May/June 2003

The Next Worldview: Spirit at the Core of Everything

by Walter Wink

This essay could have been written by any number of people, from a number of different traditions. I speak as a Christian, to Christians, but those of you who are not Christians will probably recognize what I am going to talk about: perhaps you will find the conversation useful, too.

Some of us Christians want to recreate Christianity, building the new from the old. Others have excavated lost emphases and powerful new visions squarely at the heart of the tradition, visions that can revive atrophied faith. Still others have formed alternative communities biblically based but free from rigid dogmatism or domination.

What holds all these inchoate efforts together is a profound intuition, articulated by the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, that our boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing.

And nothing

happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…

- Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life? [1]

What Jiménez grasped was the emergence of a new worldview, a way of viewing the world that is not identical to Christianity, or any other religion for that matter, but which is able to deliver us from the aridity and poverty of materialism, and is fostering a new spirituality that will make mystics of many.

For some time now I have wanted to expand the discussion of "worldviews" with which I began both Engaging the Powers and The Powers That Be. For understanding worldviews is one key to liberating people from unconscious control by the Powers. Our worldviews determine to a large extent what we can believe about life, faith, and the very cosmos. If we are unaware of what worldviews claim our allegiance, they will continue to determine our behavior in ways to which we are simply blind. At a far deeper level than ideologies or myths, worldviews tend to dictate what we are able to believe. They are not just the presuppositions by which we think, but the very foundation of thought itself. Consequently, people who have difficulty believing in prayer, or spiritual healing, or the life of the spirit, or God, are, in my experience, suffering far more from a worldview problem than a theological problem.

What are worldviews?

Worldviews are the fundamental presuppositions about reality, the elementary bases of thought for an entire epoch. A worldview dictates the way whole societies perceive the world. It is neutral, in the sense that it provides only the presuppositions with which to think, not the thoughts themselves.

Worldviews provide a picture of the nature of things: where is heaven, where is earth, what is visible and what invisible, what is real and what unreal. As I am using the term, worldviews are not philosophies, or theologies, or even myths or tales about the origin of things. We might think of them rather as the foundation of the house of our minds. On that foundation we erect the walls and roof, which are the myths we live by, the symbolic understandings of our world. The furnishings - the stuff to sit on and lie down on and eat with - these are our theologies and personal philosophies. People notice the sofa and rugs (our theologies), they comment on the structure (the key myths), but no one notices the foundation (our worldview). It is covered, hidden from view. In the very act of opposing another person's thought, we usually share the same worldview. Thus, during the Cold War, the Russians and the Americans shared a similar worldview, with no comprehension that we were so alike. Here are five worldviews that have had an impact on Western societies.

The Traditional Worldview. This is the worldview reflected in the Bible, and, for that matter, just about all ancient societies. In this conception, everything earthly has its heavenly counterpart, and everything heavenly has its earthly counterpart. Every event is thus a combination of both dimensions of reality. Everything has a visible and an invisible aspect. If war begins on earth, then there must be, at the same time, war in heaven between the angels of the nations in the heavenly council. Likewise, events initiated in heaven are mirrored on earth. This is a symbolic way of saying that every material reality has a spiritual dimension, and every spiritual reality has its physical consequences. There can be no event or entity that does not consist, simultaneously, of the visible and the invisible.

There is a beautiful image of the traditional worldview in the Book of Revelation. It reads:

When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given them. . . . Another angel with a golden censer came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth; and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. . . . Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets made ready to blow them (Rev. 8:1-5).

This is a magnificent picture of the indispensability of prayer within the Traditional Worldview. Normally, events "come down" on us from the mighty systems and structures, corporations and nation-states that determine so much of social reality. People experience this overwhelming power simply as fate. But John indicates that when believers pray on earth, the power of fate is broken. The Powers force us by their sheer size and power to do their bidding. But rather than things "coming down," these prayers rise from the earth and change what subsequently happens. The angel at the altar of incense mingles the prayers of the saints with coals of fire and hurls them upon the earth. Now something is going to happen in history that would not have happened had they not prayed. In short, history belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being.

The problem for us in the modern world is that we know the world turns. There is no "up" in the world any longer. That may seem a small matter; most of us are able to accommodate the fiction of "up" in order to interpret Scripture and tradition. But the fact is that we can no longer let down the full weight of faith on a spatial metaphor that we no longer believe is true. This Traditional Worldview was held not only by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians and Chinese, but it is still held by large numbers of people today. There is nothing uniquely biblical about this worldview. It just happened to have been the view current at the time the Bible was written. That means that there is no reason why the Bible cannot be interpreted within the framework of other worldviews as well.

The Spiritualist Worldview. Perhaps this should more accurately be called the Gnostic or Dualistic Worldview. In the second century ce a new worldview emerged, one that radically challenged the Judeo-Christian notion that the creation is basically good. In this worldview, creation was the Fall. Spirit is good, matter is evil. This world is a prison into which spirits have fallen from the good heaven. Having become trapped in bodies, these spirits became subject to the deformed and ignorant Powers that rule the world of matter. Consequently, sex, the body, and earthly life generally were often considered evil. The religious task was to rescue one's spirit from the flesh and the Powers, and regain that spiritual realm from which one has fallen.

 This worldview is historically associated with religions like Gnosticism and Manichaeism, the Orphic mysteries, and the sexual attitudes we associate, however unfairly, with Puritanism. (After all, the Puritans did populate New England!) It continues to be a powerful factor today in spiritualism, sexual hang-ups, asceticism, eating disorders, negative self-images, and the rejection of one's body. The UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects) phenomenon may reflect this longing to escape our planet for a better world. This longing was literally depicted by the Heaven's Gate cult, which committed mass suicide in hope of flying up, bodiless, to a spacecraft hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet that would take them "home." The members not only pledged celibacy, but some of the men, their leader included, had been castrated in pursuit of their ideal of androgyny. The body was, they believed, a disposable container to be shed when they return to the world from which they came. [2]

But the spiritualist worldview is also reflected in those forms of Christian faith that use asceticism to mortify the flesh, or which place all the emphasis on getting to heaven when one leaves this "vale of tears."

The Materialist Worldview. This view is, in many ways, the antithesis of the world-rejection of spiritualism. The Materialist Worldview claims that there is no heaven, no spiritual world, no God, no soul; nothing but what can be known through the five senses and reason. The spiritual world is an illusion. There is no higher self; we are mere complexes of matter, and when we die we cease to exist except as the chemicals and atoms that once constituted us. Matter is ultimate and eternal; we are ephemeral.

There is a "soft" or popular materialism associated with consumerism, self-gratification, and an absence of spiritual values. And there is a "hard" or philosophical materialism that sees the universe as devoid of spirit. Soft materialism is popularized by the media, by the unashamed espousal of greed, by the worship of the dollar in its temple the mall, by the belief that owning things satisfies, and by the substitution of fads for values.

"Hard" or philosophical materialism is far more insidious. Here are three representative statements by evangelists for hard materialism. The physicist Steven Weinberg states, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." [3] The biologist Jacques Monod comments, "Humanity lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes." [4] And biologist Richard Dawkins reports, almost with glee, that the central purpose of evolution is the survival of DNA, not of the beings that are DNA's temporary expression. "The universe we observe," he writes, "has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." [5]

Since the universe is itself meaningless, we must create our own meanings. But of course, these meanings are meaningless. They cannot be regarded as true because we made them up. But truth is coherence with reality. It is the very foundation of science, without which scientists would falsify data at will. [6] If the universe is indifferent to our crimes, why not be criminals? If the world is pitilessly indifferent, why not commit suicide? If it is all pointless, what is the point of belaboring the dreary point? If there is no evil, why should we strive to be good?

These scientists are simply living off the capital of Greek and Christian civilization. Their "scientism" is not science at all, but simply bad philosophy. The irony is that the new physics has now gone all the way through materialism and out the other side, into a world in which matter no longer exists, but only energy-events, patterned energy, spirit-matter. Meanwhile, some scientists seem to be going the opposite direction, back toward a reductionist science that the many physicists abandoned with the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics.

The Supernaturalist Worldview. In reaction to materialism, theologians invented the supernatural realm. Acknowledging that this higher realm could not be known by the senses, they conceded earthly reality to modern science and preserved a privileged "spiritual" realm immune to confirmation or refutation. The materialists were only too glad to concede to the theologians the "heavenly" realm, since they did not believe it existed anyway. This meant splitting reality in two, and hermetically sealing off theology from the discoveries of science.

An extreme example of this split is a friend who was a doctoral student in geology at Columbia University. As a religious fundamentalist he believed on Sundays that the universe was created in 4004 bce, but during the rest of the week he accepted the theory that it was created around fifteen billion years ago! That is only a flagrant form of the split accepted by the vast majority of twentieth century theologians. In a world inundated with scientific data and discoveries, most theologians simply were not interested in science.

Terrified that the ground under their feet was eroding, theologians proposed the slogan that many students learned in seminary: "Science tells us how the world was created, theology tells us why." This is slick, but it is basically a schizoid view of reality.

The "how" and "why" distinction is spurious. As Bruce Bradshaw points out, science and religion ask different kinds of "why" questions. To the extent that they address different "why" questions, science and religion are not dichotomous or competitive. Instead, science serves religion by focusing on the intermediate "why" questions. The answers to these intermediate questions shed light on the ultimate "why" questions. [7]

The price paid for this uneasy truce with science was the loss of a sense of the whole and the unity of heavenly and earthly aspects of existence. Science and religion cannot be separated. The heavens and the earth reveal the glory of God, and it is the divine vocation of scientists to uncover the majesty of God.

An Integral Worldview. The great thing that our boat has struck, down there in the depths, is the Integral Worldview. In the United States and Europe, this new worldview has been emerging over the past century from a number of streams of thought. These include the new physics; the reflections of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on the unconscious; the ecstatic vision of paleontologist/priest Teilhard de Chardin; the thought of process philosophers Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin (the latter has been especially helpful in my development of this paper); Paul Tillich's "ground of being;" liberation and feminist theology; the writings of theologians Morton Kelsey, Thomas Berry, and Matthew Fox; the reflections of ethicists William Stringfellow and Jacques Ellul; the writings of scientists Brian Swimme, Ian Barbour, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacock, and Fritjof Capra; Black religion; Celtic spirituality; the engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh and Joanna Macy; the Sufism of Rumi and Hafiz; many Native American religions; and mystics of every period and persuasion.

Like the traditional worldview, this integral view of reality sees everything as having an outer and an inner aspect - but these aspects are differently aligned.

In Revelation 1-3, for example, "angels" are the spirituality or the ethos or the corporate personality of a church. Those of us who go from church to church recognize how different the spirituality of different congregations is. Sometimes you enter and immediately sense something terribly pathological. At other churches you feel a palpable impression of warmth, love, and acceptance. And this is true of every corporate entity: they all have a corporate culture or spirit or personality at the core of their reality. This spirit does not exist apart from its physical manifestations: its building, personnel, trucks, computers, territory, demographics, and so on. In the Integral Worldview, it is the unity of outer and inner that characterizes our experience.

 Heaven and earth, in this worldview, are seen as two dimensions of a single reality. The Integral Worldview affirms spirit at the core of every created thing. But this inner spiritual reality is inextricably related to an outer form or physical manifestation. This new worldview takes into account all the aspects of the Traditional Worldview, but combines them in a different way. Both worldviews use spatial imagery. The idea of heaven as "up" is a natural, almost unavoidable way of indicating transcendence. But that's all it is, a metaphor. For if the world turns, there is no longer an "up" anywhere in the universe, just as on a map north is no more actually "up" than south is actually "down."

Few of us in the West who have been deeply touched by modern science can actually think that God, the angels, and departed spirits are somewhere in the sky, as most ancients literally did. The Integral Worldview reconceives that spatial metaphor not as "up" but as "within," within not only people but within institutions and organizations, within corporations, within even states (see, for example, the angels of nations in Daniel 10).

In the Integral Worldview, soul permeates the universe. God is not just within us, but within everything. The universe is suffused with the divine. This is not pantheism, where everything is God, but panentheism (pan, everything; en, in; theos, God), where every thing is in God and God in every thing. Spirit is at the heart of everything, even down to the smallest particle of spirit-matter. Hence all creatures are potential revealers of God. This Integral Worldview is no more essentially "religious" than the Traditional Worldview, but I believe it makes the biblical data more intelligible for people today than any other available worldview, the Traditional one included.

This Integral Worldview is also evident in the Native American representation of Sky Father and Earth Mother, and in the Buddhist yin/yang figure. It is given modern representation by the Moebius strip, which can be demonstrated by taking a belt, forming a loop, and then rotating one end of the strip 180 degrees, or onto its back side. If you follow the loop with your finger, it will be now on the inside, now on the outside, and inside again, and out, and so on, illustrating the intrinsic unity of inner and the outer. This is a fascinating metaphor for the Integral Worldview, which sees all of life as an oscillation between visible and invisible, spirit and body, inwardness and activity, contemplation and social engagement. So the goal is not to have some people practicing mysticism, while others engage in social action. Rather, we wish to bring those two aspects together, both in the life of individuals and their communities.

Quantum physics cannot, and never will be able, to prove the existence of God or eternal life. But just as theologians can use metaphors from science in order to make the Integral Worldview intelligible, so also, scientists can use metaphors from theology or poetry. After all, "God," too, is a metaphor, in the sense that all language fails in the presence of the final and absolute Mystery - the God beyond all Gods - the God beyond even our God. These metaphors and images drawn from science are transient, and quickly replaced by others. Nevertheless, they are invaluable, because they help us to hold science and faith together in a single reality. It is our task to leap nimbly from one image to the next, abandoning what is no longer useful.

For instance, in the worldview of the new physics, everything is related. All the matter in the universe derives from the Big Bang. We are all one matter. Our bodies are virtually all water, and every drop of water in our bodies has been in every spring, every river, every lake, and every ocean during the last four and a half billion years on earth. We are all one water. [8] Each breath we breathe contains a quadrillion (10¹⁵) atoms, writes G. Murchie, and more than a million of these atoms have been breathed personally sometime by each and every person on Earth. [9] We are all one breath. But we also breathe the dust of all those beings who have been vaporized in our warfare, our death camps, and our gulags. We are all one body, for good or ill. Likewise, attraction is characteristic of almost everything, from gravity to love. We are all one embrace. If ever a creature should feel at home in our universe, it is human beings.

If everything is related, then the self is coextensive with the universe. We have a heat shield around the body, and an electromagnetic field as well, that can be detected by incredibly precise instruments. Theoretically, these fields (and no doubt others) extend out infinitely, in the sense that there is no point at which they can be said to have ceased to exist, though they become so minuscule that they no longer register on experimental instruments. If, then, we are coextensive with all things, we also interpenetrate each other. We are all one being.

Yet the materialists would have us believe that we are alien to what is. Quite the contrary, everything interpenetrates everything else. Sperm and ovum unite, becoming related. We are already related to our mother in her womb. We enter life with relationships of every kind. Babies cannot even survive without touch. We are not isolated billiard balls knocking up against each other as if we were essentially separate and alone. Rather, we are a hive of six billion humans, always already related. We must be taught to be alienated, to hate, to kill. This to me is the profound sadness and waste of the existentialists, with their painful angst at having to create meaning in a meaningless universe. Sartre said hell is other people. But try living without them. Other people are hell only when they are deprived of genuine relatedness, attraction, and love.

One of the greatest blows to materialism came with the discovery that matter did not exist. Only patterned energy, or spirit-matter, exists. We in the West may have tried to dodge the implications of this discovery, but Joseph Stalin understood it perfectly. If matter is not ultimate, there can be no materialism. And with that concession, dialectical materialism, the foundation of atheistic communism, would be shattered. Stalin called in Beria, the head of the secret police. Stalin proposed killing all the physicists. Beria objected; they were needed to create an atom bomb. Fine, said Stalin. "Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later." [10]

That we are related to everything is no longer a hypothesis. In what physicist Henry Stapp has called one of the most profound discoveries in all of science, John Bell posited the following theorem: "A change in the spin of one particle in a two-particle system will affect its twin simultaneously, even if the two have been widely separated." Put more simply, when paired particles are sent in opposite directions at the speed of light, even to the limits of the universe, and the spin of one is changed, the other particle's spin also changes, simultaneously.

That was in 1964. Bell had no idea whether his theorem was correct or not. But in 1972, John Clauser was able to fashion an experiment that proved Bell right. Now the theorem was no longer a hypothesis, but a fact of the universe. But how could such a thing be possible? How did the second particle know that its partner's spin had changed? How could a message be transmitted from one to the other, since that would require speeds far in excess of the speed of light? And to suggest that anything could exceed the speed of light would be to cancel the very foundations of relativity theory, which seemed inconceivable.

Finally it dawned: there is no distance. There is no distance for a message to traverse. Everything is already related. This means that the universe is a single, multiform energy-event characterized by nonlocality. Physicist Max Planck had already grasped the implication: each individual particle of the system exists simultaneously in every part of the system; hence, no particle can be explained except in reference to the entire cosmos. Everything is related.

In terms of the Integral Worldview, the spiral carries us from the outer edge, or local reality, the reality of everyday life, to radical inwardness, or nonlocal reality, the non-separability that characterizes the world of quantum reality. Mystics have long known this deeper dimension of reality. It is what John's Gospel calls "eternal life" (John 17:3), or what Jesus called "the Kingdom of God within" (Luke 17:21).

Implications

Now we are in a position to test the capacity of the Integral Worldview to do justice to key theological themes.

Creation. In the Supernaturalist Worldview, it was impossible to affirm that God was the actual creator of the world. Rather, that worldview maintained a fiction in which science told how the world really was created, and theology told an "as if" story that wasn't really true. The result was a split worldview that created split worldviewers. In the Integral Worldview, however, God's role in creation is literally true. God really is the creator, and science is the means of discovering how God did it. This is not creationism, which is simply a literalistic throwback to the Traditional Worldview. Nor does it condone materialist distortions of biology. Rather, the Integral Worldview insists that if God is real, then God will have to be included in our theories of the nature of things. This holistic way of perceiving reality regards the new story of creation as approximately true in a symbolic sense. Did God create the world? Definitely, though we are still trying to figure out how.

Several years back I was lecturing in Annapolis and made some uncomplimentary comments about scientists being caught up in the Materialistic Worldview. At the break, seven or eight physicists descended on me. "You don't know what you're talking about," they assured me. "We physicists talk about God more than any other department, including the religion department!" The new physics has opened a whole new way of perceiving, and relating to, reality. It will be decades before we take the full measure of its accomplishment.

Prayer. Since everything is related, then we have no need for actual physical contact in order to have an impact upon each other. Now that Bell's theorem has proven that there is no distance in nonlocal space, prayer and spiritual healing can be understood as just the kinds of communication we would expect from a world in which there is no distance.

If there is no distance, then our prayers can be as effective halfway around the world as they can be in the hospital room, since nonlocal influence doesn't diminish with distance. Unlike local events, nonlocal interactions link up one location with another without crossing space, without decay and without delay. [11] If prayer doesn't have to go anywhere, then it may simultaneously be present everywhere, enveloping the praying party, the party prayed for, and the total field of reality, which we might call God. Instead of being a superstitious throwback to an irrational past, prayer can be seen as the highest kind of rationality.

It might help to contrast the understanding of prayer in the Supernaturalist Worldview with that of the Integral Worldview. In the Supernaturalist Worldview, one might pray for spiritual healing. But because the Supernaturalist Worldview allows no real contact between the realm of science and that of theology, or between body and spirit, seeking complete health through prayer would be inappropriate, even foolish. And so another slick adage is born: God may not cure us (physically), but God can heal us (spiritually). That adage is no doubt true in some cases, but it can also be a cop-out when it is used as a way to avoid prayer for actual physical healing.

When I lecture to clergy on spiritual healing, I ask for a show of hands of how many had a course on prayer in seminary. Only a few hands go up. When I ask if any had even a single lecture on spiritual healing, the response is almost invariably zero. Yet Jesus spent most of his ministry, according to Mark, doing healings and exorcisms, and praying.

In the Integral Worldview, however, prayer is given the place of honor in the life of the spirit. Since we are all already related to each other, we are immediate to each other. We don't have to get related, we already are related. So prayer becomes the most natural thing in the world. We don't have to pump ourselves up in order to release a charge of healing energy. The other persons don't even have to know we are praying for them. Because we are already related, and we are one body in God, God's healing power is already there, or here (but there is no distance), and our prayer is simply a matter of opening the situation to God.

And because ours is not a schizoid reality, but only one world, scientific research into prayer and spiritual healing is both appropriate and urgently needed. In Healing Words, Larry Dossey examines over a hundred empirical studies of prayer, many of them double-blind, some of them done on cultures of bacteria or on animals so as to eliminate the human factor or the placebo effect. One hundred years ago, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel commented that in the future, scientists would take love into the laboratory and find more power there than in the atom. His prophecy is being enacted before our eyes.

Everyone is a mystic. In the Integral Worldview, everyone is a mystic. Not in an intentional sense, perhaps, but at least in an unconscious way. As this new worldview penetrates society, people will simply recognize the reality of the spiritual world. They may not believe in God. They may not perceive themselves to be religious, or belong to any kind of church. They may not engage in any practices, disciplines, spiritual readings, or even prayers. But they will have absorbed by osmosis the Integral Worldview and they will be, willy-nilly, spiritual. This has already begun to happen.

But one of the great deceptions is that the spiritual is good. We will need to recover a sense of the depth of evil, and of the idolatries perpetrated by the Powers That Be. For there are people of every religious persuasion who are praying against the well-being of others. And so we will take more seriously the need to protect ourselves from the darkness in the psyche, including the collective darkness. So, too, we will recognize the atheism of our time to have been a tragic form of collective soul-suicide, induced by the Materialistic Worldview and propagated by an intelligentsia largely blinded by Promethean pride.

Because the mystical experience will so often reunite people to nature, nature itself will be reenchanted, capable of providing theophanies of God. And because we are all related, nonviolence will become the norm of social action and political life.

Eternal life. I have always had a difficult time swallowing the notion of eternal life. I can understand it as the timeless dimension of the present. I can appreciate Whitehead's idea that nothing of creative value is lost. I am able to allow for a kind of eternal memory that, as it were, preserves in God something essential about every person that ever lived. But I have never been able to get excited about the idea of personal immortality (or, for that matter, the resurrection of the dead). I trust God to take care of all that, and am sure that God will not disappoint.

But I also have to acknowledge that it is the Materialistic Worldview that has made this issue difficult for me. The lack of empirical proof of an afterlife is an embarrassment. In the Integral Worldview, however, eternal life is a natural corollary of the infinitely inward-spiraling center at the heart of all things. The fact that consciousness is nonlocal means that the mind cannot be limited to the brain and to the present, only to perish when we die.

The Gospel of John asserts something similar: "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (17:3). Eternal life begins the moment we encounter the living God and God's revealer. In the more neutral terms of Bell's Theorem, when we recognize the reality of nonlocal reality, in that moment the world becomes reenchanted for us.

The Integral Worldview will also be subject to misuse. Societal acceptance of this way of looking at the world will not usher in utopia. People will still find ways to pervert higher values. There will be superficial spiritualities, selfish prayers, and the manipulation of spirit for material gain. Some will seek spiritual power over others. There will be shallow, cafeteria-style religiosity, franchised insights, egomaniacs huckstering their own amalgam of snake remedies, nostrums, and cure-alls, and automatic writers claiming a direct line to ancient prophets. But none of that is new. We will simply have to live with it.

What an exciting challenge: to be able to help shape the global broadening of the Integral Worldview along lines that honor life, the environment, and the very universe itself - a view that sees the whole teeming world as a revelation of God. Is it possible, then, that everything has already happened, and that we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Walter Wink is professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and the author of numerous books, including a trilogy on the powers of domination. He has lectured and led workshops all over the world. He lives in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.

©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation