Jesus and the New Story

Christians finding their way to the New Story, with its themes of evolution and emergence, face a daunting task of re-interpretation. How do they relate to the old, embedded as it is in Bible and Creed? What do they make of the stories? What do they make of Jesus?

Any number of writers are making that re-interpretation. One is Margaret Silf, whose Roots and Wings does so in a series of short, exploratory reflections. The book puts new wine in old wineskins, with all the perils attendant upon that process. Perhaps that's why she begins with the counsel, "Be not afraid."

Silf's revision opens with a walk through Eden, where she links the New Story to that ancient plot. When the serpent tempts, she is reminded of our lower "reptilian" brain. When Adam and Eve discover their nakedness, it's our hominid ancestors standing upright, exposing their tender undercarriage to possible attack. The curse of pain in childbirth? A narrow birth canal, the cost of the new bipedalism. Does Silf believe these meanings are actually in the Garden story? Sort of. To her, they are "other echoes" that the Genesis writer "had a hunch about" or perhaps articulated "unconsciously."

The major turnabout comes at the end: expulsion from Eden was not punishment but progress. Now homo sapiens had to toil and sweat to further its own evolution. Here, no case is made that "evolution" and "progress" are actually in Genesis. The wineskin is old, the wine entirely new.

Who, then, was Jesus, the "new Adam"? "This may be as far as the book goes for you," Silf warns. She reminds us that Jesus wrote nothing, left behind neither a philosophy nor a theology, established no form of government. Some would argue he established no church, founded no new religion. What he did leave behind was a spirit. "He entrusted the ongoing evolution of the human family to a few men and women who had understood who he was."

Silf's Jesus came up from the earth, not down from the heavens, and he did so just at the moment when homo sapiens was becoming spiritually aware. Jesus used the "lever" of love to shift the course of human evolution. Silf cannot accept the idea that he died to atone for sin. The God of compassion could not have demanded a blood sacrifice--the ultimate death penalty--to pay the price for some fall in the Garden 100,000 years before. Jesus was killed, rather, because he evoked the "shadow" side of a human nature incompletely evolved.

Did he rise from the dead? Silf imagines Jesus becoming a "wave of pure energy" that many call the Holy Spirit. He is the perfect model of where evolution is heading, or at least has the chance to head: a stage in which humanity fully reflects the divine life.

This is a new Christian story, and Silf is far from alone in telling it. The peril lies in the way it strains the old symbolic framework. At what point will the wineskins break? When is the story of Eden no longer the story of Eden? When does the figure of Jesus cease to be Jesus? The story cease to be Christian?

The New Story concepts of "evolution" and "emergence" are from the twentieth-century. For Christians to adopt them, they will have to take Jesus out of the categories of first century Jewish thought and bring him to the "gentiles" in a way Paul never imagined. The shifts in meaning may shock the orthodox, but they're no different from those that occurred in the first century after Jesus died. Arrange New Testament materials chronologically: the face of Jesus changes from first to last. Twenty centuries of art tell the same story. Risky business, this replacing of wine, but it's been happening from the very beginning. I think it's the only way a tradition lives.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. The most recent is called "Journey Out of Religion." You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

Reason? Or the Whole Life Experience?

How many of are making journeys of the spirit? In February the Pew Forum reported that 28 percent of American adults had left the faith of their childhood--44 percent, if you included migration among Protestant denominations. Many ended up in other faiths, but 16 percent ended up in none. The amount of movement was staggering.

To hear the neo-atheists tell the tale--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others--the only journey worth making is the one from religion to science. You "break the spell" of religion by embracing reason and evidence. If it sounds like a head trip, it is; and nothing could be farther from the truth.

People travel, not heads. Research I published decades ago, as scientific as you can get, showed that "pre-intellectual" or "a-rational" factors were the keys to transitions involving religion. The whole person made the journey, not just the faculty of reason. The whole life experience shaped the outcome.

The book containing this research will be re-issued this fall by Transaction/Aldine. The subjects were 100 young adults raised Catholic, 50 of whom remained in the church and 50 of whom did not. The two groups had received identical exposure to the church. The two acknowledged the same "evidence" about it. But now they construed that evidence in opposite ways. It wasn't a question of reason. Something came before reason. Something lay outside of it.

You can read a summary here, but the biographies of two famous scientists make the same point. When Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle at the age of 22, he was a firm believer in Genesis and had in fact completed studies for the ministry. Later in life he became an agnostic. He abandoned religion not because of any evidence he found on the Galapagos nor because religion was incompatible with his theory of evolution. Though he had given up a belief in creationism, Darwin left religion only when he beloved daugher Annie fell ill and died. He could not reconcile the loss with Christianity's claim that a good and loving God cares about every hair on our head.

As director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins led a scientific journey comparable to Darwin's. Yet his religious journey was nearly the opposite. At age of 22 Collins was an atheist, the son of freethinkers. He entered medical school and a few years later began having bedside conversations with sick and dying patients. Many were deeply religious and, despite their terrible suffering, they were at peace "Suddenly all my arguments [for atheism] seemed very thin," Collins wrote in The Language of God. "I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking.'' He began an intellectual search that led to C.S. Lewis and ultimately to Christianity, where his faith survived a trauma, though not a death, involving his daughter. This was a journey of reason, science, evidence and . . . bedside conversations. Not a head trip, but a whole life experience.

The Metanexus Institute likes to talk about "the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person." If you tell such a story, it will come from everything that's happened in your life.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. They've been submitted by readers, and most (but not all) are about traveling from Old to New. You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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The Journey

He was fifty years old, and he still didn't know how his own mind worked, what its deepest desire was. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 19)

I came to the science-religion dialogue as a scholar in neither science nor religion. My professional work was in psychology, and there I wrote books about the course of life, about memory for life events, and about the impact of lives on future generations. Somewhere along the line I left "scientific" psychology to record the tales of life's journey. They called it "narrative" psychology.

As I was finishing the last of those books, a story came to me. It came in several pieces over the course of several weeks. A title came, a character, a personification, a plot. The Story of Everything. When I told it to my wife, I wept.

I had no idea why the story moved me as it did, but I knew I had to write it. It took five years. I had a lot of science to learn and a genre to figure out, and besides, other things were going on in my life. At first I thought I was writing a children's story but then I realized it was a parable.

Only now do I realize why I was so moved. This was the tale of my journey. The events weren't autobiographical, but the energy surely was:

Story. Adam had no idea how often the word entered his mind and how seldom it escaped. He didn’t know how many beginnings and middles and endings were trapped inside of him, or how they kept lining up, now this way, now that. He didn't realize that, at his core, Matter was a story, not a science. Life was a story, too, not "biology." It was narrative, all of it, but Adam didn't know it. He was fifty years old, and he still didn't know how his own mind worked, what its deepest desire was.

Later, Adam was enlightened:

One morning at dawn, a low shaft of sunlight streaked through the valley where Adam was staying and outlined every flower, rock, and pebble. It was a solitary ray, and it lasted no more than a minute. But in that minute there awoke in Adam a solitary longing. Why that? he asked. Why now? It made no difference: he might as well have told the sun to go back down. For in that minute Adam learned which way from here. He learned what he had yet to do in life, perhaps what he was born to do. I am to speak a Story, he said, and he knew which story it was.

And yet he could not speak that story. Something had to happen first, and it finally did in a dream:

. . . When the sky began to panic, clouds came in and covered it, clouds so thick and low that he could hardly breathe. It began to rain.

Adam stood in the rain. As it came over him, he felt a cleansing. Something said, I forgive. And something else, I am forgiven.

Adam could not speak his story because it was new and he loved the old, even though it was deeply flawed. He had to forgive the old its sins. He needed forgiveness for abandoning it. Then he could speak "cleanly."

No matter how compelling the New Story, no matter how much the evidence behind it, there is still an Old to leave behind. You may say good-bye to it. You may say good riddance. You may feel regret. You may never look back. You may deny there was a leaving. The kind of departure depends upon the point of departure, on the ties that bound you to the place of origin. They can be complex, and they're all part of the journey, or at least they were of mine. Forgive and be forgiven.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. They've been submitted by readers, and most (but not all) are about traveling from Old to New. You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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