Revitalizing Christianity

Thinking Beyond Modernity With John Vervaeke and Brendan Graham Dempsey

A few days ago, I had a conversation with

Brendan Graham Dempsey

about the first part of his new book that he's releasing serially on evolution as a learning process. I thought that was a valuable and interesting conversation about metaphysics. Today, John Vervaeke just put up on YouTube his conversation with Brendan about a different but related topic: metamodern Christianity. I just finished watching that and wanted to share a few thoughts. I resonate with where these gentlemen are headed with their thinking and feeling. But I want to, in responding, emphasize a few points and share some ideas I didn’t hear (but that I don’t think John or Brendan would disagree with). I’d like to see if my interpretation of the problematic situation they are responding to might prove helpful for those hoping to revivify a religious attitude toward the world in light of modern, postmodern, and metamodern critiques and reconstructions.

Let me briefly lay out how their conversation went. John began by sharing a bit about J.L. Schellenberg’s work, who I haven’t myself read yet. John lays out his sense that there are certain problems to be overcome in our attempt to recover a viable sense of religiosity today, which he summarizes in terms of the “Triple Transcendence” of ultimate reality, ultimate transformation, and ultimate narrative orientation.

One of the issues needing to be addressed is that there’s roughly at least 40,000 years of human spirituality that we have material evidence for. Now, I would say probably something like spirituality in terms of ecstatic inner experience was prevalent among hominids going back millions of years. Why would we draw the line at just when we have the material evidence? Obviously, we’re having to speculate and make some inference there, but still, it seems to me that—hell, Jane Goodall would say even chimpanzees exhibit spiritual behavior. Regardless, this just strengthens what I take Schellenberg’s point to be: lets say it has been only 40,000 years, Schellenberg says we’ve been spiritual beings for so long, why would we imagine that it was only a few thousand years ago, say with the axial religious transformations, that we finally got it right? It would seem more likely that there’s an ongoing process here, kind of an open-ended revelatory process. I’m putting words in Schellenberg’s mouth there—again, I haven’t studied his work.

John goes on to elaborate some problems for theism that anyone trying to resurrect, as it were, a metamodern form of Christianity is going to need to respond to. One is the problem of evil. When you uphold the omni-variety theism—a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and supposedly omnibenevolent and all-loving—it becomes difficult to reconcile the divine nature with the presence of evil in the world, the presence of suffering and injustice. Why would an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God create a world with such suffering, with childhood cancers, and murder, and rape, and war, and all the rest of it? Responding to the problem of evil is at the top of the list for anyone trying to reimplement or re-equip themselves with a kind of God image or God concept that might be psychologically convincing and socially effective. You’re going to need to account for this problem of evil because, after all, it’s really why people would turn to religion in the first place, for some sense of reconciliation.

Another problem that John mentions is onto-theology, of course—this idea that we commit idolatry if we imagine God to be some kind of super-being or omni-being, as if God is just the biggest among the beings, the strongest amongst all of the beings, rather than, say, the ground of being itself. Think of Heidegger’s ontological difference here between being and beings. If we are going to engage in God talk, we need to be wary of such traps.

Luckily, human beings have been engaging in self-critical, self-negating God talk for thousands of years—Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite are in many ways involved with us in this conversation still, thousands of years later, as well as other more modern, early modern thinkers like Cusa, Bruno, and Spinoza (who John mentions): they’re fully participants in this dialogue and I think have insights which are convergent with “metamodern” ideas. When we do these historical dating schemes, we have to, I think, be humble and recognize the ways in which individuals at earlier times were already here, and we can look to them as conversation partners today.

In our critique of onto-theology, we can look right to the mystical core of Christianity itself for a response. In response to the problem of evil, we can turn to Origen, one of the Church Fathers in the early centuries of Christianity: apokatastasis, this idea that everyone is saved in the end, even Satan. Not that that’s a complete solution to the problem of evil. We could also look to process theology and open and relational theology to deal with this problem. There’s a lot of work on that question from Hartshorne and Cobb and Griffin and Whitehead himself. Thomas Jay Oord nowadays speaks powerfully both from the perspective of biblical interpretation, that there’s actually no biblical basis for omnipotence, but also from a theological and philosophical point of view, that we shouldn’t be imagining God as all-powerful, at least if by “powerful” we mean, you know, competing tit-for-tat, blow-for-blow with creatures in sort of a physical exchange of forces. God doesn’t engage force against force. If God is “powerful,” that power must be love, which is a relational quality that we might call the metaxic ground of becoming. If love is a form of power, then it’s a power, as Plato already noted in The Sophist, to affect but also to be affected by. And so there’s a reciprocality to love. When we say God is love, we’re already undermining a lot of these omnis, particularly the idea of God as the dictator, God as the coercive commander.

One of the other serious issues that John raises is the problem of pluralism. There’s a plurality of spiritual and religious or cultural traditions, responses to the uncanniness of human existence. So how do we, as say, metamodern Christians or just followers of Jesus Christ, how do we honestly claim to have some unique insight that the other religions would not? And I think inclusivism gets us some part of the way there, which would be basically saying you don’t need to call it Christ, but whatever it is that Christians call Christ—and for me, the historical Jesus is important, but Christ is a cosmic principle—we can just say that principle is active everywhere in every human culture and in the cosmos itself, even if it’s called by some other name. Call it Krishna, call it Buddha—it is a cosmic power that is a power of love and has been guiding and shepherding this process of cosmic learning, of evolutionary learning. That would be the inclusive response to the plurality question, that just as we, as scientists, would want to seek some universal account of the nature of things that’s not culturally relative, I think in our religious life, we also seek universality, but always while remaining dialogical. We should continually be in dialogue with those we differ from about religious questions and religious practices. In some sense, dialogue must become an essential part of the religious life—dialogue across difference—because we’re drawn to learn from each other. If we’re all guided by this mysterious power, and different religions call it by different names, if we stay in good faith dialogue with one another, we’re bound to become better coordinated within that ultimate mystery. We need everyone involved in this project, and so any Christianity is going to need to be deeply pluralistic. Which doesn’t mean that Christians wouldn’t feel the unique significance of Christ, but that they would be flexible enough in dialogue with others to accept that that Christ Being is ultimately mysterious, and can manifest to others in ways that might initially be unexpected to us. I do think a new kind of Christianity is recoverable after these critiques.

Brendan then offered his account of the evolution of meaning through the transmission of semantic information. For him this is a deep learning process whereby agents are gathering more information about their environments and so approaching eventually—as they move through these levels that he draws from Gregg Henriques of matter, life, mind, and then culture—there’s a convergence toward a sacred mode of being that is an awakening to the fact of transcendent learning itself as the meaning of it all, that we are involved in this process of learning together. Once we become meta-conscious of the learning process that we’ve always been engaged in, this transcendent experience dawns upon us, and our whole society becomes reoriented around it. I hear this in Brendan’s perspective, at least. This transcendent learning process, this sacred learning process, aids our reciprocal opening to reality, to co-creatively discover ever-deeper facets of reality. As Brendan put it, “continually updating our world model” via a normative co-discovery of the growing grain of the world-process.

For Brendan, enculturation and sociality, and culture—these are uniquely human. Just as in our conversation and in some of my written responses to the first part of Brendan’s book, I question these levels and how sharply we should imagine mind and life and matter really being divided by an ontological emergence. It sounds almost like a new kind of reality comes into existence when life emerges, and then a new kind of reality comes into existence when mind emerges. I think life and mind are already implicit in whatever we might think matter is, which is to say that already at the level of plasma dynamics and nuclear physics and the elements and stars, multiple generations of stars that give rise to heavier elements—that this whole process of physiogenesis is already a process of evolutionary learning. The point is not to think of physical particles as little persons in their meaningful arenas making conscious decisions, but whatever it is in the human being that has become conscious must, in some way, be a dramatic amplification of what has always already been going on. We are, after all, made of the same energy and patterning that has come to be over the course of this multi-billion-year cosmic evolutionary process.

We can make rough distinctions between physical, biological, psychological, and cultural, but I think these are phenomenological descriptions, not ontological domains. What do we mean by culture in human beings? Well, we mean symbolic language in all of its various forms and the inner experience associated with our interpretation of all of the symbols. But at a more general level, when we talk about culture, we’re talking about a kind of experiential learning that individuals in their communities can engage in together that can then be passed on generation to generation because of communication, because of a kind of transmission among and between individuals. I think animals can do this too, and probably even single cells because they are themselves experiential agents, and they’re in deep relationship to one another—internally related, as we’d have to put it in metaphysical terms. They require one another for their own existence as themselves. Talk about reciprocal opening—that’s what cellular coexistence is all about. There’s a kind of cultural transmission—it’s not symbolic exactly, but there’s a kind of, you know, the experience that each cell is having can be transmitted, that the feelings that they are undergoing can be radiated out into the environment of other cellular centers of experience, and thereby they have this shared memory that they carry with them in the present. All of this is already a form of culture (yes, bacterial culture!), already minimally minded, and obviously, living; and it’s the same atoms doing it all! So, I don’t want to make these levels ontological; I would rather see these levels as phenomenological. They’re helpful descriptions, but at the metaphysical level, in terms of what there is, what type of entities there are or occasions that actually exist, I think we’re going to need to see how all of these so-called levels are actually already enfolded in the original.

That’s my take, at least; and that’s what Brendan and I were talking about in our last conversation. The reason that it’s relevant here is because I really agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who’s not a sophisticated philosopher, really. He’s a paleontologist and a Jesuit priest, and he developed a new kind of evolutionary vision of Christianity. He claimed he wasn’t even doing theology in The Human Phenomenon, he wanted it to be science. He wanted it to be the science of the human being—a kind of anthropology, if you will. But it’s obviously quite theological as well. I really think his voice should be heard here, that he should be a big part of this conversation, especially when we try to think about what it is to be a person and what it means to be a person who knows that they are a product of evolution. Teilhard was really saying that God is evolution. Evolution is God. What does it mean to say that? It’s to say that God made the universe so that it could make itself. And that God made a universe and is made by that universe in turn, remade by it. There’s a deep reciprocality here. Teilhard was accused of pantheism, of course, for saying this, but I think it’s a more complex vision than that. To say God is evolution is not just to say God is nature. It’s really to say that we don’t know what nature is yet. Nature doesn’t know what it is yet because it’s an evolutionary process. Nature is “an incomplete in process of production,” as Whitehead put it.

Christianity, too, is a historical process, and it’s a process of uniqueness being universalized and universality being made unique. It’s a story of the growing recognition of this dialectic between the plural and the unified, and the individual and the universal. It’s a conscious breaking through into a new kind of cultural operating system, to put it in crude terms, that a society would need to survive this degree of self-consciousness and intelligence. If there wasn’t this loving embrace of the paradox of individuality and universality, of plurality and unity, of the identity of identity and difference, then no human society of this size could continue to peacefully coexist on this planet. This religion of Christianity emerges in the midst of the Roman Empire occupying Jerusalem, and historically is the story of the Jews with their unique tribal religion in relationship to a monotheistic deity. They had broken with the custom of the ancient Mediterranean world where there was actually a lot of pluralism in different city-states. Various regions would have different names for gods, but there would be translation tables. So you see, “oh, Zeus here is Thor here, is Jupiter over there.” You can all acknowledge one another’s gods without having to fight about it. But then the Jews come along and say, no, none of those gods are real. This God, our God, Yahweh, is the God. This whole idea of a messianic savior and an incarnation and the merger of Greek philosophy and this idea of the Logos with the Torah’s story of this relationship between a people and their God created this new religion that just caught fire in people’s souls and toppled an empire. But then the empire rebranded and kind of co-opted it, and the rest is history. But the real Christian question here is, what is a person?, and why would this historical process that the Bible attempts to convey—and I’m not a biblical absolutist; I think scripture continues beyond and around the Bible, and there’s a whole Apocrypha we’d want to include, and let’s keep reading and writing—but what is the person in the context of this broader tradition of the Abrahamic faith? Why is God three people? One God, but three persons—what’s going on there? Why is Elohim in Genesis plural in the Hebrew? Why does God need angelic and natural hierarchies—minerals, plants, animals, and so on—to create with? Why can’t God just do it ex nihilo? Just as there’s really no biblical basis for omnipotence, there’s not much biblical basis for the creatio ex nihilo doctrine, either. I think we can understand the cosmos like Teilhard did, as a personalizing process. So, when we ask, is the cosmos a person?, or is there a person behind it? These are questions where I think we start to get tangled in our own grammar. It’s best just to say that the cosmos personalizes, or as Teilhard himself put it, cosmogenesis is anthropogenesis. You could say this is just a nice narrative, but it’s also arguably consistent with evolutionary science. You can’t get around this anthropic principle. You can offer a deflationary interpretation of it, but the question is nagging that we can only observe the universe that has created us in these sorts of meta-situations that we find ourselves in. These situations really do call for a sense of the sacred, which would be participatory, where we come into dialogue with this ultimate ground which, as Brendan says, is receding from us.

This is where Brendan will say it’s non-dual all the way down, and then John offered that, yeah, there can even be a kind of mystical materialism here. You can be a physicalist and still accept this kind of narrative, and I agree with that. I think that’s fair. But I also think there’s more than that. I don’t want the—at least for me, the revitalization of Christianity is not going to be just about God becoming this receding horizon, this noumenon. I like the idea of God as learning process and the living out of that, but I worry then, if we just say that God is beyond the horizon, we end up with a kind of God as the Jungian unconscious, or we end up with a kind of psychologization of Kantianism, where we’re only ever going to have access to the phenomenal and never really be able to come face-to-face with the noumenal, the archetypal reality, or the natural reality even, that we’re just seeing through a mirror darkly. I don’t want to dead-end there. What that requires is something like what Brendan was referencing actually—this idea of emergent, transpersonal hyperpersons that may have come to be in other regions of the cosmos, but that we might be able to either ourselves generate through our collective coordination and social activity or that we can come into relationship with via prayer and imaginal practice. But John also warns about the problem of false agency detection. So when we ask, is the universe personal, we have to remain critical and not just allow ourselves to go down any metaphysical rabbit hole that strikes our fancy because we’re munching on mushrooms all the time and are super neuroplastic and detecting machine elves everywhere, world-building in every direction. We’ve got to find balance here and avoid false agency detection.

Yet, when it comes to agency, as I was saying earlier, all these levels are fine as phenomenological descriptions, but we shouldn’t ontologize the levels because already in the plasma out of which this universe was born, there was learning transpiring. There was mind and life in nuce. When we understand the universe as creative from top to bottom in that sense, then there’s agency all the way down. Yes, we can make false detections; we can hallucinate agency and personal intention when really it’s just accidental. We don’t want to project agency everywhere in an indiscriminate smear, but the world is made of agencies, and they go all the way down. So that primal sort of animist, originally participatory understanding of the soul of the world and the animacy of nature, it is true! We continue growing, but we don’t want to “grow out of” that primal sense of cosmic participation. We just need to transfigure it, mature it. The axial age revolutions, which occur across different cultures in around 800 BCE to 200 BCE or so, and then with Christianity, continues to unfold with an even more intensely incarnational vector. There’s also a truth discovered here of the importance of the universality of the individual in the midst of the social, and the sense in which the individual can come into direct relationship to the transcendent such that something like a post-conventional morality becomes possible. An individual can know that their society is unjust and appeal to a transcendent Good in defense of that belief. That’s new in the axial age, and that’s a valuable insight. But we need a second axial turn, as Ewert Cousins called it, which would mean recovering this primal sense of participation while also integrating the important moral impulse that comes out of this connection to the transcendent that the axial traditions give us. So, it’s bringing together these two impulses and attempting some kind of integration. That would mean granting the cosmos the status of a personalization process. The cosmos personalizes, which isn’t to totalize, but I think it is to acknowledge that personhood has always been an attempt to portray the infinite. The idea of a persona, like wearing a mask, a mask through which sound passes, I believe is the full etymology of that word. What is this air passing through the mouth conveying? Meaning. Personhood is deeply mysterious, and I think it’s where the infinite meets the finite and takes on definite form, even determinate form. For human beings, that’s where the learning happens. Speech, logos, plays a principal role here, and we’re doing it. Conversations like these are contributing to the evolution of consciousness.

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One thing about the agent-arena relationship, and I know Brendan gets this because he says at some point that non-duality goes all the way down, but he said earlier that an agent is coupled to its arena. I would just want to emphasize that coupling is not created, really—it’s always already there. Then in a series of graduated stages, evolutionary stages, an original unbroken unity of organism and environment, a kind of cosmic organism if you want, is internally differentiated and complexified. There never was just an arena with no agency. There never were just agents with no arena. So, there never was a need to “create” coupling as such. The organism-environment field begins as this whole, a Gestalt, which is then internally divided, internally differentiated into agents and arenas. The agents can collectively learn new things about their arenas, but the thing is, the arena is always changing as a result of what the agents learn because the arena is nothing else than other agents. The environment is nothing else than other organisms operating at different scales. I think Brendan gets that completely, but I want to just emphasize that because then we’re never in a situation of having to say the agent emerged out of the arena or something like: there was just space-time and matter-energy, and then agency—poof—appeared, and then life—poof—mind—poof. Sorry, I’m not trying to be unfair, but I worry about that kind of an emergentist account. It’s a bit too creationist! Call me an evolutionist!

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I think if we want an account, if we want a cosmology compatible with Christianity, then we need an account, like Teilhard’s ultimately, or like Whitehead’s, where God creates by letting the world create itself. Then following the implications of that through to ourselves as persons engaging with each other, sharing the same air, conspiring in an attempt to breathe life into this emergent recognition, which is not just intellectual, it’s also ethical and deeply heart-centered. But it’s not just a feeling; it’s a knowing at the same time. It’s just wonderful and inspiring to be able to do this, and I look forward to continuing with all who seek to dialogue.