What is Evolutionary Christian Spirituality?
We are imagining evolution as a divine strategy for making a world. Evolutionary Christian spirituality is a way of reflecting on the story of Christ from an evolutionary perspective, and then practicing our faith with the goal of conscious spiritual evolution.
But why evolutionary?
Science is a great gift to humanity. Cosmology, biology, and psychology have empirically shown that the universe is evolving. We think that evolution is Charles Darwin’s greatest gift to theology. If God is involved with reality as we now know it to be, then God is involved with evolution. We evolve along various lines of intelligence – moral, cognitive, and psychological to name a few – but also the spiritual. If we want to solve the problems facing humanity in the 21st century, we need to bring as much spiritual intelligence as we can to the task.
Is this really Christian?
It’s true that our founders, including Jesus, could not have known about the scientific theory of evolution. But the Christian tradition has itself evolved over the last two thousand years, as one would expect in an evolving universe. Long before Jesus, God spoke through the prophet Isaiah with the words: “Behold I do a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?” Jesus wanted to reform his own spiritual tradition, and since Jesus, the Christian tradition has seen four major re-formations. God seems to be present in the evolutionary impulse to evolve.
But doesn’t science say that evolution is directionless and purposeless?
Some scientists make this claim, but when they do they are not speaking as scientists. They are making philosophical and metaphysical judgments, which is fine, but strictly speaking it’s not science. The scientific method itself is concerned with making hypotheses, and then gathering and testing the data, and then articulating theories which can be disproved. Some scientists, but not all, believe that evolution is random and purposeless. But when we look at the evolutionary process from the Big Bang to this moment, we see an evolutionary trajectory with a bias toward increased complexity, unity, consciousness, and compassion. We believe that God is in that trajectory.
Is this like intelligent design?
Intelligent design is a school of thought that maintains that there are some things that are simply too complex to be the result of purely natural processes. Evolution by itself, according to this thinking, is simply too random to account for such complexity.
God must have designed some things directly, independent of natural processes. But in every one of the examples that intelligent designers cite, science has shown that evolution working through deep time is, in fact, responsible for all of this complexity. We believe that Spirit is present in natural processes and natural processes are present in Spirit. There is only one sacred and loving intelligence that functions non-coercively through the evolutionary process. Another way of saying this is that God is the persuasive presence of Love, luring all of creation toward fullness and freedom of being.
Does the Bible say anything about evolution?
No. The Bible was written thousands of years before the discovery of evolution. But the Judeo-Christian tradition is unique among the major religious lineages in its affirmation that history is actually going somewhere. We’re not involved in an endlessly repeating cycle, and the goal is not simply to escape the wheel of life. God is present in the historical unfolding, calling "Her/His" people to go, set out, and to leave behind the security of present circumstances to help realize a sacred future. The wheel is in motion in a meaningful direction. While it is not explicit, we think that there is an evolutionary intuition reflected in many of Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s theology. To take just one line of intelligence, it’s possible to track an evolution in empathy - from a belief that God is concerned exclusively with just us (our tribe) to the awareness that God’s love extends to all of us and all that is.
How do you practice evolutionary Christian spirituality?
Well, there are some practices that have a timeless quality about them. Community worship, caring for the poor and marginalized, keeping one day a week that is just for pleasure and not for work, daily prayer and meditation – these are all practices that we gratefully inherit from our tradition. What changes however is the reason we are engaging in these spiritual practices. It's not so much about obedience to an external authority (grounded in fear of punishment or an eternal reward). Rather, the motivation is rooted in a felt, interior impulse to evolve for love’s sake and a yearning for greater spiritual freedom. To inhabit and follow that impulse deeply is to abide in Christ (using traditional language).
Where does Jesus fit in with all of this?
Jesus represents different things to different people, depending on their worldview and value system. From a traditional worldview, Jesus is the Son of God, Savior and Redeemer of the world, whom God sacrificed to deal with human sin. From a modernist worldview, Jesus is a Jewish peasant and rabbi, a teacher of values and virtues, but not the divine Son of God. From a postmodern worldview, Jesus is a prophet of social justice, preaching the good news that we are all equal before God and encouraging us to join with other faiths to make the world a better place. From an integral or evolutionary worldview, Jesus represents all of these and more. He is the embodiment of the sacred evolutionary impulse itself – one who has consented in absolute fashion to giving his life in sacrificial devotion to the emergence of the new thing God is doing – what he called the Kin(g)dom of God. At this stage, he is regarded once more as fully divine and fully human.
How can I find out more about evolutionary Christianity?
Visit the sermon page, follow our minister, Bruce Sanguin's blog, and if you live in the Lower Mainland, drop in on us any Sunday morning at 10:30.
Finally, you can read the "What Is Evolutionary Christianity" booklet. Click here for the PDF.
