the role of jesus in inter-spiritual dialogue?

Hello Anne,

Cheers,

Cam

--

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

Greetings Camfree,

Your comments are thought provoking and inspiring. thank you.

this is my third attempt at a response. Seems my novice status in these things and my computer are working against me. anyway, i've mostly run out of steam so this will be more brief. Hopefully it will communicate.

Essentially, what about Melchizedek and the Magi? These represent two "stories" from outside our story that break into our story. They honor Abraham (the patriarch of Judaism) and Jesus of Nazareth (the Messiah of Christianity -- and Christians say of Judaism) and then disappear or rather return to their story.

First, can we say God pre-exists the Judeo-Christian story?

Second, can we say Melchizedek and the Magi indicate that God was/is revealing God's Self outside the Judeo-Christian story?

Moreover, Melchizedek and the wisemen only pay us a visit; they do not stay. however we might want to use (in the best possible sense) them to further the glory of our story, they nonetheless leave with no incrimination.

Now, if God is revealing God's Self outside the story, which surely Melchizedek and the Magi demonstrate, what does that say about God? What does that say about our story? Would God, in revealing God's Self outside our story, remain consistent with Who God has revealed God's Self to be within our story? Would God be the God of Love and Truth as God reveals God's self outside our story? If no, what does that say about God? If yes, what does that say about our story and about other stories?

Ok. This is more brief than i originally intended, but hopefully it makes the point with a little reading between the lines ... or questions.

Thanks loads for expressing your faith and devotion and service in this way.

Jim ... a purported or at least wanna be "Orthodox Chrisian"

And on a related matter, the Christian tradition began with an event of rupture, with a shattering disturbance of all existing forms of meaning and social belonging... Jesus is subversive... disruptive... disorienting... and the Gospels are confusing testaments to the sheer impossibility of articulating the Easter event itself.... And so in view of the radical singularity that founded the tradition, for Orthodox Christian theology it must also be said that continuity with the past is preserved at times only “by shattering the received terminology, the received imagery, the received theology”.[iii]  That’s what the Christ-event does... it leads in and through a constant process of disruption and innovation - and in the process of passing on the dangerous memory of Jesus - and the witness of the resurrection, there will be more and more to discover, more depths... That is, the mystery of God is more like a sea to swim in, not to cross over to a final destination...

In this sense, I also resonate with your own point about how religious inclusivism tends to become triumphalist by appropriating/assimilating everything seemingly “Other” to it... Whether Christian or Integral this propensity to subordinate or erase all differences in the quest for a higher synthesis is problematic, and that’s why I would say that Christians are called to simply live with paradox, embrace the contradictions, tolerate the ambiguity and the passion for not-knowing.... I would even go so far as to say that the genuinely heretical impulse (from an orthodox Christian perspective) lays in a destructive longing for final clarity, a totality of vision in which all tensions and ambiguities are eliminated – a totalizing impulse which brings forth the monsters of religious and political idolatry.

--

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

--John

Cameron told me he was having a hard time getting on Integral Life and asked me to post this letter for him:

~*~

I just want to take this opportunity to respond to some of the more significant comments and criticisms that have developed out of my original post “the role of jesus in inter-spiritual dialog”. Most of what follows is a response to Bruce’s (Balder) posts which I have found particularly insightful and challenging, but I have tried to take on board the questions and comments of others as well, and want to thank everyone who has contributed to this discuss thus far.
 
I have to say from the outset that I really do appreciate the fact that - in spite of our disagreements, Bruce does have a solid grasp of the issue here – how to bring the radical core of Christianity (the Logos made flesh, the embodied story of God-in-time) into the post post-modern world-space… without any triumphalist or exclusivist overtones… I believe this can be done - and he has pointed out several good reasons why this project is still problematic.
 
And while any such claim to take the “spiritual high ground” is often the most resourceful mask of marginalization and oppression (this holds for Integalist’s as well)… I would also insist that the way of Jesus and his radical enactment of the Kingdom of God (a singular event which is incompatible with the Christian Church post-Constantine), is indeed the decisive, unparalleled, once-and-for-all self-revelation of God to human history…
 
And so while I regularly feel sick in the guts by how bad I am at following this particular path, I will still argue that the Christ-event is the fullest and most explicit self-communication of God to the world at this point in human history… And I simultaneously want to argue that this position is in deep conformity with the Integral desire to, in some sense, “rehabilitate” universals”, i.e. to move beyond flatland relativism and the nihilistic end-game of post-modern pluralism, etc.
 
The argument can be very simple: Name me another human being in the history of the planet with a greater love for God and other people? And particularly from an Integral perspective – where the mark of “higher” second-tier development is “Free to be Fully Human” (i.e. 100% Humanity and 100% Divinity) - there is simply no other game in town than the astonishing events surrounding the person of Jesus - the incarnate Logos, the human face of God.
 
Ok - it’s that very claim that tends to piss people off, so let’s clarify what this means.
 
Firstly, here is a summary of the Catholic Inclusivist position which has been roundly criticised in the post-modern world: “Because there is only one saviour, because all of God's activity in the world stems from and is directed toward the God-man Jesus – all other religions have to be fulfilled, or included within Christianity.”
 
This is not really what I believe. Here’s a summary of my (still evolving) position:
 
“The Christ-event is an Absolute Paradox, an intrinsically unpredictable (and un-objectifiable) event-horizon in which our conventional horizons of meaning-making no longer hold, an event which opens up conditions of possibility for an altogether new kind of human being… In other words the Christ-event is (in Alain Badiou’s terms) a ‘universal singular’ - a singular event which unsettles, disrupts and re-constitutes individuals into subjects universally… i.e. irrespective of their race, sex, social class, etc.
 
Or more pointedly, at the very centre of the way of Jesus (and even the Chalcedon Christology of 451 AD) is the call to navigate the creative tension between opposites, to live with paradox… Evidence for this claim is found in the mind-bending paradoxes that inform the narrative centre of all of Jesus’ most memorable teachings on the Kingdom (Freeman 2007). 
 
That is, in becoming Christians, we are to avoid the trap of identifying the way of Jesus with either side of any of our standard oppositions between: liberal/conservative, secular/religious, fundamentalism/tolerance, traditional/progressive, reason/faith – i.e. the endless intractable dualisms of the Western tradition. This Non-dual embrace is thoroughly Integral – i.e. it constitutes the basic thrust of Ken’s SES (Volume 1 of the still developing Kosmos Trillogy).
 
So to cut a very long argument short, the capacity to live with paradox sit at heart of BOTH
 
a) what it means to live an Integral Life (Robb Smith (IL CEO) also testifies to this “tension between opposites” at the very centre of the question of what it means to live an Integral Life AND
 
b) the radical dawn of Christianity in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
 
Of course, living with this tension between opposites is not exclusive to Xhristianity (e.g. the same basic orientation is to be found in Taoism, Jewish mysticism [Kabbalah], Zen Buddhism, Tantra, Vedanta, Jungian psychology, etc) but if I had to choose one tradition among many to spend a lifetime digging into, well quite frankly, this capacity to embody paradox and express the dynamic tension.
 
That is, if yr into paradox as a mark of the Divine (which is deeply implicit in Integral theory), you can’t go past the Christ-event, the world-shattering Incarnation of God-in-time…
 
Ok, now to Bruce's qiestions
 
Question: When you say things like, “Jesus is the decisive self-revelation of a God to humanity,” or “the resurrection of Jesus is a radical singularity that shatters the co-ordinates of the existing order,”… each of these statements depends for its meaning and impact on a number of initial presuppositions about the “order” of the world … Presuppositions that I (and members of many other faiths) do not necessarily share.  In order for these pronouncements to carry the weight – the “universal import” – that you attribute to them, in other words, I must first “buy in” to certain very basic Judeo-Christian presuppositions. 
 
Answer: Ok, you say that my position presupposes (takes as given) the universality of a historical-cultural interpretive frame. Well my interpretive frame of reference is certainly NOT the Genesis to Revelation framework of the Bible… I’m happy to jettison this totalizing story - the creative-redemptive meta-narrative of the Old and New Testaments.
 
So what are the basic presuppositions of my argument? There is an underlying presupposition of something like the evolutionary context of modern science (i.e. the world-historical process is going somewhere, it has a direction or even a meaning and a purpose)…
 
Or maybe there is an assumption of “unfolding revelation” in human history. So, is it the Judeo-Christian category of “revelation” that is problematic here, the notion that God discloses God’s self to the world at particular point in human history? That indeed is something alien or foreign to the Eastern Enlightenment traditions, which do not recognise the historicity of Biblical experience, the linear-progression of time or a personal God (i.e. the Ground of Being as a creative intelligence with a will and a character that relates to persons).
 
So you have a point here about the incommensurability of the worldviews of East and West, their different metaphysical presuppositions, but maybe this is where interfaith dialog can help the Eastern Enlightenment traditions learn something from the Judeo-Christian traditions…
 
This is especially important given that the evolutionary context of modern science (which informs the Integral world-space) has changed the very meaning of the word Enlightenment… As KW writes in Integral Spirituality, Enlightenment is not so much about continually residing in primordial awareness of the Timeless Now (Absolute) – and more about the flesh and blood (Relative) Incarnation of God-in-time – i.e. the embodiment and expression (fullness) of Non-dual awareness (freedom).
 
And again Christianity is unique in that it is about something that happened in human history… God became a man - which means that the Absolute Paradox of the Incarnation is now the best place to look for a life affirming 21st century spirituality. 
 
Question: An approach which is inclusivist in the sense we've been discussing appears, to me, to inevitably carry triumphalist, other-subordinating overtones, and is thus not a viable post-/postmodern approach. This is not mitigated, in my opinion, even by imagining God to be suffering, identified with the weak or marginalized, etc, because it still calls for the erasure or subordination of other worldviews and narratives to this particular Christian mythos and the Christian narrative of history. 
 
It seems your discounting inclusivism a priori… that by definition there can be no valid inclusivist position in  a post-modern universe, because that would “inevitably” squash the original multiplicity of different traditions and worldviews…
 
So a couple of points: Christ (particularly the original parables of Jesus) calls us to maintain a contemplative attention to the unfamiliar, an open-ness to differences, and a correlative refusal of the logic of the same. So this is an inclusivism that is distinct from an imperialist incorporation of the Other, one that is at home with the implications of post-modern pluralism and anti-foundationalism…
 
The suffering God of Christianity does not exclude or erase any other worldviews, but it does challenge and provoke the supposed superiority and triumphalism of the powers that be… This is a key point: when the Absolute shows up in human history it divides the world in two… Otherwise it wouldn’t be Absolute… So there is a kind of transformative urgency here that is uncompromising in its commitment, and in this sense the Christ-event will insist on the limitations and even falsity of other worldviews (e.g. Social Darwinism, Scientific reductionism, Eastern philosophies of Impersonal Enlightenment, Fascism and Communism, Western imperialism, Islamic extremism, etc) And of course, the critique and re-contextualization of such dangerous ideologies is a good thing…

And in relation to “this particular Christian mythos and the Christian narrative of history” the Gospel story of the god-forsaken God does not exclude anyone – the highest towards which humans can aspire is also the victim of all human cruelty… the way up is the way down… noone is erased or forgotten…
 
Furthermore, the story of the crucified God does not gloss over the senseless nightmare of human existence or explain away the meaningless catastrophic accidents depicted in the evolutionary story of modern science… And furthermore,  the disruptive novelty of the Absolute Paradox is also profoundly congruent with the lack of global or overarching meaning exposed in the post-metaphysical context of contemporary philosophy…
 
That said, there are also a series of unexamined metaphysical assumptions in the post-modern world-space - assumptions about irreducible plurality, original multiplicity, and intrinsic differences that are every bit as foundational and metaphysical as claims to overarching unity, one-ness, same-ness, etc…
 
And so, I am simply saying that we need to avoid BOTH of these positions (wholeness and fragmentation) and navigate the paradoxical tension of unity-in-diverstiy… And the path or tradition that happens to be most explicit about this is the way of Jesus.
 
The bottom line: an inclusivist position is allowed to make distinctions between better and worse – and the standard is “Free to be Fully Human” – the Non-dual embrace of Humanity and Divinity, the transforming union of Eros and Agape… And while there are indeed morphic resonances in other traditions, if the Absolute is a Paradox (100% Human and 100% Divine) then the Christ-event is the standard – and anything less than this is… less than adequate…
 
To be continued…
 
Cameron

Another perspective, this one coming directly from Krishnamurti, who can express it much better than I:

"We realize that life is ugly, painful, sorrowful; we want some kind of theory, some kind of speculation or satisfaction, some kind of doctrine, which will explain all this, and so we are caught in explanation, in words, in theories, and gradually beliefs become deeply rooted and unshakable because behind those beliefs, behind those dogmas, there is the constant fear of the unknown.  But we never look at that fear; we turn away from it.  The stronger the beliefs, the stronger the dogmas.  And when we examine these beliefs -- the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist -- we find that they divide people.  Each dogma, each belief has a series of rituals, a series of compulsions which bind man and separate man.  So, we start with an inquiry to find out what is true, what the significance is of this misery, this struggle, this pain: and we are soon caught up in beliefs, in rituals, in theories.

"Belief is corruption because behind belief and morality lurks the mind, the self -- the self growing big, powerful and strong.  We consider belief in God, the belief in something, as religion.  We consider that to believe is to be religious.  You understand?  If you do not believe, you will be considered an atheist, you will be condemned by society.  One society will condemn those who believe in God, and another society will condemn those who do not.  They are both the same.  So, religion becomes a matter of belief -- and belief acts and has a corresponding influence on the mind; the mind then can never be free.  But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief, because your very belief projects what you think ought to be God, what you think ought to be true.

(Interestingly, Thomas Merton, the mid-20th century Catholic, Trappist, monk, said essentially the same thing:  "Our concept of God is much more a reflection of who we are than it is of who God is.")

"We are confused, and we think that through belief we shall clear the confusion; that is, belief is superimposed on the confusion, and we hope that confusion will thereby be cleared away.  But belief is merely an escape from the fact of confusion; it does not help us to face and to understand the fact but to run away from the confusion in which we are in.  To understand the confusion belief is not necessary, and belief only acts as a screen between ourselves and our problems.  So, religion, which is organized belief, becomes a means of escape from what is, from the fact of confusion.  The man who believes in God, the man who believes in the hereafter, or who has any other form of belief, is escaping from the fact of what he is.  Do you not know those who believe in God, who do puja, who repeat certain chants and words, and who in their daily life are dominating, cruel, ambitious, cheating, dishonest?  Shall they find God?  Are they really seeking God?  Is God to be found through repetition of words, through belief? 

"So, your religion, your belief in God, is an escape from actuality, and therefore is no religion at all.  The rich man who accumulates money through cruelty, through dishonesty, through cunning exploitation believes in God; and you also believe in God.  So, religion is not escape from the fact; religion is the understanding of the fact of what you are in your everyday relationships; religion is the manner of your speech, the way you talk, the way you address your servants, the way you treat your wife and children, and neighbors.  As long as you do not understand your relationship with your neighbor, with society, with your wife and children, there must be confusion; and whatever the mind does, the mind that is confused will only create more confusion, more problems and conflict.  A mind that escapes from the actual, from the facts of relationship, shall never find God; a mind that is agitated by belief shall not know the truth.  But the mind that understands its relationship with property, with people, with ideas, the mind which no longer struggles with the problems which relationship creates, and for which the solution is not withdrawal but the understanding of love -- such a mind alone can understand reality."

From the Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, 17 Vols., Dubuque, IA:  Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1991, 1992, Vol. VII, p. 130; and Vol. VI, pp. 140-41.

Stephen Kladder

 Cam, I am poised/planning to write a book called "Christians Thinking Like Energy". Right now, I am still polishing the first book, The Marketing of Virtue: Allsberg Rising. In that first book, I create a fictional model community that agrees on 5 main "spiritual principles" that cut accross all the participating traditional faiths of the group. Their allegence is not to "God" or to "Jesus", but to God-in-action and Jesus-in-action. I have embraced incarnational theology, or at least my best shot at understanding of it.

Truly embracing incarnational theology involves a fundamental understanding; it is the energy-like, dynamic, Christ-function that is the only "way" - not the Christ-object. If, as you seem to indicate, Christians are still attached to thinking like matter by thinking that Christ meant "I" (the object called a particular being or man) am the way, as opposed to I am the "way" (the process, which, when interfaced with the physical world, becomes a "function"), then that whole subgroup of spiritual disciples (Christians) will not be able to grasp the spiritual principle, and will be an obstruction to true cooperation. Will the whole Christian faith become the party of "No"? My dream of folks uniting with mutual understandings about true spirituality (which, IMO, requires thinking, doing, and being like the pure energy of God, and like Pure Energy's Interface Format, or "Christ", that translates Pure Energy to the ways and means of matter), will never be realized if Christians, or any religious group, clings to the old, lower frequency, way of thinking. The optimal spiritually-principled model community must have the right model if it is to be a successful. And I feel it is Pure Energy's will for such a community to succeed - for some significant measure of "heaven on earth" to come true, become manifest, in our collective flesh.

We are in a time of shifting over to thinking like energy. The shrinking sociological group called the Traditionals (and one of their charcteristics may be a fairly high degree of literalism and "thinking like matter") will have more and more members come over to the Cultural Creatives who share some of the Traditionals' relationship values, and the gradual merging will begin to hold a candle to the Moderns. At some point, the Cultural Creatives will hold the reins of society, and Moderns will also gradually move toward a "center" (core value) that is less money-centered, less achievement-centered, less status-centered, less competition-centered, etc., and more in line with Christian love, but in a newer form than the old, traditional, way.

IMO, one of the conveyor belts for this shift of centers will be learning to think like energy, process-oriented (like I Am That I Am), rather than content-oriented. At some point, the content of "Christ" will simply be in the way of the Way, unless Christians can begin to think like energy ("spirit") and to embrace the true nature of Christ as the Way (he put that description first, perhaps because it is the gate or door to understanding spirit/energy), rather than the content-clinging misinterpretation of "I am the way..."

I consider myself a Christian. I hope and pray that your characterization of Christians is wrong. Wholeness, Pure Energy, and God tells me it is.

Darrell