Spiritual Minimalism

​Spiritual Minimalism:
Knowing More, Saying Less
 
The major world religions which are with us today emerged during an historical period known as the Axial Age, extending back from roughly 2500 to 2000 years ago, at a time when the human species was developing a sense of epistemological confidence: humanity as the pinnacle of creation, the center of the Universe, and perhaps most significantly, the holder of the key to all knowledge: Reason. And from this confident sense of human epistemological abilities there emerged detailed, complex, confident dogma, doctrines, theologies, and philosophies. Indeed, one could argue that over the millennia that have passed since the emergence of Axial Age religions, our sense of epistemological confidence, derived from the legitimate role of reason in helping us understand aspects of reality, devolved into a sense of epistemological hubris, where reason was seen as an infallible key to explaining and controlling all things, including our knowledge of and relationship to Spirit.
 
But over the past century or so, all that has changed. An honest, informed 21st century sensibility includes a radically altered sense of the context of the human presence in the vastness of space and time. We now recognize humanity as a species which, relative to the 14-billion-year history of the Universe, has only recently appeared, and, relative to the immensity of the Universe, exists on a tiny speck of a planet. Such recognition of the human presence in the vastness of space and time is a profoundly humbling experience. When humanity is spatially and temporally contextualized like this, the notion that a recently evolved creature using a three-pound organ (brain) on one tiny planet should be able to make detailed and definitive statements about the Ultimate nature of existence becomes glaringly arrogant and preposterous.
 
Recognizing the place of the human species in the broader context of the Universe produces what might be characterized as a profound sense of Epistemological Humility, or a sense of the limits of human knowledge, and Epistemological Humility in turn should lead to what we will refer to as Spiritual Minimalism, or a constant awareness of the need to avoid saying too much about the nature of Spirit/Ultimate Reality, which will always exceed the capacity of humans to understand and describe in a comprehensive manner. These concepts of Epistemological Humility and Spiritual Minimalism are important considerations for the nature of religion and spirituality as they evolve farther away from the declining traditional religions and into an as-yet-undeveloped 21st century transformation.  
 
Predictions that the religion of the 21st century will be theologically minimalist are shared by many who are exploring the possible contours of the future of religion. As Sean Kelly has put it, the spirituality of the future is likely to be characterized by a “renunciation of certainty” that stands in marked contrast to the detailed doctrinal positions of existing religions.1 Similarly, Ervin Laszlo, in exploring the religious implications for the evolving global character of human consciousness, suggests that we should attempt no more than a “minimally speculative theology.”2 And J.L. Schellenberg argues that with reference to religion, “We simply need to start thinking more generally than we are accustomed to doing,”  generating religious beliefs that can best be characterized as “thin,” in contrast to the “thick” collections of detailed ideas found in the theologies, doctrines, and philosophies that are associated with traditional religion.3
 
Similarly, we need to recognize that we are only at the beginning of the emergence of a post-traditional, post-Axial spirituality, and hence there will likely be a similar period of creative theologizing in which new words, symbols, concepts, etc. are offered up as the best ways to express the Sacred, and over time, as in the case of Christianity and every other major religion, new preferred expressions will emerge, some acquiring a revered status with which they will function in a doctrinal and theological manner. Even then, however, we are suggesting that Spiritual Minimalism will always be present, given that 21st century humanity has acquired an Epistemological Humility and a historical consciousness which, once attained, will not go away. New insights into the nature of Spirit, both philosophical and empirical, will continue to be sought and achieved, perhaps leading to religious/spiritual landscapes that would be unrecognizable to today’s believers, but whatever form that evolved sense of Spirit takes, it will be rooted in a sense of cosmically contextualized humility that (with a few notable exceptions) the religions of the past 2500 years have lacked.
 
Knowing and intuiting more, while saying less – perhaps this will be the foundation of the religion of the future.
 
 
1See Sean Kelly’s Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era and Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation.
2 See Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain.
3 Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg is perhaps the best known “mainstream” figure to write extensively and in great depth and detail about the temporal contextualization of religious thought and exploring the radical implications of the future evolution of religion. Schellenberg proposes “Ultimism” as a replacement for theism, and his concept of Ultimism shares many characteristics of the 21st century spirituality which are explored on the Religion Evolving website.
For non-philosophers, his accessible Evolutionary Religion is an excellent starting point.