Integral Christianity: The Spirit's Call to Evolve

by Paul R. Smith

Jesus warns us not to cling to our group in any way that will keep us from evolving spirituality. Anything that competes with the call of the Spirit to new

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The dominant consciousness of most institutions of the civilized world is at the modern level—except for the world’s religious institutions.

An estimated 15–30 percent of the world population is at the modern station of life.

the influence of the New Thought Movement such as Church of Religious Science, Church of Divine Science, and Unity Church

The Unitarian Universalist Church is solidly in the modern stage.

The one institution in the world that is still primarily at the mythical level is Christianity. Very rational people in the rational world of business world during the week go to church on Sunday morning and immediately move into a prerational worldview.

“Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed.”

“When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. And after they have reigned they will rest.”

the Jesus Seminar, which searched for the authentic words of Jesus in the four gospels in the New Testament and the Gospel of Thomas. They wanted to discover the real Jesus viewed “through the lens of historical reason and research rather than through the perspective of theology and traditional creedal formulations.” They ended up with 18 percent of the 1500 sayings traditionally ascribed to Jesus qualifying as probably or possibly said by Jesus.3

One cannot use reason to argue someone out of a position they did not arrive at by reason.

God is in everything and everything is in God. This is the God which Jesus said was greater than he was. This is the One about whom the apostle Paul said, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

Postmodernism is the world of the sensitive self, the pluralistic worldview, and believing that there are many ways of looking at reality. It has given birth to the green earth movement, feminism, civil rights, and gay rights. Those at this altitude can see things from many perspectives and embrace a more inclusive compassion that thinks, feels, and acts globally. It moves beyond the mere tolerance of the modern level to embracing and honoring other religious traditions.

An estimated 5–10 percent of the world’s population is here.

the postmodern one is filled with spiritual exploration.

the postmodern stage one can see that the biblical stories can be true without having to be literally and factually true. Borg says, “The emerging paradigm’s central

enlightenment.” Borg describes it as “a way of seeing the Bible (and the Christian tradition as a whole): historical, metaphorical, and sacramental.

Panentheism offers a third way of viewing God with an emphasis on the middle syllable “en.” God is in everything and everything is in God. God is in creation but is also greater than creation. I believe panentheism is the most advanced way of thinking about the Infinite Face of God that is compatible with both postmodernism and integralism.

Eckhart Tolle

While God may be defined by Jesus, God is not confined to Jesus.

My purpose is to shock those who are ready for it into considering Jesus’ message in a new way.

an integral Jesus is the foundation of the integral church.

The laws of the Israelites are described in the detail in the next four books of the Torah: Exodus, Leviticus (mostly narrative), Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Old Testament and one

thousand verses that describe God’s own violent actions in punishing humankind.

Many followers of Jesus have yet to come to believe that God practices what Jesus preached.

“Fulfilling” means the task has been successfully completed and it is time to move to the next level.

The renewing of our minds leads us into the ever upwardly evolving spiral of divine awareness, of seeing things more from God’s point of view and less from our ego’s limited one. While

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John 16

He said that we literally cannot “bear” the next stage until we have thoroughly engaged the previous stage.

We are moving toward looking like Christ as we change by degrees to that very same image.

It will be just as challenging and liberating.

Jesus could forgive those who were crucifying him because he saw where they were coming from. They were not at the place yet where they had awakened to who Jesus was and the power of the systems that crucified him. What they were doing made sense at the law and order traditional level. They simply could not see beyond that to what Jesus saw.

He shouted, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations.” 35

We can only know what our worldview allows us to know. When we understand that spiritual growth comes in waves or levels, then we realize we can only see the world from the stage we are at. The bigger, more compassionate, more inclusive, more truthful view of the next stage is not yet present in us. It can be “near,” as Jesus told one person, “You are not far from the Kingdom.” But until it is present within us, we will not “know.” The greater perspective is not ours until we enter the land and take it.

The integral level is the first level that looks around in the awareness of where people really are and kindly says, “They really don’t know what they are doing. When they attack me, they don’t know what they are doing, so I don’t need to take it personally. When they attack others furiously, I will speak out against those attacks in order to break their hold on the oppressed.

Understanding this profound truth opens us to a kinder, gentler understanding of the world. This is a call to move on up to the next level. Grow up some more! Move on up to where the problems we have created can actually be solved. The world can only be changed from the inside out. This is the Spirit’s call to evolve.

they reinvented it at a lower level because their consciousness was at that level.

As with all messages that purport to be from God, including the Bible, we must do the work of spiritual discernment.

He was physically present then, and is spiritually present now, and available to us in a similar way if we know how to connect with the non-physical spiritual reality that includes him, other spiritual beings, divine healing energies, and the Spirit’s presence. That is why I call this the “connecting” state.

is knowing that your deepest self, your true “I,” is divine. Jesus’ “I am” statements in the gospel of John came from this exalted consciousness.

Being a follower of Jesus came to be defined by what you believed about him and not what you experienced with him.

Here Jesus wrestled with how he would use his highly evolved spiritual powers. He struggled with his own ego self, personified and projected outward as “Satan,” in vivid scenarios involving his use of his heightened spiritual abilities. Jesus had an ego like any normal healthy human being. He

grappled with whether to use his spiritual power in service of his ego or in service of God. This is also the contemporary challenge facing all spiritual seekers, especially in some church and New Age beliefs and practices. Many “prosperity beliefs” do not seem to end up where Jesus did, which was to deny his false self (identifying with ego) in order to honor his True Self (the Christ consciousness of complete identification with and service to God).

This non-ordinary consciousness was his ordinary

state.

Isbouts believes that Jesus was an energy healer and that his method of healing was a transfer of electromagnetic energy from himself to another.8

was an energy that releases God’s love, healing, and creative vitality into the world.9