RethinkingOurStory

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Again this week, we’re following the path laid out by the historical conversation by looking at Jesus humanity and what we Christians mean when we say “Jesus is divine.”

We spent several weeks thinking about Jesus’ humanity, his historically determined self-perception as a warrior-messiah (a well-rehearsed genre of leadership in Israel), but we also saw how he subverted the violent, militaristic core of that genre. We said that this understanding of Jesus’ humanity profoundly shapes how we live out our religion, how we follow Jesus.

Last week, as we began looking at what it means when we Christians say that Jesus is divine, we saw that if we don’t think clearly about this, it has troubling implications for living our faith.

Jupiter: God of the Romans

We saw that throughout the ages, people have held a personified, humanized, anthropomorphized, vision of God. We’ve tended to see God as a man; a super, special, majestic, celestial kind of man, but a man nonetheless. The Romans, Greeks, Aztecs, and Norse all saw their gods this way. It is almost a knee-jerk human instinct to do so. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, our saints, sages, and writers of scripture have disallowed us this instinct. We are to hold the tension of allowing our God to exist and function beyond human construct, beyond our ability to contain, understand, or pin down.

But even though our ancient traditions teach us this, we usually try our best to pin God down to the understandable. Even our scriptures tell the stories of God interacting with people as though he himself was a person. In the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, God talks as a person, acts, and wills as a person. But again and again in our tradition, we’re told not to limit God to any image we can construct in our minds.

God the Father

But because we do it anyway, because we work so hard to envision God as a “him,” a Father, a King, or a Bridegroom, when we say “Jesus is divine,” our mental images tend toward the special, toward the “big-man-in-the-sky.” Our instincts tend to equate him with the way the Greeks talked about Zeus, a full god;  or Heracles, a demi-god. We tend to interpret our doctrine that Jesus is divine in a way that corrupts any meaningful way of thinking of Jesus as truly human, at least not the way I am human, or the way you are.

In the section we did on rethinking our humanity, I said we’d discuss another way of thinking about ourselves when we got to the section on Jesus. Now’s that time.

Let’s imagine a way of thinking about our own human nature that takes into account the things we know about ourselves from experience, but also the things we’ve come to believe about ourselves by faith; beliefs we gain from our historical, religious, and scriptural traditions.

Human Nature in Three Parts

Imagine with me, three concentric circles. These three circles represent three layers of human consciousness. The outer layer is the easiest to see, the inner the most difficult.

Let the outer layer represent our body-consciousness. This is the part of us that is aware of existing in three dimensions, aware of existing in time and space. This part of us is aware of up and down because we feel gravity; it is aware of physical limits, because our body provides a nice package to contain us. In other words, we don’t exist beyond our skin the same way we exist inside our skin.

Body-consciousness represents a primal part of us that is rooted in our biology, and relies on our senses. It distinguishes the experience of awake-ness or asleep-ness, it knows if we’re energized or fatigued, it has muscle memory, it is conscious of hot, muggy days like we’ve had recently, or cold, frigid days like we have in winter.

Freud

We assume the capacity to observe our body-consciousness resides in our brains, the second of our concentric circles. Our brains both energize and direct our senses, and interpret the data we gather. Together, the gray matter, the chemicals, the neurons, the transmitters, create another layer of consciousness we can call ego-consciousness (for those familiar with Freud, we’d include superego in this layer). It is the amalgamation of thoughts we think and feelings we feel. It is the way of being ourselves that expresses temperament, habit, instinct, morality, and conscience. Though this layer of consciousness is also rooted in our bodies, the human brain is so vast in its capacity that this way of being self is distinguished from the animals, and is less primal than body-consciousness.

It is in this part of self that we contemplate truth, beauty, and the good life. It is here we become self-aware, and discover that we’re extroverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, thinkers or feelers. It is here we discern if we’re strong or weak in compassion and resolve to do better. It is in this layer of being that we find ourselves more an impulsive person, or more a methodical planner.

At first glance, one could say that these two layers, understood deeply enough, would suffice to define our humanity. In fact, a whole philosophical school called “material reductionism” insists that this two-layer model must suffice. But saints and sages from all the religious, and from many philosophical, and metaphysical traditions have made another observation as well.

We are able to observe ourselves existing in ego-consciousness. I can observe myself thinking thoughts and feeling feelings. I can observe myself being moral or immoral. I can stand outside myself and watch myself being introverted or extroverted, impulsive or methodical. With training, I can put such a gap between this form of “me” and my impulses that begin to think of self having a third layer of consciousness, an “observer” layer.

Which raises the question, what is the nature of this observing layer of the self?

The problem is that when we set out to observe this observing part of ourselves, we become it. When I observe the observer, I become the observer. When I look at the looker, I become the looker.

So by definition, I cannot pin down with precision, what the nature of this observing self is. I know it is deeper than the thoughts I think or the feelings I feel because it can observe myself doing them. It is deeper than the temperament I possess, or the instincts I experience for the same reason. So what is this mysterious inner layer, this mysterious inner part of me?

As our society increasingly gravitates to the material reductionist view of “The Way Things Are,” the view of many has become that for something to matter, it must fit into what can be sensed, measured, or reasoned by human beings. Consequently, many come to believe that any layer to our humanity that is beyond the senses or reason.

But what if it’s not that way?

To say that reality only exists inasmuch as we humans can observe, measure, or reason is a statement of faith. Certainly we Christians (as well as Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus) believe that reality is much less limited than that. Our faith statements would be at odds to the that of the material reductionist.

We would agree with the reductionist view that the human brain, and ego-consciousness is extraordinarly powerful, but would disagree that chemicals and electrons are all there is to reality. We would agree with the neuroscientist’s observation that part of the brain lights up when nuns meditate or when Pentecostals speak in tongues, but would disagree that these spiritual experiences are nothing more than the electrons and chemicals that are being observed.

Because neuroscience can show us where spiritual functions happen, it does not follow, to us, that that’s all there is to reality.

I read a neuroscientists who said this, “Just because I can look at your brain and tell that you’re seeing an apple, does not mean I can say definitively that the apple is there, or that it is real, only that you are having a brain experience of an apple. The same is true of the experience of God. Because I can tell you that your brain is lighting up the God-section, this says nothing about the realness or un-realness of God. (REFERENCE)

Consider an analogy from my mp3 player.

To say that an experience in the brain is God, is like saying that playing an mp3 on an iPod, is Chopin. A Chopin nocturne plays by ones and zeros on my digital player, and if I was an engineer, I could fully understand the process. But if my player breaks, Chopin still exists beyond the player. Chopin exists as sheet music in some other part of the world. Chopin exists in the memories of many skilled pianists. Chopin exists in mp3 files on my computer. So if my iPod breaks, I can access Chopin elsewhere. I can get it back.

An mp3 player is not Chopin.

Drawing on this analogy, we could suggest that another layer of consciousness exists beyond the grey matter in our heads, that a layer of consciousness exists beyond the electrons, beyond the neurons, beyond the transmitters of our brains. We could suggest that our brains, like mp3 players, may die, but that a layer of consciousness could exist beyond our brain’s life or death. In fact, in the last many years, a great deal of research into near death experiences seems to indicate this is so, that a layer of human consciousness exists beyond an active, living, brain. (REFERENCE)

Even though many today are deeply committed to the idea of material reductionism, many philosophies (not just Christian philosophies) chafe under the rigidity of these restrictions. George Berkley (the guy the city and the university were named after) made this point. When I see and touch an apple, I don’t see and touch an apple. I only see and touch the image that goes in my eyes, the sensations I take into my hands. Then I take these sensations into my brain and construct an image. My experience of the apple is the experience of this image. What I don’t know is if that mental image corresponds to reality. Is there a real apple out there that I’m experiencing? Of course I assume so, but I cannot prove it. (REFERENCE)

Schopenhauer

Building on this, another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer said something like this. Our sense perceptions are not reality, they are only sense perceptions. This means there are two worlds, the “phenomenological” world that we experience through our senses and the “numinous” world we must be willing to admit may exist beyond our senses. (REFERENCE)

The world of phenomenon that we access through our five senses may not be the sum total of reality, existence, or human nature. Our spiritual faith has suggested for thousands of years that this is so, and that the third part of human consciousness, the undefinable part of us, the part of us that is able to observe and think about the things that happen in the layer of ego-consciousness, is spiritual in origin.

The different religious and philosophical traditions talk about this layer of human consciousness differently, but in Christian thinking, we teach our children that this part of us is the part where Jesus lives in our hearts, the part of us is where the Holy Spirit of God indwells us. This is the part of us Genesis says is made in the very image of God, and it is where we experience what Jesus prayed for us, that we would be one with God as he experienced being one with God.

At NRCC, we’ve been talking about this part of our faith story for a while, and have said it this way; this is the part of us that is made out of the same stuff God is made out of.

We’ll finish next week by talking about the implications of this way of seeing humanity, and we’ll see that it helps us think about the words “Jesus is divine” in a way that doesn’t discount him being a real-live human being like you and me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 1:44 am and is filed under 5-Rethinking Jesus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.