Between Silence and Saying Too Much: The Language Dilemma of Future Spirituality

​Between Silence and Saying Too Much:
The Language Dilemma of Future Spirituality
 
Over the vast stretch of human evolution, consciousness, slowly and fitfully, has evolved.
 With that evolution of consciousness, humans eventually acquired a sense of the Transcendent, Spirit, the Numinous, Something More, or whatever language one wishes to use to designate that meaning-creating aspect of reality that is not limited to the physical dimension of the Cosmos. Humans, in other words, have acquired the capacity to sense the spiritual dimension of reality.
 
The Language Factor
 
And as humans, a communication-oriented species, we sought to express that elusive and ever-evolving sense of the existence of the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos through the creation of religious language, based on the symbols and concepts available to us at any given time. 
As centuries passed, and as human awareness of the spiritual dimension changed (as all aspects of human awareness and knowledge change in the unfolding of the potentialities of consciousness), we developed new linguistic expressions to communicate about that Spirit.
And consequently, we developed new religions, with new words and concepts to provide doctrines, creeds, sacred texts, moral teachings, accounts of religious experiences, and all that goes into this ever-changing thing that we call religion.
 
Religion’s Changing Language
 
This was a long and complex process, and any attempt to capture the evolution of human spirituality and religion in a neat and tidy model is necessarily an over-simplification. Nonetheless, recognizing its limitations, historians of religion tend to portray this spiritual evolution as passing through the stages of animism (a vague belief in spirits, often present in nature, often without a defined and clear identity), to polytheism (spiritual beings, residing in a heavenly realm, often capricious and far from consistently moral, with a clearer identity and personality, communicating with humans, responding to human actions such as sacrifices and rituals), to monotheism (a personal, unitary being –one God, not many- whose nature includes a sense of Goodness and justness, and expects the same of humans). There were other variations on the human perception of the Sacred (monism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, etc.), but for humanity as a whole, and especially for the “ordinary” citizen who was not a religious or philosophical specialist, this directional development from animism to polytheism to monotheism appears to hold true.
 
Transitions: Slow and Conflictual
 
But the shift from one mode of spirituality to another did not happen rapidly and smoothly. To the contrary, each shift required a long transition period which was characterized by conflict between the established old view and the emerging new view, as the new view sought to develop and establish a language, beliefs, and practices appropriate to its new form of spirituality. The transition from animism to polytheism was hardly a smooth organic process, and one need look no further than the Bible to see the intense animosity (resulting in political and military conflict and the loss of much life) between the traditional animistic/polytheistic religions of the ancient Near East and the monotheistic Hebrews, or the similar history that was repeated between pagan polytheistic Greco-Roman culture and early Christianity. Transition to the next step of evolving spirituality is never rapid, and is never easy.
 
The Contemporary Transition
 
Today we are in the midst of such a transition, as the traditional anthropomorphic myth-based religions lose their hold on 21st century spiritual consciousness and contemporary believers move on to….well, what? Part of the spiritual dilemma of our time is that, while the old religions have lost their credibility, a clearly articulated replacement for these 2000 year old traditions has not yet emerged. In a broad but ill-defined sense, a new awareness of Spirit has emerged, but the language, practices, doctrines, ethical codes, and all of the other factors that are required for a spiritual sensibility to be sufficiently expressed in objective form so as to allow it to be communicated about and practiced, has not yet coalesced.
 
This doesn’t mean that we are in need of a wholesale rejection of the traditional meaning of the word “God” and the various beliefs and traditions that derive from the traditional sense of Transcendence. A future spirituality and its religious language should retain the nature of the Ultimate as the source of all Being, the essence of Goodness, the basis of Meaning and Hope, in some sense both immanent and transcendent, both personal and more than personal, the source of order, virtue, and some sort of moral accountability. But that future religious language must be cleansed of the qualities of jealousy, capriciousness, vindictiveness, favoritism, and cruelty that all too often are part of the traditional notion of  "God." The Ultimate reality of the next stage in human spiritual evolution will not be seen as something which orders the murder of innocents, authorizes a rapacious subjection of the non-human natural world which has no inherent value, or privileges one gender or race over another. The “God” of this next phase of human spiritual awareness will be one which reflects the (slow and still quite imperfect) development of human spiritual and moral sensibility, in language that is meaningful to contemporary humans.
 
Then why, one might ask, doesn’t someone just put together the details of what we might call a 21st century spirituality, or a religion for the future? But the emergence of a new form of spirituality and its concrete expression in a religion is an extraordinarily complex process, one which happens over centuries in an organic manner with multiple contributors and multiple variations until an identifiable new expression of faith emerges.
 
A New Religious Language
 
This short blog format is not sufficient to speculate on the entirety of that sometimes century-long process. Rather, here we will confine ourselves to what might be considered the first step in the development of a new religion, one which, in the words of J.L. Schellenberg, is a “religion appropriate for out times,” and that first step would be the development of a new religious language.
 
The traditional theistic God-centered language of the existing traditional religions is no longer adequate for many 21st century believers. Human spiritual consciousness is in need of a language to express a sense of the Sacred that is far more expansive, universal, and moral than much of the God-language of traditional religions. This is not to take the position that “God,” or an Ultimate Reality, does not exist. Rather, it is to affirm that the “God-word” as understood in the context of the anthropomorphic, mythic, tribalist, sexist, militaristic and other problematic associations that it has acquired over the past 2000 years might be too narrow and parochial to fit the 21st century spiritual consciousness. We need a language that adequately reflects the spiritual experience of the more expansive, global, universal sense of Spirit that human consciousness is now capable of experiencing on a wide scale basis.
 
For some, the word “God” can be divorced from these traditional limiting connotations to an extent that it is still a useable word. But for others, those connotations are so tightly bound to the word and related beliefs and doctrines that they cannot be undone, and a new language is needed. But this is precisely the dilemma faced by the evolution of 21st century religion: we have achieved the capacity for a certain mode of spiritual awareness, but we lack a language in which to express it, and lacking a language, we cannot develop the corresponding beliefs, doctrines, shared practices, moral codes, etc., that are necessary to turn an internal, private experience available to a few, into a public expression of a religion made possible by shared language and the institutional components which grow out of that language.
 
So what shall we do?
 
Three Options
 
The first option is to make no change at all: use the same language of God, Lord, Father, King, Judge, etc., with the understanding that its meaning has changed in conformity to a contemporary scientific, historical, and, above all, spiritual sensibility. Some are comfortable with the continued use of “God,” but redefined in a contemporary sense, divested of the moral and character limitations of jealousy, vindictiveness, ethnocentrism, etc. Indeed, liberal Christian theology has often tied itself in theological knots trying to hang onto the “God” word by radically redefining the term, sometimes to the point that earlier believers would no longer recognize it.
 
The second option would be to choose to simply say nothing, or as little as possible, reflecting the centuries-old tradition of recognizing that the Ultimate is ineffable, or beyond that capacity of humans to express in words. The notion of a religion based on silence rather than language is hardly anything new: Buddhism's Shunyata, Hindu Vedanta’s “neti-neti”, the Chinese characterization of the Dao as Unnamable, and similar positions of apophatic theology found in Jewish, Islamic, and medieval Christian mysticism all adopt such a strategy.
 
Today, in a spirit of radical epistemological humility where there is a newly found cosmological awareness of the vastness of time and space and the consequent diminished status of the capacities of human knowledge, there are those who sense this new spiritual awareness and are content to remain silent, as did their predecessors in the traditions described above.
 
But our situation is different from all of those earlier traditions in which silence was a workable option, in the sense that those traditions were embedded in well-established existing religions with sacred texts, doctrines, well-developed theologies, liturgies – in short, agreed upon language as pointers to the sense of Spirit which was available at the time.
 
But for an emerging spirituality, silence won’t work: an emerging spirituality which needs to communicate a new spiritual awareness needs words, however admittedly inadequate they might be, to communicate at least a vague sense of that new spiritual sensibility and a process for experiencing and living according to such spiritual awareness. For a sense of Spirit that is only dawning on human consciousness, how do you communicate it to others? How do you exchange ideas, and enter into meaningful conversation that leads to a refinement of what constitutes the preferred language to express it? How do you counter misguided paths which lead to pathological expressions of it? And how do you introduce it to youth and insure its transmission from one generation to the next?
 
In light of these challenges, a third option appears to be required: We need to develop a new religious language which is adequately expressive of a contemporary sense of Spirit, a language which will retain some aspects of the words and concepts of traditional religion, but one which in some ways will necessarily generate a dramatically new religious vocabulary, which over time will lead to statements of belief comparable to the creeds, doctrines, and theologies of the existing traditional religions.
 
So why don’t we just do it? Why don’t we create a new language and a new religion that reflect this new spirituality? As we move away from the traditional religions rooted in the Axial Age, why not just create a post-tradition spirituality which will bring forward the religions of what some have a called a Second Axial Age?
 
This is where things get rather frustrating, for the simple reason that religious concepts and their expression in language need to develop organically, and organic development takes time – a very long time, as in centuries. We are in a transition process where the old religions are no long grounded in language that is universally meaningful, but the new religions and new linguistic tools for communicating about the contemporary sense of the Transcendent have not yet emerged in useful, clear, agreed-upon, shared forms.
 
What’s more, we don’t even know how far into the transition to a new spirituality we are: early, mid-point, or near the end? The Protestant Reformation, for instance, did not begin and emerge fully developed in one day when Martin Luther made public his 95 Theses on October 31, 1517. Several centuries of previous debate about this newly emerging spiritual sensibility in Christianity culminated in that act of Luther, who was less responsible for “creating” the Reformation than for simply bringing to the church’s and public’s attention a spiritual transformation that had begun centuries earlier, organically culminating in the expression of that new spirituality in Luther’s document. And Luther’s spiritual vision continued to be refined by further variations of Protestantism, as well as Roman Catholic responses, that emerged in the decades and even centuries following Luther.
 
In a comparable sense, how close are we to such a transition? Clearly, a post-traditional, post-traditionally theistic, post-exclusivist, global type of spiritualty has been developing for centuries, as evidenced in medieval Christian and Muslim mystics, Indian varieties of non-dualism, the Cosmic writing of Chinese Neo-Confucian tradition, American Transcendentalists of the 1800s, and various new religious movements during the past several decades.
 
But when will these diverse strands of post-traditional spiritual sensibility coalesce to the point of generating a language that is sufficiently clear to be shared?
 
Caught Between Saying Too Much or Saying Too Little
 
So for now….
 
Perhaps we must assume that we are at an early stage of one of those transitional stages where the old ways of articulating the nature of the Spirit are no longer effective and meaningful, but new ways have not yet organically emerged. They will emerge, but it will take time.
 
In the meantime, we are left in this very peculiar position of trying to thread the needle between saying nothing and saying too much, between silence and meaningless verbiage. Reluctant to use the traditional language of ancient terms like God, Lord, and King, there is a temptation to remain silent in the still awareness of the existence of a Transcendent reality that is always difficult to express in words, and which can no longer be adequately captured in those traditional religious words that are deeply rooted in outdated anthropomorphic and mythic connotations.
 
Silence is tempting indeed, but silence will not succeed in bringing about the transition to the credible religion that we desperately need at this time. We need a new religious language that will seem believable to and resonate with contemporary believers and would-be believers, those who stay away from traditional religions because the existing language of the traditional religions is not meaningful to them.
 
In the meantime, as happens in any major transition in human consciousness, we can only patiently wait, contributing what we can to the emergence of new ways of articulating an emerging sense of Spirit that is far more vast, expansive, universal, and inclusive, than that which has preceded it. And knowing that, like all changes in human consciousness, the development of an intelligible, communicable, publicly shared linguistic expression of this spiritual awareness – in other words, a religion – will take time and needs to develop organically, we patiently wait and contribute in whatever way we can.