Originally published Apr 24, 2015
3,600 words
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“No one has ever seen ‘God’ …” This line, common to the gospel and the first letter of John, contains a multitude of clarifications. It says, to begin with, that “John” did not think of “God” anthropomorphically as you would expect from someone whose primary reference was the Hebrew scriptures. For the Bible speaks very clearly about many people having seen “God” or at least met him and heard him speak. John seems to have believed that the descriptions of those encounters used imagery that was not literal and did not reveal “God.” His use of the phrase suggests instead that he was a bi-cultural diaspora Jew whose primary categories were Greek; for the Greeks believed that “God” was not knowable.
Then, because that line is a lead-in to the next: “the man Jesus has made him (“God”) visible,” John appears to be claiming a new beginning. He is not talking about a revelation that simply added to or refined earlier Hebrew revelations — one of a sequence that places Jesus in the line of a tradition of “knowing God” — it is a revelation like no other. We never really knew “God” before this, he says, now we do.
It also disregards the Hebrew injunction that any image said to represent “God” would be “idolatry.” It’s no wonder that Jews saw early Christianity as foreign to their tradition; for writers like John were relating to what had gone on before only to say that it was totally superseded. They were speaking as if things were starting from scratch, that what our fathers thought they saw was not “God” at all — that in Jesus we have seen “God” for the very first time. John’s use of one word that evoked Yahweh’s “tenting” among the Hebrews wandering in the desert acknowledged continuity with Jewish tradition; but it was poetic allusion. The direct religious imagery and nomenclature had changed. The John who wrote the gospel called him Logos and proclaimed he was the beginning of all things, and his appearance was like a new creation. In the letter that bears his name he called him LIFE, and source, but not Yahweh or even “God.”
Three hundred years later, when the bishops at Nicaea tried to clarify what Christians meant when they prayed to Jesus and referred to him as “God,” they said he was the very same all high “God” who had spoken throughout Jewish history. They referred to that traditional Jewish “God” as “Father” and Jesus (John’s Logos) as his “Son” and said that they were both Yahweh. The Council declared John’s Logos, homoousios — “the same substance” — as the Father. That was intended to explain what they thought John was saying: the Logos revealed the Father as never before because he and the Father, though presenting distinct personalities to the world, were — in “essence” — one and the same “God.”
The bishops had already decided that Jesus’ “father” and John’s “LIFE” were the same “God” and they assumed that’s what John meant too — that the Logos was Yahweh. But John had said Jesus was Logos and LIFE, and source, and beginning, and revealed “God” for the first time. It was a form of expression that could admit a different interpretation: that the “God” that Jesus revealed was not what the Jews thought it was. What John’s Jesus revealed was new because no one had ever looked at “God” this way before. In Jesus we could see for the first time what “God” was really like, for before this “no one had ever seen ‘God’.”
At Nicaea, by simply assimilating Jesus to his “father,” the bishops failed to respect Jesus’ own very clear statements about what “son of God” meant to Jews like him, and second, they did not leave room for what John might have been trying to say … they simply assumed that John’s LIFE was meant to refer to the Jewish Yahweh. In the first case, if they had really listened to Jesus they would have heard him saying he was not “Yahweh,” and therefore homoousios was inappropriately (and, for a Jew, blasphemously) applied to him, and in the second, they failed to perceive how far from Jewish categories John had ranged to find an apt expression for his understanding of Jesus’ transcendent significance. What John actually said was that he, the man Jesus, was “God,” but the definition of “God” was different. It was cosmological, not personal. It was Greek, not Hebrew.
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People like John and Paul were thoroughly imbued with Greek cultural assumptions. They had a concept of “God” that one of their number, the philosopher Philo (“the Jew”) had begun to elaborate. Philo was a diaspora Jew like they were. He lived in Alexandria which had come to supersede Athens as the primary center of learning in the ancient Mediterranean world. Philo was well-educated in Greek philosophy; he had also immersed himself in the Septuagint, the Greek-version of the Hebrew scriptures, and spent his life correlating his Greek knowledge with the words and imagery found in that Bible.
Philo believed that “God” in the Septuagint was the same “God” that the Greeks said was the real reality behind the stories of the gods of the Mediterranean pantheon. By the sixth century b.c.e. Greek philosophers like Heraclitus had come to the conclusion that their many gods were fictions of the imagination — the remnants of an ancient folk religion that related to the various forces of nature as separate divinities. The gods were primitive attempts to worship what was really a single life-force that underlay all of reality. The Egyptians had a similar insight 700 years earlier. The gods were symbols of the living energies of nature — the earth, the sea, the sun and the sky, fertility of the soil, art, music and poetry, love, war, power, and the dark forces of the underworld — but the real source of nature was really “one divine principle” which the Egyptians called Aten and the Greeks called ho theos — “God.” There was only one divine energy that was responsible for it all — only one “God.”
This was mind-blowing for a Jew like Philo who had been trained to shun the goyim because they blasphemously asserted there were many gods, in violation of the first commandment. But here the Greeks were acknowledging there was only one “God.” Philo was ecstatic about this concurrence; he was convinced they both must be talking about the same thing because, as a Jew, he knew there was only one “God.” He spent his life trying to convince others of this agreement. But the two concepts were very different. The Hebrew “God” was a warrior-king of the Jewish People; he was a “person” who told Jews what he wanted them to do, expected them to comply, and would reward them if they did; the Greek “God,” in contrast, was the principle of LIFE — a universal guiding energy — whom no one has ever seen.
Philo tended to take the Greek categories as literal science and the Jewish scriptures as metaphoric equivalencies — stories designed for the edification of people who were not philosophers. That was the methodology he used to elucidate the concurrence between them.
The general sense of “God” as the one source of nature’s energies persisted in Greek thinking even after Plato came along 150 years after Heraclitus and tried to introduce “reason” into it. Plato said that once you realize what the human mind can do, you have to acknowledge that it is totally different from everything else in the visible universe. Therefore our minds must be made of something other than the material flesh we share with animals. He called it “spirit.” “Spirit” and “matter,” he concluded, are complete opposites. “Spirit” goes beyond the capacities of “matter,” therefore it is a separate thing. Like oil and water they do not mix. Plato’s worldview is called “dualism” because it claims the universe is divided between two separate and distinct kinds of reality.
“God” for Plato was the ultimate paradigm for this spirit-matter opposition. “God” was “Pure Spirit” with no admixture of matter whatsoever, and therefore “pure Mind.” That absolute purity meant that nothing contaminated with matter could ever know “God.” “God” was utterly inaccessible; it required a special mediator — a Craftsman — to bridge the gap between the spiritual blueprints in the Mind of “God” and the material construction of the physical universe. Philo identified Plato’s Craftsman with the personified “Wisdom” mentioned in Proverbs 8. Philo called it Logos.
Philo came well after Plato. He took his idea of what “God” wanted from the stories in the Bible, but his theoretical definitions of “God” were dominated by the Greek philosophical categories that formed the mindset of his age. Philo added Plato’s ideas about “Pure Spirit” to the older thinking that saw “God” as the one source of the natural forces represented by the gods. It was Philo’s triple syncretism — a Biblical “Yahweh” and the “One” of Plato grafted onto ho theos as the life-force of the universe — that his fellow diaspora Jews like Paul and John embraced as their own. The fundamental and guiding imagery of the life-force was never lost. For Philo and his fellow diaspora Jews, “God” was always the “energy” that created, sustained and enlivened the natural world.
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That means that when John and Paul talked about Jesus’ cosmological significance as “divine” it was his embodiment of the LIFE-force that they had in mind. They took Jesus’ human behavior, relational charism and spiritual attitudes and explained them in terms of that divinity. (And they explained “God’s” divinity in terms of Jesus’ attitudes and behavior). They said Jesus made “God” visible because his words, deeds, death and “resurrection” was the mirror image, the human expression of that LIFE-force. Jesus, they said, was “God,” but it was Philo’s “God” they meant. That’s why they used the names that they did: LIFE, Logos, source, beginning. They were all Philo’s. Later generations with an essentialist worldview converted their dynamic mysticism into a static metaphysics. Instead of being a “God-energy,” Jesus became a “God-entity,” from being LIFE he became “God.”
John and Paul were not essentialists. Notice they did not say that “man was God,” but that this particular man, Jesus, was “God.” Similarly, It was not Jesus’ “humanity” that was “divine” but rather his human life: i.e., how he lived, what he said, the way he said it, what he did, how he defended his message and accepted death, that revealed the “God” that no one knew. They were not speaking of Jesus being “God” apart from these things … as if he would still be “God” if he had never done any of them. No. He was “God” precisely because of what he said and did, the way he lived and died … and his “resurrection” authenticated for Greeks the divinity made visible by the trajectory of his life; for only “God” was immortal.
For John and Paul “God” was a living presence, an energy on display in LIFE … in nature and in the moral / spiritual life of men and women as the manifestation of “God.” “God” was not an entity distinct from Jesus’ human actions and personality. And Jesus was “God” precisely because his life and actions were the perfect expression of the LIFE-force. In Philippians, Paul dismisses the relevance of “prior” divinity and emphatically specifies it was Jesus’ human moral achievements that earned him a “name above every name.” And for the same reason John never suggests “we are in the light” without immediately adding “because we love one another.” The “divinity” is in the living process — which by reflecting its source also conjures its presence — for there is no difference between what a thing is and what it does; that is the very nature of energy. Energy is not a “thing” that exists apart from what it does. “God” is not an entity that exists apart from its energizing action. “God,” Plato’s “Pure Spirit,” for diaspora Jews like John and Paul, was the energy of LIFE.
Reflecting the LIFE-force in lived human attitudes and behavior meant that this particular man embodied “God;” he personified “God” in material form; he was … “God-made-flesh.” But that does not preclude the possibility that others may also engage so thoroughly with the LIFE-force that they too become “God-with-us.” “You can be sure,” John says, “that every one that does right is born of ‘God’.”
There is no pantheism here, because pantheism has to do with entities, things. It is an essentialist label. It is an equation of identity; it says “these things are God.” Process Pan-en-theism is different because it is not talking about “things” it is talking about shared energy. Energy is not an entity. By its very nature it “exists” only in its effects and only when it is having an effect, and so it is always a completely shared phenomenon. It belongs equally and simultaneously to cause and effect, and the effect is energized IN the energy of its cause. There is no energy off by itself somewhere doing nothing. The effect energized in turn becomes a display of the energy conveyed to it. It is LIFE. Process Pan-en-theism speaks to the sharing of LIFE between source and recipient. The sharing means both have the same LIFE at the same time — even though one gives and the other receives. Each becomes present — becomes visible — in the exchange. In order to be Creator “God” needs to be creat-ing. Genesis said that on the seventh day “God” rested. That is literally impossible; or “God” would stop being “God.”
All this implies that the “God-factor” in our lives is not a “thing,” an entity that exists outside of active human relational valences. And the first witnesses said the “God-factor” in Jesus was the power and precision of his human energy, discharging itself in infallibly effective work. They told us that what they had seen and heard — the transparency of Jesus’ unfeigned esteem for others, the incisiveness of his perceptions, the balance and compassion of his judgments, the accuracy and appropriateness of his counsels, the confident authority with which he spoke and the courageous fidelity of his commitments — activated the autonomous humanness of the people he touched. He energized them. For people who found in him support for their own efforts to be human, and for people whose lives had been dehumanized by the exploitive system managed by Rome, this generated a universal enthusiasm. They became “followers.” But for those who benefitted from the Roman system, Jesus’ human energies spelled mortal danger because they threatened to elicit — among exploiters and exploited alike — a preference for LIFE and a refusal to participate in that system. The Roman occupiers and their local collaborators clearly saw him as a threat to order, and to protect their way of life they killed him in an attempt to kill that liberating energy. They failed. He may have died but his energy — his spirit — lives and multiplies. John called it LIFE.
The key notion in all this is that “God” is energy. Embarrassingly for traditionalists, it recapitulates Thomas Aquinas’ “definition” of “God” as ESSE IN SE SUBSISTENS — which in Aristotelian terms means nothing less than “PURE ACT.” “Pure act” is conceptually analogous to pure energy. It corresponds to a reality that is not an entity. ESSE is not a “thing.” It is “act,” an energy that is not really there until it activates a potential, i.e., has an existential effect in the real world. That is esse. That is “God” for Aquinas. It is not a “thing,” but an energy that makes things to be.
Four hundred years before Aquinas, Irish mystical theologian John Scotus Eriúgena described this interactive existential relationship between “God” and creatures in very explicit terms:
Eriúgena conceives of the act of creation as a kind of self-manifestation wherein the hidden transcendent God creates himself by manifesting himself in divine outpourings or theophanies (Periphyseon, I.446d). He moves from darkness into the light, from self-ignorance into self-knowledge. … In cosmological terms, however, God and the creature are one and the same:
It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting himself, in a marvelous and ineffable manner creates himself in the creature … (Eriúgena, Periphyseon, III.678c).[1]
Eriúgena called the material universe “the Mask of God.” I contend that John and Paul had similar imagery. Following Philo, they saw “God” as that in which we live and move and have our being — LIFE — which from the beginning has been the source of LIFE for all its living extrusions. We are the emanations of the superabundant living energies that are not mechanical necessities but rather the products of an infinite sharing and self-emptying.
That’s the interpretation that our traditional metaphors place on the evolving universe. And we have those metaphors largely because people like John used Jesus’ life and message to clarify exactly what the LIFE-force was. In traditional terminology it is love. When we embrace those metaphors as our own, it means we make a choice. We choose to interpret the energies of LIFE as consistent with a generous self-emptying love as taught by Jesus. We are encouraged in that choice because we have touched and been touched by it — LIFE — embodied in the living energies of the realities around us, primarily human persons. That’s how John was certain that what he saw and heard and touched was LIFE.
It may be logically circular, but it is not irrational. There is more than enough out there to warrant such a bias even though no one is constrained. The option for LIFE is not coerced; it is a rational choice, appropriated by those who recognize that it resonates with their own moral and relational aspirations — their sense of the sacred and the synderesis that grounds their sense of truth and justice. At the end of the day it is our spontaneous recognition of LIFE — our sense of the sacred — that confirms our acknowledgement of Jesus as LIFE. WE know him because we know ourselves.
There is no possible one-to-one correspondence between any entity and “God” because as energy “God” energizes absolutely everything and transcends any particularity of whatever kind. As the energy that energizes each and every entity, it is indistinguishable from all of them while being exclusively identified with none. That excludes pantheism as well as traditional Christian exclusivist theism. Jesus was never a “God-entity,” neither before his birth nor during his life nor after his “resurrection,” because there is no such thing. LIFE is not an entity. But Jesus’ personal energy was the perfect moral analog — the re-presentation in human terms — of the generating energy of the LIFE source. He was the receptor whose energy faithfully re-produced the energy of his source, not unlike the way a child receives the cells of its parents and begins to live in those very same cells, but now as its own. But the reality transferred is not one entity from another — a “son” from a “father” — but a shared LIFE, an energy provided and accepted, faithfully reproduced, as fully alive and generative in the receiver as in the source.
To be LIFE as Jesus was LIFE is not exclusive to him. It is open to anyone. And in other traditions around the world others have played the foundational role that Jesus played in ours. There is nothing to prevent any other human being from matching or even surpassing Jesus in the faithful reproduction of LIFE, i.e., being a human being. John reported that Jesus himself said so explicitly: those that come after him will do even greater things than he has done (Jn 14: 12). How could that be possible if John thought there were some sharp line of demarcation separating us from Jesus … as if Jesus were “God” and we were not? And how would John have even known that what he saw was the source of LIFE unless he knew what he was looking at? Where did that come from, if John were not already in some sense what Jesus was? We are all radically capable of recognizing LIFE when we see it and making it visible as Jesus made it visible; thus we can all be the source of LIFE for others. This is also a solid part of our treasury of Christian metaphors: to follow Jesus is to become increasingly “divinized.” How could that be possible if divinity were exhausted in a particular entity / person? But “God” is not an entity; and Jesus is not “God” in that sense. “God” is energy, an energy that can be shared endlessly and is not diminished in the sharing. The LIFE that enlivened the man Jesus, enlivens us all. This is what John was saying.
What John said suggests that the community formed by those who consciously join Jesus in this adventure will make LIFE generative in a way that is intensified exponentially: LIFE feeding LIFE. There are no divine entities. In this view of things there’s no way a “church” whose leaders live immoral lives, its ritual practices designed intentionally to create dependency and generate profit, and its political alliances complicit in systemic exploitation, could ever be “divine.” The reformers were right. A church can only be divine the way Jesus was divine, not by being a sacred “thing” but by activating a profound and available humanness — the mirror-echo of the LIFE in which we live and move and have our being.
“God” is the energy of LIFE (II)
From May 3, 2015
2,200 words
This is a follow-up on the April 23rd post called “ ‘God’ is the energy of LIFE.” I believe aspects of that post can be relevant to the difficulties that some people have with the rational option to see the universe as “benevolent.” The term “matter’s energy,” after all, is not very poetic. But it is the source of the existence of the conatus, which is the wellspring of our sense of the sacred. “Material energy” is a prosaic label for what drives our spectacular universe as well as our own sense of awe. It deserves to be recast by our religious poets in terms more evocative of its indestructability, its vast and lavish abundance, its selfless availability, its inexhaustible vitality and its evolutionary creativity that has always been self-transcending; material energy displays divine characteristics.
The April 23 post contends that in the first century of the common era, Philo’s “God” was still an immanent nature-“God” and had not yet been essentially changed by the addition of the Platonic characterization as “Spirit” in a universe divided into spirit-matter. Later, “Pure Spirit” came to dominate the scene so completely that it created a new paradigm which replaced Philo’s “God” with a Platonic “God” that provided a philosophical explanation for Genesis’ transcendent “Creator.” Plato’s absolute transcendence of “spirit” over “matter” set up granite divisions in a cosmos that up until then had been physically / metaphysically continuous with the “nature-God:” “God” was integral with nature as its logos or guiding energy.
This immanentist tradition continued on in the East, but in the West it became a “minority report” — sometimes tolerated by the hierarchy, sometimes not. Ninth century Eriúgena’s Periphyseon divided “nature” (physis) between “nature that creates and is not created” and “nature that is created and does not create.” In the fouteenth century Meister Eckhart found Aquinas’ esse itself at the existential core of the human person. Nicolas of Cusa in the fifteenth century said “God” was “non aliud,” not other (than nature). Similarly seventeenth century Baruch Spinoza used the terms natura naturans for “God” and natura naturata for creation. In all cases “God” was part of nature — the originating, guiding, enlivening part.
At the time of John’s letter, one of the effects of assimilating Jesus’ life and message to “God” was to specify exactly what Philo’s nature-“God” was like. As the amalgam of the pantheon, “God” would naturally have been expected to enliven the dark and cruel aspects of nature (once represented by Hades, Ares, etc.) as well as the creative and benevolent. John clarified that once and for all: Jesus’ life showed us that “God” was light, and there was no darkness in him. It would be hardly necessary to say that, unless there were some ambigüity. No such confusion would have attended Plato’s “One.”
Jesus’ life made things clear. Nature’s immanent “God” was benevolent; and Jesus’ moral goodness — Paul identified it as a self-emptying generosity — was the mirror-image of the creative LIFE-force itself. While we usually read John as using “God” to help us understand what Jesus was, I contend that John’s point was that Jesus life helps us understand what “God” is. His approach is “inductive.” John learns from his direct, personal experience of the man Jesus, what “God” is like.
Fast forward to today: the discreditation of traditional religious sources leaves religion as we knew it scientifically high and dry. This is the heart of the problem for “religion” in a material universe. We are forced to find our reasons for the “benevolence option” not in some authoritarian other-worldly source, like scripture or the magisterium which have been discredited as sources of knowledge about the cosmos, but from what we know of our material reality using the tools we now trust. And I claim that following the example of the the dynamic inductive perspective on “God” assumed by John, there is nothing to prevent an analogous correlation of our human moral and relational energy to the energy of the matter of which we are made. Reading John’s letter in this way means John stops being an “authority” with infused knowledge from another world which he “reveals” to us in “scripture,” and instead becomes one of us — a earth-bound seeker who has “seen, heard and touched” what he was convinced mirrored the heart of nature itself, and is passionate to share his discovery.
John’s theological method is inductive not deductive, and it works on the assumption of immanence. He starts with what he experienced. Jesus’ personal kenosis reveals “God” not because Jesus was a “God entity” and spoke to us of “truths” from another world but because all human moral and relational energy is an expression of the LIFE-force and Jesus’ life was so extraordinary that it had to be the mirror-image of the LIFE-force itself. It’s a conclusion evoked by what he saw and heard … but like all the conclusions of inductive reasoning it remains hypothetical until the successes of experimental practice move it toward certitude. But John insists that he has confirned it and it is certain: “By this we may be sure we are in him … that we walk the way he walked.” (2:5) Notice it’s the walking that conjures the presence of the LIFE-force and provides certainty. “You can be sure that everyone who does right is born of ‘God’.” (2:29) “No one born of God commits sin because God’s nature abides in him and he cannot sin because he is born of God.” (3:9) These extraordinary statements confirm both John’s method and his worldview. “Doing right” makes the divine energy present and visible … and confirms the authenticity of Jesus’ witness.
Analogously, in our times, our spontaneous, unsolicited recognition of the authenticity of human justice, generosity and compassion allows us to project that it is reflective of the material energy of which our organisms are made, for our organisms are nothing else. Like John, we start with what we experience: our instincts for right behavior
There is nothing new about starting there. Daniel C. Maguire bases his Ethics on a sense of justice — right and wrong — and makes no (explicit) appeal to any deeper justification. He’s able to begin his ethics there because no one argues with him about it. Noam Chomsky calls for international justice on no other grounds than people’s sense of fairness and right and wrong. Even though he has acknowledged — and it may be fairly said to be the leitmotiv of his contribution as a linguist — his belief that all human behavior is an expression of innate organic structures, he clearly feels he does not need to have recourse to such structures (or even claim that they exist) when it comes to justice. Apparently, his many readers agree. David Brooks recently wrote a book appealing for a return to what he calls personal virtues (the virtues of moral character) as opposed to marketable virtues (the virtues for knowing and making and selling) without any further justification, because everyone knows what he’s talking about and no one disagrees with him. This is what was meant by syndéresis: our human instincts for right and wrong … and it is where we start. You have to start there … everyone starts there … and I claim it is where John started.
The point of departure is our humanity. It’s all we really know. We resonate with benevolence, and, as Sartre noted, the thought that the material universe (which includes us) is a meaningless mechanism makes us nauseous (and then, bitter and angry). Why is that? Some claim this is our inveterate Judaeo-Christianity speaking. But in my estimation, our spontaneous predilection for benevolence cannot be explained as the result of a mere few thousand years of brain-washing. A survey of world religions shows the same choice virtually everywhere and from the dawn of history. It is more ancient in time and more universal geographically than Christianity. It speaks to the existence of the innate “sense of the sacred” and the syndéresis (instinct for justice and truth) that is its corollary which I contend are reactions to our organic conatus’ instinct for self-preservation. Then, unless you want to claim some hard wall of division between humankind and the rest of the natural world (including the component elements of our own organisms), there is every reason to concede that “benevolence” in the human idiom translates the superabundant life that we see teeming everywhere driven to survive by the lust for life … the insistence on existence … characteristic of organic matter in whatever form it has evolved.
Rationally speaking it’s not the same as in earlier times when benevolence was a logical “deduction” from infallible premises — the irrefutable conclusion of theological “science.” But I believe it is sufficient to support the practical choices we have to make; for our own need to survive drives us toward justice and compassion … for ouselves and for our natural world. This may be called the “argument from practical necessity.” It’s ironic but true: we need to cherish and esteem other life forms and the earth that spawned us all if we want to survive.
But really … am I the only one who sees that the deck is stacked? What other choice do we have? … say “bullshit” and die? Kill anyone who is different from us? Destroy our planet for our short-term enjoyment? If we want to survive we have to cherish ouselves and our world. We’re stuck. But the criteria by which we evaluate and choose belong to us, not to “scripture.” Some of the legacy of John, however, like the divine immanence he believed enlivened the natural world (and Jesus’ personal energies), in my opinion, is remarkably consonant with what modern science has observed about the evolution of the cosmos driven by matter’s energy to exist.
But I want to emphasize: this does not suddenly ground and justify the supernatural illusions proposed by authoritarian Christianity. It rather evokes an entirely different religion, one that is more like the kind that John was trying to construct at the beginning of the second century: a religion whose data all come from this world — the human sense of the sacred and its moral requirements — not from some other world.
This way of looking at things has certain other corollaries:
(1) no one is ever constrained to see life as benevolent … not even the most fortunate. There is enough random destructiveness out there to support those who choose to accept the Steven Weinberg hypothesis: the universe is pointless. But by exactly the same token, there is also more than enough to support the hypothesis of a creative power and self-emptying generosity so immense that, regardless of ideology, and eschewing absurd claims to providential micro-management, no one with a modicum of poetic sensitivity is inclined to reprove those who call it “divine.”
(2) the perception of benevolence is always, therefore, an intentional appropriation … a choice … without which even a religiously formed individual’s sense of benevolence will atrophy and disappear. But a choice requires some a priori recognition … even if only in the form of desire. There has to be some internal basis in the human organism. The “command” to cherish and esteem does not come from another world; it arises from the matter of our bodies. Our material organisms need to love, not only to reproduce, but to survive.
(3) those who cannot connect emotionally to “benevolence” for lack of parental inculcation (or, as with Weinberg, because of experiences like the Holocaust) may still connect indirectly through the mediation of others. This is one of the roles of the religious “fellowship” (and other “therapeutic communities”). Once the koinonía is functioning it provides the “matter” for resonance: a loving community. (“Look at these Christians [fellow addicts, fellow mourners, fellow workers, fellow activists, friends and family], how they love one another!”). Then the “Weinbergs” of this world might find themselves drawn to what their formation (or experience) had failed to provide.
If you are a theologically traditional western Christian, at some point you still have to admit there is a bedrock place in the human organism that allows it to appropriate “benevolence” based on its own connatural recognition and need. Will you reject even this as “semi-Pelagian”? If you do, as many of the sixteenth century reformers did, you will have to fall back on the absurd predestinarian position that the entire “salvation” business is a matter of divine permissions and miraculous interventions … from sin through conversion to perseverance … foreseen and managed by “God” for a display of his glory … all of which further depends on a discredited supernatural theism based on allegedly infallible “sources of revelation.” Ultra-absurd! … and no one is buying it anymore.
(4) I am also realist enough to recognize that none of this will fly institutionally, because the institution continues to chug along on that same authoritarian track it inherited from Constantine and Augustine. The reform I’m speaking of is not a mere “revision” of Catholicism, like the one that occurred in the sixteenth sentury. So if by “reform” you mean something that will work “politically” you’ll have to kick the can down the road like they did at the Reformation … and maybe for as many centuries more.
[1] Moran, Dermot, “John Scottus Eriugena”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/scottus-eriugena/.
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