What is "Metamodern" Christianity?
A personal exploration of my relationship to Christ and Christianity
Yesterday, I listened to this wonderful dialogue between
and John Vervaeke:They discuss Brendan’s proposal of a “metamodern” Christianity and explore the potential to reclaim faith in Christ in a contemporary, intellectually responsible way. The conversation revolved around the evolution of human understanding and relationship with what, following Jung, we can call “the God image,” tracing the journey from ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern to possibly metamodern phases.
The discussion highlighted how various historical transitions have reshaped the way humans relate to the divine image or the idea of God. John invokes the figures of Socrates and Buddha as points of comparison, which raises the question of the extent to which Jesus Christ is somehow unique. While I do think there is something unique about the Christ Event, asserting the uniqueness of Christ does not negate the universal wisdom found in other traditions like Platonism and Buddhism.
There need be no competition between spiritual figures like Christ and Buddha; rather, there is a universal value in their teachings that all humans can and, indeed, should learn from. Human beings are participants in an evolution of consciousness, and I believe that a deep understanding of the missions of both Buddha and Christ is essential for human spiritual development (see my essay from 2011, “Religious Dialogue as Soul-Making: A Prayer to Buddha and Christ”).
I wanted to offer my two cents on these issues as someone who, in my late teens, unexpectedly found myself called by Christ. I was raised by an agnostic Jewish father and an evangelical Christian mother. By about 12 years old, influenced by my mostly still uncomprehending reading of people like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, I was proudly identifying as a scientifically informed atheist. I thought of religious belief, especially Christianity, as something only the most gullible people could fall for. But later in my teens, I broadened my reading to include people like Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and Friedrich Nietzsche. I realized that the history and psychology of religion was more complicated than reductionistic materialists had led me to believe.
The turning point was in my 19th year: my encounter with what, again in Jungian terms, I feel most comfortable now referring to as the “Christ archetype.” I use this language not to diminish the ontological shock or to negate the palpable reality of this encounter, but to make this story more digestible to those who have never had such an experience. I certainly did not relate to this being as a projection of my psyche at the time. Christ appeared to me—or better, erupted into my soul—about 45 minutes after I’d ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. I felt His face just behind my own face as a glowing warmth, a loving embrace unlike anything I had ever felt. But along with love there was also an almost angry insistence that I wake up. To what? To the fact that Christ inhabits every human soul on Earth, dwelling just behind our human faces and literally dying to be recognized and embraced.
This experience was unexpected because at the time I was a practicing Buddhist who continued to view Christianity as a uniquely irrational belief system. I did not realize it at the time, but I had totally swallowed “Buddhist modernism.” This made Buddhism appear compatible with a secular scientific world view only because it stripped the tradition of many of its core elements (ritual, cosmology, reincarnation and karma, etc.). That Christ should erupt into my consciousness with such transformative force after I’d spent my entire teenage life making fun of Christianity was humbling.
After this experience, I began a serious study of the esoteric and mystical streams of Christianity. I had not fully appreciated the extent to which the West, too, had its own forms of nondual awareness and spiritual practice.
I’ve come to understand Jesus as a historical figure, even if our lack of detailed evidence of his real doings and sayings limits what we can say for certain about his ministry. But Christ is a cosmic being, a deeper spiritual power that informs while transcending human culture and psychology. Christ is thus an ontological power that cannot be owned by this or that church or religious sect. Christ is not a brand name. Christ does not belong to nominal Christians. I relate to Jesus as the initial vessel for the Christ being to incarnate, but, crucially, not as the unique vessel.
Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, I said ‘Ye are gods’”?’ -John 10:34
This cosmic perspective invites a relationship to the Christ Event as something numinous, a moment as pivotal as it is mysterious where the eternal meets and mingles with the historical, significantly transforming human consciousness and the longer term arc of our now planetary civilization. In light of such mingling, we cannot refer to it simply as a historical event. Christ is still incarnating, being born and dying in every human soul. Yes, even in those who couldn't care less about the religion called “Christianity.”
I get the sense that Brendan views “God” more as an emergent construct that humanity is collectively creating, rather than a pre-existing Being that created humans. This emergent view of God aligns with the idea of a dynamic and evolving universe. I also reject the classical idea of a creator God, but I find more satisfaction in a dipolar conception like Whitehead’s or Teilhard’s, where there is a sense in which God is both Alpha and Omega, both primordial and consequent in relation to the evolving cosmos. I agree with Brendan and John that the divine always remains in excess of human attempts to understand or control it. This excess, often terrifying, is what the great wisdom traditions have striven to help humans cope with. Unfortunately, these institutions too often overstep their human frailty by pretending man could rule God (i.e., that any one human institution might possess the final word on God’s plan). We need religions that can protect those who need it, while also encouraging those on a growth path to journey into the mystical cloud of unknowing without fear of excommunication.
Religions are both coping mechanisms and training methods, guiding humans through life's inevitable challenges, especially death. Secularism, too, is a kind of religion, as it also functions to shield humanity from the unruly chaos of reality by way of its own unique coping mechanisms (e.g., shopping, nationalism and other surrogate identities, etc.). Secularism also often represses the essential role of myth and magic, which are integral to human experience. I don’t mean to suggest we forego science and rationality to return to the superstitions of the past. But what modern Enlightenment reason can only (mis)understand as superstition remains even more effective in modern societies because of its repression: think of the way secular societies relate to money, obsess over sporting events, and worship celebrities. Think of the myth of progress haunting our ecocidal economy. Think of the numinous feeling that drives millions of people to watch someone else unwrap a new Apple device on YouTube. Myth and magic are ineradicable aspects of human consciousness that we’d do well to integrate instead of foolishly imagining we might eradicate them by the application science and technology. If anything is magical thinking…
My relationship to Christ has also been deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner. He refers to the Christ event as the “turning point in time” and insists that “we are but at the beginning of Christian evolution” (Occult Science, p. 246). I discuss the context of his statement in this session of our Urphänomen reading group:
Ultimately, I’d hope that a “metamodern” approach to Christianity can transcend binaries—between history and eternity, Jesus and the cosmic Christ, and between religions themselves. Such an approach would also be able to integrate scientific and religious wisdom, recognizing that both are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of reality. After all, science, in its devotion to truth, is itself a variant form of religious pursuit grounded in metaphysical assumptions about the intelligibility and unity of nature. How are these assumptions to be justified?
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The thoughts above were written after I recorded this video reply to John and Brendan:
This particular lecture by Steiner had a monumental impact on my own understanding of the relation between the Buddha and Christ impulses (in the Earthly stream of evolution about 2000 years ago). To be clear, and as you also pointed out, this is not to set up some binary opposition between the two impulses. We're going through an evolutionary process and each new impulse is supposed to bring a new level of unfolding for the Spirit that works and expresses through humanity.
The Buddha impulse was meant to help raise the Earthly self from the web of entanglement with bodily life, to differentiate that from the higher spiritual being that purifies and perfects itself, practically becoming master over the flesh. This is not negated by the Christ impulse but is led further. The higher spiritual being enters and fertilizes the Earthly spectrum and with this begins its gradual redemption through human spiritual activity. This can be achieved only through the power of Love, which is not something that we can make out of our separate efforts at self-perfection but flows from the Source of Being. It is synonymous with the idea of 'no being left behind'.
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"Buddha's doctrine of suffering had a mighty and vivid effect on the hearts of human beings. Countless people learned the great truth of being liberated from suffering through the extinction of the thirst for being, and they also learned how to strive outward from their earthly incarnations. Truly, the highest peak of human evolution is placed before our souls by such an endeavor.
Let us now view the period that comprises twelve centuries — six hundred years each before and after the birth of Christ. We need to stress that the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the middle of that period. From the age of Buddha, six hundred years before Golgotha, let us now call special attention only to what the Buddha felt at the sight of a corpse and what he taught in relation to this. Now that we have done this, let us immediately consider the time six hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha, when countless souls and eyes turned to the cross on which a corpse was hanging. It is from this corpse that the impulses emanated that spiritualized life and signaled the glad tidings that death can be conquered by life. That, then, is the exact opposite of what Buddha felt when he saw a dead body.
Buddha saw in a corpse an indication of the insignificance and the futility of life. By contrast, the human beings six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha looked up to the corpse on the cross in a spirit of devout fervor. It was to them a sign of life, and their souls came to be imbued with the certainty that existence is not suffering, but that it carries over beyond death into a state of bliss. The crucified cross of the Christ Jesus six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha came to be a memorial symbol of life, of the resurrection of life, and of the victory over death and all suffering; six hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha a corpse was the memorial symbol for the fact that human beings are subjected to misery and suffering because their thirst for being causes them to enter the physical world. Never has there been a more momentous reversal in the entire evolution of the human race.
If the human being's entry into the physical world had been considered as suffering six hundred years before the Event of Golgotha, how does the soul perceive the great truth of the misery of life after this event? How is this former truth perceived by people who look up to the cross of Golgotha with a high degree of understanding? Is birth suffering, as Buddha had said? Those who look up to the cross of Golgotha with a knowledgeable soul and who feel united with it will say to themselves: “This birth leads a human being into a world that had the opportunity to invest the Christ with its own elements.” They were glad to enter this earth on which Christ had walked. And through the connection with Christ, the soul had gained the strength to find its way up to the spiritual worlds, as well as the knowledge that birth is not suffering; birth is rather the gate through which one must pass to find the Savior — the Savior who has wrapped Himself into the same earthly materials that constitute the human physical sheath.
Is sickness suffering? Those who understood the Impulse of Golgotha in the true sense said: “No, it is not!” Even though mankind today cannot yet understand what the true spiritual life is that streams into them with Christ, people in the future will learn to understand it. They will know that a person whose innermost being is pervaded by the power of Christ, that an individual who allows himself or herself to become imbued with the Christ-Impulse will be able to overcome all illness with the help of the strong and healthy powers that he or she develops from within. This is so because Christ is the great healer of mankind. His power comprises everything that emanates from a spiritual well and is really able to develop the strong, healing power that can conquer illness. No, illness is not suffering, but rather an opportunity to overcome an impediment or a handicap by the development of the Christ-Force within us.
In the same way we must gain a clear understanding about the difficulties of old age. The weaker our limbs become, the greater the opportunity for us to grow in spirit and to master our infirmity through the power of Christ within us. Old age is not suffering because with every day we grow further into the spiritual world. And neither is death suffering because it is conquered in the resurrection. Death has been conquered through the Event of Golgotha.
Moreover, can we say that being separated from what we love constitutes suffering? No! The souls that imbue themselves with the Christ-Force know that love can forge indestructible spiritual bonds beyond all material hindrances. And there is nothing in life between birth and death and between death and rebirth to which we cannot spiritually find the way through the Christ-Impulse. If we imbue ourselves with the Christ-Impulse, it is unthinkable that we could possibly be separated from what we love in the long run. The Christ brings us together with what we love.
By the same token, “to be united with what we do not love” cannot be suffering because the Christ-Impulse teaches us that once we have accepted it into our souls, we must love everything in its own measure. The Christ-Impulse shows us the way, and when we have found this way, “to be united with what we do not love” can never cause suffering for then there will no longer be anything that we do not embrace lovingly. And “not to attain what one desires” can no longer be suffering either if one embraces Christ, for the human sensibilities, feelings, and desires are purified and ennobled by the Christ-Impulse in such a way that human beings desire only what they are meant to receive. They no longer suffer from the lack of things, for if they are meant to do without something or someone, such lack is for their ennoblement; and the Christ-Power gives them the strength to perceive it as a purification. When this happens, the feeling of lacking things no longer evokes suffering.
So what is the Event of Golgotha? It is the gradual abolition of the teaching by the great Buddha that life is suffering. No other event has had a greater impact on the evolution and the nature of life in this world than the Event of Golgotha, and that is why we can understand that it will continue to work for mankind and have tremendous positive consequences for humanity in the future." (GA 109, L VIII)
Thanks for this. I am a Teilhard Catholic, a fellow traveler with Steiner (especially of what he says about the blood shed at the crucifixion) and a dedicated reader of the very great tome of Christian esoteric thought, the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot (with a preface by von Balthasar and a postscripte by Bede Griffiths!!!!!) which I commend to one and all, Tarot or no Tarot. But really, thanks for this. Hard to do.