Why I Write This Blog, and Why Christianity Needs to Evolve

Jesus had a superlatively developed consciousness. Today, Christianity typically resists human cognitive development, thereby courting its eventual irrelevance.

This blog is an attempt to articulate a way forward for Christianity along the path of individual and collective human development, informed by a long look backward, and moving forward toward new and more complex ways of thinking about and practicing Christianity in a world that is industrialized or post-industrial, scientific, informational, and already postmodern, even if the identities and outlooks that some people express have yet to catch up. Christianity is exploding in other parts of the world (much of it is charismatic), and the forms it is taking fit with cultures and societies where it is flourishing. At the same time, Christianity is becoming irrelevant to many people—not all, but many—in parts of the world that are wealthier (however uneven the distribution), longer industrialized, more informational, service-oriented, and postmodern.

Modes of thinking necessary to negotiate life in this world have altered our individual and shared realities enough that Christianity as we have known it is becoming more or less obsolete. In some ways, we are worse off as human beings for the ways our understanding of the world has had to change, but our reality is what it is. Unless Christianity adapts to the necessary ways we have come to negotiate reality, Christianity as we have known it will fade in this part of the world. Truth is timeless, but our imperfect grasp of it is not. Our faith has adapted to changing realities many times before, and it must adapt again to go on informing a functional spirituality in people’s lives.

We have partially transcended common pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, pre-informational, pre-global ways of understanding religion, without turning back and re-integrating what is essential to move forward. We must accept the ways that the development of knowledge has impacted Christianity over the last five hundred years, so that we can recapture the essential functions of religion, in light of what has changed, so that we can move forward. This blog aims to show that scriptural interpretation, theology, teaching, and practice have all changed throughout our history, in response to changing circumstances. These changes are embedded in scripture itself, as well as in the history of Christianity’s development since its beginnings. Accepting this reality of continual change—within scripture, in our shared history, and over the courses of our individual lives—can help us welcome and adapt to the changes that are happening within Christianity now, and find better ways of integrating faith and reality.

A renewed and vibrant Christianity that better addresses the deep psychological challenges of life as experienced in our part of the world is possible. Achieving this will require re-mythologizing Christianity’s basic narratives and rituals. Functional mythos has not been lost in those parts of the world where Christianity is growing. We have the chance to find it anew, but we must accept and integrate a modern view of Christianity before we can transcend that view and reconnect with the power of our faith.

Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.

Myths in the truest sense are metaphorical narratives told in conjunction with rituals that are enacted to address this abstract and subjective facet of conscious reality. Religion is the organized, systematic pursuit of such a process. Superstition is the irrationally literal belief in, and fear of, supernatural characters or forces found in religious stories. Since explicit empiricism has become part of our reality, confusion has reigned. Empirically based factuality for understanding the concrete, physical world has been misapplied to religious metaphors symbolizing the abstract, subjective realities of consciousness.

Modern, liberal Christianity has managed to sidestep the factual interpretation of its myths, rejecting superstitions of the past, without the additional and essential step of reintegrating those myths as metaphors for intra-subjective reality, integrated with the newer light of empiricism. Without a functioning mythos, what may be termed modern, mainline, or social justice Christianity— liturgical or not—has become less relevant, serving the peripheral moral and social functions of religion at the expense of addressing deep human psychological or spiritual needs, while leaving as the only alternative traditional forms of Christianity—Catholic, charismatic, evangelical, or otherwise—that are less relevant in their own right for failing to properly apply empiricism to reality in the first place.

With a failure to re-integrate mythos on the one hand, and failure to integrate empiricism on the other as the main alternatives, Christianity as we have known it is on track to becoming a dying religion, replaced by something else. Or, as it has done at critical junctures in the past, it can replace itself with its basic narratives and rituals intact but retooled, consistent with transcending the mundane realities we face. This could make Christianity relevant for modern, educated people, in the context of a post-industrial, informational, science-based, postmodern society. Reintegrating Christianity’s stories as the metaphors they have always been, and faith as the spiritual practice independent from otherwise needful factuality that it has always been, can help Christianity once again fulfill the essential functions of religion.

The purpose of this blog is not to find a compromise between the untenable alternatives of lacking mythos and misapplying empiricism to mythos. In practice, many churches already attempt this without being explicit about it. The purpose is rather to consider a Christianity that transcends both alternatives, integrating a mythic view that metaphorically addresses the ineffable depth of human consciousness with an objective view that empirically addresses the material world as it is widely known.

This is an attempt to integrate knowledge about scriptural texts, religious concepts, and human development on the one hand, with a call to re-mythologize religious narratives, rituals, and life practices on the other. Conservative Christians must embrace what is now known through combined expertise about the origins of scripture, the archaic history of Judaism, and the development of Christianity; they must abandon recent accretions of assumed literalism and implicit or explicit supremacism. Liturgical, mainline, conservative, and renewalist (charismatic) Christians alike must embrace the narratives of Christianity as functional mythology and ritual that metaphorically addresses the very real issues and experiences of human self-conscious existence, which remain inaccessible to science and technology as we know them. This all must occur in conjunction with a recapturing of emphasis on contemplative practices for more Christians, not just the few who are members of or occasional participants in consecrated communities. In this way, faith and prayer can address the basic issues and experiences of self-conscious human existence, fulfilling the true function of religion within our current and evolving context.

The reality is that just one hundred fifty years ago, the majority of our forebears with few exceptions were marginally literate if at all, and were engaged in some form of agriculture or trade that supported it. The Christian religion as taught, practiced, and understood was suited to people with those characteristics. Whatever one might think of their fellow citizens today, the average person in the contemporary world—urban or rural—is far from being a marginally literate homesteading farmer or stock raiser working on land in the process of being settled by people who had arrived there, sometimes within living memory.

Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, retains many ways of thinking that made it suitable for our forebears. These same characteristics make it unsuitable in light of the average level of knowledge and complexity of thought shared across the populace today, and inadequate for the postmodern world we live in. Christians must accept what is now known about our scriptures and traditions so that we can recapture their power in light of that knowledge. All the narratives, symbols, liturgy, and rituals in need of re-mythologizing are informed by scripture; therefore, to understand them, we must also address the ways we understand scripture itself. Three cardinal assumptions have been made about readers of this blog: They are at least somewhat biblically literate; they are versed in basic concepts and practices of Christianity; and, they are interested in a path forward for thinking about Christianity as it faces its greatest transition in five hundred years.

Christianity as we know it is becoming less relevant, in the context of material, social, cultural, and intra-subjective realities as they are known and experienced in the postmodern world; in terms of the basic functions of religion; in light of the actual teachings of Jesus; and, with respect to ancient spiritual practices developed from Christianity’s beginnings, which have been lost to Christianity as it is widely known today. There is hope insofar as Christianity reorients itself to the teachings of Jesus: unconditional and total love for God, ourselves, and others in thought, speech, and action. This love, patiently cultivated through dedicated spiritual practice, replaces shame and resentment, addresses personal issues instead of projecting, respects enemies, and puts spiritual growth over material ambition. Christianity’s loss of relevance is proportional to its abandonment of these teachings in favor of aggrandizement, power, wealth, control, supremacy, and enforced conformity.

My interest boils down to this: Save Christianity from itself by endeavoring to 1) show where it came from and where it falls short in our context, 2) reorient it to what Jesus actually taught and what spiritual disciplines he practiced, so it has the power to 3) raise human consciousness making individuals and societies better, in order to 4) repair and save the world. Too ambitious? I think about this stuff all the time anyway, so I may as well write about it. I think trying to be a flawed agent of grace in whatever way we can is all any of us is called to do.