Neural Buddhists And The Trinity

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18 May 2008 05:04 pm

It's Trinity Sunday so forgive the extended theological discussions. A reader adds:

Forgive me if I get too academic, but I wanted to respond to the ongoing conversation regarding David Brooks essay "Neural Buddhists." As an aspiring theologian finishing a dissertation on the late Canadian Jesuit theologian/philosopher Bernard Lonergan, who addressed many similar issues, I've been fascinated by the discussion, both for its richness and its occasional doctrinal errors.

You may want to remind Ross that God does not have a body. This is a common failure of Christians when they begin to think about the Chalcedonian formulation in common sense terms, and it is tantamount to heresy. According to the doctrines Jesus was a divine person with a human nature. His body was part of his humanity, but not his divinity (the glorified body is something else altogether). The failure to make this distinction leads to all manner of theological blunders, especially as it pertains to Christ's presence in the Eucharist (the subject of my seemingly endless dissertation). Also Ross suggests, "the foundational encounters with God - the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity - are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe." I don't want to be glib, but how does he know? Unless he's personally experienced both, such an argument, though I believe well-meant, is simply beside the point. As far as I know only Moses and Jesus endured the heights of such mystical experience, or what Thomas Aquinas calls the beatific vision.

Which brings me to my desire to echo your point: "It may not be a free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe, but it can be a free-floating sense of one-ness with Christ, and the Trinity, and thereby, at some point, the Universe." Leaving aside the free-floating business, your argument is at the center of Christian theology while Ross is still stuck in the common sense mode of questioning.

Simply put, Jesus, as the incarnation of the logos of God is that wisdom through which the universe is created according to John 1. Therefore any sense of oneness with the universe is, from the Christian perspective, de facto and de fide oneness with Christ. This is not a rehash of Rahner's "anonymous Christianity" argument - one he makes on substantially different grounds - rather it is the truly orthodox belief that for believers there are no competing truth claims to Christianity, but any claim to an authentic truth participates in the Truth which is the wisdom of God, the Logos, the Christ.

When you throw it back to Ross, you hit on exactly the key issue: "What ... is the difference between a personal God and a personal Love Force that is also the power behind all Creation? In a word: Jesus. But what then of the Father and the Holy Spirit? Are non-Christians unable even to sense them - in a different idiom and practice? And could we not have already evolved to understand them in our minds/souls/genes - long before Jesus' revelation made so many things so much clearer? And if we had not, how could Jesus have even made sense to anyone?" The last question is the most important. Human beings, according to Paul, are not able to say anything about the Truth/Christ except through the Holy Spirit. If we have not already received the gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus is simply unintelligible. But every human being has received the gift of the Holy Spirit from creation as the breath of God that gives the image and likeness of the creator to the created. There are not anonymous Christians, but there may be, as some Lonergan scholars have suggested, anonymous "Spiritans."

Perhaps to further the discussion I'll leave you with a quote from Lonergan's article "Mission and the Spirit" [from A Third Collection, ed. F. Crowe (University of Toronto Press). I'm attaching the article for you as well.] in which he distinguishes, amidst some fairly complex terminology, between the mission of the Son and the Spirit (we Christians tend to forget about he latter, to our own detriment). Forgive the length but I think you'll find it fruitful (the last line is the kicker, italics added).
"The divine secret, kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed (Rom. 16:25), has been conceived as the self-communication of divinity in love. It resides in the sending of the Son, in the gift of the Spirit, in the hope of being united with the Father. Our question has been how to apprehend this economy of grace and salvation in an evolutionary perspective and, more precisely, how it enters into the consciousness of man.

First, I think there is an awareness of a need for redemption. Human progress is a fact. There is a wheel that, as it turns, moves forward. Situations gives rise to new insights; insights to new courses of action; new courses of action to changed situations; changed situations to still further insights, further action, further change in situations. But such progress is only a first approximations to fact, for it is marred and distorted by sin. There is the egoism of individuals, the securer egoism of groups, the overconfident shortsightedness of common sense. So the intelligence of progress is twisted into the objectification of irrational bias. Worse, to simpleminded sins of greed there is added the higher organization of sophistry. One must attend to the facts. One must deal with them as in fact they are and, as they are irrational, obviously the mere dictates of reason are never going to work. So rationalization enters the inner citadel. There is opened a gap between the essential freedom all men have and the effective freedom that in fact they exercise. Impotent in his situation and impotent in his soul man needs and may seek redemption, deliverance, salvation. But when it comes, it comes as the charity that dissolves the hostility and the divisions of past injustice and present hatred; it comes as the hope that withstands psychological, economic, political, social, cultural determinisms; it comes with the faith that can liberate reason from the rationalizations that blinded it.

Secondly, the new order (II Cor. 5:17) comes in the visible mission of the Son. In him is presented: (1) the absolutely supernatural object, for he is God; (2) the object for us, for he is man; (3) for us as to be redeemed, for he dies to rise again. As visible he is the sacrament of man's encounter with God. As dying and rising, he shows the way to the new creation. As himself God, already he is Emmanuel, God with us.

Thirdly, besides the visible mission of the Son there is the invisible mission of the Spirit. Besides fides ex auditu, there is fides ex infusione. The former mounts up the successive levels of experiencing, understanding, judging, deliberating. The latter descends from the gift of God's love through religious conversion to moral, and through religious and moral to intellectual conversion.

These three are cumulative. Revulsion from the objective reign of sin and from the subject's own moral impotence heightens vertical finality. Without the visible mission of the Word, the gift of the Spirit is a being-in-love without a proper object; it remains simply an orientation to mystery that awaits its interpretation. Without the [in]visible mission of the Spirit, the Word enters into his own, but his own receive him not ."