Dr. Freeman

For Part 1 Click here

To continue the surprising and generous response to this post I just want to turn this inquiry upside down and begin by showing that there is indeed a strong and significant overlap between the Integral framework and the basic tenets of the Christianity (at least as I see them). For starters, “Free to be Fully Human” – the creative tension between Freedom (human) and Fullness (divine) at the core of the Integral Life catch-phrase, corresponds exactly to the paradoxical nature of orthodox Christology – where the person of Jesus is held to be 100% divine (free) and 100% human (full).

Moreover, in SES (volume 1 of the Kosmos trilogy), KW also unpacks the interlocking and overlapping conjunction of humanity and divinity (“Free to be fully human”) in Christianity in terms of the Non-dual union of Other-worldly Ascent and This-worldly Descent, which is also an integration Eros and Agape… where Eros is the love of the human (lower) for the divine (higher), and Agape is the love of the divine for the human.

So where the Christian story holds to the Absolute Paradox of God-in-time, in SES Ken also maintains this same kind of secret non-dual union of Eros and Agape: where Ascending and Descending paths are inextricably interwoven, as he writes in his footnotes on the Real: “the realization of the One-in-the-Many and the Many-in-the-One, is, of course, common and definitive of all Non-dual schools”[1] an insight which also points directly to the paradoxical teachings of Jesus and a profound convergence between Integral and Christianity…

In this respect one of the key points of SES is that an emphasis either too much Eros/Ascent or too much Agape/Descent have their own distinctive and correlative pathologies. The shadow of a merely Ascending (Eros) path is called Phobos (a repression or avoidance of the material-sensual world) the characteristic dysfunction of Western monotheistic religion; while the shadow of a merely Descending (Agape) path is Thanatos (a fixation to the material-sensory world) what Freud called the death-drive and something that is commonplace in flatland…

So where the secret Non-dual embrace of Integral can help to re-imagine, re-contextualize or re-configure the Christian tradition, and balance some of the lop-sided perspectives that have prevailed in Western Christianity, there is also something about the Gospel story of “the god-forsaken God” that slips through the AQAL net and offers a distinct alternative to the Eastern (Non-dual) enlightenment traditions.

The (real/apparent?) dissonance here has been put well by Slavoj Zizek (see The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity 2003) who reminds us that the Great Chain philosophy that underpins the basic orientation of the Integral model is actually a pagan philosophy (as exemplified by Plotinus, the Neo-Platonic mystic-philosopher). That is, the notion that we have to throw off the lower world of the flesh (material-sensory), purify ourselves and advance through higher stages from body to mind to soul to union with the One – is a purely Ascending (or pagan) philosophy… It has nothing to do with the Gospel message that “Jesus is Lord” (i.e. Caesar is not!) and denotes the very movement from the human to the divine (Eros) that Christianity overturns and reverses with the “Logos made flesh” (Agape)…

To get to the heart of the matter, according to Zizek (arguably the most radical Christian thinker alive today), the primordial fact is the “non-coincidence of the Absolute with itself.”[2] This means that God is not at one with God’s self. There is an irreducible gap or tension in the heart of the Real that refuses any proper resolution or any mediation of opposites in a higher synthesis - i.e. there is no such thing as a secret Non-dual union… There is only the inherent gap of the One with itself – an Absolute Paradox - and this is particularly true of the Christ-event, the dividing point of Western history where God becomes “en-fleshed”, fully participates in the worst that the life-process has to offer, and puts radically into question all other man-made religions and philosophies, which in the wake of the crucified One are exposed as barely concealed and all too human attempts at self-deification…

The key difference here is that with Jesus and his death on the Cross, the fundamental gap between humanity and the divine is now radically transposed into God’s own self. This means that the very thing that once seemed to separates us from God (suffering, abandonment, death) is now the very thing that unites us with Him… That is, in my weakness and abandonment, when I am vulnerable and powerless - precisely then I am identified with Christ, the God-man, the one who was also abandoned and powerless on the Cross. As Zizek says, “we are one with God when God is no longer one with Himself, but abandons Himself, ‘internalizes’ the radical distance that separates us from Him. Our radical experience of separation from God is the very feature which unites us with Him – only when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God do I share an experience with God Himself (Christ on the Cross).”[3] For Zizek, the basic message here is that “God now trusts us” (i.e. the supernatural mythic God that guarantees an orderly universe is dead), and he goes on to argue that this is the only original freedom and fullness available to the Western tradition.

So in Christ, God becomes Incarnate (finite, temporal) and descends into the pain and messiness of life, God internalizes the painful gap between the human and the divine and becomes one of us, a broken, imperfect and suffering creature… and this Agape (descending) path is in direct contradiction to pagan (and Eastern) religions in which human are to purify themselves and move to the higher spheres of the Great Chain of Being.

So where Christianity finds an inseparable union with God in identifying with Christ crucified, the love of God in Christ is a radical disclosure of the “non-coincidence of the Absolute with itself”, the gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self… as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself vulnerable.3 And just as Christian gospels tell us that God is radically present to us precisely when God is not at one with God’s self, the paradoxes of Jesus on the Kingdom of God also renounce all attempts to collapse this minimal difference (or irreducible gap between opposites) by either reducing one aspect to the other or enacting a “higher” synthesis of opposites.

The point here is that there is a paradox at the heart of things, or what Zizek calls a “structure of imbalance”– a paradox that was also alluded to by Ken Wilber at the end of SES (1995) when he gives an all too brief prelude to Volume 3 of the Kosmos Trilogy (still as yet unpublished). Given a working title The Spirit of Post-Modernity when summarizing the basic contours of Volume 3 Ken says that all of our endless dualisms (agency/communion, coherence/correspondence, integration /differentiation, etc) are fated to battle it out forever, with no side ever, ever ultimately winning – and here we have what Zikek calls “the Real of irreducible tensions as such”, where Yin and Yang never find any ultimate reconciliation.

So there is an irreducible tension, gap or antagonism at the heart of the Kosmos, and in the Incarnation (the central mystery of Christianity) what we call God is precisely that which is fully present (and therefore becomes real) in the midst of this absolute contradiction… And in the same way, just as the teachings of Jesus challenge and overturn the ‘rational order’ of the pagan universe with a paradoxical reversal of meaning – or a “weird intrusion” that interrupts the semantic code of the default (pre-given) world - Christ himself is the ultimate diabolic figure, insofar as diabolos (to separate, to tear apart the One into Two) is the opposite of symbolos (to gather and unify).

As the Absolute Paradox (the irreducible gap in the heart of the Real) Christ brought the “sword, not peace,” in order to disturb the existing harmonious unity and turn the world as we know it inside out and upside down. Thus the Christian stance is radically different from the teachings of New Age (pagan) philosophy and Western Buddhism which claim that the universe is the abyss of the primordial Ground in which all “false” opposites - good and evil, appearance and reality, light and dark, etc. - coincide. Christianity proclaims as the highest action precisely what New Age paganism condemns as the source of all evil—the gesture of separation, a principle of ir-reconciliation, an event of rupture, a drawing of the line, a singular truth-event, a clinging to an element that disturbs the balance of the All…

This is a pretty radical position but as far as I can see the paradoxes of Christianity are thoroughly orthodox, and they also evidenced in the parabolic structure of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom … And while there is indeed space for convergence between the Non-dual embrace of Integral and Christianity, as Zizek says of the New Age philosophy of ‘cosmic balance’, which seeks the global harmony opposites: “precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.”[4]

So the question here for me is this: Does the Absolute Paradox of Jesus Christ (God-in-time) reveal the secret Non-dual embrace of Eros and Agape, Human and Divine, Ascending and Descending currents, or is this “Kosmic balance” precisely what the paradoxes of Christianity break open and throw into question with the scandal of the crucified God and the non-coincidence of the One with itself?

That is, are we, like a good psychoanalyst to resolve the enigma of existence by supplanting it by an even more radical enigma? I don’t know the answer to this one, but any and all comments would be appreciated…

When it comes to the question of entering the Kingdom, we do have this memorable aphorism from Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it.”[1] So we enter the Kingdom through the narrow gate, which in contemporary terms means we are to live with Jesus’ paradoxes - the creative tension between opposing perspectives, and this is indeed the road less travelled…. and about as much fun as child birth.

So Jesus does not say that the Kingdom is “always already” within us, that it has always and already been there, and that we need simply awaken to what we have all along possessed. Were that the case, then the Kingdom would be a matter of Platonic “recollection,” of anamnesis, and entering the Kingdom would amount to nothing more than a kind of Neo-Platonic conversion, a turning in that recovers what we have always possessed but have lately forgotten. This is a very Greek metaphysical (and even an Eastern Enlightenment) view of things and essentially at odds with the temporality and historicity of biblical experience.

So I’m not sure it’s a good idea to simply conflate the Kingdom with either the Greek metaphysics of ‘recollection’ or Eastern Enlightenment teachings on ‘always already’ awareness… So while the Kingdom is indeed “entos humon”: inside you, within you – it is not simply that it has always been within us and we just need to remember something forgotten (in involution, etc) but it is already happening, right now, and you are in the midst of it. As Jesus says: “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out devils, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Lk. 11:20),

So it is more accurate to say that the Kingdom has “come upon us”, not that it has always been within us. The Kingdom is not always already present, but something that is happening now, something that has begun to happen today, with the advent of God’s rule that Jesus announces. It is a prophetic conception that God’s rule has come over us (ephthasen), and therefore an essentially historical conception- and not a Buddhist or Pagan theory about the make-up of the human soul which has driven off the highway of eternity into the ditch of time. So the proclamation of the Kingdom is not a theory about humans being always already perfect, but the announcement of an historical event, that the time of God’s reign has begun. Now, today… as a permanent challenge that is already beginning, where one becomes what one is not, and one ceases to be what one was. I have had a change of heart, I have been transformed. I have not become what I am but I have become something else, something new…

I wish it was otherwise, but Obama has not really been practicing bi-partisanship. On the contrary, in the recent passing of the Stimulus Bill democratic procedures were de facto suspended. One Congressman (Ron Paul) called the legislative process “atrocious”. Not a single member of Congress even had the time to read the 1000 page document. While special interets had prior access, the Bill was not made available to Congress until midnight the day before they voted. It included spending initiatives never articulated on the floor of the House, it had all sorts of insertions and addition written in pencil throughout its pages, and included programms that had nothing to do with the real economic problems at hand. Hardly democratic, let alone bi-partisan. How can anyone vote for a bill when they have no idea what they’re voting for? Not to mention that it was the biggest spending bill in American history…

It’s pretty clear that the financial meltdown has confronted us with the blatant irrationality of global capitalism. When it comes to real matters of social justice and human dignity - the fight against Aids, hunger, lack of water or global warming, we all recognise the urgency of the problem, but there is always time to reflect, to postpone decisions. Not so with the financial meltdown, the urgency is now unconditional; an inconceivable sum of money is immediately found. Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, finding a cure for Aids, saving the starving children . . . All that can wait a bit, but ‘Save the banks and the big corporations!’ is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action. The panic has been absolute. A “bi-partisan” consensus was immediately established, all grudges among world leaders are now being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. Enormous sums of money are being spent not for some clear ‘real’ task, but in order to ‘restore confidence’ in the markets – i.e. for reasons of belief or faith.

As far as I can tell, Obama’s message (Change, Hope, Unity) is beginning to sound like a “signifier without the signified”, i.e. words that in the end no one knows what they mean or refer to. It seems as if Obama’s “words” merely allow us to consent to what we know is a lie so that we can avoid a direct encounter with Reality: the unconditional claim of Spirit that demands we change fundamentally the way we live in relation to each other and the world. In other words, with Obama’s soaring rhetoric, it is Capital whose demands are now more absolute than ever - and far more pressing than the demand to transform our social and natural reality. That is, what if the Obama presidency merely allows us to think and feel that we (through US national politics) are contributing to a better world all the while staying comfortable within our protected enclaves?

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

Jesus of Nazareth was brutally executed for treason and blasphemy - that is on both political and religious grounds. As the leader of a messianic movement growing in popularity and influence in and around Jerusalem he was a threat to both the Roman Empire, under which Augustus Caesar was said to be the one and only ‘Son of God’ and also the Jewish Temple authorities who alone mediated access to the divine through various religious rituals and sacrifices.

His public crucifixion outside the city walls of Jerusalem was therefore a decisive public statement by the Jewish priestly collaborators with the power structures of Rome that Jesus was a god-forsaken pretender to the messianic throne, just another one of the many Jewish insurgents and failed revolutionaries that were crucified under the Roman Empire and thrown on the scrap heap of history in the 1^st century.[1]

So where the messianic claims made about Jesus only began to crystallize amongst his followers in the wake of those radically unforeseeable events we now call the Resurrection (i.e. the Empty Tomb and the Appearances), during his public life and earthly ministry there was no substantial social consensus or agreement that this man - Jesus of Nazareth - was the ‘only begotten’ Son of God, the long awaited messiah and promised liberator of Israel from Roman occupation.

As Dietrich Bonheoffer, one of the twentieth century’s greatest theologians maintains, Jesus of Nazareth did things which looked, at least on first impressions, very much like he was a sinner (religiously), or a rebel (politically). He became angry, he was harsh to his mother, he slipped away from his enemies, he befriended prostitutes and undesirables, he broke the Law of his people, he stirred up revolt against the rulers and religious men of his country[2], and he even called God “Papa” (Abba), a blasphemous term denoting unusual intimacy with the Creator of the universe in a Jewish cultural matrix in which the name of God was not to be even allowed to be uttered by mere mortals.

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But not only must Jesus have appeared a sinner and rebel in the eyes of his contemporaries, we must also acknowledge the disturbing possibility that for many in 1^st century Palestine Jesus of Nazareth must have embodied the very archetype of evil: Satan, where Lucifer comes as a fallen angel, an associate of outcasts, and an antagonist of the existing order who seeks to overthrow the powers that be in the name of his own Kingdom. The demonic, the diabolical God-like pretender to the throne of the divine, is exactly how Jesus must have come across to many of his contemporaries, so much so that Jesus himself must have been personally aware of the seeming lunacy of his single-minded mission and the radical content of his life’s work.

To further unpack this disturbing ambiguity, from the very outset of his public ministry Jesus’ messianic identity was intertwined with the voice of Satan. After being rejected as a prophet in his hometown of Nazareth[3] and moving to Capernaum about twenty five miles away on the Sea of Galilee, even Jesus’ own family came to his house to seize him and take him back home under the belief that he was suffering from a severe delusion and had gone insane.[4] Not only was he accused of being demon-possessed by those closest to him, after his initial rejection in his Nazareth, the very first to proclaim that Jesus to be the Son of God were not his immediate followers but those tormented souls that were possessed by evil spirits. We see this in Mark’s gospel, where Jesus drives out an evil spirit from a demon possessed man who violently shrieks “I know who you are - the Holy One of God!”[5] This confession by a man driven to the extremes of inner torment is the earliest Christological statement in the historical development of the Church, and it comes directly from the voice of Satan. However, this is not an isolated example for Mark goes on to say that “Whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God’. But he gave them strict orders not to tell who he was.”[6] That is. Jesus explicitly denied that he was the Son of God and told those inwardly disturbed souls who proclaimed this publicly to be silent, and not because his messianic identity was a secret but because those who made this claim were simply wrong…

So at the earliest origins of the Christian movement it was demons and evil spirits proclaimed that Jesus is the Son of God. And rather than confirming their claims, this strange itinerant preacher immediately tells them to be silent, and moves on to another town before local townsfolk attempt to domesticate him and turn him into a guru or prophet to be worshiped, a decision that evoked vociferous public debate about the true identity of this singularly enigmatic figure.

The Gospel narratives are punctuated with many similar examples where Jesus refuses to claim the Messianic status attributed to him by others. In Luke’s gospel Jesus heals a leper and then tells him to go and make customary sacrifices to the priestly authorities that Moses commanded to deflect attention away from himself and his own healing powers. As soon as news about Jesus’ miraculous healing powers started to spread he withdrew to lonely places to pray[7], a clear indication that early in his ministry this all too human Jesus seems himself uncertain of his own true vocation and self-understanding.

Later, as Jesus’ earthly mission moves towards its unpredictable climax in Jerusalem, and with his messianic identity still clouded in mystery, he asks Peter (his closest disciple) the question that sits at the very core of any Christian faith commitment: “Who do you say that I am?”[8] In all three Gospel accounts of this dialogue (Mark 8:30, Matt. 16:20, Luke 9:21) as soon as Peter says “you are the Christ”, Jesus rebukes him, telling him that he has it dead wrong and then commands him to remain silent.

Having denied the messianic status attributed to him by Peter, Jesus then goes on to interrupt his disciples inflated expectations of a militant messiah that would liberate Israel from Roman occupation and institute a royal kingdom of sovereign power by explaining that he is now to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die because of his passion for the Kingdom of God. This reversal of expectations is a stunning declaration that again throws his privileged messianic identity into question, and is encapsulated in Jesus’ severe rebuke to Peter – the one that had just called him “Christ”, for as soon as Peter attempts to deter Jesus from his inevitable suffering and death he is told by Jesus in no uncertain terms to “Get behind me Satan”.

And in a final astonishing example of holy blasphemy, it was the Roman centurion at the foot of the Cross, perhaps the very man who drove the nails into Jesus’ tortured flesh, that first confessed that “truly this man was the Son of God”[9] From beginning to end, in true paradoxical style, Jesus’ messianic identity was shrouded in ambiguity and inextricably intertwined with the voice of Satan – from the demon possessed, to those (including his ‘virgin’ mother) who thought he was insane, to his deluded disciples, to his executioner, the utter lunacy of Jesus’ earthy mission always shadowed him…[10]

However the messianic expectations and assumptions projected onto Jesus by those around him were consistently frustrated by this subversive Jewish teacher. In fact, what makes the Jesus of history so authentic - so intriguing and unique, is that he shows up as the exact opposite of what a God-man or Savior figure would look like if we were to create him in our own image. For in our all too human seeking for God we normally construct idealized visions of an almighty and sovereign power beyond the mortal terrors of time and embodiment, and like to identify ourselves with one that displays his infallible divine status through signs of supernatural glory and miraculous interventions in the natural order – just look to the disturbingly popular ‘Left Behind’ series of novels for a contemporary example of Christ coming again in violence and glory to smite his enemies and carry off his chosen few into the eternal bliss of paradise - while the only world we know goes to hell.

But in contradiction to this fundamentalist distortion of the founder of Christianity we only have to look at the earliest written account of the historical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark to find the story of a strange, enigmatic, and even restless figure, a solitary individual constantly misunderstood by those closest to him. It is Satan (in various disguises) that calls him the Son of God, and everything he tries seems to fail, until in the end there is just the agony of crucifixion and three terrified women fleeing from an Empty Tomb…

If Jesus is the Christ it is only because he is a scandal – a kind of obstacle, an unfathomable X who slips through the cracks and disturbs the complacency of the moral order of things. That’s why the great German philosopher Hegel called the Incarnation – the revelation of God’s own self in Jesus of Nazareth, a “monstrosity” – as inappropriateness ‘as such’. Jesus comes to us as a madman, as an unspeakable trauma, as a blasphemous fool who does not make things make sense… Against all expectations Jesus does not require success, fame, wealth, or power to justify or validate his privileged status but instead he shatters the security of our predictable common sense world with teachings that embody deeper internal discord than the teachings of any other religious founder or tradition[11], culminating in the shocking monstrosity of his contorted body hanging on a Roman cross and the weird intrusion from some unheard dimension that eventually came to be called the Resurrection… That is, if we are really honest with ourselves, we will confess that an encounter with Jesus is a traumatic experience that shatters the illusions of the consensual social world - he is simply not the Messiah that we either want or expect.