Charles Victor on Religion

In contrariety to Greek thought, there stand the visions of man rooted in the spiritualities of Judaism and of Judaism as reinterpreted by Jesus. The quintessential elements of Judaism are embedded in a covenant between the people descended from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob/Israel and their God, Lord of the heavens and the earth. In the idiosyncratic ruminations of the late second millennium before Jesus, this comprehensive contract sets out the rules for the right approach to life not only in worship and prayer, but in dress, diet, hygiene, marriage, the treatment of strangers, the proper management finances, fields, cattle, and, in summation, of every other conceivable aspect of life social, familial, and private. This covenanted relationship with God is about man’s life in this world. By living in accord, by being a-toned, at-one, with the Law, the Torah, the heart and mind of God concerning life in the world, it confers true vitality of being, right dignity, “righteousness”. Its boon is the here and now blessing of the life well lived. The being-in-accord with the Law means something more than simply fulfilling the requirements of a command: it is about the quality of a life. It is about life lived in a living relationship with the living God. As vital and vitalizing, as referencing man’s ultimate well-being [salvation], it entails a formula, a format, a discipline supremely characterized by alacrity, that is, by agility, fervour and dedication of heart and mind, by, as says scripture, “delight” in the Law of the Lord. The commitment to God is communal; it is a shared honour and obligation. It is in attitude tribal, a state of all for one and one for all, and all under God. It is a socio-religious ideal that will face challenges. Continue reading →

I—The God Ambiguity

God evolves. While this declaration stands the foundation of process theology, I intend it here to stand first and simply as an historical statement. The human understanding of God evolves as man comes to more fully understand the functioning of the cosmos and the human psyche. It is, thus, necessary and proper to make this observation at the initiation of talk about spirituality because we are inclined to forget, or disinclined to remember, that we as a species, and as civilizations within the species, change, grow, progress, occasionally regress, in brief, evolve, in sundry manners, and with and within those metamorphoses, so too our abilities to envisage, imagine, objectify and conceptualize, of which the notion, idea, and vision of God is the most abstract logically, and the ultimate both axiologically and aetiologically. It may, admittedly, be countered that the above declaration claims no more than it is not God who evolves but the human understanding of God or that alternately this evolution is simply an unfolding of the divine gifting of revelation, the “growing in grace” concomitant with the continuousness of “salvation history”. However, if God is not received as the God of Deism, not the Maker of a machine that operates without oversight and providential care, and if the term God denotes more than a mathematical principle to explain causality, God, as Judeo-Christian tradition has ever held, relates to his creation, remains open to relativity, to prayer and supplication and in them to the human capacities for knowing, willing, freedom and love, and so is responsive, relatable, relative, mutable. This is not heresy; Plato is. We tend to skim over that which the Apostle Paul means when he claims “if Christ rose not…”.  Paul points us directly into the mutability of God: God in Christ[i] can and does experience desertion, despair and even death, and only in that mutability, that passivity to the fullness of human experiential compass, does God will to affect a turn, a conversion, in human consciousness toward the heart, the availability, the novelty and creativity of his Spirit. We tend, for sundry and often fallaciously pragmatic explanations, to over-look this. There may reside within each and all a haunting in want of sagacity and gravitas, but many among us have ceased to realize we live rooted in the depths unimaginable, and mindlessly skim the surface of life, confusedly accepting an influx of sustenance rather than pursuing the endurance of substantiality. Continue reading →