Dissolving the Closed Horizon: A Free-Religious Pentecost
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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One of my great problems with established Christianity is its arc of ‘the Beginning, the Way and the End’—an idea we can also describe as ‘Alpha–Way–Omega’. In this schema, the End or Omega—which can be arrived at only by following the correct, iron-law-governed Way prescribed by the capital-‘C’ Church—is exactly the same as the Beginning. To me, this closed loop has always seemed deeply suffocating; if the end is exactly the same as the beginning, then the world—and our lives in it—is ultimately going absolutely nowhere. Under such a schema, there is nothing new to be discovered, nothing new to be created.
Because it cuts strongly against this arc, I continue to have an interest in the basic myth of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–31) in which, fifty days after Easter, the Spirit descends upon the Apostles, Mary, and other followers of Jesus while they are in Jerusalem celebrating the Feast of Weeks. Here is the opening of the story:
‘And, when the day arrived that completed the fifty after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place; and suddenly there came a noise like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting, and there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them, and they were all filled with a Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them to utter’ (Acts 2:1–4, trans. DBH).
This story has traditionally been taken as the ‘Birthday of the Church’—and for what it is worth, I still take it to be just that—but, as a good and faithful heretic, I have come to see it as the birthday of a quite different kind of Church from the one that eventually manifested as established Christianity. Let me try to explain this by drawing on the German philosopher Ernst Bloch in his book Atheism in Christianity (Chapter 35).
Bloch thinks that in the basic Pentecost myth there is glimpsed a completely new type of creativity that does not necessarily rely upon the existence of an almighty ‘God the Father’ (Pater omnipotens). If we look at the imagery of the tongues of fire parting and coming to rest upon each individual, what happens in the moment of Pentecost is that the idea of God as an external creator entirely disappears from the picture. The single, external divine literally dissolves into ‘all flesh’ and comes to reside inside the people, showing up in each person as a creative, innate, inner guide (spiritus intus docens)—something that in traditional language is often called the Holy Spirit.
To put this into modern terms, Bloch suggests that in the moment of Pentecost it is not the case that all beginnings disappear—as you will see, lower-case ‘a’, infinitely small ‘alpha’ moments remain very much in play—but what does vanish is the capital-‘A’ ‘Alpha’ moment. It is important to realise that the new beginning experienced in the Pentecost moment is not a mythical, one-off creation of the universe before time began, leaving behind a finished, completed world ruled by iron laws. Instead, the story awakens us to something that has always been moving through history: namely, that there always-already exists a fundamental, primordial beginning within everything and within every single moment of everything, something still searching for itself and not yet fully realised. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher D. G. Leahy, reality is always-already ‘Absolute Newness’.
It is precisely this ‘Absolute Newness’ that resonates so deeply with my own free-religious tradition; and to my ears, Bloch and Leahy are describing something akin to ‘the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution’ [自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命], about which the Japanese Unitarian and free-religionist Imaoka Shin’ichirō often spoke.
Read through this lens, Pentecost thus reveals itself as one powerful expression of human awakening to the realisation that the future remains equally open to everything and nothing, to absolute ruin or total fulfilment. This is what Bloch sometimes calls the ‘world-experiment’ (experimentum mundi).
The key point to grasp here is that our journey of life and its ultimate destination are not, and never have been, fixed by ‘eternal, iron laws’, as many ancient cosmic myths suggested. Instead, we live, move, and have our being within a vast realm of forward-looking creative openness and possibility. This is a realm of the future, filled with genuine possibilities for new births, development, and trial attempts at fulfilment.
This means that, for Bloch, Genesis does not happen, once-for-all, at the beginning of time, but in the midst of time. Following the moment of Pentecost, every moment is now experienced as a genesis, an exodus in which we are set free to walk paths that are safer than the known ways.
As he famously wrote in The Principle of Hope, in this active, creative journeying ‘something arises in the world that glimmers in everyone’s childhood memories, yet where no one has ever actually been: home.’ Home, for the free-religionist touched by the creative spirit of Pentecost, is not a static paradise we once left behind, and to which we desire to return; rather, it is the open future we are actively inviting into every moment in the here and now so as always to be lovingly crafting here on earth the cooperative community that has also been called the Pure Land of Buddha, Kingdom of God, or even the Republic of Heaven.
I hope you can now at least glimpse why I think the myth of Pentecost cuts against, and frees us from, all ancient myths about a Creator God who made a flawless, finished universe at the very start of time that will be exactly the same at its end.
I hope you can also see why, when I said at the very beginning that I still take Pentecost to be the ‘Birthday of the Church’, but it is for me the birthday of a quite different kind of Church from that of established Christianity, with has its fixed and final Alpha and Omega and with only a single way, truth, and life joining them together.
And, in a world increasingly populated by people all too ready to insist that to their narrow social, political, and religious ideologies ‘There Is No Alternative’—TINA—it is vital to celebrate the daily, moment-to-moment birth of the universal, free-religious church that intuits a deeper truth: not TINA, but TATIANA—That Astonishingly, There Is An Alternative. It is only the universal, ever-moving spirit of Pentecost—‘the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution’—that has the sufficient gentle power to dissolve all closed horizons. The spirit of Pentecost reminds us that in every moment the script is not yet written, the world experiment is still live, and the door to our true home in this world forever remains wide open and welcoming to all free spirits.
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