Speculation that we have entered the early stages of a Second Axial Age from which there will emerge a post-Axial spirituality that is significantly different from that which we find in the traditional, or Axial Age religions that are with us today is certainly not a new idea. Its origins are sometimes traced to the philosopher Ewert Cousins and the cultural historian Thomas Berry, both of whom were at Fordham University in the 1970s. Many others have added to the conversation about a second Axial Age, some explicitly and others implicitly, from mainstream figures such as sociologist Robert Bellah and historian of religion Karen Armstrong, to more non-traditional contemporary philosophers such as Sean Kelly and Ervin Laszlo, to leading figures in the “Big History” field such as Brian Swimme and David Christian, and many others. So what we are exploring on this website clearly is an idea that is “in the air,” so to speak.
While further posts on this website will examine the multitude of diverse manifestations that post-Axial religion might head in the 21st century and beyond, in this series of six posts we would like to simply introduce a brief summary of what this “religion of the future” might include – each of these items explored in more detail later, as well as in Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New guide for the Perplexed. A Different Way to Think About “God” As soon as we affirm that Spirit/God exists, we must also immediately acknowledge the utter inadequacy of human language to describe that Ultimate Reality. In a sense, religion is an activity in which humans use whatever linguistic symbols (i.e., words) are available in the culture in which they live to attempt to try to describe the indescribable. Necessarily, that has often meant using words derived from our experience as humans to describe God, a practice known as anthropomorphism (God is a father, king, ruler, etc.). But it increasingly appears to be the case that the Axial Age anthropomorphic language used to describe “God” is no longer adequate for the sense of the Sacred that exists for much of contemporary humanity, living as we do in very different cultural and historical circumstances than those of the humans who developed that anthropomorphic God-language. What we need, then, is a way of talking about Spirit that uses more contemporary language and symbols, producing a “religion than is appropriate for our time” (see note below on J.L. Schellenberg). Such a new way of speaking about Spirit is likely to be less anthropomorphic and less rooted in pre-modern value-laden terminology (words such as “king” and “lord” might have had a positive connotation in pre-modern and feudal societies, but they have not retained such a positive association in many contemporary cultures). Conceiving Spirit as a male king, ruler, lawgiver, punisher, father figure, and, at times, rather capricious personality, is just not as meaningful or credible to a 21st century sensibility as it was to humans at the beginning of the Axial period when today’s major religions developed. So what is the alternative? That’s hard to say, since we are still in a transition period to post-Axial religion, such that at the present time we can only make best guesses as to what the emerging post-Axial language of faith will be like. However, it seems reasonable to postulate that as the new post-Axial spirituality emerges over the coming centuries, a new religious language will develop to help humans express that which is beyond language. The “God” of the 21st century and beyond will be a much bigger and more expansive sense of “God” than we currently find in the existing traditional religions, and a language to adequately refer to that “God” is yet to be developed.
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