#18 Awakening Consciousness
The Not-Yet God:
Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, OSF
Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Chapter 4
HOW THE SKY GOD WAS BORN
Teilhard asked if the real problem might be a sense of unsatisfied theism, a shrinking of God into nice, neat formulas, a God who no longer nourishes in us the interest to go on living and living on a higher plane. When the growth of science and technology outstrips our spiritual growth, the human person is reduced to data and eventually obliterated as a subject of infinite proportions. Teilhard thought that God has to be reborn as the God of Evolution: “The human world of today has not grown cold but it is ardently searching for a God proportionate to the new dimensions of a universe whose appearance has completely revolutionized the scale of our faculty of worship.”
The two terms, the death of God and the rebirth of God, were meant to underscore several ideas:
1.Religion is too individualistic and needs to be reframed within the scope of the cosmos; religion is a cosmic phenomenon not an individual one.
2. Christianity, with its emphasis on trans-cendence and other-worldliness, has become irrelevant.
3.The rebirth of God requires a rebirth of religion since all religions have a role in the future of humankind.
4.The new physics invites a new emphasis on the birth of God in matter. Teilhard thought we go to God in and through matter.
The more conscious we become of God in our own embodied lives, the more conscious we become of God in every aspect of life. “Matter puts us in touch with the energies of earth, where we find ourselves looking to the ‘Unknown God’ who is to come.” Teilhard’s ideas were consonant with those of Bohm, Jung, and other mystics informed by science.
= 2 =
By awakening to matter’s infinitely entangled divine life, we help complete God by realizing the potential of our own creaturely existence. The only way to conceive of God in a new way is to begin with our cosmic reality of relational wholeness. Hence, we need a new theology of the whole, or theohology, and we need to understand why theohology rejects the notion of the supernatural.
The word “supernatural” is not found in scripture. The concept appears for the first time in the Latin translations of the 5th century mystic, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and later in the writings of Hilduin and John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century. Only with Thomas Aquinas does its usage become general. The term “supernatural” appeared for the first time in decrees of the Council of Trent and the propositions of the Bull that Pius V promulgated on 27 April 1570.
Medieval theology placed theological or revealed truths at the core and called them the substance of faith to show their central, eternal, and unchanging character. Within this world-view and from its philosophical categories, the notion of the supernatural was understood and formulated. God is simply the beginning and end of all things. The supernatural pertained to that which was not constitutive of nature but over and above it. Hence, Thomas’s statement, “grace builds on nature,” means that grace is a supernatural divine gift that perfects nature. For Thomas, God is the supernatural Truth, the supernatural cause, the supernatural principle, because God’s essence is existence itself. The divine call to union becomes a supernatural perfection of human nature. In other words, union with God is above nature and beyond the powers of nature to attain and only possible with God’s grace.
THE QUESTION OF GOD AND WORLD
Franciscan theology differed from that of Thomas Aquinas by placing an emphasis on divine love and relationality. However, the Catholic Church turned its back on the Franciscan theologians following the rise of nominalism and modern science.
= 3 =
By officially mandating the theology of Aquinas as the official theology of the Church in 1879, the Church closed itself off from supporting a living God-world relationship in a world of change. However, cosmology has shifted over time, from the Ptolemaic cosmos to the Copernican cosmos to the Big Bang cosmos, so that the hierarchically structured Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis, which held sway in the medieval to modern periods, has become theologically stifling.
The rise of modern science, with its corre-sponding shift in cosmology, did not result in a new understanding of God or the God-world relationship. Christian theology remained bound to the Ptolemaic cosmos and the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis, which gave rise to two distinct worldviews and, two metaphysical orders: science and religion.
The artificial separation between science and religion lies at the heart of our contemporary theological confusion. The distinction between a conceptual order and one of real relationship undergirds the difference between classical theology and the new relational holism of theohology. Whitehead and the school of process philosophy sought to understand a new metaphysics of the whole. Process reality is a philosophical paradigm that tries to see reality as an open system in which every entity is interrelated and connected through a dynamic process whereby events influence each other. The essence of reality, however, is not being but becoming. Reality is a dynamic process of ongoing transformation.
Taking his cue from quantum physics, Whitehead developed a God-world relationship of mutuality and reciprocity: God affects the world, and the world affects God. He coined a term for this process of becoming: “philosophy of organism,” and he situated both God and creaturely life within the model of organic wholeness. God and world are interconnected and interdependent. An individual (other than God) is only a fragment or fractal of reality, not the whole. Cosmic wholeness, not infinity, is the essential concept of divinity.
= 4 =
God is the whole of the whole of spacetime, and the whole itself is a dynamic and infinite relatedness. God is integral to the world’s becoming. Whitehead believed that “Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty.” God shares in the relational (creative) process as the one who lures the entire evolutionary enterprise to possibilities that enable the achievement of rich and complex values—values that ultimately reflect and enhance its very source.
Divine love is the energetic lure; it is both alluring and affected by that which is lured. Authentic love preserves the freedom and integrity of the other by offering possibilities to the other without forcing the choice to act. Love is always persuasive and never coercive: God’s power is God’s love. As the ground of freedom and novelty, God’s power enables, sustains, and nurtures possibilities, but God’s lure depends on creaturely freedom to respond. From God’s side, the divine lure is to ever-increasing freedom, novelty, and relationship; to make available opportunities to envision a world beyond the world presently actualized.
Creation is not a solitary act but a social act between God and world. The incarnation is entangled divinity and humanity co-creating and co-actualizing potential new life in every creature open to the fullness of life.
COMPLEXITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Teilhard reframed the God-world relationship as a complementary pair of mutually affirming opposites. He wrote that Christianity will finally become aware of the fact that the three fundamental personalistic mysteries upon which it rests are in reality simply three aspects of one and the same process (Christogenesis), depending on whether one looks at it from the point of view of its principal moving power (creation), or its unifying mechanism (incarnation), or its elevating effort (redemption). The God-world relationship can be likened to a complex dynamical system in that God and world must be considered in relation to each other. If creativity is the ultimate principle for divine and creaturely life, then dynamic being, and relationality are one and the same. To be is to be related.
= 5 =
Gordon Kaufman points out, God is creativity. Since love is the most intense relationship that unifies and forms absolute wholeness, love is the most characteristic of being itself. Being is the dynamism of love, and love is always the movement from potentiality to actuality. We might consider this creative movement of love as the ever-dynamic movement of divinity itself….Divine being moves itself from potency to actuality in virtue of its own intrinsic dynamism. God is always active as the subject of the ongoing act of existence, or the ongoing subject of relationality, because God is the name of persons or personal relationships in a dynamism of love and so is continuously coming into being as God.
As Meister Eckhart wrote:
“God is the newest thing there is, the youngest thing there is. God is the beginning, and if we are united to God, we become new again. It is in the coming to be that God is.”
God is the newest thing there is, and all who seek God live in the newness of life. Love is what God is; and God is always seeking to be more in love. The world is restlessly yearning for the fullness of life because the heart of yearning is the heart of love. Evolution is an ever-newness of life born out of the ever-newness of divine love.
Teilhard’s insights impel us to reconsider the doctrine of creation. Creation is not the appearance of something out of nothing; rather, it is an act of immanent unification by which the world is in the process of being created. Teilhard states that God and world can be thought of as the complementary union of the uncreated and created, infinite and finite, distinct, yet each having a need both to exist in themselves and to be combined with each other.
John Haught writes: “It is because God is not-yet that there is room for time and the coming of a new future.It is because God is not-yet that there is room for hope. It is because God is not-yet that the passage of time is not a threat but the carrying out of a promise.”
= 6 =
The not-yet God is the God of the future, the God who is coming to be. The drama of cosmic awakening, therefore, contributes to the very identity of God. God and world cannot be separated because matter, and the potential of matter to become something more, undergird existence, and the heart of existence is the infinite wellspring of love, which is the energy of life itself. Hence, transcendence does not belong to God alone but to the God-world unity in its infinite potential to become something more together.
God is the whole that comes into clearer vision with each new stage of consciousness. Evolution brings God into focus. God is the goal toward which all things are moving. Traditional theology begins with the Godhead, while emergence points to the God-ahead. God’s creative activity cannot be thought of simply as enabling things to exist. Rather, such activity must be seen as enabling things to evolve and to become what is new. God is creative, and so too are we. Consciousness is a creative act because the mind acts on potentials and brings them into actual existence. Each person who acts consciously co-creates the universe. God and world co-create the universe as a whole because they are becoming something more together in evolution. It is not just creatures who are becoming new in evolution; God also is becoming new.
God affects the world, and the world affects God. God can change and grow because matter changes and grows. Only what is alive can change, and only what can change can grow. Teilhard spoke, instead, of a bilateral and complementary relationship between God and world and maintained that what gives life to Christianity is the sense of the mutual comple-tion of God and world. Without the physical universe, it is not possible to conceive of God, and without God, the universe does not exist. God and world are a complementary pair and, together, they form a unified whole.
“Theology, like philosophy, rests on a particular worldview that is our ultimate God is always God for the World, and if the conception of the World has changed so radically in our times, there is little wonder that the ancient notions of God do not appear convincing. To believe that one might retain a traditional idea of God while changing the underlying cosmology implies giving up the traditional notion of God. One cannot go on simply repeating ‘God, creator of the world’ if the word ‘world’ has changed its meaning since that phrase was first uttered the word ‘creator,’ as well.”