Why the Death of One of My Personal Heroes Gives Me Hope–and Why My Header Is Now Orange

With vast numbers of my fellow Canadians, I have been mourning the death of one of our country’s greatest political leaders. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party–and leader of the official opposition in parliament–died on Monday after succumbing to cancer. He was 61.

Layton was a great advocate for the poor, for women, for Canada’s aboriginal people, for the LGBT community. He was a voice for ordinary people in a political system that most of us feel quite alienated from. He was a champion of peace and environmental responsibility, in stark contrast to the militaristic and environmentally destructive policies of the governing Conservatives.

When I heard the news on Monday I was quite dismayed. It was because of Jack Layton that I switched my political allegiance to the NDP in 2003, despite the fact that they were only the fourth-largest party and were not considered by anyone to be a serious threat to win a federal election, or even form the official opposition (which is what happens to the party that comes in second).

This past May, the NDP surprised everyone–except maybe Jack himself–by increasing their representation in the House of Commons from 37 seats to 103, making Layton Leader of the Official Opposition. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Conservative Party won, after several failed attempts, a majority of the seats–despite winning less than 40% of the popular vote. (Layton was a champion of proportional representation, which would effectively close Canada’s yawning democratic deficit; however, if a party can win a majority government with less than 40% of the popular vote, they have little incentive to change the system.)

The ascendancy of the Conservative Party has seemed to many people like a dark cloud gathering over this country. For many of us, Jack was a great sign of hope; the Conservatives might do things we don’t like, but not without a fight.

His death, coming at the pinnacle of his career, has been a major blow to this country. He was probably the only person in Canada whose death could inspire mourning on such a massive scale–among the many tributes, the CN Tower and even Niagara Falls are being illuminated tonight with orange light–the colour associated with the NDP. And I even changed the colour of my header.

So why does his death give me hope? Shouldn’t it do the opposite?

I imagine a lot of other Canadians have had an experience similar to my own: becoming increasingly disillusioned with our federal government, feeling that progressive values were losing favour among the Canadian people. Before this year the conventional wisdom was that the progressive NDP would never compete with the centrist Liberals, who were therefore our only hope to stop the Conservatives. It was commonly said that a vote for the NDP was a wasted vote.

I imagine a lot of other people recognised, as I did, that this man embodied our deeply-held values, but had no idea how many other people felt the same way.

The sheer scale of the grief should serve as a wake-up call: progressives are not an insignificant minority. My hope is that enough people will realise this and the non-conservative majority in this country will get its act together.

So busy…

I’ve been out of town for a wedding, and now I’m off to the U.K. for a couple of weeks. I won’t return to posting regularly until sometime after that, probably, but I’ve added some bits about Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy on the Writings page that are new.

What Is Integral Christianity?

My blog header indicates that this is “a blog about Integral Christianity,” but I haven’t explained yet what I mean by that.

First I should clarify what I mean by “Christianity.” For many people, Christianity centers around belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; any religious tradition that does not do this is something other than “Christian.” It seems to me, though, that the death and resurrection of Jesus were not central to the message of Jesus himself, so I don’t see why it should be central for us.

I prefer to think of Christianity as encompassing every tradition that is understood by its adherents to be committed to the Christian message, however understood. This last phrase—“however understood”—is important, because it’s not obvious precisely what “the Christian message” is. It’s not a given, even if most Christians imagine that it is. Part of being a Christian means seeking to understand “the Christian message” and striving to live by it.

Our understanding of “the Christian message” is necessarily an interpretation, and every interpretation is undertaken from some perspective or another. An Integral approach to Christianity will try to understand the Christian message from as many perspectives as possible.

There is no shortage of perspectives within the church. This fact is deplored by many, who believe that only one perspective—their own, naturally—should be tolerated. Others pay lip service to the idea of pluralism, but are often quite dismissive, ironically, of those who don’t share their enthusiasm for diversity.

Rather than bemoaning or celebrating the diversity of perspectives, I think it is more important to understand it. Why do Christians so often disagree with one another?

One reason, I’m convinced, is that there are many stages of development along a number of different lines: cognitive, spiritual, moral, etc. Something like this has been acknowledged within the Christian tradition from very early on. Paul was already distinguishing between the “spiritual” and “mature” on the one hand, and the “unspiritual” on the other, in his correspondence with the Corinthians (see 1 Cor 2.6-15), and the concept of the “three ages”—“beginner,” “proficient,” and “perfect”—was developed by patristic thinkers like Origen and Augustine.¹

More modern and scientific models, like the seven-stage theory of James W. Fowler, shed a lot, I think, on why there are such divisions in the church. Everyone recognises that there are developmental differences between children and adults, but it is not sufficiently recognised that there are significant developmental differences between adults as well. An Integral approach to Christianity has to recognise this.

Not all differences in perspective can be attributed to developmental stages, of course. In a religious context we also have to take into account different states of consciousness, particularly those that we would associate with religious experiences. The relationship between stages and states, which has most successfully been explained by the philosopher Ken Wilber,² is something that also needs to be understood.

Certainly there is more to it than this, but hopefully this gives some idea of where I’m planning on going with this blog.

Notes

1. The Greek word translated “perfect,” teleios, is the same word translated “mature” in the passage from 1 Corinthians mentioned above. It does not mean “flawless” as the word “perfect” has come to mean in modern English. The Latin perfectus has a similar semantic range.

2. See especially Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 88-93. This is a subject I’m going to return to very soon.

Creating Jesus in Our Own Image

One of the perennial criticisms made against historical Jesus scholars is that they inevitably “create Jesus in their own image.” (I’ve seen the same criticism made of “liberals” in general.) There is some truth to this, I suppose. But it seems to me that every Christian does this, to some extent or another. Our image of Jesus is necessarily a reconstruction.¹ This is no more true of scholars than it is of regular people sitting in the pew.

So I think this following observation by Walter Wink applies not only to scholars but to everyone else as well:

I am beginning to understand that no scholar can construct a picture of Jesus beyond the level of spiritual awareness that she or he has attained. No reconstruction outstrips its reconstructor. We cannot explain truths we have not yet understood. We cannot present insights that we have not yet fathomed. Our picture of Jesus reflects, not only Jesus, but the person portraying Jesus, and if we are spiritual infants or adolescents, there are whole realms of human reality that will simply escape us. In Revelation 1:19, the seer John is ordered, “Now write what you see.” The problem lies precisely there, in sight: we can only describe what we see, and if we haven’t seen it, we may miss the revelation entirely. It is my spiritual blindness that is the greatest impediment to my scholarship.

I’ll have more to say later about Wink, who has in recent months become one of my favourite writers. The source for this quotation is here.

Notes

1. John Dominic Crossan makes this point very nicely in the epilogue to The Historical Jesus, 424-426.

The Problem of Authenticity

When I was about six weeks old I was baptised into the Catholic Church. I don’t really remember it happening, but my mom says that I didn’t put up much of a fuss, and I believe her. Still, no matter how cooperatively I might have behaved at the time, it’s clear that the tradition in which I was raised was not one of my choosing. I can only imagine that this is true of everyone else as well.¹

At some point, I don’t really know when, it must have occurred to me that I might have been brought up in a different tradition. And at some point after that it must have occurred to me that belonging to another tradition was still a live possibility.

Just as a thought experiment, I might ask what would have been the most authentic way of proceeding from that point in my development. The reason I’m interested in this particular juncture is that I imagine very nearly everyone reaches it at some point. And it might be the last point that nearly everybody reaches.

To begin with, I might ask whether the existence of traditions other than my own is a matter of indifference. Does it really matter which tradition one belongs to? What is religion for, really? What are the most desirable religious ends, and how might these best be attained?

Even if I believe that the most desirable religious ends, whatever they might be, can in principle be attained within any tradition, I will no doubt recognise that within every broad tradition are a number of sub-traditions, and some of these are to be evaluated more positively than others. That is, some will be judged to be more conducive than others to the attainment of the most desirable religious ends, whatever they might be.

Because I value authenticity (a term I will have to elaborate on in the future), I naturally want to avoid remaining within an inauthentic tradition, and so I have to ask whether my particular tradition is authentic or not.

A lot of people don’t really ask this question, or they answer “yes” rather too quickly (which amounts to pretty much the same thing). They take for granted that their tradition is authentic, often exclusively so. This is a common position but hardly an authentic one. It would be quite unreasonable of me to say that everyone should go through life without ever questioning the authenticity of their particular tradition. And if I believe that at least some people should question their tradition, on what grounds could I exempt myself from doing the same? To assume, as many people seem to do, that my religion is correct and therefore does not need to be critically evaluated simply begs the question.

So I have to question the authenticity of my tradition. And authenticity demands that I seriously consider the possibility that the answer is “no.” The upshot is that, whatever I decide, my religion will be self-chosen,² even if I decide to remain in the tradition of my childhood.

But where do I go from here? It’s one thing to recognise the need to critically evaluate the authenticity of one’s tradition. It’s something else entirely to know how to proceed.

There is also a further complication: even if my own tradition is authentic, there is the more personal question of whether I have appropriated it authentically.

I happen to find the thought of the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) particularly illuminating with regard to both of these problems. Actually, they can be considered two sides of the same problem, as it is the personal inauthenticity of individuals that ultimately fosters inauthenticity in broader traditions. Lonergan’s own perspective about the problem of authenticity in religion is well worth exploring, and it influenced much of what I’ve written here, so I’ll talk about that very soon.

Notes

1. I would argue that even those who are not raised within any identifiably religious tradition are still raised within a religious tradition of sorts. They are presumably raised to believe whatever their parents (or whoever) believe and value what their parents (or whoever) value, for example, which is a kind of faith tradition in the broadest sense.

2. One possible objection to this is connected with the idea of divine election. If I believe that my salvation is dependent on my religious affiliation, and I believe in divine election, then I probably imagine that I did not choose my affiliation—rather, God did, for better or worse, depending on whether I am among the “elect.” This objection is worth examining, not because it is reasonable, but because so many people believe it. For now I will just note that it is easy to evade the responsibility of questioning the authenticity of one’s tradition by hiding behind the notion of election.