Jim Marion In Dialogue: Putting on the Mind of Christ

Jim Marion

Jim Marion is the founder and Director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness in Washington, D.C., the author of Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner Work of Christian Spirituality, and The Death of the Mythic God, the Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality, studied for the Catholic priesthood, and later undertook divinity studies at the interdenominational Hartford Seminary.

While the notion of development has been around for millennia, its modern iteration is scarcely a century old. Structuralism gave researchers, for the first time, an outside view of the interior of the individual (as opposed to the ancient practice of introspection, which gives the inside view of the interior of the individual). This methodology basically involved posing a series of questions to a group of people and following their answers over a period of time. As researchers studied the way in which the answers unfolded, patterns emerged: evidence of developmental structures. The numerous lines of development originate from the types of questions that various researchers posed.

Particularly interesting were the questions that James Fowler posed, regarding faith, or how people make meaning. Fowler asked his respondents questions such as “what do the scriptures mean,” or, in a fascinating twist, “where do the scriptures come from?” Using Jean Gebser’s worldviews (archaic/magic/mythic/rational/pluralistic/integral), the answers unfold predictably. People at the mythic stage of development often respond that “God wrote the Bible”; at the rational level, it becomes all too clear that human beings were the authors. At pluralistic, the answer might be that humans wrote the scriptures, but under divine inspiration. And what might we say from the integral level?

The integral level is the first to spot the fact that as we develop, we continually make subject into object, receding into increasingly expansive and spacious subjects. Speculation—and the testimony of a precious few witnesses—points to a point at which all subjects have been made object, and we finally come to rest as Absolute Subjectivity. In other words, as Spirit Itself. When we look from a place of infinite depth, through a kaleidoscope of infinite perspectives, it is Spirit that is writing these words, and Spirit that is reading them….

From this view, it is indeed God that wrote the scriptures—but God by means of human perspectives, human contexts, human limitations. As human beings evolved, so did their perspectives—or the perspectives that God was able to take through their eyes. Scripture itself is evidence of this; the older books of the Bible bear the hallmarks of magical consciousness; later books begin to evidence mythical consciousness and beyond. In so many ways, scripture is simply a record of Spirit’s own unfolding. Or as Ken memorably put it at the first gathering of Integral Spiritual Center, scripture is the work of “God as blogger.”