PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

17 Nov PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. To that end, he is reviewing the theology of three contemporary theologians whose thought is very integrative of Nature and Spirit from three very different approaches. In this post, Pastor Pat will apply philosopher Ken Wilber’s development stages of consciousness and his Integral Operating System to better locate the thought and metaphysical claims of Sigurd Bergmann’s orthodox, liberation theology and David Ray Griffin’s process theology.

Pastor Pat Bailey

Sigurd Bergmann tries to avoid metaphysics by use of his apophatic methodology. He focuses on the economy of God’s presence and actions rather than on the being of God.  Yet Bergmann does, in fact, offer an ontology of God, arrived at through the economy of God in the history of salvation based in Christian revelation.

Bergmann’s theological approach is revisionist; that is, the historical claims of Christian doctrine are scrutinized according to the invariant standards of meaning and truth assumed by all liberal studies. Revisionist theologians stress the need for theology to abide by academe’s standards of rational public discourse. Such an approach, however, is finally inadequate to establish the truth either of Christianity’s claims or the standards of liberal studies because there simply are no situation-neutral criteria for meaning and truth.

By Wilber’s stages of consciousness I would evaluate Bergmann’s thought as mythic-rational; they lie somewhere between the overlap of these two stages. Wilber’s stages are not attempts to define, rather to locate. They are not ontological categories, they are descriptive of perspectives or of preferred orientations.  Bergmann’s approach demonstrates that one can renounce metaphysics and still end up with foundationalism.

Bergmann’s thought represents the mythic-rational stage of development with an application mostly in the Its quadrant of Wilber’s Integral Operating System. Bergmann views Nature, humanity, and the Spirit’s activity in terms of ecological and social systems viewed from a third-person perspective. Spirituality for Bergmann, then, largely involves attending to issues of power and victimage within and between those systems.

David Ray Griffin’s Process theology is unapologetically metaphysical, but he tries to avoid foundationalism by defining metaphysics as an explorative, always-incomplete last-philosophy rather than as a foundational first-philosophy.  Indeed, Process thought provides a metaphysics that is modern, natural, integrative, and imaginative.  Process thought and theology, however, are also foundationalist in the sense that they claim certain ontological aspects of divinity as the thing itself and as the foundational basis of particular beliefs.  Such foundationalism is most apparent in Griffin’s dual-nature conceptualization of God and of God’s primordial envisaging of eternal objects, forms, and values.

A working metaphysics that is explorative and transitional must acknowledge not only its incompleteness but also its perspectival character if it is to avoid foundationalism.  By Wilber’s locating, Griffin’s thought is an expression of a rational-pluralistic worldview.  Griffin’s theology demonstrates that even a very progressive and integrative metaphysics can convey foundationalist assumptions.

Griffin’s thought represents the rational-pluralistic stage with much of its focus in the It quadrant, which is the favorite quadrant of rationalism and science.  He explores the it of God and Nature from a third-person perspective.  While Griffin discusses the I quadrant of religious experience, he does so from a third person perspective, looking at the interior experience as something to be studied from the outside.  His spirituality seems to issue in the application of rational standards to the Christian tradition, the hallmark of the Liberal tradition from which he comes.

Next week I will review Mark I. Wallace’s post-modern, rhetorical theology in light of Wilber’s categories.