Being and Becoming

Looking at the Wall Street Journal this morning an ad caught my eye: “How Jesus Became God.” That sort of headline will snag me, to be sure. It belongs to a category of icons that signal to me the entire thrust or essence of something without my having to expend even a tiny bit of energy to know whether I’m interested or not.

The ad is promoting The Great Courses (The Teaching Company, LLC), and the professor who teaches this course is Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It seems to me that, given a forced choice, people may be divided into those who are for Being and those who are for Becoming. Count me among the former. I assume that those who vote for Becoming (certainly the inclination of modernist thought) can also have their arms twisted hard enough to confess that Being has some role to play in reality, albeit it is but a momentary sort of thing before becoming has changed it into something else which, itself, is getting ready to become yet something else again in a nanosecond or so. Those who vote for Being do not deny Becoming but certainly rank it as something hierarchically lower than Being. Thus they assert the reality of something absolute.

Now that title acts as a badge of modernism, which is marked by paradox—like the Liar’s Paradox. If Jesus can become God, God is evolving. That’s been done more extensively by Hegel, but to do justice to Hegel in a Great Course would cost the buyer more than the $79.95 (marked down from $269.95) to learn how Jesus evolved. Ehrman describes himself as an agnostic (from the viewpoint of knowledge) and an atheist (from the viewpoint of belief) (link), but certainly not in the ad or on his own website. So why does he bother with this subject? Is Christianity so irresistible even to unbelievers? Or is the problem that once you have a PhD and Master of Divinity, you’ve got to talk about something?

The Clash of Being and Becoming

The church needs to recognize that things have changed and times are changing and people are changing.

     [Frank Schaefer, former Methodist Minister]

Everything flows, nothing stands still.

     [Heraclitus of Ephesus]

The trigger for this note is the first quote. A story in the New York Times this morning relates a conflict within the Methodist Church. Frank Schaefer, one of its ministers, was expelled for violating the rules of the Methodist Book of Discipline; the context was gay marriage. The Rev. Schaefer clearly voiced his own convictions, no doubt feeling that they are self-evident and should therefore command universal assent. But that is because we are now living in an age in which Becoming has achieved at least a temporary dominance.

Having been brought up in a tradition in which Being is the ultimate anchor and reference, I’ve found it odd that our times are so enamored of Becoming. It’s everywhere. It neatly matches the spirit of an Age of Progress. That age itself takes its inspiration from the theory of evolution—which seemingly provided, in the nineteenth century, a plausible alternative to explain Life, at minimum, and, by extension the whole of reality as capable of explanation without God. Heraclitus, who anticipated the rise of Hellenism by some handful of decades, gave Becoming its brief motto; he had no access to Darwinism yet, original or neo, but still believed that reality had always been, would always be, but never the same at any moment. Job One, therefore, is adaptation—and the early bird catches the juiciest worms.

I’m speaking here of fashions—fashions in thought. “Being” is associated with God, “becoming” with matter. Nothing wrong with becoming, per se, of course. It’s a matter of observation, another way of saying that energy is present and acts in Time and Place. No time, no change. My musing centers, rather, on the promotion of this concept to a very high rank. Why is that? Perhaps because in our current social life the transcendental is effectively silenced and mere motion and change have been promoted and are evoked to justify change. Cultural epochs are marked by one or the other side of this pairing; Becoming is king now, but we are moving toward Being again.

I think this because I am convinced that we’re now passing through what might be called an anti-Renaissance; the twentieth century represented an important segment of it. Therefore philosophers—Whitehead comes to mind and, for me, also David Bohm, the physicist, in his cosmological writings—are struggling in some way to reconcile Becoming with Being. But, such is our time, they begin by looking at physical reality first in their attempts at explaining the “mystery.” The mystery is consciousness, agency. They are headed back toward a comprehensive answer but do not quite arrive.

The curious thing is that Being and Becoming are readily reconciled if one begins with consciousness, with agency, the most fundamental experience all of us share. Trying to explain what we are, we discover a hierarchy in which Being is more fundamental than Becoming, hence on a higher plain. And even that which always flows and moves must first be before it changes and thus because something else that still is. Even the flux is, first of all, before it is transformed. Reason, which is irreducibly part of awareness, then leads us to add another dimension to reality beyond the three of space and time. And with a transcending dimension added, the conflict disappears. Bohm discovered an “unconditioned order,” read intelligence, as a complement to the “conditioned order,” read matter. Whitehead discovered an evolving God. Close. But we’re not there yet. Anti-Renaissance still has a ways to go.