If Not Metaphysics Then What

From what we suppose about the earliest fruits of the religious impulse it yielded metaphysical designs. Perhaps the religious impulse was intermingled with humanity’s fear of its demise amidst an unpredictable and dangerous natural world. Perhaps that fear found itself in an uneasy alliance with humanity’s innate curiosity. Whatever it roots, it eventuated in combining humanity’s sensitiveness to passing between the sacred and the profane worlds, with speculations as to the “true order out there.” Ancient Judaism eventually saw the universe as originating from a “unity,” hence its monotheism, carved out of the polytheisms of its various milieus. We know now that its monotheistic, unitary view of existence was a gradual process, which included the assimilation of local deities into one “Lord of History.” Christianity emerged out of Judaism with a metaphysical bent and over the centuries constructed models of how “the universe was structured.” God’s will and God’s plan were proposed, defended, corrected, and reconceived. Heaven and Hell were mapped, and the qualifications for citizenship drawn up. Perhaps this was because from its beginnings Christianity was infatuated with the end of time and Jesus’ radical reordering of society’s structures from Rome’s “human” order to the Kingdom of God. But this metaphysical thrust continued to develop, culminating in the most elaborate and sophisticated of all designs, the universe as constructed by the medieval scholastics and popularized in Dante’s classic Divine Comedy with its three-tiered, multi-leveled cosmos.

Western religion’s metaphysical character continues to our day when religionists argue with scientists over the origins of the universe, evolution of life on the planet, and the rise of human being. Modern science has not challenged religion’s metaphysical explanations as much as shown them to be an emperor without clothes. God, as the creator and origin of the universe it is religion’s role to describe, has to be re-thought because religion as a metaphysical explanation of the “true order out there” no longer holds. The religious impulse must evolve in its fruition from explanation to something more. God’s will and God’s plan cannot be used with any confidence again as referring to any knowable explanatory structure.

If, though, religion’s aim is not to explain but to find deeper ways to connect (a covenantal understanding), then metaphysics becomes the speculation it truly is; no more and no less. Science, as in cosmology for example, becomes an aid in helping us understand the layers of connection that link the present with the reasoned speculations about original time and future possibility. And God becomes a way to describe the forces immanent in existence that lend themselves to providing a deeper mutuality within creation. Or, in other words, God becomes that Spirit that moves amongst human beings in such a way that they realize their deeper connection with one another and with existence; a shared destiny amongst creation. The “Holy Spirit” moves always, but when it is received and shared by freely choosing human beings it yields a deeper love. “Love thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, and all thy soul” is an invitation into a deeper mutuality with others and with creation, an ever-present possibility in all cultures and times. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is choosing to live here and now in a “Kingdom of God that is at hand,” ordered by the connective tissue of the Spirit. And once an individual dwells there, metaphysical explanations become the secondary speculations which at best they are.