Book Review: A Sociable God
This book is Wilber’s attempt to present eight views of what we mean when we use the word “religion.” Given the amount of Wilber’s writing that has focused on integrating religion with science and the general claims of modernity, it makes sense that such an exercise would be both valuable and need to occur early in his writing career. Defining religion is important to us all, as what each of us means when we use the word is different. While in part this book seeks to define our use of the word religion, he also introduces three concepts critical to this book, as well as his future work. These three concepts are first the relationship and definitions of body, soul, and spirit; second, stages and states; and last, the pre/post fallacy. The body is defined as the waking, gross realm of matter; the soul as the dreaming, subtle real of archetypal images and luminosity; the spirit as the formless, deep causal realm of vast emptiness and pure infinite emptiness. When Wilber talks about stages and states he is showing personal growth from the stage of selfish to that of care, then universal care, then integrated. For states he shows a hierarchy from gross (the body) then more advanced with the subtle (the soul), then finally as the ultimate ideal causal (the spirit). Seen differently, these are also described by him as psychic, then saintly, then sagely. At each of these states, the state above has access to that which is beneath it (as an example, the sagely can access the saintly), but not vice versa (the psychic can not access the saintly). In allowing each state below the one above it to become something better Wilber builds on his belief that hierarchy can not be overlooked as certain ideas and ideals are better than others and also, he introduces the idea of a holarchy - his word for a state that has access to all intermediate states below it.
Within this book Wilber addresses the idea of “Falls” common in religion; the Christian idea of the Fall would apply to his analysis. He identifies two types of fall: a metaphysical fall which means a loss of a conscious oneness with Spirit and consequent immersion in a world of sin and separation. The second type of fall is a psychological fall which is a self-reflexive awareness of that mess and the life we lead in a fragmented, torn, alienated world that appears to be separated from Spirit. The latter is the type of fall most commonly talked about by Christianity. I am in the community of people that find the idea of original sin and the fall both literally and philosophically unhelpful to say the very least and appreciate Wilber’s ability to take language I am familiar with and give it new, deeper meaning. By rescuing the idea from a literalist approach (literalism says at one time man lived in Paradise and chose to sin, leading to the Fall), he allows us to acknowledge that with the development of our consciousness we become aware of being detached from what Wilber calls Spirit and what monotheisms call God. For Wilber, this is all the Fall is and nothing more. In embracing this he allows us to accomodate the Fall with biological evolution which is not able to be integrated with any literalist definition of the Fall (evolution gives no evidence of a past epoch of spiritual unity or higher level and in fact is only observable and knowable because it shows the precise opposite - the advancement of man through social and biological processes).
The final critical concept introduced in A Sociable God is the pre/post fallacy. The essence of this idea is that pre-X and post-X are often times confused or assumed to be the same because they are not X. Said another way, pre-conventional and post-conventional are confused or assumed to be saying the same thing because they are both not conventional. By both not being conventional, they are assumed to be making the same arguments when this could not be farther from the truth.
Towards the latter part of the book Wilber talks about common religions ideas and texts in an attempt to show that his model of religion and spiritual development can be consistently held across cultures and time. His two examples contrast Christianity and Hinduism. At the time of the Mosaic theophany on Mount Sinai, in India the Vedas are experiencing a similar experience as Moses describes. Keep in mind Wilber is not a literalist so he is not making the argument that Moses literally had a theophany but that Moses’ stages and states are following the same trajectory as do the Vedas: they share a subtle/soul/saintly level apprehension, experience a numinous other that is Light, Fire, Insight and Sound, but no where does Moses claim to be at one with that Being. Flash forward several thousand years (or, if you hold to the Documentary Hypothesis, not quite so much!), and again compare Christianity – this time in the form of Christ, with Hinduism – this time in the form of the Upanishads. When Christ says “I and the Father are one”, showing in Wilber’s model a causal/spirit/sagely state at the same time the Upanishads are saying “Thou art That … This Atman is Brahman … I am Braham.” Unlike the theophany of Moses or the spiritual experience of the Vedas, the Christ and the Upanishads are both showing unity with spirit.
Christians reading Wilber need to be careful in pulling from his insights. Wilber’s arguments are highly structured and do not function well when they are made to accommodate something they explicitly deny. As just one example is Wilber’s absolute central claim that mythology must be secondary to certainly causal/spirit/sagely state level development and perhaps also must be secondary for complete ascension to the lower level of subtle/soul/saintly. This makes truth claims of religious truths such as the Resurrection of Christ, his virgin birth, his ascension and most of the miracles ascribed to him, the prophets and Paul secondary if we follow Wilber’s model. This is not an easy pill to swallow, but it does by default then make unknowable truth claims secondary to transcendence. Since A Sociable God is one of Wilber’s earlier books, his references to mythology are nested within his comments about the future of monotheistic faiths – Christianity specifically as opposed to his much more explicit and substantive treatment of religious myth in The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. We can see, in A Sociable God, the beginnings of Wilber’s argument for myth statements being secondary in his conceptualization of mana religion, or what he also calls the “food of each level.” He advocates a religion that is composed of good religion, namely that which is integrative, healthy, legitimate, and intrinsically binding. What he claims as bad mana is that which is dis-integrative or is, in any way, less integrating philosophically.
Brian McLaren, one of the key members of the Emergent Church, has referenced Wilber’s work in his own writing, a statement which says much about McLaren’s own intellectual pursuits and breadth. But in exposing oneself to Wilber, you will come away wondering how much good the Emergent Church can actually do. Does it represent a real addressing of the issues modernity is asking? As Wilber says in the preface to this book, postmodernity is quite good and dead with its contribution being that it made us acknowledge the limits of objectivity; but the death of postmodernity as a viable philosophy should make us question why postmodernity is so central to the only viable reform movement within Christianity! But perhaps we can let Wilber speak most directly to the Emergent Movement: “
That point is that neither pre-laws nor counter-laws seem to be significant sectors of actual social transformation – not on the emergent scale we are now discussing … If actual social transformations do generally come from some sort of presently outlawed sector, the only one left to consider is that of the translaws.” (Emphasis Mine - Page 129)
Said differently without Wilber’s terminology this quote suggests that to reform the Church, the movement to do so must be at the very least content to look outside the church and leave behind those who have what they feel are final and authoritative answers. The longer the Emergent movement, in what it calls a spirit of grace, attempts and adjudicate theological and cultural differences with their conservative colleagues they are squandering limited resources and a finite attention span of those who might be compelled to embrace a new idea of church. Such a decision would allow them to accelerate the theological differences that actually do separate them from the church; however, what may be at play in the Emergent movement is less a desire for real reform and more a desire to adapt slightly to make the church more palatable to contemporary man. I am personally suspicious that the Emergent movement is not really serious about reform as long as it feels necessary to explain itself to parts of the church that have answers and positions they feel no need to change. As any organizational behaviorist knows, change from within is fundamentally harder to accomplish than is starting anew. Of all the insights from A Sociable God, this last lesson may be the most important.
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August 3rd, 2005 at 4:41 pm
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