Progressive Christianity?

In our current U.S. American cultural situation of religious plurality and diversity, and its increasing impact on our consciousness and action, there is a recurrent question that continues to rear its head for many Christians seeking to both recognize these circumstances and yet remain committed in faith: What does it mean to be a progressive Christian?

Now, many Christians who decidedly take a stance against what they call “liberalism” will undoubtedly assert their perspective of what progressive Christianity is and is not. And, it will likely have pejorative tones. Yet, those of us who claim and embrace our self-identity as progressive will have a different, more amenable interpretation of who we are.

As one trained in the academic study of history and philosophy of religions, when attempting to understand a religious group I find it most instructive and socio-culturally appropriate to ask what is that particular group’s self-definition – how they describe and identify themselves. In anthropology this is called the “emic” approach. From there we can launch into further discussion with those outside the religious group to take their views into consideration, which is what’s termed the “etic” approach. Thus, it’s so important for those of us within “progressive Christianity” to participate in the ongoing conversation of just who we are and what we’re all about.

This dialogue has been going on for some time, but I offer my views as a contribution to help further the understanding. Therefore, I’m not forwarding these points as an absolute definition of progressive Christianity. Rather, these are what I think progressive Christians believe, value, and do from my informed but limited perspective at this time. (I have drawn on different articles and essays at ProgressiveChristianity.org for inspiration.)

First of all, as Christians, Jesus is paramount and central. There’s no Christianity without Jesus. Progressive Christians embrace the path and teachings of Jesus, which inspires a greater awareness of God, as well as the oneness and sacredness of all life.

On this view, Jesus’ way and wisdom is but one of many diverse means to experience and express the unity and blessedness of life. Progressive Christianity affirms that it is possible to grow spiritually through learning from the beliefs and practices of other religions.

Progressive Christians cultivate community that is inclusive and open to all people regardless of their life-situations. This is a value that has been articulated as “big tent” Christianity that encourages a “generous orthodoxy” (Brian McLaren, Phillip Clayton) or even “polydoxy” (Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider), where many teachings (“poly” + “doxai”) in dynamic dialogue with one another about God, Jesus, humanity, and the world are accepted as legitimate. This openness of community would include, but not be limited to traditional Christians and questioning skeptics, believers and non-believers, women and men, those of all gender identities and sexual orientations, and those of all socio-economic classes and abilities.

Unlike other systems that prioritize belief and assent to propositions over actions, progressive Christians tend to see that the way we behave toward one another is a direct reflection or expression of what we believe. If we truly value something we will live that out through our practices and actions toward others and ourselves.

Progressive Christianity also embraces postmodernity through finding more worth in questioning than in ultimatizing, more value in the process of understanding than in absolutes. There is a recognition that every teaching, belief, and doctrine is conditioned, relative, and from a particular historical and cultural location. No one can know everything about anything. This is why continual questioning and dialogue with others is so vital to the spiritual and religious life.

Within progressive Christian circles, the pursuit of equality and justice in society is of principal importance. This includes a great concern for the Earth and the impact of human activity on the wellbeing of the planet as a whole.

These points are not meant to compose an exhaustive list, but are general tenets with which many, if not most, progressive Christians would agree.

My hope is that suggesting these points may offer some opportunities for re-claiming and re-embodying our Christian identity as positive, practical, pluralistic, and progressive.

God-Talk and Process New Thought

In this series of blog posts about re-claiming Unity's Christian heritage, one area that I'm interested in addressing is our God-talk -- i.e. the ways in which we go about formulating language about God.

Not Limiting Our God-Language

Perhaps many people of faith are like me and find it rather difficult and sometimes intimidating to talk about God. It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t engage in God-talk. But, for many of us, there can be some ambiguity and lack of clarity about how we choose to speak of God, what kind of language to employ. It can be overwhelming sometimes when we start to try and put words to our experiences of the Divine. I think this is primarily because language doesn’t really do justice to our experiences, feelings, and thoughts about… well, anything, really. And this is even more true when we’re talking about God, the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being.

Have you ever had a situation where you couldn’t find words to describe an experience you went through? Even something as seemingly menial like, say, a strawberry. How would we tell someone what a strawberry tastes like to someone who has never tasted a strawberry? It would be hard, no doubt. We might take recourse to analogies, symbols, and metaphors, but ultimately the explanations would break down. Indeed, language fails to completely convey our experiences. However, we nonetheless still need to speak, to talk, to communicate our experiences to others and create meaning for ourselves, which fundamentally requires the use of linguistic structures and formulation.

So, how do we talk about God in Unity? A lot of different ways, no doubt. Contrary to a lot of classical understandings of God as totally outside and distant to us, the Second of the Five Basic Unity Principles (first formulated by Connie Fillmore Bazzy) claims that we are created and exist in the image of God - that we are of God - and that God is within us, and that thus our true nature is fundamentally good - the Christ. Therefore, we are endowed with inherent dignity and worth as human beings. We in Unity tend to speak of God as the Life, Love, and Wisdom within all creation, being inside us.

But is God only within? Is this the only legitimate way to talk about God’s relation to us in the Unity movement? Perhaps, friends, we could take a both/and rather than an either/or view, a more generous, inclusive understanding, and not limit our God-language to one exclusive spatial metaphor – God within.

If we hold to the Truth that God is everywhere present, that God pervades all that is, and that it is God in whom we live, move, and have our being, then we may also claim that God is both within us and outside of us, all around us – in every person, place, and being we meet and also outside of them, too. In our times of prayer, meditation, contemplation we certainly experience God within ourselves, and yet we can also encounter God through our experience in relationship with other persons, places, and things that are outside of ourselves. When we think and speak of God we can do so confidently, recognizing that God is immanent as well as transcendent, within and beyond.

This awareness of God as both within and beyond not only breaks down all tendencies to put God in a box of limitation, but it also frees us to the possibility of experiencing God’s presence whenever and wherever we are – if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. When we recognize God’s unbounded, ubiquitous presence, we find the liberation of continual transformation and growth into ever greater depths and heights of experience of the ever-abiding yet always-more Life of God the Good.

Process-Relational Theological Paradigm

In a context of growing religious-cultural plurality and ambiguity, the impact of postmodernism (de-centralizing, de-absolutizing; affirming subjectivity, relationality, and contextuality), and the influence of new discoveries in the sciences (such as like Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory, the language of how we talk about God, humanity, and the world must change or become increasingly irrelevant. Though we often in Unity speak of God, humanity, and the world in terms that are distinct from what is often known as "traditional" Christianity, nonetheless the predominant theological language employed by our founders and presently is largely still based in what I call "substance metaphysics" (seeing reality as being composed of fundamental unchanging, impenetrable substances, e.g. "mind" vs. "matter"). And this paradigm is still very similar to classical/traditional Christian theology.

What I'll do with what follows is briefly state the difficulties with traditional Christian and Unity substance metaphysics and then outline the basics of process theology and its helpfulness for creating a new theological language or interpretive paradigm in our present context of plurality, postmodernity, and new sciences.

For those who aren't aware, process theology is based on the work of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It is a coherent and complex philosophical system that asserts the constantly changing nature of all reality - everything is in process and fluctuation. Grounded in everyday human experience, process thought views existence as fundamentally and thoroughly dynamic and relational. Process thought accepts the scientific position (in both natural/physical and social sciences) that the universe is made up of dynamic relations at all levels, but at the most basic level, pulses of energy. Process thinkers see these bursts of energy as feeling or experiencing ("prehending" according to Whitehead) one another at various levels and intensities, and are thereby inextricably interrelated. Earlier occasions of experience influence later ones, and developing ones have at least a measure of freedom to choose (unconsciously for most of them) how they will incorporate and unite the past and the possible into the present moment. In other words, all of reality is a web of living experiences. This whole cosmology/metaphysics rejects the understanding of reality as composed as unchanging, underlying substances, and instead views reality as made of inherently, internally interrelated events of experience/feeling at various degrees of complexity and intensity. This is basically a pluralistic idealism: all that exists is experience - feeling, deciding, remembering, thinking, cognizing, etc. - but there are innumerable individual minds doing the experiencing.

It's common (perhaps especially in most of New Thought, but also in classical Christianity) to view mind as an enduring, immutable thing (i.e., substance), but, on a process outlook, mind is really a process of momentary, developing, yet enduring, experiences. Some who claim mystical experience speak of there being only one mind (God). However, that conclusion leads to unsolvable problems of the actual reality (rather than mere illusion or appearance) of our own and others' individuality and of the free will to make real choices required for all genuine morality, value-systems, relationships, transformation, time and space, and thus all existence as we experience and know it.

The God that process theology speaks of is the perfectly loving God, who guides and inspires us (as well as all other existing experiences) by offering/presenting to us the best possibilities for our specific circumstances, and then perfectly preserving the completed experiences after they have come to pass through uniting the past and the God-given potentials. God is the ultimate person. This does not mean that God is a human being, anthropomorphically, but rather that God is the reality most supremely self-conscious, rational, relational, and value-oriented (presents the best for each moment of experience and willfully acts toward realizing this). Contrary to how personhood is often conceived in Unity and New Thought, a person is a unified and enduring experience or a series of experiences (feeling, thinking, desiring, deciding, etc.). While experiences range in their quality, the most perfect Reality, who supports and coordinates of all of it, cannot be less than the supreme, self-conscious, rational, relational, value-oriented enduring experience, exercising most fully what philosophers and cognitive scientists term "personality" or simply "person" (not to be confused with a human persona). As C. Alan Anderson aptly says, "God could not be fully impartial if God were not fully personal. God’s complete reliability is a personal moral quality, not a mechanical one" (C. Alan Anderson, "Our Great Companion in Co-Creation"). In other words, the truth that God is impartial and reliable is best understood as a moral-value characteristic of perfect personhood, not that of an unfeeling, unmoving, static principle.

On a process view, the universe is contained within God, which means that God experiences the plurality of individual experiences that make up the world. Moreover, each experience in the universe also experiences God, and thus contains God (i.e., God within). God is within and beyond the world. There is no such thing as unchanging substances, only momentarily developing experience. What we call space is the interpenetration and interdependency of experiences, and time is the movement of transition from one experience to the next, to the next, etc. This is the true meaning of co-creation.

Process New Thought

New Thought could be characterized as an American movement of practical spirituality that centers on practices and teachings geared towards transforming unconsciously held assumptions and conscious beliefs, attitudes, and expectations so that one experiences greater contentment, well-being, and prosperity. The metaphysical or philosophical system employed to underpin and ground these pragmatic teachings and help them to make reasonable in critical analysis.

Rather than re-formulating the important points of integrating process theology and New Thought, I'll simply quote Alan Anderson's excellent outline:

"[Process New Thought] is down-to-earth, applied in readily understandable ways. It is exceedingly simple, although it requires constant practice. It uses familiar New Thought techniques, such as affirmative prayer, visualization, spiritual mind treatment, and meditation. In its theory, it is superbly, elegantly

1. Rational, yet thoroughly respectful of mystical experience.

2. Personalistic: God is not anthropomorphic, but is impartially personal (self-conscious, rational, value-oriented) without the limitations of human personality.

3. PanENtheistic, not pantheistic. God is not all, but is in all; and all is in God (by means of prehension, the feeling of the feelings of others).

4. Panexperientialistic: there is nothing actual except experience, meaning any sort of awareness, from subatomic to divine.

5. Relational: everything is related to everything else and is nothing apart from relationships.

6. Idealistic, in both popular and philosophical senses, yet maintaining a realistic idealism of a vast number of minds/experiences, none of which is dependent for its existence on being perceived by any other unit of experience" (C. Alan Anderson, "A Practical Spirituality: Process New Thought").

While this post is rather lengthy, it nonetheless is a yet another point in furthering the conversation with in Unity, New Thought, and wider theological discourse.

Jesus and Salvation

This is the second post in a series about Unity and Re-claiming the Christian heritage. In this post I'd like to focus particularly on Christology and Soteriology, or who Jesus is and his role in the process of salvation/liberation.

First of all, I should state up front that there are many Jesus' to be found out there - the variety of portraits of Jesus found in biblical scholarship, Christian theology, church worship and liturgy, and even other religions (recall, for instance, the important and revered role of Jesus as prophet in Islam). Here I'm combining my understanding of biblical studies and Christian theological discourse and history to forward a way to bridge "traditional" approaches to Jesus and salvation with Unity. Or more accurately, I'm trying to forge a way to integrate certain mainline/traditional theological doctrine into a Unity context.

Throughout Church history there have been several different models of understanding who Jesus is. The earliest Christians articulated the following confession: "Iesou Christou Theou Yion Soter -- Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior." Jesus, for them, held the title "Christ" or "Messiah," which means "the annointed one" of God's establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. He was also "Son of God," which was a title also often applied to the Roman Emperors. In these early Christian communities, Jesus was seen as God's special Son sent to inaugurate reconciliation with God and redemption. And this liberating, transformative role also speaks to his role as Savior or healer of the individual soul, humanity, and all creation.

Now, there were several early Christian groups who understood Jesus rather differently from one another. For instance, there were the Ebionites, or Judean Christians, who saw him as only human, but still regarded him as the greatest rabbi and prophet who was the Messiah/Christ ushering in God's new Kingdom or rule on Earth. On the other side of the spectrum were Docetic Christians (from "dokeo" meaning "to seem or appear") who asserted that Jesus on appeared human but was, in reality, totally and solely divine or God. And then there were various shades and combinations in between on the spectrum. The eventual "orthodox" perspective claims that Jesus was and is 100% human and 100% divine, totally human and totally God (adds up to 200%, I know, but this is not math but faith experience and reflection). This "fully human, fully God" view has been affirmed by the Fillmores and Unity leaders throughout the years, but then adds that we are like Jesus in this way. We are different from Jesus only by degree or perhaps office/role but not in kind or species.

The central element that I believe Unity has lost or is in the process of losing is the discipleship and devotional elements in regard to Jesus. In normative Unity, especially in Charles Fillmore's writings, Jesus is affirmed as our way-shower, elder brother, and/or great example. I'm wanting to kick this up a notch and show how more explicitly discipleship and devotional understandings of Jesus make sense in Unity and can be brought in to our theological understanding. Concerning discipleship, this involves following Jesus' way of living, the manner of his relationships, the transformative content of his teachings, and learning from his death and resurrection what sacrifice for truth and liberation means. Being a disciple of Jesus simply means claiming Jesus as a/the central figure whose life is worthy of complete emulation due to his transparency to God.

Concerning devotion, this is a bit more controversial in Unity. This is because most Unity folks make a significant distinction between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus, or faith of Jesus versus the faith in Jesus. Many Unity people have given up on the belief that Jesus saves or liberates by virtue of some sacrificial atonement or penal substitution. Well, quite frankly, I count myself in among them. However, this doesn't mean that we must completely discard or discredit faith in Jesus. In redefining and clarifying what this means, faith in Jesus involves embracing the faith of Jesus. There is a devotional tenor here. Devoting our spiritual intention, attention, and energy to aligning our thoughts, words, and actions with the pattern of God's disclosure and expression in and through Jesus' whole life. If he, as is widely asserted in Unity, is the one who has most fully manifested his Christ nature, then it would make perfect sense to put trusting acceptance (faith) in his whole personhood (his teachings, way of life, mindset, relationality, etc.) that fully reveal who and what God is. We may devote our spiritual life and growth to Jesus, looking to his example and thus guidance, and give him thanks in gratefulness for his God-consciousness. And when we devote ourselves this way to Jesus, we become further inspired, awakened, enlightened, and transformed by the impact our relationship with his life has on us. And this is not simply a literary relationship but a dynamic, living relationship with Christ Jesus (the "ascended Jesus," as Charles Fillmore puts it) who is still living in and among us and is available when we call on him in consciousness, in prayer and meditation or in other contemplative practices.

In "traditional" Christianity there has been essentially four distinct soteriological views concerning Jesus. There are four ways of understanding the role of Jesus in the process of liberation or salvation from the human condition, which is sin, "missing the mark," or a sense of estrangement/alienation/separation from God (in Unity this is normally understood to be estrangement from God in consciousness, since we are always one with God).

The first soteriology is often called "Christus Victor." This the belief that Jesus the Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, has defeated the devil or Satan (however understood) in some kind of cosmic battle. His victory has liberated humanity from the bondage to sin that the devil/Satan has had over us. This particular perspective was very popular in the first few centuries of the early Church and was revived again in the 20th century in the theological work of Gustav Aulen.

Another view may be called "penal substitution." This was most influentially articulated in the 12th century by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. This has become the dominant understanding of salvation in Protestantism and Catholicism in the West. The idea here is that all humans owe all possible honor and obedience to God. Through the sin of Adam and Eve, all of humanity has incurred an infinite debt and dishonor to God who is infinite. However, as we are finite creatures, we cannot possibly fulfill this debt. Only God, who is infinite and eternal, can satisfy this debt. Thus, only a being who is both human and God could right this wrong. Enter Jesus Christ, who is understood to be the God-man who took on the punishment that humans deserved and fulfilled the debt obligation to God since he is fully divine. On this view, Jesus accomplishes salvation for humanity by reconciling us to God.

One view of salvation that holds importance in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is what may be termed theosis, or divination. That is, when the eternal Logos/Word became human as Jesus Christ, the human and divine natures were completely united, allowing for the cleansing or purification of humanity through identification with Jesus. By virtue of personal, mystical union with Jesus, the Christian is transformed into greater likeness of him - human and divine. The meaning is often stated: We become by grace what God is by nature. And this is accomplished through conscious identification with Jesus.

The final view is the one most normatively understood in Unity circles. I term it inspirational influence; others call it moral influence theory. This was first explicated most comprehensively by medieval scholastic Peter Abelard. This is essentially the outlook that when the Christian encounters the life of Jesus in scripture and prayer, s/he is inspired, enlightened, transformed in mind, body, and spirit. Jesus' entire life profoundly impacts and influences the person into greater experience and expression of God's Love.

The last two - theosis and inspirational influence - I believe are able to be integrated into a Unity Christian soteriology that, if explained in New Thought language, would be tenable for many or most Unity folks. I like to state it this way: Jesus, as the pinnacle demonstrator of the Christ Spirit within all, reveals and discloses who/what God is for humanity. Most of the time we don't live out our true nature as the Christ/image of God, and so we need a concrete human exemplar that demonstrates the fullness of human potential that we rarely, if ever, witness -- Jesus. Aligning ourselves with and following Jesus (the identification of theosis) as the perfect pattern of human life totally transparent to God and completely imbued with God's Spirit brings liberating, transforming, and "saving" experience. That is, Jesus saves by showing and offering us his life, which allows liberation from a sense of estrangement from God and others and liberation into an awareness and experience of God's immediate presence of Love and Wisdom.

Through this union of traditional teaching and New Thought re-interpretation, I believe it is definitely possible and, indeed, spiritually important to bring Jesus back into the center of the Unity movement. While not everyone will agree with this viewpoint, I think it's one that is viable for the movement, one that not only puts us back in touch with the roots of Unity but also moves us forward into new ways of re-claiming and finding transformational import in and through the most influential spiritual individual person in history.

I look forward to further dialogue and conversation about Jesus and new ways to re-claim him for Unity in the 21st century. Peace!