The Future of Sacred Texts

                          The Future of Sacred Texts
 
If human consciousness evolves over time, it follows that our capacity for perception and comprehension also changes over time. Humans in the 21st century, operating in a different mode of consciousness than, say, humans in the Paleolithic era, simply perceive certain aspects of reality in different ways than did our ancient ancestors. It would follow that as our consciousness evolves, our capacity to perceive or sense the spiritual dimension also evolves. For example, the vestiges of religion from the late Paleolithic era suggest that human consciousness of the sacred at that time differed from the awareness of the sacred that developed several centuries later in what we now call the Axial Age religions (for a more precise model of the evolution of human consciousness, see the work of the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser,whose model identifies the stages of archaic, magical, mythical, mental (rational), and integral consciousness. Gebser’s model was subsequently expanded by Ken Wilber to include transpersonalspiritual modes of consciousness).
 
If the evolution of human consciousness includes changes in the human capacity to perceive the spiritual dimension, it further follows that attempts to articulate our sense of the sacred also change over time in conjunction with these changing modes of consciousness. Humans not only experience a sense of Spirit, they also try to communicate this sense through language, and when this communication becomes written, we have what have come to be generically referred to as sacred texts, as found in all of the major religious traditions.
 
But as we enter into the 21st century, we must ask if the existing sacred texts, as the product of an earlier modality of spiritual consciousness, are still relevant. Some would argue that existing religious texts have lost their credibility in light of the rational/scientific mode of awareness that was not as fully developed when those texts were composed as it is today. Belief in a seven day creation was more credible when a pre-scientific mode of awareness rooted in a static concept of the universe was dominant. But that is no longer the case.
Others would argue that, as a consequence of the expanding circle of moral concern that has accompanied the slow evolution of spiritual consciousness, some existing sacred texts are not morally credible, as seen for example in the portrayal of God as a temperamental, capricious, angry, vengeful being, who sometimes seems to act in a manner that would be considered morally unacceptable if engaged in by a teenager today.
 
But such a wholesale rejection of these revered ancient texts would seem to be a misguided over-reaction. Yes, we should be honest in acknowledging that these texts contain much material that simply is not credible to a fully-informed 21st century sensibility. But we also must acknowledge that there is much wisdom in these texts, and this wisdom accounts for the enduring influence of these writings despite the fact that certain parts of the texts have lost credibility.
 
And yet, as we move forward into the 21st century and beyond, clearly we need to re-examine our understanding of these ancient texts (their content, how they originated, their validity in the context of a 21st century sensibility, etc.) and, perhaps more importantly, consider what the sacred texts of a post-Axial type of religion might look like. This is an enormous issue, which is explored in more detail in Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century. For our purposes here, perhaps it would be easier to first affirm what the sacred texts of the future forms of religion are not going to be like:

• Sacred texts will no longer be interpreted in the literalist manner of religious fundamentalism. Recognized as the product of the human sense of Spirit rather than an unchanging and infallible revelation, future sacred texts will be appreciated as the “best guesses” of well-meaning believers, valued as such but also subjected to scrutiny as human products
• Sacred texts will not be supportive of an exclusivist religious perspective, according to which God has issued a special revelation to a particular group of people, offering one and only one path to salvation
• Sacred texts will not function as explanations of natural phenomena. They will not be a substitute science
• Sacred texts will not be understood as expressions of eternal, unchanging truths about the nature of Spirit, but rather will be viewed in the epistemological context of all human knowledge, which is to say in the context of the recognition of an evolving consciousness which leads to changes over time in the human perception of Spirit

 
With regard to positive content, an evolutionary spirituality would suggest that the sacred texts of the religion of the future will likely be:

• Rooted in theological minimalism derived from a sense of spiritual epistemological humility, as described in detail in our previous post on Spiritual Minimalism
• Non-parochial, or texts that are not the limited expressions of the necessarily partial perspective of a specific population or time
• Consistent with a contemporary cosmology, grounded in a full awareness of the vastness of deep space, deep time, and the ever-evolving nature of the Cosmos
• Expressive of the Cosmic Sense:  If there is one predominant theme that is found amidst the wild diversity of contemporary spiritual writings outside of the traditional religions, it is a larger, more expansive sense of Spirit, cleansed of the anthropomorphisms that in the past have been attached to Spirit. It is a sense of the Cosmic dimension of the sacred which expresses a more expansive sense of Spirit than that which we usually (although not always) find in mainstream, Axial Age-originated, traditional religions
• Global, trans-human morality: Moral teachings that will reflect the contemporary reality of the evolved human sense of ethical responsibility toward not only the human realm but also toward other species, the biosphere, and indeed the entire the planet – in other words, a global morality

 
The skeptic of this perspective on the future of sacred texts might understandably ask: where will these texts come from? If there is no revelation from God in the manner of the Abrahamic traditions or the words of an enlightened Buddha-like being, where will the content of such texts come from?
 
We should first pay tribute to traditional sacred texts and acknowledge that we are in no manner suggesting that there will be a wholesale rejection of those revered writings. To the contrary, one source of future sacred texts will be the existing sacred texts that were written over the course of the past 2500 years. As acknowledged above, amidst the parochial prejudices of those writings we also find abiding universal truths, and such meaningful content from the traditional texts should be retained. The beatitudes of Jesus, exhortations toward social justice in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and Qur’an, the moral aphorisms of Confucius, the cosmic sense of the Neo-Confucian Western Inscription and the Hindu Upanishads, the depiction of divine love and human devotion in the Bhagavad Gita – we could go on and on with examples of the abiding wisdom which is found in traditional texts and explains their persistence over the centuries.
 
But the essential content of the sacred texts of the future is likely to develop organically (as did the sacred texts of the existing traditions, despite the denial of such origins by many believers) as the product of the ongoing spiritual experience of humans whose mode of consciousness makes possible a sense of Spirit that resonates with contemporary believers. Those texts which most effectively articulate the sense of Spirit available to humans in the 21st century will over time make their way into collections that function, as do existing sacred texts, as guides to the religious life, even while those texts are also understood as the product of human authors and exceptional human spiritual experience, rather than supernatural revelations.
 
Humans – as least for now – need words to communicate, and words inevitably get strung together to construct more complex ideas, which eventually find their way into books. So humans in the 21st century, in an effort to communicate the sense of Spirit which they experience, will certainly produce the equivalent of sacred books, with the differences from traditional sacred texts referenced above. Saying nothing is not an option, even when we realize that whatever we say is necessarily a partial and imperfect effort to describe that which can be dimly experienced or sensed or intuited, but never adequately described. So we will continue to say something about Spirit and continue to produce “sacred” texts, but hopefully with a new sense of honesty, humility, and wonder.