The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole

We are a species between axial periods. Thus, our religious myths are struggling to find new connections in a global, ecological order. Delio proposes the new myth of relational holism; that is, the search for a new connection to divinity in an age of quantum physics, evolution, and pluralism. The idea of relational holism is one that is rooted in the God-world relationship, beginning with the Book of Genesis, but finds its real meaning in quantum physics and the renewed relationship between mind and matter. Our story, therefore, will traverse across the fields of science, scripture, theology, history, culture and psychology. Our guides for a new myth of relational holism are the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and the Jesuit scientist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The complex human can no longer be simplified to one view or another: one must see the whole of our existence or one does not see at all.

Ilia Delio, OSF, a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, is Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology, Villanova University, and founder of the Center for Christogenesis. Her many books include The Hours of the Universe, Christ in Evolution, The Emergent Christ, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian, and Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion (all with Orbis).