SOMETHING TRULY REMARKABLE MAY BE HAPPENING, but it seems to be as quiet as a whisper, as invisible as a breeze. Christianity appears to be in the midst of another cycle of revolutionary change, the fourth one in its history by my count. Some may want to call it another Reformation, but it feels more like a Transformation.
If we were to label the time of Jesus and the early Jesus movement the Formation, then the first cycle of historical change in Christianity, which occurred “in” (but also before and beyond) the 4th century C.E, could be called the Conformation. This was the time of Constantine and the ecumenical councils, when the church seldom confronted domination systems anymore, but instead, gradually conformed to imperial structures, expectations and power. Thus, the institutional Church came into its own.
A second historical change in Christianity occurred in the 11th century, when a variety of political and theological disputes led the Eastern churches and the Western churches to break communion. The so-called Great Schism separated the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church. These two branches of the universal (that is, catholic) Christian tradition have continued to flow in separate channels ever since. In keeping with our “formation” theme, let’s call this change the Deformation.
The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century was the third cycle of historic change in Christianity, this one shattering the institutional and theological unity of the Western tradition. Sensing that the institutional church had strayed too far from the true teachings and practices of Jesus, the early communities and the Bible, the Protestants pursued reforms in the hope of returning to the pure, original tradition. The unforeseen consequence of the Reformation has been an apparently never-ending series of protests against ever new institutional abuses leading to the splintering of the Christian tradition into an unimaginable number of distinct sects and factions.
This brings us up to date, more or less. The early Formation of Christian traditions and communities gradually coalesced into an institutional Conformation, which eventually split — in what I’m calling the Deformation — into two streams of tradition, one of which later exploded into a multitude of factions during and after the Reformation. That’s an original period of Formation, followed by three successive eras of historical change: the Conformation, the Deformation, and the Reformation.
Now, the Christian tradition seems to be working its way through a fourth time of historic change, at least in the West. Like the Reformation, our time has its eyes on the origins of Christianity. Unlike the Reformation, however, our current interest in origins isn’t an attempt to return to an imagined primal purity. Instead, we’re experiencing what might be called either a return of the repressed (to borrow from Freud) or a regression in service of transformation (to borrow loosely from Jung).
As the reductive impulses of modern criticism give way to the transgressive and holistic impulses of “postmodernity,” more and more Christians are beginning to rediscover depths of meaning in the Christian tradition by re-experiencing generally forgotten spiritual practices, by re-evaluating modern (mis)understandings of what Jesus might have been up to, and by re-discovering the symbolic dimensions of the biblical, theological and mystical language(s) Christians use to share the good news.
Ecumenical visions are reaching truly universal horizons, to the point of including all human spirituality and all forms of religion. Contemplation, meditation and related practices are breaching monastic walls — from the East, from the West, and from Asia — expanding our minds and our souls. Paul’s references to “Christ Jesus” as an apparently unique individual, are revealing themselves to be proclamations of the universal Cosmic Christ incarnating in the historical Jesus.
So many profound changes are underway in Christianity that I’m only scratching the surface.
Yet, all these changes seem to point us in the same direction: toward transformation, onto the path of metanoia (not repentance, but pushing beyond one’s limited mind). It’s the path of faith, hope, and love — on which faith means trusting the process, hope means sensing goodness at the end, and love means embracing all of creation, all along the way.
Distinct voices in Christianity have begun to call us to walk the inclusive path of justice, the gracious path of righteousness, which is also and at the same time the enchanted path leading to deep meaning and experiential knowledge (gnosis), to spiritual growth, soulful abundance and wholeness.
So, maybe it’s not too much to say, at last, Christianity might now be making the transition from the divisiveness of the Reformation to the inclusivity of the Transformation. Amen.
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