What Does Integral Christianity Look Like?

Introducing the Integral Worldview
Growing Up in the Jesus Path Series - Part Seven

Integral philosopher Ken Wilber, in over 25 books, created the first composite understanding of everything we know about human potential from around the world and put it into a comprehensive global map about spiritual, psychological, and social growth. It can show you where you have been, where you are, where you might want to go, and how to get there!

He has summed it up as Grow Up, Wake Up, Clean Up, Open Up, and Show Up. Growing Up is moving through the stages of developmental maturing. Waking Up comes from doing spiritual practice. Cleaning Up is doing shadow work or therapy. Opening Up is developing close relationships. And Showing Up is serving humanity in the world. A complete package for the fullest living!

Wilber has also made a new place for authentic spirituality in the modern world today. He can do this because he is a spiritual intellectual, making spiritual growth a centerpiece in his developmental map. Although an American who practices Buddhism, his thinking understands, includes, and affirms Christianity as well as the other great religious traditions of the world. Academics tend to shun him because of this.

Ken has incorporated other valuable systems, such as Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness and Spiral Dynamics, initially developed by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan. The STAGES model of adult development, a new framework created by Terri O’Fallon, and the work of Susanne Cook-Greuter are also making significant contributions to understanding these levels of development.

To use Gebser’s terminology, we are currently moving through a mutation or a leap into the next step in our collective development. The German philosopher Georg Feuerstein describes Gebser’s integral structure as “a consciousness of the spiritual.”

These are more than nice ideas. They are invitations into a flow of awareness some of us call integral, which is just beginning to emerge in the general population.

Integral means bringing together and strategically linking apparently contradictory or seemingly divergent worldviews, concepts, and practices to create a realistic, workable, fluid, and dynamic big picture. Does anyone today think that the world doesn’t need more of that?

In Integral Integrative, notice the integration of all things in the two circles of welcoming together with the five connecting circles. The mind sees them together in the physical realm.

In Integral Holistic, notice everything in Oneness in the global image while encompassing and valuing all previous stages.

Integral

Integral sees that everything is evolving. The integral stage of development has been emerging in the last 50 years and currently comprises about 1 percent of the world’s population and perhaps 5% in the Western World. We see integral in Ken Wilber’s “Spectrum of Consciousness,” James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” Jorge Ferrer’s transpersonal psychology, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere,” physicist David Bohm’s theories; Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields, Gandhi’s ideas of pluralistic harmony, Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision, Mandela’s pluralistic integration, the White Wizard from Lord of the Rings, and Dumbledore from Harry Potter.

In this stage of development, the integration of the best and healthiest of everything occurs. Chaos, change, and uncertainty are acceptable states. Life revolves around flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality. Integral uses all the previous levels, including Gebser’s archaic, magic, mythic, and mental structures held in transparent unity. It’s a holistic state that keeps the interwoven forces in balance.

As you may have noticed from the diagrams I use, there are currently two levels of integral consciousness that Wilber identifies – integrative and holistic.

Richard Rohr calls these wisdom or nondual consciousness levels. At these “second-tier” stages, you can feel at home anywhere with anyone.

“If you love people, you have no time to judge them.” Mother Teresa

Here are some of the values listed by Spiritual Dynamics Integral for this first phase of integral called Integral Integrative. If you can, read each one slowly in a devotional way to let it sink in.

An overarching view of living systems
View life as a chaotic organism in which change is a constant and in which insecurity is an acceptable way of living
Integrative structures and evolutionary streams
The need to develop natural living environments that support human evolution in a step-by-step and phased way
Integration of head, heart, and gut feeling
Focused on both process and content
Moves freely in different value systems
Change is a constant: it’s emergent and about long-term thinking
Personal freedom without harming others or nature
Thinks and acts from an inner-directed core

In Integral Integrative, when new forms of individualism begin to break up and fail to yield the kind of cooperation necessary for humanity’s survival, Integral Holistic can arise. Integral Holistic sees the world as alive and evolving. It is holistic and kosmocentric (Wilber uses the word Kosmos to mean more than just the physical cosmos). An Integral Holistic person lives from their individual self, self in a community, and transpersonal self. Beck and Cowan talk of spirituality resurging in Integral Holistic (called turquoise by them) as a unifying, cosmic force. It is just beginning to emerge now.

Scholar and researcher Jon Freeman says that in these last two integrative holistic stages, “we have entered a realm beyond analysis, non-linear in its trajectory and lacking in fixed rules. Control is now out of the question, replaced by flex and flow. We are required to exercise awareness, replace our fixed rules with principles — maybe several at a time — and make our choices in the moment, with the awareness that they may have to be revised.”

Buddhist philosopher Safwan Zabalawi says that yin and yang within the spiritual realm “refer to seemingly opposite and distinct phenomena, yet together form oneness. This is the teaching of Nonduality. Different characters or things (female/male, night/day, birth/death) are distinct from each other, yet are inseparable, hence not Two but not One. They are not One and the same, but together they form a wholeness and completeness. According to Nichiren Buddhism, it is the Mystic Law of Life that manifests itself in two seemingly different phases but together they express oneness.”

Here are some of the values listed by Spiritual Dynamics Integral for this second phase of integral we are calling Integral Holistic. Again, If you can, read each one slowly, even devotionally, to give yourself time to digest it.

Synergy between all forms and forces of life
Surrender, acceptance, and natural joy
Integrates instincts, intuition, and cognition
Makes energetic connections
Contemplative — a clear consciousness and inner peace
A holistic and collective consciousness
Cosmic spirituality and transpersonal
Integration of all there is, with everything that was and everything that will be. A vision is translated into an integral approach to life and an accompanying practice.

My friend, Corey deVos, Editor-in-Chief of Integral Life, speaking of Integral Holistic, says,

[This] is a mature integral view, one that sees not only healthy hierarchy but also the various quadrants of human knowledge, expression, and inquiry (at the minimum: I, we, and it). While teal [integral integrative] worldviews tend to be secular, turquoise [integral holistic] is the first to begin to integrate Spirit as a living force in the world, manifested through any or all of the 3 Faces of God:

I: the “No self” or “witness” of Buddhism;
We/thou: the “great other” of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam.
It: “Web of Life” seen in Taoism, Pantheism, [and Christian panentheism].

Notice that all of these integral values inform our values at ICN

The Bible

The battle about whether it will be understood traditionally and cling to rigid, literal interpretation is over. Most of its members now accept the place of modern rational inquiry in the writing and preservation of biblical documents while also discerning the more radical elements of this approach.

The battle about whether the church will discard the Bible as unusable is also over. Instead, the Bible is studied, referred to, and valued as an indispensable element in the Jesus path. Of course, there are still varying viewpoints about the Bible, but no one is angry about them.

The little boy asked his mother the difference between pagans and Christians. She replied, “Christians are the ones who fight about the Bible.” Integral Christianity has given up fighting about the Bible.

The Bible is now seen as a fascinating account of the evolutionary process of the spiritual path encountered in Judaism and Christianity.

Jesus

The integral lens sees a mystical reformer, prophetic Jesus who fully realized and manifested his divine identity. He includes the best of the preceding Jewish paths and transcends the no-longer-adequate elements. Jesus is the personification of the Christ consciousness. While Jesus defines God for Christians, he does not confine God for Christians who see God at work in all spiritual traditions. In the Christian path, Jesus is the prototype for the new humanity, modeling what it looks like for a person to embrace and express their own inherent humanity and divinity. He is now a Living Presence with us all the time.

Prayer

Integral prayer comes in three different dimensions that flow from each of the Three Faces of God.

Prayer in 3rd person practice is reflection, contemplation, and meditation into the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us.

Prayer in 2nd person practice is communion with God as the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us. This is with forms such as God as Divine Mother and Father, Jesus, Mary, Sophia, other saints and spiritual presences near and dear to you.

In 1st person practice, prayer is the release of sacred energy from within us as the Inner Face of God-Being-Us directed to others present or any situation in the world. This can emerge progressively in three forms of integral prayer, forming the acronym HID:

• Heart space feelings expressed to one another.
• Impressions that emerge in meditative prayer that encourage, strengthen, and comfort.
• Deep words, visions, sensations, intuitions that emerge from an altered state.

Sin and Salvation

The integral church has taken the word sin back to one of its original meanings: to miss the mark. However, the integral church probably does not use the actual word “sin” at all. Sin has become loaded with two millennia of abusive religious baggage that often invites self-loathing, a focus on sexuality, and unhealthy introspection (Martin Luther, for example). The word sin may be replaced by the idea of identifying with our ego rather than our true Self about our interior life. In exterior culture, sin might be called “oppression.” Sin is manifesting a wrong identity in unloving attitudes and actions. Sin is not being true to our Divine Self.

In thinking about “salvation,” integral church has left sin/sacrifice/atonement theology behind because they are seen as punitive, vengeful, and radically less than Christ-like. Instead, salvation is coming home to the spiritual reality of the universe. We are all beloved children of God.

Heaven and Hell

Gehenna in Jesus’ day — the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem “where the maggots never die, and the fire never goes out.” Mark 9:48

Gehenna today — a beautiful park just outside Jerusalem.

According to Jesus, the word Gehenna (the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem), which we translate as hell, is garbage dump existence. Jesus never connected hell with what one believed or if you were his follower or not. He joined Gehenna-existence with being unloving, not unbelieving. Hell was Jesus’ radical commentary on those who oppress others. Over thirty passages in the New Testament say that no one will be left behind in eternal hell but will ultimately be brought into eternity with God. (See my brochure, Hell? No!)

Kingdom of Heaven

The Kingdom of Heaven is now understood as the great nondual vision of Jesus that there is no separation between us and God, or between us and one another. Jesus did not come preaching Christianity. He came preaching that the Kingdom was at hand. The traditional church believes the goal of the spiritual life is to get us into heaven. The integral church believes that the goal is to get heaven into us. Or, more accurately, heaven is already and always present within us, and our goal is to become present to that reality.

The Mystical

Jesus was, first of all, a mystic. Unfortunately, what he was and taught morphed into a doctrine-based faith that dismisses the mystical. Mystics today have often had to leave the church in favor of the “spiritual but not religious” or Eastern religions to find a home. However, Integral Christianity welcomes mystics as those who experience the deeper state of existence beyond the ordinary world. Initially, integral integrative tends to have practitioners without a collective. Moving on to Integral Holistic such as practiced in ICN is communal mysticism as well as private.

Strengths and Limitations

I have explored some of the strengths of integral above. It is too early to see the limitations of integral, although, like all structure stages, it will become deficient and limited — and the call will come again to move on to the subsequent worldview.

I close with the reminder that integral believes in stage rights. Each stage has its enduring strengths, which can be valued, and its limitations — which can be transcended. Every person has a right to hold the worldview they have, although not the right to impose it on others.

For reflection . . .

1. In looking back over the various parts of an integral viewpoint, which do you resonate with most?

2. Which dimensions of integral seem most challenging to you?

EvolutionPaul SmithJune 18, 2022Growing Up, Evolution, Development4 Comments