The Grand Adventure:
Knowing God in the 21 st Century
Humanity has never not believed in God. Artifacts found in prehistoric gravesites provide evidence of belief in some kind of supreme spirit among even early hominids, and as soon as there is writing, there are references to deities. It would seem that ever since we could think, we have pondered and made accommodation for something beyond the physical world in which we moved. Our conceptions of the shape and the function of deity vary and change, but the consciousness of it has never disappeared.
In fact, the question of God, as far as we can tell, grew up alongside human consciousness itself. While the appearance of self-reflective consciousness remains a mystery, perhaps more confounding than its emergence is that it should have continued to evolve, as both hard and soft sciences attest, over hundreds of thousands of years, right up to today. Our growing mastery of the world cannot be attributed to a mere accumulation of knowledge, but must acknowledge that our very capacity to perceive the world has matured. So it should be no surprise that discernment of this divine principle developed hand in hand with the understanding of everything else in human experience. From animism to polytheism to monotheism and beyond, to the degree that one spoke of God in any age, one spoke from the context of that age and its understanding of itself and the world. Until recently.
By recently, I mean the last few thousand years. Within a period of just over a thousand years, and just a few thousand years in our past, the major world religions coalesced around their fundamental principles and beliefs. This age saw a flowering of human consciousness, with the rise of more universalistic values and the advance of more introspective and analytic thinking, and the religions that emerged from it carried those values into their understanding of a single ultimate reality: God, Brahman, Nirvana.
This fruitful period represented a tremendous advance in consciousness, and a rich literature of wisdom began to develop from each spiritual lineage. There can be no doubt that there was something truly new and earth-shaking in the insights and experiences of figures like Jesus and Buddha. But something else arose from the clarity and power of. their visions: definitive articulations of the reality they perceived, against which all subsequent wisdom would be judged.
For the most part, while this grand evolving human consciousness continued to unfold in the world and discovered more and more of the world’s marvels and movements, it was free to admit when its previous insights had been defective, partial, or just plain wrong. The pace accelerated; change was the name of the game. The fundamentals of the created order weren’t changing, of course, but they might as well have been for the difference made in humanity’s understanding of itself and its habitat. Across the board. In every domain save one.
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While intellectual and social growth accelerated, preparing the ground for the discoveries of science, the major religious movements were codifying their truths. With their focus on esoteric principles and multiple wisdom texts, as well as the absence of central structures, the growth of the religions of the Orient was slower but allowed more freedom to adapt with the growing witness of experience. But by anchoring itself not only in particular historic events, but in a particular interpretation of those events, the religion that was to have arguably the greatest impact on the evolution of God consciousness tethered itself to a corpus of unchanging and unchangeable doctrine.
That Christianity would bind itself to Jesus was not its limitation; as the primary revelation of the truth it carried, Jesus was of course the proper focus, just as the life and teachings of the Buddha remain decisive for his followers. But Christianity went on to seal itself inside a particular interpretation of the Jesus event, an interpretation shaped in the first and second centuries CE according to a first and second century understanding of the world. A world in which God broke dramatically into history with relative frequency to alter events; in which sacrifice was understood as an essential dynamic in the
relationship of humans and God; a world in which justice was intractably transactional; a world in which the myth of a supernatural demonic entity explained the cause of all evil and suffering. In short, it was a world that still called upon the supernatural to explain everything it could not yet comprehend about the natural world.
What the people around Jesus experienced was an authentic manifestation of spiritual reality, but even during his lifetime they weren’t sure what to make of him. And when in the early years of the movement that emerged from his life, they turned in earnest to the task of understanding, there was nothing close to consensus about much of anything. But one thing was clear: the way they spoke of it could not help but be conditioned by how they believed the world worked.
Christians of the first few centuries were on fire. Those who had experienced the power of Jesus’s witness to God carried it with an almost equal force to those who had not. They met to ponder over the intimate, emptying, loving reality that Jesus had manifested in his person and his teaching. Their excitement was not that of a new belief system, but of a new potential in their midst, first in Jesus and then in its continuity among them. There were differing views, even disputes, for the energy released into the world was so enormous that no single explanation could hold it. Jesus’s relationship with God, with the ultimate reality that shaped him, was so new that they argued over whether he was divine or human. Not surprisingly, the disputes could and did get ugly. After all, they were discussing crucial things.
Who knows how long such debate may have continued? In the way of the world, perhaps there is always a time stamp on mystery. But in the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine, convinced that the Christian God had given him victory in battle, accepted and even elevated the Christians and their religion, but he didn’t like their squabbles. The chaos made ruling them difficult. So he called together the most authoritative voices in the disputes and made them sit down to resolve the issue of Jesus’s identity once and for all. We all know the result. But precedent was established, and a few decades later when more disputes threatened unity, another council was convened. And so on, quite a few more times, but always within that original defining identity of Jesus as God.
Orthodoxy was established, identity secured. The mixture of politics with piety and passion was subsumed under the authority of an emerging theology of revelation that increasingly limited definitive revelation itself to a receding past. And the light was never quite as bright again.
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Truth is not containable; it busts out all over if we but let it. Truth is the partner of the miracle of human consciousness that discovers it and pursues it. And that pursuit is the adventure of life: the application of our precious gift of consciousness to the deep exploration of the universe, visible and invisible.
The life of Jesus was one moment when truth broke out dramatically. He was not the only such moment, but he was a pivotal one. The light he shone will continue to illuminate what we may be if we let it out of its box. If we will share it, imagine it, discuss it, argue about it. If we will be concerned to be faithful rather than orthodox, for just so was Jesus. That’s how he got into trouble. He demonstrated the love and compassion of God in the wrong places, in the wrong ways, to the wrong people. Things got messy, things got tense, and the crowds couldn’t get enough of him.
Here, at the inauguration of this blog, I invite you to join me in busting out of the box. I invite you to enter the stream of an evolving God consciousness. We will be unorthodox, that’s certain. We will disagree and we will learn from each other. We will risk being misunderstood and we will find ourselves understood in places we hadn’t imagined were there.
Many voices will be invited. The Christian tradition will be our launchpad, but not our enclosure; the path needs guardrails, but not guards. We will hear from philosophers and theologians, scientists and poets. We will invite the wisdom of other great religious traditions. You will hear a lot from me, but I hope I will also hear from you. But it is my deepest desire and highest hope that through it all we will plunge ourselves back into the grand adventure of life in its fullness, life within the depths of its spiritual matrix.
What you will find in these pages is an introduction to the ideas that are shaping my book-in-progress, The Grand Adventure: Bearing the Imago. Taking flight from the ancient wisdom of the image of God, the imago dei, borne by humanity, the book will reimagine our story, will imagine a new story and a new future for our being – yours and mine – in a world in need of transformation. A world in need of the transformation that is ours to carry. I hope that here and there in these pages, a thought, a feeling, an insight will ignite in you a hunger for more. A hunger to plunge into your own adventure with renewed vigor, renewed truth, renewed life.
Every adventure begins with a single step. We are begun.
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