Roots of Spiritual Evolution

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man,
and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Romans 1:22,23

"Darwinian evolution arose out of the ashes of a long, deconstructive frontal attack on the Christian worldview. 

Renaissance scholars such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) were known for their deep interest in occult Greek and Egyptian teachings contained in mystical works. 

Among the emphases in mystical teaching that filtered through Western culture and shaped popular thinking about the supernatural were the following: 

---a pantheistic view that saw divinity in everything and an unspeakable 

---and indescribable view of divinity that made mysticism the highest spiritual experience. 

---Equally relevant was the mystical view of humankind as the product of a long spiritual evolutionary process.

---Together with a developing interest in Kabbalistic teaching, there began a curiosity in a mystical/magical worldview, which in turn received a boost from Neoplatonic philosophy already becoming influential among European humanists and intellectuals.

Neoplatonism taught that even spirits could sometimes reveal the secrets of the cosmos to the diligent seeker of truth. 

---This intermingling of science and magic, fueled by Neoplatonism, became evident in the flourishing interest in astrology and alchemy during the 16th century. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) were key figures in these developments.

One significant consequence of the blending of Neoplatonism and science was 

--the development of a sense of a primitive core of all religions, 

--and a search for a universally harmonious theological system. 

Hence the basis for religious pluralism was born, and with it the subsequent development, during the modern period, of Biblical criticism through the influence of such persons as Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), John Locke (1632-1704), and David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874).

In the wake of Biblical criticism during the modern period, the Biblical view of origins was one of the first casualties. Following modernity’s critique of the Bible and its worldview of creation, fall, and redemption, it was evident that a new explanation of the human condition would be needed. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary thoughts in The Origin of Species (1859) provided a watershed moment in the West’s understanding of life’s origins and development.

Darwin’s early defenders had a clear spiritual vision for evolution. 

T. H. Huxley’s grandson, Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975), carried

the religious implications of Darwin’s theory much further with his “transhumanism” project. 

Here, humans will control the evolutionary process to transcend themselves and create a new humanity capable of enhanced aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual experiences. 

Spiritually, Huxley’s transhumanism was “to teach people the techniques of achieving spiritual experience (after all, one can acquire the technique of dancing or tennis, so why not of mystical ecstasy or spiritual peace?).”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), with whom Julian Huxley corresponded, is deemed to be perhaps the 20th century’s greatest advocate of spiritual evolution. 

His interest in both science and religion led him to pursue relentlessly a program in which “religion and evolution should neither be confused nor divorced. They are destined to form one single continuous organism, in which their respective lives prolong, are dependent on, and complete one another, without being identified or lost. . . . Since it is in our age that the duality has become so markedly apparent, it is for us to effect a synthesis.”

Teilhard’s commitment to promote a new understanding of holiness after World War I meant for him that Christians needed to learn to recognize and revere the sacredness of matter and the cosmos. As he saw it, “the experience of the cosmos is a necessary dimension of human experience that must be integrated into the Christian faith.” The core of Teilhard’s mysticism is a “communion with God through earth,” based on a new synthesis in which “the human being is united with the Absolute, with God, by means of the unification of the universe.”

David Lewin observes, “Rather than supposing that the spiritual life supersedes the material, the historical and the experiential dimensions of being, Teilhard points to their confluence in a unity that establishes the irreducible meaning of every moment and every place. God is thus all in all.” 

Essentially, we arrive in a universe in which there is only one substance, which is at once God and nature, body, and spirit (or matter and energy). 

Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), and Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) include the distinguished list of thinkers who embraced some form of monistic, pantheistic thinking.

Synthetic spiritualities, such as those found in the New Age movement, seek to construct a world-view that integrates and harmonizes science and religion. 

Evolution becomes an overarching concept that incorporates the sense of deep time and imbues the development of a global spiritual consciousness as an evolutionary advance for the cosmos. 

Many here are prompted by the visionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin . . . Others in the New Age movement seek to integrate the mystery articulated in Hinduism and Buddhism with advanced discoveries in physics, such as indeterminacy and quantum theory."

Kwabena Donkor, Ph.D. Biblical Research Institute