Searching for God # 53

 Many Christians in the West, N. T. Wright says, have the goal of their faith completely upside down. Instead of seeing Christianity as God renewing the whole world and uniting Heaven and Earth, many believers think the point is simply for their souls to escape to Heaven when they die.

Wright argues the New Testament teaches the opposite: God comes to dwell with us, and Jesus’ resurrection launches a new creation that’s already underway. Ephesians shows that God’s plan has always been to unite all things in Christ—and the Church is supposed to be a preview of that new creation right now. (From the last post in this space.)

One of the most serious problems (and I call them problems) with the Christian church’s attempt to introduce God to the world is the world’s already pre-conceived, pre-conceptualized, and historically endorsed world view. 

·      Whether through false modesty, or

·      a conviction of the ‘separation of God from both nature and humanity, or

·      a lack of imagination that ‘here’ is not a place where some kind of ultimate unity and harmony can be feasible of even envisaged, or

·      a deeply rooted rationalism based on a positivist empirical world view that can and will only embrace (intellectually, socially, politically, ethically and existentially) a world in which human ‘sin’ and ‘depravity’ are the defining characteristics needing, demanding and defining the need for individual redemption in order to be rewarded with ‘a heavenly afterlife’

·      or the notion of a perception of a necessary sacrifice of the ‘inherent human will, another version of original sin, in order to please God

·      or a deeply held resistance to being unconditionally loved, by anyone, especially by God, without the injection of God’s grace of forgiveness, one is not eligible for an afterlife in Heaven…

·      or a blind and hard wired conviction of disbelief, or even an constricted imagination that pre-empts the notion that ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’

·      or libraries and archives of history and philosophy that focuses on man’s inhumanity to man, that taken together demonstrates unequivocally and finally that only in and through personal transformation of individual human will, attitude, belief and action by God, can Heaven or some other kind of utopia might be realized.

·      or some combination of some or all of the above, pointing to a lens focused on the human ego as the sole, irreplaceable filter through which even to imagine what God might have in store for humanity.

Self-centredness, unfortunately, is not and cannot be restricted to selfishness, narcissism, or even hoarding of one’s possessions, or failing to empathize with others in their various plights. Self-centredness can also be a form of blindness that, unconsciously, without uttering a word, or a scent, or a drum-beat, or even a hint of a sensate shadow, can impede one’s psychic, spiritual, intellectual and ontological universe.

Popularized by the vernacular word ‘ego,’ around which the world seems both to dance and to manipulate others through both rewards and sanctions, we live in a world of the ‘self’ while still trying desperately to define and to understand more precisely what the self is. Presumed to include identity, subject-object, roles, components and development, and in the East, Atman, a perspective that is interconnected with everything, the self remains elusive, and like the amoeba highly responsive to various kinds of stimuli.

Atman in Hinduism is the fundamental spirit, the divine spark, in all beings (humans, animals rocks) and the goal of spiritual life is to realize oneness with Brahman. (In Hinduism, Brahman is the ultimate unchanging reality, the infinite formless absolute.)

Paradoxically, Buddhism teaches that individuals are a constantly changing flow of mind and body with no fixed essence, considering belief in Atman a source of suffering. For Buddhists, recognizing anatta (non-self) is crucial for liberation from suffering.

The insertion of the above paragraphs, is an attempt to illustrate some of the questions around which humans attempt to orient ourselves to God, to the universe and to each other.

From Concordia Publishing House, blog.cph.org, in a piece entitled, Teaching the Differences between Christianity and Hinduism, by Phil Rigdon, March 21, 2024, we read:

(Respecting the Hindu Atman), Christianity teaches that God lived in eternity before He created the world…(and) while God created human beings in His image, people do not have a piece of God inside of them. Furthermore, at the fall in the Garden of Eden, human beings became blind, dead, enemies of God. The image of God is restored only after the Holy Spirit brings the sinner to faith through the means of grace-God’s Word and Baptism. Regarding nature, while we can see the splendor of God’s divine creativity in nature, He is separate and distinct from nature which He created.

From the same source, in a piece entitled, teaching the Differences between Christianity and Buddhism, by Phil Rigdon, April 26, 2024, we read:

Ultimately, like all non-Christian religions, Buddhism leads sinners to try to solve the problem of sin by their own efforts. Buddhism seeks not to eradicate the root problem but to treat one of the symptoms: desire. Christianity also teaches resistance against desire but only sinful desire. What is more, Christians resist sinful desire not to reach deeper enlightenment but as a loving response to God’s actions for us. Left to ourselves, we will always fail to resist sinful desire. There can only be success with the help of the Holy Spirit…..Buddhism directs people away from God and toward themselves. God’s Word teaches the truth of a God who in mercy and love, entered a world of suffering in His Son, Jesus Christ.

(Phil Rigdon is pastor of St. John Luteran church Kendallville IN)

Converging here are a number of different images: divine spark, for example. Is it, or could it be an image of Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God is Within You’ imagined as non-violent resistance to evil with force? Do Christians wonder about have a ‘self’ and/or a ‘non-self’? Is the root of sin, human desire, which, left to its own devices will always veer towards evil? And is the solution to human desire, from God, from within, from a combined influence of both, or neither? Rooted in all of these ‘ramblings is the question ‘what is evil’ and ‘how is a Christian (and or others) to resist, or to accommodate or to integrate whatever amounts to evil in our ‘nature’?

It might be appropriate to introduce Carl Jung into this discussion.

From paricentre.com, in a piece entitled Jung on Evil, by Murry Stein, March 2020 issue of Pari Perspectives, we read:

Wholeness is the master concept of Jung’s life and work, his personal myth. Thus, when it comes to discussing the relation of good and evil it is altogether consistent that Jung should oppose dualism at any cost. This was for him the worst possible way of conceiving of the relation of good and evil, to pit one against the other in external and irreconcilable hostility. At bottom, good and evil must be united, both derivative from a single source.  For Jung a dualistic theology would have been anathema, a dualistic psychology harmful. Never one to shy away from using mythological or theological language,  Jung would therefore strongly entertain the notion that good and evil both derive from God, that one represents God’s right hand, so to speak, and the other His left. In ethe Biblical account of Job, Jung found confirmation of this view. Here Satan belongs to Yahweh’s court. Jung sees him as Yahweh’s own dark suspicious thought about his servant Job. In  the New Testament, good and evil would become more harshly polarized in the images of Christ and Antichrist, but always Jung would refer Satan and Antichrist back to Lucifer, the light-bringer and he elder brother of Christ, both of them sons of Yahweh. From the other angle of vision, both good and evil are products of conscious judgement. This is as true of god as it is of evil. Moreover at this level of consideration, good needs evil in order to exist at all. Each comes into being by contrast with the other. Without the judgement of evil there could be no judgement of good, and vice versa. Good and evil make up a pair of contrasting discriminations that is used by ego consciousness to differentiate experience. A complete conscious account of any situation of person must include some employment of this category of good-and-evil if it is to be a fully differentiated account…..Theologically educated students of Jung’s psychology….would take strong exception to this view. For them it was not inconceivable to postulate the existence of absolute goodness without evil, since this is after all the standard Christian doctrine of God. Good does not require evil in order to subsist any more than light needs darkness in order to exist. But for Jung this was highly debatable, Pure light without any resistance or darkness could not be seen, and therefore it would not exist for human consciousness. Since he looked upon good and evil and judgements of ego consciousness, it would be impossible in his view for real persons to name such a thing as light or goodness if they had never experienced darkness or evil.

Here is some follow-up on that question from the Chaplaincy trainer, ‘Does Jesus and/or God have a Shadow?’

While Jung saw evil emerging from an unrecognized and unacknowledged unconscious, Hillman’s depiction of evil is worded differently: his phrase identifying evil is ‘the anaesthetized heart’ that fails to react to suffering and darkness, leading to a kind of numb, psychic, disconnected state where evil can and does operate without limits. By ignoring our Shadow, (similar to Jung), we tend to project ‘evil’ onto others and reduce the world to a simple ‘good versus bad” kind of Manicheanism.

On chapala.com, in a review of Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War, by David Bryen, we read:

Hillman says, ‘war is governed by something like a collective force beyond individual human will. The task then is to image the nature of this collective force.’ To address this archetypal force, he uses the Greek/Roman god of war, Ares/Mars, to exemplify the divinity that imposed allegiance, as all tyrants do,  to implement a bellicose agenda. This force sweeps the entire world into its vortex, defines the scapegoats, dehumanized humanity, and hides its presence and its reality by creating the enemy that must be destroyed. Yes, WAR is presented as a personality (yes a Deity) that has the capacity to exercise its agenda throughout human history regardless of human desire to end war. What we cannot see, we cannot understand, and Hillman wants us to recognize Mars/Ares in our chief perpetrator of waring activity. He wants us to see that the Western world is deeply Christian, and that these war gods are hidden in the roots of our Christianity. It is not secret that all wars have been fought in the name of the one God, the one Truth, the one Sacred Scripture and the divine right to protect the property the divinity granted. The major paradigm of our whole Christian culture is based on a war, the war between God and the Devil, between good and evil. Every war we encounter has been fought to end all wars, al threats of danger, all evil. Hillman relentlessly puts our hypocrisy in front of our faces. The claim to exclusive truth, divine rights given by the deity, is the one common thread that feeds humanity’s justification of war….He concludes, ‘The real satanic seducer is our willful ignorance, arrogant stupidity, the coward’s retreat from awareness.’

Could it be that the faith’s and the Christian churches’ insistence on the one Truth, focusing on the Light, enables a kind of  blindness or ignorance, perhaps not either conscious or willful, but nevertheless unsustainable, given the enhanced reckoning by both Jung and Hillman of the unconscious, the darkness and the Shadow, in each of us, as well as within the ecclesial institution?

To be continued…….