Today marks the end of this series exploring the way conceptions of God and our relation to God evolved through the ‘sacred history’ of the Scriptures. We’ve seen how one man’s personal covenant with a local god, in which he’d be blessed with land and a family line, evolved step by step into a covenant with the one and only creator and ruler of the universe that brought the whole world and all of its peoples together in a radical, new, way of life, based not in receiving but in giving, not in glory but in the cross. Today I’ll survey how different groups of Christians have tried (and often failed) to live out the challenging new understanding of God and faithfulness revealed by Jesus of Nazareth. In doing so, we’ll see how the older ways of thinking about God have remained as temptations for Christians throughout the centuries, including in our current day.
Christianity started off as a small and persecuted sect. While the persecutions were far from the systematic and universal programs many Christians envision, it is unquestionable that there were, for three hundred years, periodic and localized attempts to eradicate Christianity. At first (mostly within the New Testament period), this was largely from within Judaism, as the religious authorities sought to contain what they rightly understood as a movement that de-centred Jewish identity from YHWH-worship. But for the most part, the early Christians came up against secular and imperial rather than religious power. In the early Roman Empire, imperial personality cults began to take on religious significance. For most people, it wouldn’t have been a big deal to offer a prayer or sacrifice to the Emperor (even if they rolled their eyes of their hearts while doing so), but for Christians this came up against both their monotheism and their faith in Jesus: For if Jesus was their Lord, King, and Judge, then the Emperor was not. In this environment, where the contrasts between God’s Kingdom and the world’s Empires were clear, and in which it was very possible to lose one’s life for one’s faith, it was easy to reject any theology of glory and uphold the theology of cross.
This wasn’t to say however that Christians didn’t engage with power themselves. For any group to have any sort of coherence it needs to have structure and governance. We see these wranglings start in the New Testament, such as in the controversial passages where Paul seems to set his egalitarian theology aside for the sake of maintaining the social order within the Church. But it really comes to the fore in the subsequent generation, in which the writings of the Apostolic Fathers place a huge focus on questions of order and discipline. Again, this makes sense and the early Christian community couldn’t not organize itself, but it does show the charismatic and spontaneous spirit of the apostolic age wearing off. This is particularly true when it comes to the suppression of Christian movements that continued to encourage prophecy and more vocal roles for women.
The major crisis, however, ironically enough, came with the rise of the emperor Constantine the Great, who first legalized Christianity, then made it the preferred religion of the Empire. The historical record shows us a polarized reaction to this. To some, like the historian Eusebius, this was the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God over the kingdoms of this world. But, the huge rise of desert monasticism at around this same time shows that Eusebius’s triumphalism was far from a universal response: many saw the Christianization of the Empire as a contradiction in terms that could only end up in the Imperialization of the Church. And indeed, within a few generations the Church hierarchy mirrored the Imperial government and aristocracy, in pomp, ceremony, and structure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, throughout the age of Christendom, when Church and State were understood to be collaborators rather than opponents, the royal ideology of the Israelite and Judaite kingdoms returned. In iconography and theology alike, there was a focus on God’s governance of creation mirrored in the king’s governance of his kingdom and people. For the most part, however, the kings recognized each other as Christians, so the ethical-monotheistic ideals of ‘fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man’ were not lost in petty dynastic rivalries. Either way, a theology of glory had returned with a vengeance. This was exacerbated as the Church became a natural destination for aristocratic third (or military-averse second) sons. The Church was completely wed to earthly power, and often served its purposes and aims. Even monasticism found itself badly in need of reform over and over again as this spirit of earthly riches and glory seeped in.
The Reformation further complicated matters. Flattening the Scriptures as it did, it freed Christians to adopt the language of any part of the Bible without second thought. And with the proliferation of denominations and sects the Reformation instigated, in which anyone could, interpreting whatever the ‘plain sense’ of Scripture meant to him, become the founder of his own church, things got very complicated very quickly. Most groups rejected the marriage of Church and State — and were persecuted by both Church and State for their troubles — and tried to live out what they saw as the radical calling of the New Testament. And yet, many also became petty and exclusivist, bringing in a tribal spirit to Christianity, with different sects competing and fighting, sometimes literally, for hearts and souls.
The Enlightenment ushered Europe and the West in a new way of looking at the world, which we call ‘modernity’. This worldview (labeled as ‘orange’, Rational-Conventional by Integral theorists) was marked by the rule of reason, the development of the scientific method, mass education, and a belief in personal striving and social progress. For the first time, Christians were challenged by a way of looking at the world for which their Scriptures had no parallel. They were faced with a big question: Could they faithfully adopt this way of thinking? And if so, how?
This is perhaps where I think Integral theory’s stages of development are most insightful. Now before I begin, it has to be said that any discussion of major worldviews and shifts in worldview is going to paint with big brushes and grossly oversimplify very complex phenomena. The posts I link to in the following discussion offer a bit more nuance, but this is going to be a very broad strokes discussion. But, recognizing these limitations, I still think it’s a valuable set of ideas to think through.
Grounding its cultural memes as it does in combining models from developmental psychology, Integral theory posits that any individual (and, as a collective of individuals, any society) must start at the beginning before growing into stages that allow for more complexity. One of the main roles of religion, it claims, is to help people progress through the available stages in their culture. (Ken Wilbur calls this the ‘conveyor belt’ model of religion.) And so as children, we think of God in terms of a magical parental figure who provides and cares for us and is able to do things we don’t understand; but then as we grow and as our world becomes more complex, our conceptions of who God is become more complex too, through care for my family and friends, to my community, and eventually, to the whole world. In other words, one of the primary functions of religion as a cultural phenomenon is to help us to grow from the magenta (’personal magic’) through the red (’power gods’), to (at least) the amber (’mythical conventional’) memes, as required by the complexity of the world around us. If it doesn’t do this, then the religion simply isn’t doing its job.
Framed in these terms, the emergence of the ‘orange’ modernist meme posed a huge question for people in ancient faith traditions: Did faithfulness to God in this new context mean lengthening the conveyor belt to include the new ways of understanding the world, or did it mean rejecting the new learning entirely? This is no small question, for adapting to the new worldview required a big change within the tradition; but failing to adapt to it would mean rejecting the increased complexity it allows and therefore a lot of effort to prop up the less complex understanding of the world. So for example, accepting evolution absolutely means changing how we approach and understand the Creation narratives of the Bible, but rejecting it also means rejecting all of the fields of study that point to it — not just comparative biology and palaeontology, but also geology, astronomy, astrophysics, and increasingly genetics. In order to prop up their worldview, Fundamentalists have to, essentially, understand the whole world as a vast conspiracy, designed either as a test of faith by God or as a temptation by the (surprisingly powerful) devil.
Many Christians did, as it turns out, adapt to, and even lead the West’s movement into the modernism, but the impact of this debate was huge and continues to play out today. For, the mid twentieth century saw the emergence of yet another cultural meme, the ‘green’ postmodern worldview, with its values of ecology, global thinking, welcome, and allowing marginalized voices a seat at the table. Those churches who had found a way to embrace modernity largely had the mechanisms in place to shift into this new worldview too. But this also left those churches that rejected modernity increasingly distant from prevailing culture. Moreover, they have become not just ‘un-modern’ but ‘anti-modern’, taking an aggressively antagonistic stance towards society at large. What’s most shocking to me about this is that an increasingly large and vocal segment within these groups is also rejecting the universal ethical and moral precepts that were at the heart of the ‘amber’ meme, reverting to the zero-sum, power and domination games of the ‘red’, ‘power gods’ stage, which we saw at work in the tribal and monarchy periods of Biblical history. No only do they have no room for the postmodern challenges of climate action, personal authenticity, and the interrogation of big societal narratives, or the modernist triumphs of science, evolution, civil rights, and democracy, but increasingly they have no room even for the ethical principles of the prophets (to say nothing of the teachings of Jesus) which have formed the basis of our civilization for well over two thousand years.
The point of all this is that we’re at a point in history where professed Christians have become so divided as to fill up the entirety of the cultural spectrum, all the way from ‘power gods’ to ecological pluralism. This is a huge problem for both Christianity and Western society at large. So how might we get out from this? There are no easy answers to this, but again I think this is a place where Integral theory is helpful. It would argue that, because we can’t skip stages, we can’t critique the newly re-empowered red meme from either the modernist orange or postmodern green positions. Rather we can only critique it from the next stage up, the amber ethical monotheistic position. This means doubling down on our commitment to calling up the prophetic imagination of the likes of Isaiah and the teaching of Jesus.
Another Integral prediction is that in order for growth to be healthy, it must include the truths and benefits of the preceding stages. If it doesn’t, it can even end up a reversion to an earlier stage, just dressed up in the clothing of the later one. To make this easier to see, let’s use a simpler schema than the Integral memes we’ve been using throughout the series: We can think of moral development in terms of a three-stage process, from pre-conventional (’I do what I want’), to conventional (’I follow social rules’), to post-conventional (’Social rules are beneficial but can be arbitrary or unnecessarily exclusive and therefore must be followed with care’). If we try to move on from the conventional to post-conventional stages without bringing with us the benefits that the conventional stage provides (e.g., social cohesion, the value of the greater good, etc.), our attempts at post-conventional thinking will end up as pre-conventional selfishness expressed in the lofty language of self-actualization. We see this issue all around us, from postmodern folk rejecting scientific medicine, to the many modernist movements that, abandoning the moral imperatives of ethical monotheism, became humanitarian and ecological disasters. Healthy growth transcends previous stages not by rejecting them, but by harnessing their strengths as we move into a wider perspective. If this is true — and I think there is a lot of truth in this — then we need to call up the strengths of the red meme — such as passion, pride, and belonging — even as we insist we also embrace the compassionate and ethical strengths of the amber meme. (A great example of this that I’ve seen in practice is the “Y’all means all” movement in Texas, which harnesses Texan identity to promote love of neighbour.)
Zooming back out, the thing about the teaching of Jesus is that it doesn’t belong to any one worldview. Though it would be incomprehensible without the prophetic critique, it doesn’t belong to the prophets’ ‘amber’ worldview. It likewise challenges all of the subsequent worldviews and turns them all on their heads. The Christian message always proclaims a heavenly kingdom that is ‘not of this world.’ Therefore it challenged not only the ethical monotheism of Jesus’ day, but all of the cultural worldviews that have followed it. No matter where on the spectrum of worldviews we feel most comfortable, the Gospel will always have something to say to us, and shake us from our comfort.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen how the story the Bible shows how the people’s experience of God and the world caused their ideas about God and their relationship to God to change over time. From a private and parochial god, through a tribal and nationalist God, to an ethical God who is the loving father of all who welcomes all into a fellowship of grace. No matter what we may think of later developments in human culture, we have the duty to ensure that the faith we live out and teach ends up at that end point at the very least. Anything less is a rejection of not just Christ’s message, but even that of the Prophets, and a return to ways of thinking and behaving human societies largely outgrew two-and-a-half thousand years ago. It certainly can not be considered ‘Christian’ no matter how many crosses one may slap on it.
And for those of us who feel comfortable or even called to embrace the cultural shifts that came after it, whether modernist, postmodern, or whatever comes next, we are free to do so, but we must never lose sight of this the ethic of grace and peace upon which our identities as Christians rest. The only way to transcend the past is to bring its strengths with us.
Matthew Root 