The Partying Sage

Written By: Wendell Krossa

 

Sheehan’s ‘The First Coming’ is such a piece of insight.  As noted by Campbell and Eliade, originally as the earliest consciousness incarnated in humanity, people began to sense something transcendent about life; they first located this in animal life and then later this perception of Spirit moved to plant life.  It then shifted to the cosmos and the regularities of the universe.  Then, according to Sheehan, it moved in the Jewish tradition, to human action in history.  This was the realm that God was seen to be active within.  Then there was a shift toward more humane views of divinity (around the Axial period of 7th Century BCE) as people began to see more clearly the compassion of God.  The Buddhists viewed this as a supreme value.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/pdf/FromDivi.pdf   is a fuller version of Thomas Sheehan’s essay ‘From Divinity to Infinity’ and offers some further interesting insights on God in humanity.  It fleshes out more of the original essay.  He looks at Strauss’s early work in challenging the Jesus tradition and Christian dogma on Jesus.

 

Some quotes:  “The incarnation of God was not a one-time, one-person event, but took place from all eternity and within the entire human species”

 

“We are radically finite; our imperfect infinity means we are always open, always able to become more; to question, to be interested in, and search for everything…with every step forward we transcend our previous selves…endless self-transcendence…our only sin is to refuse to be the mortal, finite, and thus endlessly self-transcending infinity that we are”

 

He denies the traditional models of God as waiting to fulfill up ahead on the horizon. “We face endless possibilities of self-realization within the world…we face an endlessly receding horizon and thus the inexhaustible possibilities of human knowing and doing…endless acts of self-transcendence…we endlessly humanize the world…the endless humanization of the world”

 

This human journey is not to be about God as religion has taught us, but about human possibility and striving for that better, more human world.  God has incarnated and disappeared into humanity for this very reason - to explore human potential and human learning and knowing. God is about the “unfolding of our natural powers”.

 

The gift of God is given over entirely, without remainder, to explore justice and mercy through human experience and striving.  Faith and hope have to do with this unending struggle for justice and mercy in this life.  As with any material there are points to argue and disagree with, but some of the essential material here points to some very fascinating new directions in thought re God and human spirituality.

All helpful in developing a sense of the wonder of being human and understanding the meaning of human existence as God incarnate.

 

With Jesus, this tradition of viewing God as humane continued and intensified.  Do this (don’t retaliate, but forgive and love your enemies) and you will be like Abba.  God is manifest in humane feeling and behavior.  More and more over history as consciousness matured, people understood that God was humane.  This was more tightly related to our understanding that because of the transcendent ‘Reality’ that had incarnated in us, we were to act accordingly.

 

In chapter 3 of his book, Sheehan notes the difference between Jesus and John.  Jesus preached the joy of God’s immediate and liberating presence.  A dirge had given way to a lyric; Hence the partying sage.  He continues that Jesus saw not a terrifying God, but the intimate presence of a father, who God had incarnated in all as forgiving (liberation from our pasts), merciful, generous to all.  “So go and be likewise to others”.  This is the ethic based on the understanding of the Presence as humane.  As Sheehan says, “in Jesus’ message the offer was the presence of the Father, and the required response was mercy toward one’s neighbor.  This was the revolution that Jesus unleashed…He signaled that God was immediately and intimately present; not as a harsh judge but as a loving and generous father.  His presence was a pure and unearned gift, and one could relate to him without fear.  Be not afraid…do not be anxious…do not worry”.  This is a radical break with all past understanding of divinity.  For millennia it had been beaten into people’s minds that the gods were angry, vengeful, terrifying and needed endless, costly pacification.  The forces of nature, disease, and cruelty of others all revealed this.  Again, one of the massive shifts in human consciousness has been to grasp this new reality.  I wonder how important this information is in light of the historically recent surge of apocalyptic in environmentalism.  Apocalyptic is fueled by the old pagan views of divinity; no matter how secular it pretends to be, the still ‘new’ theology of Jesus (long buried in the salvation theology of his followers), has still not fully penetrated public consciousness in a widespread manner.