Where Does the Resurrection Fit Into Integral Theory?

Dear Greg,

I never saw this blog entry of yours until I checked out your intriguing profile but I did write a piece on the Resurrection for the IL portal editor(s) about a year ago. It never really got off the ground so I've included it here for you to check out. I hope you enjoy it...

So for starters, we can begin with a brief All-Level summary of the 1st-tier approaches to the Resurrection: 

Red-Ego: At this level Jesus is a divinely ordained magician and his Resurrection is a divine power play, expressing for its adherents a denial of death and mortality awareness, and a triumph of magical wish-fulfillment released from the very real limits of space, time and embodiment...  

Amber-Traditional: At this stage God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. The Resurrection here is physical and bodily and it believed in as an event in which God intervenes in human history to save a new group of chosen people... The gospel narrative is taken to be literal reality, and so with the Resurrection the figure of Jesus is vindicated as God’s one and only begotten Son, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead.  

Orange-Modern: With the world-view of modern science and reason there is no historical evidence for the Resurrection which is seen to be just another one of the miracles attested to in the Gospels, all of which contradict universal Laws of Nature. Although the resurrection is seen to be a myth, from this stage it may also be said that either the life of Jesus symbolizes a universal human possibility or that the Resurrection simply means the memory of Jesus lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers, who may have been suffering from some kind of delusion or hallucination in the wake of their leaders execution. 

Green-Post-modern – Here the Resurrection is not so much a historical event but a myth that is found in many different pre-modern religions, or possibly a New Age symbol of the coming global transformation. The question is not, “how is such an event physically or historically possible?” but rather, “what event do these stories harbor?”, “what do these stories mean?”  At this stage there are no facts, just interpretations and so all things flow in a river of meaning. The Resurrection is therefore intended above all as a matter of subjectivity or interiority 

Now, while an Integral approach can see the relative degrees of truth and meaning in all these previous value-structures, it also adds its own important contributions, based on the capacity for vision-logic (multiple perspective taking) and the discoveries of the modern and post-modern world. It is these that we shall now turn to:  

Firstly, from within an evolutionary context of inter-locking hierarchical systems, the Resurrection is a foremost instance of Spirit’s creative advance into novelty (Whitehead), where the risen Jesus is the first fruits of an altogether new kind of humanity... As Pope Benedict XVI said at his first Easter mass, borrowing the language of evolutionary science, the Resurrection is  

“The greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.” 

From an integral perspective, we see supporting evidence of Pope Benedict’s somewhat surprising view of the Resurrection event in the serendipitous creativity of the evolutionary process. From a primordial fireball that gave rise to countless swirling galaxies to a hot house planet teeming with carbon-based life to the collective passions and unceasing ingenuity of the human endeavor, the amazing metamorphoses and stunning transformations of the evolving universe are paradigmatic of the Resurrection event and give a contemporary expression to the very substance of what Jesus of Nazareth is always doing in the Gospels.

For just as evolution is marked by an inexorable capacity for bringing “order out of chaos” in consistently going beyond what went before it (from matter to life to mind), Jesus’ is also transforming lives in all of his works and deeds, giving people hope where there was despair, love where there was fear, and the intimacy of companionship where there was only isolation.

And when it comes to Jesus and his radical enactment of the Kingdom of God, none of these transformations is more amazing than his being raised from the dead. In the transformation from death to life, we see Jesus bring - not eternity - but a new time with new hope for the future out of the abject horror and radical injustice of his crucifixion. For just as evolution consistently brings forth new forms of living complexity out of the incredible pain, waste and accident of the 3 billion year history of life on Earth, the Resurrection shows us that the love of God flourishes precisely by taking up meaningless suffering and absorbing the finality of death, even as the Creator Spirit also brought forth abundant life from a planet that was formless void in the book of Genesis. In other words, Resurrection is reality.

Moreover, in accordance with Integral theory, the Resurrection can also be likened to what Ken Wilber calls a “Kosmic groove” that has been laid down by Jesus of Nazareth in inaugurating the Kingdom of God and the creative emergence of an altogether new kind of humanity. According to Wilber’s theory of Kosmic grooves, once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world—from crystallizing complex molecules to stabilizing Non-dual awareness—the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else on the planet. In this respect, the Resurrection is a Kosmic groove laid down in human history, first by Jesus of Nazareth – who is the locus of the transformative energy of the Kingdom and the one in whom the evolutionary trajectory of Spirit’s own self-realization becomes conscious of itself for the first time. And through the temporal process of human evolution this initial Kosmic groove is now being slowly crystallized into a Kosmic habit – as more and more rare individuals take up Jesus’ radical path of crucifixion and resurrection (losing self to find Self) that constitutes the meaning authentic Christian discipleship.  

Furthermore, with the recent integral insight that Enlightenment itself is perpetually evolving along with the rest of the universe, the Resurrection is not merely "always already" accomplished for each and all in and through God’s self-offering in Jesus Christ but it is also deeply and profoundly still “to come” – as an event that is by its very nature beyond any horizon of meaning and action that we can currently program or foresee. So while an Integral approach maintains that both the “already” (sudden) and the “not-yet” (gradual) perspectives are held to be 100% true, there is also a suggestion here that with the “Logos made flesh” in the Christian tradition that God is not ultimately real (in the Hegelian sense of “concrete universal”) until He/She//Thou/It actually enters into the stream of time and space and expresses God’s self as a flesh and blood human being in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  

In view of the Resurrection event, then, there is an impulse to New Creation in the depths of the Divine, which is now seen to be radically present in "anguished intimacy" with the long and painful evolution of increasing exterior complexity and deeper interior consciousness, from atoms to amoebas to humans to God knows what in the future.

For just as St. Paul tells us that all of creation “groans for fulfillment”, with an integral understanding of the evolutionary nature of enlightenment, in the passion of Jesus to go all the way, to go to the point of maximum intensity where ones soul reaches it breaking point and yet does not break - but instead shifts into a deeper expression of it’s own inherent potentials, we discover an archetypal expression of Spirit’s own self-realization through the creative advance of the world-historical process into radically new forms of sentient life and consciousness.  

And from this perspective, the Resurrection is not so much an historical fact but an eschatological event. In other words, the Resurrection does not conform to our demand for historical evidence and neither does it fit into our conventional expectations or categories of thought, rather it is an event that signifies a new reality breaking into the business as usual world, bringing with it hope for a New Creation.

And importantly, as an eschatological event those who hope in the Resurrection can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. In Christ, peace with God now means conflict with the world, and as such the Resurrection, as hope in that which is “to come” becomes the source of Christian orthopraxy. Those who follow the way of Jesus and the hope and promise of his Resurrection therefore behave in this world with the eschatological goal of transforming it, in expectation of a divine transformation. Daniel Migliore grasps this well:

"Authentic Christian hope will certainly stand in opposition to present injustice and to every effort to absolutize the status quo. However, in the struggle for justice, equality, and human rights, Christians will always insist on “more”—on a different, greater future than what is ever achievable by human effort and ingenuity, a hope beyond hope. Utopian hope finds in humanity itself the resources and capacities to remove all suffering, establish universal justice, and complete history. A Christian theology of hope, by contrast, knows that the fulfillment we seek is an incalculable gift of God. Consequently, Christian hope will generate criticism both of the status quo and of all absolutized programs of progress and strategies of revolution." (Faith Seeking Understanding, 341)

In working to honor the hope and promise of Christianity to bring about a fundamental transformation of the world as it is - as a gift from God, at the heart of an Integral Life is a call to live with paradox, to navigate irreducible perspectives (e.g. the 4 Quadrants), and to hold the creative tension between opposites in the recognition that no single perspective is privileged or pre-given.

This capacity to live with paradox and ambiguity, as well as being central to the teachings of Jesus, is also found within the somewhat fragmentary Resurrection narratives recorded in the New Testament gospels. From the two women fleeing from an empty tomb in fear and trembling (Mark), to the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus disappears at the instant he is recognized (Luke) to doubting Thomas, the Resurrection is an event that is constantly vulnerable to human misperception – a precarious, delicate, insubstantial and fragile Reality – and therefore utterly precious, much like a new born baby. So, just as the risen Jesus tells Mary “do not cling to me”, the Resurrection will slip through our fingers if we hold onto it too tightly, and so we cannot be too sure that we have ever gotten hold of it fully. As such an encounter with the risen Christ breaks into our human experience world as a mystery to be approached with astonishment and awe, and is disclosed in an act of faith that is held with courage and often in spite of deep trepidation and cognitive uncertainty. 

And in further developing this point, just as the crucified Jesus is himself an expression of the love of God (see Good Friday blog), if we look at the earliest forms of Christian art that depict the Resurrection we find that the glory of risen Christ is always expressed in the visual form of the wounded Jesus. The risen Christ has wounds. That is, we cannot separate the risen Christ from the wounded Jesus, they are to be held together in the creative tensions of an integrally informed faith, where the authority of the risen Christ is found precisely in his precariousness, in his very wounded-ness and vulnerability.

So, just as the passion and suffering of the crucified Jesus is always already an expression of the glory of the risen Christ, the glory of the risen Christ is always and already expressed in the form of the wounded Jesus.  

So at this point of maximum intensity, where we accept and embody the irreducible paradoxes of Christianity, the more we experience the tension and intensity of the crucifixion – i.e. the violence, injustice and unspeakable horrors that have been suffered by the countless untold dead of human history, the more radically we awaken to and deepen our capacity for faith, hope and love in the Resurrection “to come”. In other words, where living through irreparable loss releases the event of a new birth, the more we pray and weep for the irredeemable sufferings of the past (in Auschwitz or Belfast, in Kosovo or the West Bank) the more we resurrect an irrepressible openness to the future.  

And from this more dynamic and evolutionary perspective, the Resurrection can now be seen an Omega-point of Christ consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin), an Omega-point that has already entered into human history and been accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but whose ultimate temporal horizon is radically unforeseeable... 

And moreover, the paradoxical secret that stirs within the Resurrection event also points to the transformative potential of Christianity. For if losing ones life is a necessary condition for finding it again then the critical deconstruction of the Christian faith tradition in the modern (Darwin, Marx, Freud) and post-modern (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) world is precisely the condition required for Christian renewal, and as such may well be the greatest achievement of the last 2000 years of Christianity.

Of course Christianity has already undergone five or six major historical turnings, suggesting that it is a faith tradition that is open to transformation and novelty. And in the wake of the Death of God in the 20th century (or any over-arching center of truth and meaning) and an institutional Church that is more concerned with self-preservation than renewal, having exhausted the potentials of its traditional forms and structure, it seems that the Church is again on the threshold of crucifixion/resurrection, and as such more prepared to transform itself than any other religion.  

Of course, what Christianity will become is totally unpredictable, but if it is to be true to its origins and re-activate the challenge and invitation of Jesus of Nazareth, the future of Christianity will involve an unpredictable earthquake, an event that exceeds our comprehension and expectations. For if Christians are really honest with themselves they will admit that Jesus is not the Messiah (Christ) that we either want or wish for, since the Kingdom will come “like a thief in the night” and at a time and place that we least expect... 

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"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)