Giving a book three stars can either mean you thought the whole thing was just OK, or that you have gone and got yourself into an intense love-hate relationship with it. As you may guess from the length of this review, I find myself in the latter situation.
"Integral Christianity" is an important book, not least because it's the highest-profile attempt so far to frame the world's numerically largest religion within today's best known full-spectrum philosophy of consciousness, Ken Wilber's integral theory. The author has nearly half a century of experience as pastor of the same church in Kansas City, so as you might expect, the emphasis is practical and experiential rather than academic. How well has he succeeded in proposing something that is both truly integral and authentically Christian?
The task Smith has set himself is not an easy one, because despite Wilber's model being the theoretical framework used in Centering Prayer, one of the two leading contemporary Western expressions of the Christian contemplative tradition, Wilber himself is a Buddhist, and draws much more on Eastern religion in his work. His book "Integral Spirituality", for example, only mentions Christianity in passing; a surprising silence, one might think, given that both Wilber himself and most of his readers live in cultures where Christianity is very much the dominant faith. One is entitled to wonder, then, whether an integral Christianity is even possible, and Smith's book is a valuable attempt to find out.
And there's certainly lots to like about it. It's engagingly and clearly written, the author comes across as a genuine and very likeable person, and for those coming from a Christian background it's mostly a good introduction to Wilber's system. Smith's discussion of the more bloodthirsty features of the Old Testament in terms of the development of its authors up through the tribal, warrior and traditional stages of consciousness makes a lot of sense, and there are certain aspects of the teachings and actions attributed to Jesus that fit well with the modern, post-modern and integral stages. Wilber's framework gives an excellent account of the evolution of spiritual traditions and individual believers through time, and Smith uses it to bring out many useful insights into the evolution of Judaism and then Christianity and where the latter might be headed today. The real strength of the book is the material on day-to-day spiritual practice, both for the individual and in suggesting how we might "do church" from an integral perspective. At the heart of Smith's spirituality is an emphasis on the first, second and third-person faces of God, or God as Inner, Intimate and Infinite. Keeping all three of these in view at once is something Christianity has historically not been very good at, and the way the author works this theme out is the best thing about the book for me. If I lived in Kansas City, I would definitely check Smith's church out.
Still, I'm not sure the book delivers what the two words of its title promise, if by "Christian" you mean most of what has passed for orthodoxy in any of the major traditions over the last two millennia. Integral it may be, but whenever there's a clash between the Bible and integral philosophy, it's always clear which way the author is going to jump. Nowhere in the book to we find any specific criticism of Wilber's work or any suggestion that it might not be able to account fully for what we find in Christianity. Smith skilfully delineates the difficulties and distortions that a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible leads one into, but he never addresses the possibility that assuming the inerrancy of Wilber, as he effectively does, might be equally problematic. This forces him into carrying out systematic Procrustean surgery on the corpus of the New Testament.
While acknowledging in passing the difficulty of knowing which, if any, passages in the gospels reflect things Jesus actually said and did, Smith's solution to the dilemma is in practice to assume that whichever teachings appear to be consistent with an integral perspective are authentic, while the others must be inventions by later writers who did not understand Jesus's message properly. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his conclusion is that "Jesus practiced integral philosophy" (p82). In just the same way, others, using similar methodologies but different presuppositions, have "discovered" a historical Jesus who was, respectively, a Cynic philosopher, a magician, an Orthodox rabbi and a revolutionary. The historical value of all this is unclear; whenever we carry out such an exercise, we risk making Jesus in our own image. It's far from obvious that Smith has avoided that trap, and it's doubly important that he should do so given the priority he explicitly assigns to the (supposed) words of Jesus over other parts of the Bible.
This partial approach to the content of Christianity is, in my view, the book's biggest failing. Roughly speaking, Smith's New Testament seems to consist of most of the descriptions of Jesus's ministry in the four canonical gospels and a few carefully chosen passages from Acts and the epistles, with the addition of the gospel of Thomas, for which, against the bulk of scholarly opinion, he assumes a very early date. All the rest is either rejected or, more often, simply ignored. Thus the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are never discussed beyond a passing dismissal (p246) of the idea that he might have died for our sins. Other major doctrines such as the ascension and the second coming are not mentioned either. Some attention is given to the fall (p204-5), but here, Smith sides with the Gnostics: the serpent was telling the truth, and "awakening to the knowledge of good and evil was exactly what needed to happened" (sic).
Smith does assent to the divinity of Jesus, but only in the sense that all of us are divine by virtue of carrying the image of God within us. To garner support for this equality of divinity from the text of the Bible, he has to resort to some rather dubious manoevres. He makes much (p209) of John 10:34, where Jesus responds to his opponents' accusations of blasphemy by quoting the words of Psalm 82, "You are gods". However, if one reads both passages in context, it is far from clear that they will support the interpretation he puts on them, and the rest of John's gospel continually emphasizes the special status of Jesus. Even more problematically, Smith quotes Hebrews 2:17 (p207) as saying "He was like us in every respect", which it does not; the Greek text literally says that "he had to be made like the brothers in all things", presupposing that initially he was not like them, and it then goes on to tell us that this was in order that he might make atonement for the sins of the people, which also requires his uniqueness, and which, as we have seen, is not a topic that Smith seems to want to discuss.
Similar remarks could be made about the other passages Smith cites on this topic; yes, they do teach that all of us are "participants in the divine nature" as 2 Peter puts it, but that does not at all erase the clear distinctions that the same authors repeatedly make between Jesus and the rest of humanity. Context is everything, because as the saying goes, a text without a context is a pretext.
One consequence of this selectivity is that Smith has a hard time knowing what to do with most of what's in the epistles. He asserts, rather bizarrely, that "the rest of the New Testament [after the gospels] is important because it is the interpretation of Jesus' life and teachings that came to dominate in the three centuries after Jesus." How can this possibly be, when the epistles contain no explicit references at all to anything that the gospels record Jesus as having taught, nor to his miracles, nor indeed to anything the gospels report him as doing prior to the week of his crucifixion? Their teaching about Jesus focuses on other matters altogether, but those are, more or less, the topics listed above that Smith prefers not to deal with.
Despite these radical departures from any traditional version of the faith, Smith's "integral Christianity" still comes across as distinctively Protestant. The closest he comes to acknowledging anything of value that is specific to Catholicism is that the Mass can be of value "if one is already practiced in moving to an elevated inwards state of consciousness". The Reformation was "brilliant" in the way that it "used the Bible to wrestle control of Christianity from the Roman Catholic hierarchy", but it "did not go far enough" (p236). Any consideration that something might have been lost as well as gained in the process is altogether absent. So much for all the centuries of Catholic tradition, reflection and theology. Indeed, "tradition" for Smith is, when it comes down to it, a decidedly negative word; traditional Christianity, with its preoccupations with awkward matters such as sin, the fall, the atonement and physical resurrection, is located only halfway up the ladder of consciousness, and now we have integral philosophy, we can leave such things behind, focus on the future rather than the past, and move on up to more "evolved" levels (p236). This unrelenting optimism has its attractive qualities, but I did miss any discussion of the realities of suffering, poverty and impending ecological disaster. One of the things that makes me most cautious about Smith's brand of Christianity, and the integral movement in general, is that its appeal tends to be overwhelmingly to affluent, educated, healthy, cosmopolitan Westerners. It's easy enough to be "world centric" when you can hop on a plane to visit any part of the world you choose to; harder, perhaps, if you're a factory worker in Indonesia or a resident of a Latin American slum.
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