ABSTRACT
The contemporary philosopher of science and religion Philip Clayton in his Mind and Emergence suggests an emergent level of spiritual or transcendent activity, which emerges from mental activity, that in this systems model would capture activity at a sixth, transcendent, level. This chapter describes a way to relate the six levels as a community of perspectives that unify only in their shared interpretation: The twentieth-century American pragmatist Josiah Royce characterizes the formation of community and describes their shared interpretations. Some religious systems and relationships between cultures have emergent properties that transcend cultural systems, and the chapter describes how some of those emergent systems form a higher, transcendent level. In ethical systems, John Rawls takes a Kantian approach to ethics in developing a social contract based on a bargaining game. Although referring to an emergent human system as 'spirit' appears to contradict many traditional Christian and Trinitarian doctrines, that paradox does occur in Irenaeus' writing.
