore see that Jesus again invokes an arresting reversal of his audience’s background assumptions regarding the Kingdom of God. With a comic inversion of traditional assumptions Jesus pokes fun at the messianic expectations of 1st century Jews by saying that the smallest seed – and that one which grows into the most unruly and undesirable of all plants - is really the new symbol of God’s Kingdom (Empire, Caesar).[xiv]

Of course, by the time the New Testament was written (100 AD), Jesus’ early followers had buried and domesticated the radical edges of these and other subversive teachings. But in it’s original context, it now seems that Jesus used the term Kingdom to express his paradoxical wit, to given added intensity to his provocative message, to pop open awareness with a new configuration of reality that discloses to us what the world would look like if God was running the show…. The fact that much of our current language on the Kingdom of God is no longer dissonant or paradoxical only shows us how we have domesticated it over the last few thousand years…

As an Integrally informed scholar/practitioner, the most perplexing aspect of the Gospel story for me is that the Kingdom of God is not for the best and brightest, not for those who meet the requirements of second-tear awareness, and not for those with turquoise qualifications and credentials, as Paul said of the early Christian apostles,

“Not many were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world… to bring to nothing things that are.” (Cor. I:27-28)

In his privileging of those without privilege, Jesus of Nazareth was more of a Rebel than a King, and his parabolic discourse consistently challenges and overturns this implied structural network of associations between kingdom, power, sovereignty and God. As one recent Jesus scholar put it:

“The Kingdom of God was made – 1st, for children, and those who resembled them; 2nd, for the outcasts of the world, victims of that social arrogance which repulses the good but humble man; 3rd for heretics and schismatics, publicans, Samaritans, and Pagans of Tyre and Sidon… The doctrine that the poor… alone shall be saved, that the reign of the poor is approaching – was, therefore, the doctrine of Jesus.”[xv]

The point here is that the story of Jesus is still a strange, foolish, awkward and dangerous story when read through an Integral (AQAL) lens… The love of God in the scandal of the Cross defies logic while subverting many of our religious, cultural and philosophical assumptions in ushering in a revolutionary understanding of God. For in Christ God is now fully identified with the god-forsaken - as Chesterton said: from all the religions of the world it is only in Christianity and Jesus’ cry of desolation from the Cross does it look like God, for an instant, became an atheist…

So the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a radical paradox – it does not make everything make sense, it disturbs and unsettles and throws everything off balance… So for me (and I would appreciate any comment on this thorny issue) there is this deep tension between the second-tier “elitism” of Integral - an excellence to which everyone is invited, and the undeniable privileging of the outcast, the afflicted, the powerless in the Gospel story of Jesus – who is for me the human face of God…

As Paul writes, those who find their righteousness in Christ “glory in their weakness”… where the love of God is freely given in suffering and the Cross – and where the boundless love of God is revealed to us in the form of an executed criminal, a despised and abandoned heretic…

So there is no getting around the fact that Christ shows up not at the top of the socio-cultural pyramid, but on the margins, as the menace at the Temple gates, or as the mustard seed that slip through the crack s of the established order and de-centers all fixed enters of power and privilege with good news for the poor and the permanent possibility of offense for the sanctified who put themselves on the throne of the divine…

In contrast to meeting the requirements of an ILP as one who follows the way Jesus, my main form of spiritual practice is to risk letting go of my confidence and eloquence, and to confess not the abundance but the exhaustion of my verbal, intellectual and spiritual resources… I am only really praying when I acknowledge that I do not know how to pray.

Cameron

[i] The Greek here is “three satas” which is about 22 liters – a very large amount and enough to feed about 100 people. It also reminds Jesus’ listeners of the story of the angels who give a prophecy concerning Issac’s birth in Genesis 18, among the items Sarah prepares for them is cakes made from “three satas” of flour…

[ii]For more see Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (1989)

[iii] Scott 2001, p.27-34

[iv] The leaven is “concealed” krypto (Luke), enkrypto (in Matthew) is a much more negative word for hiding (it means to keep secret) than the more neutral kalypto. The phrase “by a woman” is also an unexpected reversal and a problematic representative of the sacred. Woman as the un-favored gender role in the Roman Empire, subject to fathers and husbands and at a disadvantage when it comes to purity codes, so Jesus’ use of woman as a symbol of the sacred is again arresting and provocative

[v] Funk 1996, p.157

[vi]Thomas has ‘falls on disturbed ground’ which is absolutely right, botanically. Mark has ‘is sown’ which is absolutely wrong… it’s a weed… but this fits with Mark’s chapter 4 ’sowing’ theme. Matthew and Luke (who used Mark) also have ‘sown’.

[vii]Only the version of this saying in Thomas refers to the herb as a “plant”. Mark 4 refers to is as a “shrub”, Matthew 12 as both “shrub” and “tree” and Luke 13 as a “tree”. In actual botany, the plant is called SINAPI (Greek) and in this parable it was an annual wild herb that never grew to a size that any Mediterranean person would ever call a tree. (Mahlon Smith CrossTalk - 14 Jun 1998)

[viii]Crossan 1991, p.277

[ix] Funk 1996, p.157

[x] In putting the distinction between insiders and outsiders into question, the mustard seed is “is a startling metaphor, but it would be interpreted quite differently by those, on the one hand, concerned about their fields, their crops, and their harvests, and by those, on the other, for whom fields, crops, and harvest were always the property of others.” - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)

[xi] Crossan 1991 as Roman natural historian Pliny the elder (23-79AD) writes, mustard “with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild… when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” Pliny (the Elder) in Natural History 29.54.170 (LOEB), p.170-171 quoted in Scott 2001, p. 37

[xii] Douglas Oakman, “It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the Kingdom of God to a weed.” (1986, p.127 quoted in Crossan 1991, p.278)

[xiii]Crossan 1991, p.278 In further establishing the mustard plants (Brassica Nigra) subversive meaning, it has been likened by Smith to “a colonizing annual that appears in disturbed ground and, often, after sturdier plants appear in a few years, disappears. This might have parabolic implications.” (CrossTalk - 14 Jun 1998)

[xiv] Funk 1996, p.157

[xv]Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus 1972, p.194-196

This paper was published in The Global Spiral (March 2009)

This exploration aims to resolve the fundamental split between two diametrically opposed worldviews in the present day:  the evolutionary story of the universe as described by modern science since the time of Darwin (1859) and the traditional Gospel story of God’s self-communication in Jesus Christ that informs the lives of up to 2 billion Christians in the world today.

Karl Rahner, the influential Catholic theologian whose writings were behind the many of the reforms of Vatican II initiated this critical inquiry in the 1970s with a pioneering paper titled “Christology within an Evolutionary View of the World.”¹ In seeking out an intrinsic unity between the decisive event of God’s self-revelation in the person of Jesus and the 13 billion year process of cosmic, biological and human evolution, Rahner maintained that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “the basic tendency of matter to discover itself in spirit . . . reaches it’s definitive breakthrough.”² So for Rahner, in Jesus Christ we discover New Creation—the necessary and permanent beginning of the divinization of sentient life in the evolving universe, an event signifying to us that the absolute self-communication of God to the world-historical process of evolution has been irrevocably inaugurated and is even now moving towards its far-off goal.³

As is well known, the orthodox Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, as upheld by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett has consistently maintained an opposing viewpoint: evolution is a blind and purposeless process—natural selection simply sifts through whatever is thrown up by random mutations in the genes, and over hundreds of millions of years things such as eyes and nervous systems are accidentally cobbled together. According to Neo-Darwinian theory, all such forms of adaptive complexity (including ourselves) are the result of cunning survival strategies that ‘just happen’ and which are then honed through natural selection⁴ mechanically sifting through these random mutations in the genes—just some of which are lucky enough to be beneficial in increasing an organism’s probability of reproductive success.

But while Neo-Darwinian evolution highlights what is taken to be the blind aimlessness of an evolutionary process basically ‘red in tooth and claw’, in recent years an increasing number of biologists⁵ have expressed their belief that other explanatory features are at work in the overall trajectory of the evolutionary process from atoms to molecules to organisms to reptiles, mammals and the higher primates, and particularly in regards to the relatively abrupt origination of new forms of life in the aftermath of unexpected catastrophic events. As a result, these more marginal evolutionary biologists have broken with the dominant paradigm and argue that the mechanism of Darwinian selection winnowing through random genetic mutations (while true enough) does not adequately explain the dynamic patterns and directional trends in evolution towards increasing exterior complexity and interior consciousness, what Whitehead called evolution’s creative advance into novelty.⁶

Self-organization (Kauffman)

It now seems that the formative features of a new integration of the evolutionary epic of modern science and the Christian story of creation and redemption, will come from some of the more recent developments at the leading edge of scientific research—a field known as the “sciences of complexity.” Also called the evolutionary systems sciences, the sciences of complexity is a field that includes a wide range of scientific disciplines that describe the dynamic patterns of change that connect across disparate domains (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, socio-linguistics)⁷ with profound implications for the ongoing dialogue between evolutionary science and Christian theology.

The general claim of the sciences of complexity is that evolution exhibits some dynamic patterns, its formative features are invariant, and evolution repeats itself through in general ways so that we may now be able to glimpse its fundamental nature for the first time.⁸ The core insight of sciences of complexity is that matter on planet earth has the capacity to be ‘self-organizing’ on the account of the inherent nature of the processes that atomic, molecular, chemical and biological entities undergo. ⁹ So in contrast to the infamous Second Law of thermodynamics that dictates an overall increase in disorder (in isolated systems) leading to the ultimate ‘heat death’ of the universe, it is becoming increasingly clear that complex systems in open energy exchange with their environments can become unpredictable and chaotic in their observable behavior and then ‘self-organize’ or propel themselves onto new, higher levels of exterior complexity (and interior consciousness), commonly called ‘order out of chaos’.

In other words, it is now recognized that when a constant energy flow is passed through dynamic open systems, they have the propensity to undergo abrupt transformations and organize themselves into new and unexpected forms of order characterized by an increase in structural organization and complexity.¹⁰ In fact, all evolving systems in the real world exist in open energy exchanges with their environments and when driven ‘far from equilibrium’ have this tendency to undergo chaotic instabilities and propel themselves to new and highly organized regimes. ¹¹ And since self-organization in complex systems occurs across all levels of the known universe, evolution can now be seen to be engaged in an irreversible or ‘uni-directional’ pattern of change creating “order out of chaos” and pushing complex systems towards higher levels of structural organization and complexity.¹²

Evolution on the Edge-of Chaos

Now, evolving systems on the ‘edge-of-chaos’ are very different from closed systems at thermodynamic equilibrium¹³ and tend to be poised at a critical threshold between order (periodic change) and chaos (a periodic or random change).¹⁴ Commonly named the “edge-of-chaos”, it is precisely here in this critical state delicately poised between too much rigidity and too much fluidity that evolving systems in open energy exchange have the significant tendency to evolve towards new, more complex adaptive structures.¹⁵

The edge-of-chaos is therefore the “source of order” in the universe (Kauffman), bringing “order out of chaos” (Prigogine), and moving evolution towards new dynamic regimes with higher levels of complexity and spontaneous “emergent order” (Phillip Clayton). As Kauffman explains, “Self-organization is a natural property of complex genetic systems. There is ‘order for free’ out there, a spontaneous crystallization of generic order out of complex systems, with no need for natural selection or any other external force.”

Self-organization in complex systems finely balanced at the creative tension between opposites has also been termed “chaosmos” (James Joyce) in describing the delicate interplay between chance and necessity, stasis and change, chaotic disruption and emergent novelty in the evolutionary trajectory from inanimate matter to self-replicating life to self-conscious humanity. And in a way that speaks directly to our current global economic crisis, at this critical state of creative tension between opposing forces the outcome of any evolutionary process is said to be unpredictable in detail and inherently indeterminate, i.e. it is impossible to tell whether the system in this state of creative tension (i.e. the existing economic system!) will disintegrate into chaos or leap into a new, differentiated higher level of order.¹⁶

However the important point for the aims of this paper is that modern science has now discovered that the very site of evolutionary change is the creative tension between opposites at the “edge-of-chaos” – an insight which corresponds directly with orthodox Christian theology.¹⁷ For this same paradoxical tension between opposites is central to both dogmatic Christology – the irreducible tension between ‘fully human’ and ‘fully divine’ in the person of Jesus¹⁸ as well as (and more pointedly), the original structure of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom of God that reside within the earliest layers of the Christian faith tradition.¹⁹ That is, almost all of the recorded parables of Jesus of Nazareth have the same paradoxical voice-print, the same deep structure, where opposing perspectives are held together in the same creative tension at the “edge-of-chaos” that the sciences of complexity and self-organization have recently discovered at the wildly unpredictable edge of evolution’s creative advance. So Jesus of Nazareth spoke in paradoxes to usher in a new world (the Kingdom of God) and inaugurate a new horizon of what it means to be fully human by evoking the very same tension between opposites that has recently been discovered by the sciences of complexity and self-organization.²⁰

For more discussion on the deep structure of Christ’s teachings, see other articles on this site (e.g. Source Code) or a paper previously published by on The Global Spiral: (“Towards a Post-Metaphysical Theology” 2008) where it is shown that the same paradoxical structure, what is also called a dynamic pattern of “bi-polar reversals” is clearly evidenced in the narrative center of at least 30 of the parables of Jesus recorded in the synoptic gospels…

So where the central teachings of Jesus all give voice to the same paradoxical tension between opposing perspectives, the sciences of complexity now provide direct supporting evidence for the view that the creative tension of Christian paradox is indeed the ‘condition of possibility’ for the coming into being of emergent novelty in the structural dynamics of evolution at the “edge-of-chaos”. So the Christian hope for New Creation as is synonymous with this critical threshold between opposing forces described by the sciences of complex emergence, while this paradoxical tension is also attested to by Jesus as the very place in which significant change and transformation can take place.²¹

So where there are new grounds here for a direct correspondence between the creative tension of Christian paradox and the sciences of complexity, and to further unpack this we can briefly turn to the central mystery of the Christian faith where the God of Israel is revealed to us in the scandal of the Cross. As Jesus says in probably his most well known paradox and one which holds the radical tension between opposites: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and let him follow me! For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”(Mark 8:34-35) So where the figure of Christ crucified holds the creative tension between saving (self-expenditure) and losing (self-preservation) one’s life we have a direct witness to what Jesus called “the narrow gate’” of transformation at the edge-of-chaos, where the same creative tension between opposites that constitutes the meaning of the Cross²² and the radical core of Jesus’ authentic teachings on the Kingdom of God²³ can also be seen from the worldview of modern science to depict the very contours of evolution when taken to it’s highest pitch and most creative, unpredictable and surprising edge.

So where the centrality of paradox to the Christian faith (and the teachings of Jesus) corresponds seamlessly with the recent discoveries of modern science, with the paradoxes of Jesus at the heart of the Gospel story we also discover the flesh and blood story of a God who becomes human and participates fully in the world’s struggles, pains and convulsions. In Christianity the unsearchable mystery of God’s love is revealed in the capacity of a vulnerable, suffering creature to go all the way and fully embrace the contradictory tensions of existence. For just as it is in the face of death that life is a gift, it is in the face of the cross that resurrection is a word of grace, and it is in the midst of sin and suffering that salvation is freely received, as Jesus absorbs evil with love and transforms this-world into a new world in which the inexhaustible love and radical justice of God can reign. And moreover, in addition to embodying the creative tension between opposites at the edge-of-chaos, the evolutionary worldview of modern science also allows us to depart from the image of an immutable God that is untouched by the world’s suffering and give renewed significance to our sense of God being present in the tangible depths of life’s long, painful, unpredictable and perpetually surprising evolutionary journey.²⁴

Made of Star Dust

This cruciform pattern of change that describes how the creative tension between opposites at the edge-of-chaos leads to the emergence of new forms of complexity is not only of great importance for understanding the paradoxical heart of the Christian faith but is also evidenced in some of the more significant macro (large-scale) transformations at several critical points of cosmic, biological and human evolution in the 13 billion year unfolding of the universe.

One of these points concerns stellar evolution, and particularly the supernovae explosions that signify both the death of a star and the chemical enrichment of the cosmos. All of the heavy life-forming elements (C, N, Fe) that make up our own living bodies are synthesized deep in the interiors of these collapsing stars. As they contract, burn up all their fuel and reach the end of their existence, the chemical building-blocks of life are thrown out across the universe with the gigantic supernova explosion that signals the chaotic end of the star’s evolution. Through this dynamic process of ‘order out of chaos’, which parallels the self-organizing dynamics of complex systems in holding the creative tension between expansion and contraction, death and novel emergence, we can see that the catastrophic end of a star’s life leads to the emergence of complex bio-friendly chemistry in the universe, preparing the ground for the formation of planetary systems and the subsequent emergence of life on earth.²⁵

The Emergence of New Species in the History of Life

Evolution on the edge-of-chaos is also evidenced in the central mystery of evolutionary biology – the emergence of altogether new species in the history of life. In a long-standing challenge to the explanatory scope and power of the Neo-Darwinian theory, and one which furnishes us with further evidence for a theory of creative tension at the edge-of-chaos, comes from palaeontology and particularly the work of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge.

These palaeontologists challenged the traditional gradualist conception of change in the Neo-Darwinian theory, specifically the notion that evolution takes place through the slow, continuous, incremental mutation of favourable characteristics in organisms over long stretches of geological time. According to Gould and Eldredge, the ‘phylogenetic incrementalism’ (gradualism) associated with the name of Darwin is “alarmingly out of whack”²⁶ with respect to the evidence of the fossil record and they subsequently published a major paper in the scientific journal Palaeobiology in which they announced a deep challenge to the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.

In essence, ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’ is a linking of the pattern of stasis – that observation that “once a species appears in the fossil record, it tends to persist with little appreciable change throughout the remainder of its existence” ²⁷ with the simultaneous recognition that most evolutionary change seems bound up with the abrupt origination of new species, called ‘speciation’—the basic regularity that organisms with novel anatomical characteristics tend to show up relatively suddenly in the fossil record.²⁸ As against five to ten million years of stasis, speciation happens in approximately five to fifty thousand years, or 1000 times shorter than the average duration of species. This contrast of rates makes the emergence of new forms of living complexity look instantaneous in the fossil record so that when we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty it usually shows up ‘all at once’ and fully-formed, leaving virtually no evidence of any intermediate forms. ²⁹

We can find a striking parallel here between the pattern of stasis and punctuated emergence in the fossil record and the discoveries of the sciences of complexity. As we have already seen, the self-organizing dynamic of evolution of the edge-of-chaos can be established when it is recognized that open systems (physical, chemical, biological or social) can be driven far from thermodynamic equilibrium where they reach critical ‘bifurcation’ points and leap abruptly into new states of emergent order and greater complexity. Now in the same way, the notion that speciation in the living world is correlated with sudden changes in self-organizing systems, which pass through periods of instability and then lock onto new stable patterns, fits very well with the models of transformation as described by both the theory of punctuated equilibrium and the sciences of complexity.³⁰

As a result, in opposition to the tradition notion Darwinian gradualism (for which there is a conspicuous lack of evidence of the fossil record) it is more reasonable to think that the critical transformations between species that give rise the incredible complexity and diversity in the evolution of life have arisen through these relatively abrupt transformations and symmetry breaks, which is confirmed by both the dynamic pattern of self-organization on the edge-of-chaos in the sciences of complexity (where new forms of life suddenly emerge at the critical threshold between necessity and contingency) and the pattern of stasis and punctuated change exhibited in the fossil record.³¹

The discovery that evolution has been punctuated by a series of mass extinction events that are followed by sudden bursts novel emergence where new species appear as if ‘at once’ and fully formed is a large-scale evolutionary pattern that has repeated itself time and again at the critical ‘bifurcation’ points in the evolution of life. At least five such ‘great dyings’ have occurred in the history of life, and there is now little doubt that these major decimations are responsible for the overall shape of evolution in the biosphere.³²

As a result we can further establish this cross wiring of the sciences of complexity and the creative tension at the heart of Jesus’ most memorable teachings on the Kingdom of God, for both of these approaches to the critical question of how transformation happens maintain that significant evolutionary change happens at the edge-of-chaos, where the capacity to embody paradox and navigate the irreducible tensions of the life-process brings forth emergent order and new forms of adaptive complexity.

The Dialectic of Progress in Human History

This edge-of-chaos dynamic can also been traced through the historical development of the human species. Human history has been shaped by a number of painful and messy socio-cultural upheavals and critical periods of ‘disruption and novelty’ where the dominant regime reaches a point of chaotic instability and gives way to a new more organized socio-cultural structure. Indeed influential world history scholar Arnold Toynbee’s theory of “challenge and response” depicts socio-cultural change in much the same way to these modern day evolutionary sciences:

During the disintegration of a civilization, two separate plays with different plots are being performed simultaneously side by side. While an unchanging dominant majority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking creative responses from newly recruited minorities, which proclaim their own creative power by rising, each time to the occasion.³³

This pattern of historical change through the creative tension between opposites is also reminiscent of Hegel’s developmental philosophy, which has subsequently been taken up and modified by other Enlightenment thinkers such as Marx and Habermas. According to this theory of historical change, each stage of socio-cultural development unfolds until it reaches its own ‘catastrophic bifurcation’ called an internal contradiction, which generates a great deal of chaos and instability. To escape this chaos (often stemming from unexpected changes in the environment) the social system must evolve to a more highly organized pattern, thereby diffusing the problems and inherent limitations of the previous stage of development, and beginning a new process of evolution’s unfolding.³⁴

By touching on how the creative tension between opposites is also driving force human history, this brief analysis simply demonstrates how this fundamental pattern, what can be called “death and renewal” at the edge-of-chaos is manifested in the macro-dynamics of evolution from cosmology to biology to human history. This dynamic pattern of self-organization via instability and transformation is evidenced in everything from the supernovae explosion of the primordial elements that give birth to the building blocks of life to the catastrophic mass extinction events that catalyze the emergence to new living species on our hot house planet to the passionate and bloody upheavals of human history. And as we saw above, this capacity for evolution to find new creative solutions to complex problems at the “edge-of-chaos” corresponds almost perfectly with the deep structure at the center of Jesus’ most radical teachings, and thereby intersects with the very constitution of the Christian faith tradition.

Evolvability

So while the process of evolution is shot through with accidental, random and contingent events, in view of the sciences of complexity it can equally be said that it is precisely “through the portals of contingency that what is truly new enters the world”³⁵ for it now seems that significant evolutionary change happens at the edge-of-chaos, and it is the creative tension between order and chaos where the outcome of the process is inherently unpredictable or unforeseeable that allows for the continual admittance of disruptive novelty and emergent order.

Moreover, the dynamics self-organization on the edge-of-chaos is also considered to be the likely precondition of evolution itself, which thereby provides the fundamental tie between self-organization and natural selection. As Stuart Kauffman, one of the pioneers of the sciences of complexity and self-organization puts it in a recent interview:

“There are all sorts of neat reasons why it’s incredibly advantageous to be at the edge of chaos… And what could possibly be doing that tuning? Well, natural selection, because it’s highly advantageous. So here is a marriage of self-organization (transformation) and selection (adaptation). Both are necessary. So self-organization affords the capacity to be critical (at the edge-of-chaos) and then selection gets it and maintains it. And maybe it’s so general that it’s a law for any biosphere.”³⁶

In other words, since complex self-organizing systems exist far from equilibrium at “the edge of chaos”, natural selection keeps complex genetic arrays in this dynamic range between too much fluidity and too much fixity, as the creative edge in which alone significant evolution can take place.³⁷ And according to Kauffman this reworking of natural selection explains “evolvability” that deep property of living things which accounts for the capacity for qualitative change in evolving systems to an altogether new horizon of possibilities in the overall increase in novelty, complexity and diversity that we see in the basic directionality of evolution over the long haul. In other words, evolution on the edge-of-chaos is not only the central characteristic of self-organization in complex systems, it can also explain what Eric Jantsch has called “self-realization through self-transcendence” and account for the capacity of living organisms to go beyond a given range of possibilities and introduce new creative twists and evolve onto more complex and dynamic regimes.

As a result, self-organization in complex systems far from equilibrium demonstrates that things “evolve to evolve” to the edge of chaos, which corresponds to a delicate interplay between chance and necessity, chaotic fluctuations and emergent order, that also sits at the founding gestures of orthodox Christian theology (see note 14). So in fundamental congruence with the paradoxical heart of Christianity, the capacity to evolve at the edge-of-chaos can also be construed as the driving force of large-scale evolutionary dynamics, where natural selection works to keep evolving systems in the dynamic regime that holds the tension between opposite poles and fine-tunes the novelty and diversity that is constantly and spontaneously being generated.

This more general explanatory framework can embrace the essential truth-claims of the Christian tradition while providing a potentially rich (and inclusive) alternative to the orthodox Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. The multitude of life forms that have evolved in the natural world are not merely the outcome of blind chance and long stretches of geological time but rather the outcome of a dynamic interplay between Darwinian selection (working to optimize reproductive fitness) and the immanent self-organizing dynamics (evolvability) of complex systems working to bring forth new forms of living complexity across successively higher hierarchical levels of evolution (physical, chemical, biological, socio-cultural).

So from this perspective, it is possible to incorporate the fundamentals of Neo-Darwinism into a broader evolutionary framework, where selective pressures constitute the surrounding matrix over which the intrinsic self-organizing factors of physical, biological and socio-cultural systems are disclosed. As Kauffman again writes, evolving systems:

… are not deeply entrenched in an ordered regime . . . they are actually very close to the edge-of-chaos transition, where things are much looser and more fluid. And natural selection is not the antagonist of self-organization. It is more like a law of motion, a force that is constantly pushing emergent, self-organizing systems toward the edge of chaos.

So, while we can reject overtly reductionist slide of Neo-Darwinism which holds up the billions of tons of single-celled bacteria (prokaryotes) on our planet as the dominant exemplar of Darwinian fitness in the history of life,³⁸ we can preserve the central Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and incorporate it into a broader and more inclusive evolutionary framework. This means that we remove natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution, that which guides and controls the task of optimizing reproductive fitness. In contrast natural selection can be seen to operate, but in a modified sense where selection moves diverse forms of adaptive complexity to the creative edge of evolution while discarding whatever mutations are not compatible with the minimal constraints survival and reproduction (these biological constraints that become increasingly unnecessary in human socio-cultural evolution). In this more general context, natural selection acts as a broad survival filter where the criteria of Darwinian fitness (maximal reproductive success) that can be recast as a structural feature of our biological hard-wiring and a loose constraint to be satisfied rather than optimized.³⁹ So where biological survival drives (e.g. sex and aggression) are deeply rooted in our collective Darwinian inheritance, as evolution moves forward into new and unforeseen horizons natural selection permits any living organism, local population, or species that has sufficient integrity to adapt to its environment and spontaneously organize its self to navigate the creative tensions at the edge-of-chaos and evolve further.⁴⁰

In this way natural selection favors any organism capable of living at the edge-of-chaos, any organism capable of enduring the contradictory tensions of an evolutionary trajectory that is “rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.”⁴¹ As Kauffman again argues: “much of the (emergent) order we see in organisms may be the direct result not of natural selection but of the natural order selection was privileged to act on . . . Evolution is not just tinkering . . . It is emergent order honored and honed by selection”.⁴²

This is a significant reworking of the core Neo-Darwinian doctrine and entails a radical rethinking of evolutionary biology. In pointing directly to a fundamental change from the active constraints of maximizing reproductive fitness (where population span actually decrease as the tree of life unfolds) to the intrinsic self-organizing dynamics of complex organic systems,⁴³ this re-framing of the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution also opens the way for a re-consideration of the truth-claims of Christian theology, and specifically how the paradoxes of the Christian faith and the capacity to absorb and transmute the contradictory tension of our creaturely existence now find scientific legitimacy in the discovery of evolution on the “edge-of-chaos”.

Life Finds a Way

It seems reasonable to assume that if Christian theology is going to survive in the 21st century it must acknowledge the incredible waste, turmoil and contingency of the emerging evolutionary story of modern science. By facing up the horrific cost of evolution, where over 99% of the species ever evolved are now extinct in a “nightmare spectacular taking place on a hot-house planet where the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart”⁴⁴ theology in a post-Darwinian world must finally recognize and even embrace the nearly 500 year old rational-scientific critique of mythic religion,⁴⁵ and do away with comfortable idea of an Intelligent Designer that has everything under its omnipotent and benevolent celestial supervision.

However in tracing the cruciform nature of large-scale (macro) transformations in the evolutionary epic of modern science, it is again possible to reaffirm the sense of life’s constant openness to new creation at those critical thresholds where two opposing forces are held together in creative tension. In making this transition into a post-Darwinian God-view, the sciences of self-organization and emergent order can embrace this dynamic pattern of crisis and regeneration where new forms of life bubble up on the chaotic edge of evolutions reaching out into new creative possibilities, while simultaneously conforming to the very same tension between opposites that sits at earliest beginnings of the Christian faith tradition.

For the Christ-event (the life, death and resurrection of Jesus) is an “edge-of-chaos” phenomenon. Jesus comes to us as one we did not see coming, he throws things off balance, he goes where he cannot go, through the narrow gate at the frothy edge where impossible becomes possible and new worlds spring forth through the gate-less gate of his mind-bending paradoxes. In pushing the envelope of the creative edge of human evolution, the crucified and risen Jesus embodies the paradoxical tension between opposites to the point of maximum intensity where ones soul reaches it breaking point… and yet does not break—but instead shifts into a deeper and more genuine expression of its own inherent potentials.

In the person of Jesus we discover the archetypal event of God’s self-revelation in the world where the creative tension of paradox that constitutes the original structure of Jesus’ teachings exposes us to “the fresh wellspring of novelty” that gives rise to “the endlessly novel forms of life”⁴⁶ that are evidenced in the evolutionary story of modern science. By showing that cosmic, biological and human evolution are ceaselessly creative in ways that are unpredictable, perpetually surprising and structurally unforeseeable, we can therefore tell the evolutionary story with renewed depth and meaning by showing that the creative tension at the edge-of-chaos evidenced by modern science also re-activates dangerous memory of Jesus and the paradoxical heart of the Christian gospel.

We can further draw out this pattern that connects Christian paradox and the science of emergent order by showing how the Gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth holds together two inextricably intertwined narratives is a way that corresponds precisely with the edge-of-chaos dynamics in the scientific account of evolution. One the one hand Jesus is the one announcing the permanent challenge of an already arriving Kingdom – and doing so in his very own words and deeds, giving love to the unlovable, giving sight to the blind, giving healing to the sick and offering congratulations to the poor. And on the other hand, Jesus’ very enactment of the Kingdom activates an equal but opposite force – the powers of darkness that must preserve the established order at all costs, those destructive forces that see in the Nazarene only a dangerous heretic, a demon-possessed blasphemer, a violator of time-honored traditions.

These two diametrically opposed forces – Jesus proclamation of a his Kingdom program and paranoid violence of the powers that be came together in the final week of Jesus life in probably the most wildly unpredictable and unexpected series of events in human history, a tumultuous crescendo that ended with Jesus being directly exposed to the worst horrors that the world-historical process has to offer in being executed as a heretic on a Roman cross.

In Jesus’ last hours these two opposing forces came together at the “edge-of-chaos” in the most shocking and disturbing fashion, but of course this was not the end, for from out of this creative tension bursts forth the most unexpected and surprising event of all – the resurrection of Jesus, his qualitative emergence into a new form of life, his radical mutation into an altogether new horizon of what it means to be human.⁴⁷ Just as the sciences of self-organization suggest that evolving systems have a propensity to self-organize at the edge-of-chaos and at those critical disruptions that punctuate of evolution’s creative advance, the notion that the reinvention of a thing goes hand in hand with the capacity to move to the vulnerable edges of life and death goes hand in hand with Jesus’ paradoxical teachings on the Kingdom and is part and parcel of the Christian narrative of God’s decisive self-revelation in human history.

So just as the paradox of Christ crucified is a scandal – foolish to the wisdom of the Greeks and a stumbling-block in the way of Jewish messianic expectations, what at first seems to be an unpredictable or chaotic instability where we find ourselves torn between two equal but opposite poles is actually the edge-of-chaos, i.e. the threshold of the radically “self-transcending” capacity of life towards newer and more complex forms in general, what Martin Luther King called “that power that can find a way out of now no way”.

In fact, if the natural and human worlds were devoid of obstructions, it is highly probable that living beings would never evolve at all. For evolution to move forward, from this post-Darwinian perspective it is extremely important that life be continually presented with challenges, and that natural selection keeps evolving systems at the edge-of-chaos pushing them to go beyond its given status. Guy Murchie, in noticing this dialectic of crisis/opportunity in the evolution of life on earth, argued that evolution is a kind of “soul school” and that in a post-Darwinian worldview, the trajectory new life through critical instabilities is as good a one for nourishing the soul as we could possibly imagine.⁴⁸

The basic message of this integration of the evolutionary epic of science and the Gospel story of Jesus Christ is that Life finds a way to overcome even the biggest setbacks, the most impossible obstacles and the most devastating catastrophes. From the primordial fireball that followed the Big Bang to the massive supernovae explosion that prepared the conditions for first self-replicating organisms, to the catastrophic mass extinction in the evolution of life on our planet to the socio-cultural upheavals and revolutions of human history, evolution keeps on going beyond itself in unfolding ever new, more complex forms and structures in a tremendous sweep of creative activity running from star dust to the first glimmers of a divinized humanity.

And so we too are part and parcel of this all-encompassing evolutionary current, the dynamic, unpredictable, surprising and unexpected turns of the world-historical process through periodic edge-of-chaos transitions into radically new forms of sentient life and consciousness.For where the love of God in Jesus Christ at the radical dawn of Christianity was expressed in paradoxical stories that antagonized the existing order and set up the very conditions for awakening to the Kingdom of God, there is in the evolutionary epic of modern science a secret current of all-pervading Love that also holds open the paradoxical tensions of a creatively chaotic process (chaosmos) in bringing new life out of seeming catastrophe at the frothy edge of our evolutionary journey.

Moreover, in the traditional Christian story Jesus is the “Word (Logos) made flesh” and is said to be that one in whom everything is created – the cosmic Christ in and through whom the entire creation comes into being and reaches fulfillment. And since evolution on the edge-of-chaos is Christ-like or cruciform in its innermost nature in holding the creative tension between opposites at the edge-of-chaos, we can also affirm here the distinctive truth-claim of the Christian faith that Jesus Christ is the Logos – the true center of human existence – for the wisdom of God in the figure of Jesus also comprises the inner-guiding force of the evolving universe and encapsulates the very meaning and purpose of sentient life in the evolving universe…

Conclusion

Standing before the self-organizing, self-transcending trajectory of evolution on the edge-of-chaos from matter to life to mind, in recent years many scientists, philosophers and theologians have asked if evolution has an ultimate direction or purpose, a fundamental drive to manifest ever-greater forms of complexity and consciousness.

By showing that the serendipitous creativity of evolution springs forth through unexpected portals of paradox we find in the self-organizing dynamics of evolution an inexorable striving for new possibilities in spite of the sheer contingency, incredible pain and irreparable suffering that inheres within all life. For just as the first reptiles or amphibians that evolved on our planet could never have imagined the eventual emergence of human culture and everything from the Great Pyramids of Egypt to You-tube, our own collective future (if we make it through our the current global crises and challenges) is itself unimaginable, an ever-receding horizon that is inherently inconceivable, and structurally open to an absolute future that we can only be called God or Christ consciousness (by whatever name).

Given the persistent tendency of evolution to constantly go beyond what went before, it seems likely that we are part and parcel of a universal story that is unfinished and still evolving – and that there are higher stages of evolution to be attained in the collective future of the human species. And since it is precisely in and through creative tensions at the edge-of-chaos, critical disruptions of the status quo and the unexpected turns of Jesus’ paradoxical teachings that evolution moves towards its unforeseeable future, it seems probable that the post-human future of evolution is ultimately headed towards a rendezvous with God through the dynamics of crisis and regeneration in a potentially endless process that is constantly bringing forth new forms and structures, an evolution that has been and always will be driven to manifest more and more of its mysterious creativity.⁴⁹

That is, with the recent scientific understanding that significant evolutionary change happens at edge-of-chaos there is a hidden impetus to the evolving universe, an intrinsic connection between the swirling galaxies, the myriad of life-forms that pervade this planet and the creative passions of human history. For given that evolution has the inherent capacity to overcome even the biggest obstacles, if we are to follow the way of Jesus Christ we are to take up our cross and stand in the transformative fire of Jesus’ paradoxes, go to the place where we cannot go, to go to the place where the world is in pain, to embrace the contradictions of a world that is right now going through birth pangs and unpredictable earthquakes, a world that is groaning for fulfillment…

And if God in the Christian story is fully present in the heart of flesh, and if the edge-of-chaos is the source of the serendipitous creativity in the evolving universe, then maybe Jesus’ death and resurrection is the story of God’s work throughout the entire universe, and just maybe the Kingdom of God is the New Creation and maybe, just perhaps, our existence here matters even more than we have ever conceived possible…

I’ve posted below a clip of Nicole Kidman in The Invasion where she mentions my favorite philosopher Ken Wilber and discusses integral theory in general… Click here

One of the more significant contentions of Integral theory is that evolution is going somewhere, i.e. the 13 billion year process that led to the relatively recent emergence of the human species on this planet has a direction or teleology – what might be called a self-transcending current of increasing Eros/Love or successively higher levels of interior consciousness/exterior complexity. From the primordial chaos that followed the Big Bang, to the relatively rapid formation of stars and galaxies, to the stunning complexity and diversity of self-replicating life here on Earth, we are all part and parcel of this tremendous sweep of creative activity, a “creative advance into novelty” (Whitehead) that has become conscious of itself for the first time in humans and looks to all intents and purposes like it will eventually culminate with the self-realization of God, by whatever name…

Of course, the fanciful suggestion that there are purposes “other than” merely human purposes is widely held to be a useful fiction by philosophers of science like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And so while this view that evolution is headed toward some kind of far-off Omega point where “God will be All in all” may well just be a useful hallucination, a motivational strategy to help one cope with the crippling lack of hope in the post-Enlightenment West, there is also a spiritual basis for skepticism and suspicion of this teleological view that sees the hand of God in the evolutionary trajectory from atoms to amoebas to humans…

For not only did two world wars and the atrocities of the 20th century decisively puncture the bubble of historical optimism, the very attempt to offer some sort of over-arching explanation for such evil by fitting it into some larger account of God’s Providential design in which such abysmal barbarity is but a necessary moment in an overall evolutionary trajectory, is an obscenity that defiles the very names of each of its victims, of each one, taken singly, one by one… There is something callous and inhuman in an evolutionary world-view that sees in “teleological” history a good news/bad news story in which the countless deaths were cost accounted as a good investment in the progress of the World Soul, the high but affordable toll the Spirit must pay for advancing from one historical epoch to the next.

As theologian Emmanuel Levinas denounced in the preface to “Totality and Infinity” teleological history is one in which many an innocent flower is tread on the way to the Promised Land, so we would do well not to project deeper and more sweeping patterns of redemptive meaning onto occurrences such as the Holocaust which are unambiguously evil. The death of 8 million Jews in the Final Solution is not a sacrifice in exchange for something higher, rather we may do well to turn to the New Testament and take heed of the innocent flowers, the tender shoots that are trampled under the boots of teleology and the secrets of the heart that are unknown to the “judgments of history”.

A more compassionate and inclusive perspective would be to oppose such teleological obscenities, which rear their ugly head today in the pyrotechnic vision of the Christian Right in the USA that gleefully anticipates how a thermo-nuclear war would wondrously fulfill Scripture’s promises of God’s final judgment and usher in the return of Christ, the Lord and Giver of life!

Instead of such world-historical triumphalism we might want to re-contextualize the innate capacity of the world-historical process “to go beyond what went before it” in an inexorable development from chaos to order and from darkness into the light. Such teleological views domesticate both the unspeakable horrors and the unexpected wonders of the world-historical process and falsely renders predictable and necessary an unforeseeable passage through accident, contingency and unpredictability that has no guarantee of a positive outcome and is likely to disrupt every overarching law of nature and pattern of history if it does… In other words, the ability of a thing to be reinvented and to surpass itself goes hand in hand with its vulnerability to destruction, which is all part and parcel of the beautiful risk of creation. To illustrate this point, I will end this with an often quoted passage on human origins from the Talmud

“Twenty six attempts preceded the present genesis, all of which were destined to fail. The world of man has arisen out of the chaotic heart of the preceding debris; he too is exposed to the risk of failure, and the return to nothing. ‘Let us hope it works’ exclaimed God as he created the world, and this hope, which has accompanied the subsequent history of the world and mankind, has emphasized right from the outset that this history is branded with the mark of radical uncertainty.” Talmud

This quote is cited by André Neher, “Visions du temps et l’histoire dans la culture juive,” Les Cultures et le temps , ed. by UNESCO, Introduction by Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Les presses de l’UNESCO, 1975), p. 179. This text is itself cited by Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 193-94, who is herself citing Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos, (Boulder: New Science Library, 1984), p. 313, whose translation (from the French) we are using.

For Christians it is the most decisive event in all of human history, the truth upon which ones faith is said to stand or fall, for others it is a pernicious superstition that props up an out-dated and irrelevant institution. Whatever else it may be, the Resurrection event that founded the 2000 year history of the Christian tradition is an intriguing and singular phenomenon that many of those awakened to the Midnight Sun are naturally drawn to question and inquire into…

So for starters, we can begin with a brief Integral summary of the successive stages of developmental unfolding in all 1st-tier approaches to the Resurrection:

Red-Ego: At this level Jesus is a divinely ordained magician and his Resurrection is a divine power play, expressing for its adherents a denial of death and mortality awareness, and a triumph of magical wish-fulfillment released from the very real limits of space, time and embodiment…

Amber-Traditional: At this stage God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. The Resurrection here is physical and bodily and it believed in as an event in which God intervenes in human history to save a new group of chosen people… The gospel narrative is taken to be literal reality, and so with the Resurrection the figure of Jesus is vindicated as God’s one and only begotten Son, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead.

Orange-Modern: With the world-view of modern science and reason there is no historical evidence for the Resurrection which is seen to be just another one of the miracles attested to in the Gospels, all of which contradict universal Laws of Nature. Although the resurrection is seen to be a myth, from this stage it may also be said that either the life of Jesus symbolizes a universal human possibility or that the Resurrection simply means the memory of Jesus lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers, who may have been suffering from some kind of delusion or hallucination in the wake of their leaders execution.

Green-Post-modern – Here the Resurrection is not so much a historical event but a myth that is found in many different pre-modern religions, or possibly a New Age symbol of the coming global transformation. The question is not, “how is such an event physically or historically possible?” but rather, “what event do these stories harbor?”, “what do these stories mean?” At this stage there are no facts, just interpretations and so all things flow in a river of meaning. The Resurrection is therefore intended above all as a matter of subjectivity or interiority

Now, while an Integral approach can see the relative degrees of truth and meaning in all these previous value-structures, it also adds its own important contributions, based on the capacity for vision-logic (multiple perspective taking) and the discoveries of the modern and post-modern world. It is these that we shall now turn to:

Firstly, from within an evolutionary context of inter-locking hierarchical systems, the Resurrection is a foremost instance of Spirit’s creative advance into novelty (Whitehead), where the risen Jesus is the first fruits of an altogether new kind of humanity… As Pope Benedict XVI said at his first Easter mass, borrowing the language of evolutionary science, the Resurrection is

“The greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.”

From an integral perspective, we see supporting evidence of Pope Benedict’s somewhat surprising view of the Resurrection event in the serendipitous creativity of the evolutionary process. From a primordial fireball that gave rise to countless swirling galaxies to a hot house planet teeming with carbon-based life to the collective passions and unceasing ingenuity of the human endeavor, the amazing metamorphoses and stunning transformations of the evolving universe are paradigmatic of the Resurrection event and give a contemporary expression to the very substance of what Jesus of Nazareth is always doing in the Gospels.

For just as evolution is marked by an inexorable capacity for bringing “order out of chaos” in consistently going beyond what went before it (from matter to life to mind), Jesus’ is also transforming lives in all of his works and deeds, giving people hope where there was despair, love where there was fear, and the intimacy of companionship where there was only isolation.

And when it comes to Jesus and his radical enactment of the Kingdom of God, none of these transformations is more amazing than his being raised from the dead. In the transformation from death to life, we see Jesus bring - not eternity - but a new time with new hope for the future out of the abject horror and radical injustice of his crucifixion. For just as evolution consistently brings forth new forms of living complexity out of the incredible pain, waste and accident of the 3 billion year history of life on Earth, the Resurrection shows us that the love of God flourishes precisely by taking up meaningless suffering and absorbing the finality of death, even as the Creator Spirit also brought forth abundant life from a planet that was formless void in the book of Genesis. In other words, Resurrection is reality.

Moreover, in accordance with Integral theory, the Resurrection can also be likened to what Ken Wilber calls a “Kosmic groove” that has been laid down by Jesus of Nazareth in inaugurating the Kingdom of God and the creative emergence of an altogether new kind of humanity. According to Wilber’s theory of Kosmic grooves, once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world—from crystallizing complex molecules to stabilizing Non-dual awareness—the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else on the planet. In this respect, the Resurrection is a Kosmic groove laid down in human history, first by Jesus of Nazareth – who is the locus of the transformative energy of the Kingdom and the one in whom the evolutionary trajectory of Spirit’s own self-realization becomes conscious of itself for the first time. And through the temporal process of human evolution this initial Kosmic groove is now being slowly crystallized into a Kosmic habit – as more and more rare individuals take up Jesus’ radical path of crucifixion and resurrection (losing self to find Self) that constitutes the meaning authentic Christian discipleship.

Furthermore, with the recent integral insight that Enlightenment itself is perpetually evolving along with the rest of the universe, the Resurrection is not merely “always already” accomplished for each and all in and through God’s self-offering in Jesus Christ but it is also deeply and profoundly still “to come” – as an event that is by its very nature beyond any horizon of meaning and action that we can currently program or foresee. So while an Integral approach maintains that both the “already” (sudden) and the “not-yet” (gradual) perspectives are held to be 100% true, there is also a suggestion here that with the “Logos made flesh” in the Christian tradition that God is not ultimately real (in the Hegelian sense of “concrete universal”) until He/She//Thou/It actually enters into the stream of time and space and expresses God’s self as a flesh and blood human being in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

In view of the Resurrection event, then, there is an impulse to New Creation in the depths of the Divine, which is now seen to be radically present in “anguished intimacy” with the long and painful evolution of increasing exterior complexity and deeper interior consciousness, from atoms to amoebas to humans to God knows what in the future.

For just as St. Paul tells us that all of creation “groans for fulfillment”, with an integral understanding of the evolutionary nature of enlightenment, in the passion of Jesus to go all the way, to go to the point of maximum intensity where ones soul reaches it breaking point and yet does not break - but instead shifts into a deeper expression of it’s own inherent potentials, we discover an archetypal expression of Spirit’s own self-realization through the creative advance of the world-historical process into radically new forms of sentient life and consciousness.

And from this perspective, the Resurrection is not so much an historical fact but an eschatological event. In other words, the Resurrection does not conform to our demand for historical evidence and neither does it fit into our conventional expectations or categories of thought, rather it is an event that signifies a new reality breaking into the business as usual world, bringing with it hope for a New Creation.

And importantly, as an eschatological event those who hope in the Resurrection can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. In Christ, peace with God now means conflict with the world, and as such the Resurrection, as hope in that which is “to come” becomes the source of Christian orthopraxy. Those who follow the way of Jesus and the hope and promise of his Resurrection therefore behave in this world with the eschatological goal of transforming it, in expectation of a divine transformation. Daniel Migliore grasps this well:

“Authentic Christian hope will certainly stand in opposition to present injustice and to every effort to absolutize the status quo. However, in the struggle for justice, equality, and human rights, Christians will always insist on “more”—on a different, greater future than what is ever achievable by human effort and ingenuity, a hope beyond hope. Utopian hope finds in humanity itself the resources and capacities to remove all suffering, establish universal justice, and complete history. A Christian theology of hope, by contrast, knows that the fulfillment we seek is an incalculable gift of God. Consequently, Christian hope will generate criticism both of the status quo and of all absolutized programs of progress and strategies of revolution.” (Faith Seeking Understanding, 341)

In working to honor the hope and promise of Christianity to bring about a fundamental transformation of the world as it is - as a gift from God, at the heart of an Integral Life is a call to live with paradox, to navigate irreducible perspectives (e.g. the 4 Quadrants), and to hold the creative tension between opposites in the recognition that no single perspective is privileged or pre-given.

This capacity to live with paradox and ambiguity, as well as being central to the teachings of Jesus, is also found within the somewhat fragmentary Resurrection narratives recorded in the New Testament gospels. From the two women fleeing from an empty tomb in fear and trembling (Mark), to the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus disappears at the instant he is recognized (Luke) to doubting Thomas, the Resurrection is an event that is constantly vulnerable to human misperception – a precarious, delicate, insubstantial and fragile Reality – and therefore utterly precious, much like a new born baby. So, just as the risen Jesus tells Mary “do not cling to me”, the Resurrection will slip through our fingers if we hold onto it too tightly, and so we cannot be too sure that we have ever gotten hold of it fully. As such an encounter with the risen Christ breaks into our human experience world as a mystery to be approached with astonishment and awe, and is disclosed in an act of faith that is held with courage and often in spite of deep trepidation and cognitive uncertainty.

And in further developing this point, just as the crucified Jesus is himself an expression of the love of God (see Good Friday blog), if we look at the earliest forms of Christian art that depict the Resurrection we find that the glory of risen Christ is always expressed in the visual form of the wounded Jesus. The risen Christ has wounds. That is, we cannot separate the risen Christ from the wounded Jesus, they are to be held together in the creative tensions of an integrally informed faith, where the authority of the risen Christ is found precisely in his precariousness, in his very wounded-ness and vulnerability.

So, just as the passion and suffering of the crucified Jesus is always already an expression of the glory of the risen Christ, the glory of the risen Christ is always and already expressed in the form of the wounded Jesus.

So at this point of maximum intensity, where we accept and embody the irreducible paradoxes of Christianity, the more we experience the tension and intensity of the crucifixion – i.e. the violence, injustice and unspeakable horrors that have been suffered by the countless untold dead of human history, the more radically we awaken to and deepen our capacity for faith, hope and love in the Resurrection “to come”. In other words, where living through irreparable loss releases the event of a new birth, the more we pray and weep for the irredeemable sufferings of the past (in Auschwitz or Belfast, in Kosovo or the West Bank) the more we resurrect an irrepressible openness to the future.

And from this more dynamic and evolutionary perspective, the Resurrection can now be seen an Omega-point of Christ consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin), an Omega-point that has already entered into human history and been accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but whose ultimate temporal horizon is radically unforeseeable…

And moreover, the paradoxical secret that stirs within the Resurrection event also points to the transformative potential of Christianity. For if losing ones life is a necessary condition for finding it again then the critical deconstruction of the Christian faith tradition in the modern (Darwin, Marx, Freud) and post-modern (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) world is precisely the condition required for Christian renewal, and as such may well be the greatest achievement of the last 2000 years of Christianity.

Of course Christianity has already undergone five or six major historical turnings, suggesting that it is a faith tradition that is open to transformation and novelty. And in the wake of the Death of God in the 20th century (or any over-arching center of truth and meaning) and an institutional Church that is more concerned with self-preservation than renewal, having exhausted the potentials of its traditional forms and structure, it seems that the Church is again on the threshold of crucifixion/resurrection, and as such more prepared to transform itself than any other religion.

Of course, what Christianity will become is totally unpredictable, but if it is to be true to its origins and re-activate the challenge and invitation of Jesus of Nazareth, the future of Christianity will involve an unpredictable earthquake, an event that exceeds our comprehension and expectations. For if Christians are really honest with themselves they will admit that Jesus is not the Messiah (Christ) that we either want or wish for, since the Kingdom will come “like a thief in the night” and at a time and place that we least expect…

Check out the following links for two papers I presented at a “Christianity After Darwin” conference at the Flinders University Center for Science, Theology and Culture.

The first is titled “Heading Towards Omega?” and it leans heavily on Ken Wilber’s magnus opus “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality” by arguing that modern science has recently discovered the “self-organizing” capacity of the universe towards higher levels of complexity/consciousness. This paper therefore provides scientific evidence for the notion that “self-realization through self-transcendence” (Jantsch) is the defining feature of a fully fledged evolutionary spirituality. Simply put: the evolving universe is a God-in-the-making…

The second paper “Evolutionary Christology” looks at the the darker aspects of the evolutionary trajectory from star dust to Shakespear and identifies a dynamic pattern of “transformation via instability” through the cosmos, the biosphere and human history… It then asks the question: who is the person of Jesus and what is the finished work of the Cross in the evolutionary context of modern science? Enjoy…