Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness (Catholicity in an Evolving Universe Series)

by Ilia Delio

What we find in the first five centuries of the Church is a mutation of catholicity from a sense of cosmos as order and harmony to a fixation on orthodoxy.

Clayton states that emergence is everywhere, beginning with the Big Bang. He writes: “Once there was no universe and then, after the Big Bang, there was an exploding world of stars and galaxies. Once the earth was unpopulated and later it was teeming with primitive life forms. Once there were apes living in trees and then there were Mozart, Einstein and Gandhi.”43 Emergence is a combination of holism with novelty in a way that contrasts with both physical reductionism and dualism. It is irreducible novelty of increasing complexity in nature and underscores the fact that time is irreversible; in nature, there is no turning back.

We are relational beings through and through, and our primal relation is to the whole, including family, community, nation, globe, and planet earth. In other words, the evolution of wholeness is intrinsic to being human; catholicity is wired into our DNA. If evolution is the rise of wholeness and consciousness, it is also the rise of catholicity. We emerge from the whole; we belong to the whole; and we are endowed with the capacity to evolve to higher levels of complexity and consciousness. Nature reveals intrinsic wholeness, but the whole is not constrained by biological life; rather, on the level of the human person the whole is open to becoming more whole, oriented to transcend itself, as life stretches toward absolute unity.

The question of evolution is not simply one of existence, of why we are here; rather, it is the startling fact that, after 13.8 billion years, we are here—and we know we are here! Amazingly, a Gallup poll on June 2, 2014, showed that 42 percent of the American population still believe that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years.1 This inability to modify core religious beliefs according to what we now know about ourselves, such as the doctrine of creation, goes hand in hand with the power of religious myth to form a coherent picture of the world and one’s own place within it.2 Studies have shown that rejection of modern science by religious people is not due to a lack of the knowledge of science; rather, the power of religious myth runs deeper than science, even though the beliefs are based on outmoded notions of the physical cosmos.

Relationship is the basis of all that is. Our world comes about through a mutually creative dialogue between mind and body, between the individual and the individual’s personal and material context, and between human culture and the natural world.

To overcome our Cartesian anxiety of dualistic thinking, we need to shift our focus from objects to relationships. Only then can we realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence but rather interdependence.

For too long we have interpreted the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the reparation for sin. Medieval theology focused attention on original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve. The need to repair fallen creation and restore humanity to God became the reason for the incarnation.10 The story of Adam and Eve, however, was constructed against the background of the static, fixed Ptolemaic cosmos. It was a way of explaining evil and death in the patristic era. We simply do not live in a static, fixed cosmos. We live in an evolutionary and self-organizing cosmos where each person is co-extensive with the entire universe.11 Ours is not a “fallen” humanity but a “deep” humanity, embedded in nature from the Big Bang onward.

In the quantum view a person is a constellation of relationships, inner and outer: the degree of one’s relationships extends throughout space-time and endures in those who live on. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus undergirds the fact that life creates the universe, not the other way around. Space and time are not absolute; rather, they are “tools” of our mind to help organize our world. Death and immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries. Every act of physical death is an act of new life in the universe. The resurrection of Jesus reveals to us new cosmic life. Death is not the end; our bodies do not become dust, while the soul goes to heaven. Rather, through the lens of quantum physics, we now realize that death is the collapse of our “particle” aspect of life into the “wave” dimension of our relatedness. While

To reject evolution is, in a sense, to reject God because God is the power of evolution, Omega, who is within and ahead.

“Do we realize that if we are to influence the world it is essential that we share in its drive, in its anxieties and its hopes?”7 We are not only to recognize evolution but to make it continue in ourselves.8 We are to “christify” the world by immersing ourselves in it, plunging our hands into the soil of the earth and touching the roots of life.

The Christian of today must gather from the body all the spiritual power it contains, and not only from the personal body but from the whole immense cosmic body that is the world stuff in evolution.

Heaven unfolds when we see this world for what it truly is, “pregnant with God.”

Heaven is not a place of eternal rest or a long sleep-in, but a life of creativity and newness in love; one with God in the transformation of all things.

Heaven, hell, death, and judgment are not future events; they are present realities centered on a radical decision to love.

The four last things—death, judgment, heaven, and hell—mark the lines of division between world religions because the different religions are based on the same outmoded, ancient cosmology. That is, each religion has an individual line of escape because no religion has refitted its doctrine to an expanding universe and biological evolution.

us. If we could harness the energies of love in these moments of collective passion, we could create a new world together.

Whereas in the past religion fulfilled the need for transcendence by harnessing the powers of the spirit, now technology is supplanting the role of religion to connect us in a way that is meaningful for us.

“The kind of religion we lack today cannot be found in the religious traditions of the past which are linked to static categories; what is needed is a new type of religion that can use all the ‘free energy’ of the earth to build humankind into greater unity.”

The rise of the “Nones,” those who are religiously unaffiliated, reflects Teilhard’s insight that institutional religions no longer meet the needs of our world.

Nature is an interlocking network of systems. It is more flow than fixed, a choreographed ballet, a symphony, whereby an organism is dynamically engaged in its own self-organization, pursuing its own ends amid an ever-shifting context of relationships.

An open-systems Church cannot function as a monarchy but as a holarchy.

The Church can find new life in our age by refitting the gospel to a world in evolution and supporting open-systems theology, by which revelation is seen as process, relatedness, and patterns of organization. I propose that open-systems theology begin with the book of nature, that is, insights from modern science, as well as culture, economics, music, shopping malls, and Wall Street; a theology that begins with learning and experience rather than teaching; with creativity and imagination rather than a fixed set of principles; a theology where people continually expand their capacity to create the world they truly desire; where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured; where collective aspiration is set free; and where people are encouraged to see the whole of life together, rather than as competing tribes. Studies have shown that in situations of rapid change,

To live the gospel life is to live on a new level of consciousness, a spacious mind, like Jesus, a deep awareness of oneness with God and neighbor, a consciousness of belonging to a whole.

of catholicity at present than the Argentinian Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis. From the moment he was elected to the papacy and stepped out to greet the world by asking for prayer, Pope Francis has shown a new spirit of wholemaking, striving to move the Church from its static, inward-focused, legalistic mentality to a world-embracing church that lives on the margins.

Orthopraxis was replaced by orthodoxy. In the modern period lawfulness and hierarchy defined the Catholic Church; emphasis was placed on sin, guilt, heaven, and hell, resulting in a dualistic and disconnected left-brain Church that functioned like a sturdy ship on the stormy seas of the world.

However, the loss of a dynamic consciousness of catholicity in the modern period was profound. This loss included (1) the loss of thinking in a way that unifies, (2) a lack of dynamic orientation toward making wholes through engaged action, and (3) reduction of catholicity to abstract truths. As a result catholicity became narrow and institutional, more divisive than inclusive.

If the breadth and width of catholicity was lost after Nicea and collapsed in the modern period, it was also revived in the twentieth century by a lone Jesuit scientist writing from the deserts of China. Teilhard de Chardin was an observer, a paleontologist, and, like the Greeks, stood under the stars in awe at this marvelous universe we call our home. By bringing together evolution and Christianity in a single vision, Teilhard restored catholicity to its original meaning: consciousness of belonging to a whole and making new wholes by thinking and acting toward wholeness. His “deep catholicity” went hand in hand with his idea of “deep incarnation.” God is deeply involved with evolutionary creation from the Big Bang onward. Divine love is the whole of every whole, empowering life toward greater wholeness and unity in love. This is the emergence of the Christ, who comes to explicit consciousness in Jesus of Nazareth, the wholemaker par excellence.

I find a tremendous yearning among Nones and the millennial generation (born between 1982 and the early 2000s) for a more just and unified world. Many of the millennial generation are wholemakers involved in greening the earth, immigration reform, peace and nonviolence, economic justice, and environmental sustainability. They seek authentic community life, ways of meditation, and alternative gift economies; they believe that institutional religion is out of touch with the world. Like transhumanists, the Nones long for religious ideals without the institution.

Can we reimagine the Church as a system open to new thought patterns and structures that kindle the human spirit in its yearning for God? The Church of the future will depend on how we see ourselves in relation to the universe and how conscious we are of living in an evolving universe.

Without the dynamic energy of transcendence by which consciousness rises and relationships deepen, religion grows old and weary; it becomes rote, a mechanistic repetition of old ideas. To function out of an old cosmology with old ideas of matter and form, to think that God does not do new things, is to make an idol out of Jesus and to ignore the power of the Spirit.