Factionalism has adversely affected the Seventh-day Adventist Church from its inception to the present day. It has reared its ugly head during theological, organizational, cultural, and personality wars over the decades. Today, the challenge of diverse opinions threatens many Adventist ideals, institutions, and practices, made worse by the fact that most factional groups see themselves as representing "true" Adventism, whereas the others have betrayed it to some extent or another. Typically, we seek to solve the problem by persuading others to join our group, or even worse, by eliminating the opposing groups. Thus we have campaigns against liberals, or right-wingers, or against traditional church or charismatic worship styles, which tend to cause more trouble than they solve.

My own journey is one of seesawing through various opinions and schools of thought, sometimes quite conservative, sometimes "dangerously" liberal, raising eyebrows on either side, depending on where I stood at the time. I don’t regret such oscillations: I see them as experimental Christianity, the only way to test ideas to see if they work.

What I have also found is that, wherever I stood on a particular issue, I usually felt comfortable in what I accepted, yet suffered a sense of unease, as if something was missing. This sense of lack prompted my next phase of exploration, often to a perspective in contrast to the one I had just held. The new stand satisfied my longing, but left other vacancies. Specifically, I have tested both the belief that God is actively interventionist on a microscale in the most mundane issues of my life, and the idea that he is a general governing force who leaves me to get on with things. Each has its appeal and advantage, each has supporting evidence from Scripture and experience, each is ultimately unsatisfying alone.

Enter Ken Wilber, American philosopher and author of many volumes (such as The Marriage of Sense and Soul; A Brief History of Everything; A Theory of Everything), whose works were recently recommended to me. I was quickly convinced that he offered a perspective that could be immensely useful to Adventism’s handling of diversity (not just Adventism, the whole of Christianity, and indeed the world). He also offers up some real challenges to groups that advocate spirituality from what he considers limited perspectives and dogmas (which includes pretty well all formal religions, including Adventism), to which I will return later.

To begin, though, Wilber emphasizes ever-broadening stages of development, which are followed by individuals and groups, organizations, and cultures. He borrows a model developed by others called Spiral Dynamics, which lists nine levels, of which the first seven are particularly pertinent to my discussion.

Stage one he labels Archaic-Instinctual, the level of basic survival, which is concerned with food, shelter, and safety. Stage two he calls Magic-Animistic, which features strong ethnic ties and beliefs in magical spirits, spells, and powers. The third level, Power Gods, is more feudal, with the development of archetypical heroes and an emphasis on power and glory. The next stage, the Mythic Order, emphasizes the meaning and purpose of life, handed down by an all-powerful god. This stage has black-and-white notions of right and wrong, and a rigidly ordered society characteristic of puritan or fundamentalist societies (both secular and religious).

Mythic Order gives way to the stage of Scientific Achievement, which moves to more individualistic modes of thinking, seeking truth through rational explanation and natural laws, which can be mastered and manipulated to achieve one’s ends. The seventh stage is the Sensitive Self, which works against the hierarchies and privileging of the earlier stages, favoring community, reconciliation, and consensus, but refusing to recognize levels of value. The final two stages leap to integrative and holistic world views, recognizing the value of every stage.

Wilber argues that reality consists of whole, independent units that are simultaneously parts of larger whole units, themselves parts of larger wholes. An atom is both a whole unit and a part of a larger whole, molecules form cells, and so on. Letters combine to make words, then sentences and paragraphs, hence on to higher meaning. But each unit depends on the existence and identity of the smaller units to maintain its own life. A book of philosophy cannot eliminate the use of letters without getting rid of its higher thoughts. An adult, having reached the level of abstract thinking and deep spirituality, cannot eliminate the lower physical level as being redundant.

The application of this model to faith is simple. We move through stages of spiritual development, but typically, upon reaching a higher stage, we often seek to eliminate the earlier stage. For example, having reached a Scientific Achievement level, we use its platform to dismantle the value of the Animistic, Power God, and Mythic levels. Yet having done so, we are confronted with a sense of the loss of the simple, mystic, and heroic elements of faith. Hence the on-going appeal of fundamentalism and charismatic movements in religion, which are in effect attempts to restore what has been lost, although often done through a rejection of the higher stages of Scientific Achievement and the Sensitive Self.

Wilber’s case is that we need to embrace the contribution of the earlier stages of development within our growth, while recognizing that we have progressed to a higher level. Instead of taking an either-or approach to questions of conservative versus liberal, charismatic versus conventional, miraculous versus natural, we should adopt an and-and approach. To me this rings true to Scripture, which emphasizes the miraculous and the routine, the mystery and reasonableness, the incarnation of complete Godhood and manhood simultaneously. It also matches my experience and the experience of those around me.

Recently, I have tried applying Wilber’s model, with constructive results. Instead of being skeptical and cynical of lower-level ideas and experiences, I have embraced them without feeling the need to abandon rationality, to the spiritual benefit of myself and of those who shared them with me.

I would be very interested to hear if others have considered Wilber’s model in relation to Christianity, and, if so, their conclusions. Certainly, Wilber poses some real challenges to conventional religion, as he sees faiths like Christianity to be lower levels of spiritual expression. At the same time, I believe his model offers a way for us to reintegrate the fragmentary Christian world, which expends so much of its energy fighting other, often valid, even necessary, expressions of itself, rather than harnessing its full potential, from the Archaic to the highest level. Maybe then, the movement in the church might be forward momentum, instead of the sideways swing of the pendulum.

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