Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 4

Finally, we come to our allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account. What does it teach us, if the “facts” aren’t scientific facts? What we are looking for is eternal truths. First and foremost, we learn that–whatever the time frame or process involved–God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Creation has a purpose and is not the result of chance.

If we refer to John 1:2, we learn that Christ (the Word) was with God in the beginning. And in John 1:3, it says, “Through him all things were made.” We see that God has accomplished his work through Christ from the beginning.

Now let us ask, if God did not create the measurements of days and years until the fourth day, why does he introduce a six day period? He does so in order to introduce the Sabbath. God did not make the Sabbath for himself; he made it for man.

What about Adam and Eve? There are a number of allegorical interpretations. One is that Adam and Eve are our first parents with a fully formed spiritual consciousness.

As for the fall of man, are we to maintain that there was a real tree in the midst of the garden whose fruit transmitted the knowledge of good and evil? Certainly we could, but the allegorical method concerns itself with the eternal message. Was there a real serpent and did the fall of man happen as a single act of disobedience over God’s command not to eat the fruit of a tree in the midst of the garden? Again, we need to inquire about the eternal message in the fall of man. About our fall.

The serpent said, “You will be like God.” (Genesis 3:4) It sounds like pride, but there is also something more fundamental about the nature of the fall. The “original sin,” as St. Augustine called it, lies in the attempt of humankind to pursue our own self-will and therefore to be outside the will of God.

The Garden of Eden is the symbol of humankind’s fellowship with God. The self-will of our primordial parents separated them from intimate fellowship with their Creator. Therefore, the eviction from the Garden of Eden simply means the loss of that intimate fellowship.. Similarly, our very existence recapitulates the original pursuit of self-will. “Oh see, in sin I was born.” (Psalm 51:5)

At some point in our lives we feel the unbearable loss of that intimate relationship with that very One who is closer to ourselves than our own soul. If we could only turn back the clock of history and return to the time of fellowship with God in the Garden of Eden.

We saw that, in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, Christ (the Word) was with God in the beginning; and all of God’s work is accomplished through Christ. It is therefore preordained that our journey home to the Garden of Innocence traverses through Christ.

For this reason, Christ was incarnated in the man Jesus, insofar as he was the perfect expression of God’s love. He gave himself to God on our behalf, surrendering his own will to that of God’s, even unto death on a cross.

He was crucified, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again from the dead, and he ascended into heaven at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

Surrendering ourselves to that same cross, we die unto ourselves, insofar as we are no longer committed to our own self-will, but to God’s. And in him we are resurrected: our spirit is born again into that intimate fellowship which our original parent’s enjoyed with God.

And this is how the future evangelical church might absorb evolutionary theory into an evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 3

In order to absorb evolution theory into evangelical Christian theology, we need to explicate the Genesis creation account with more interpretive freedom than our current assumptions about Scripture allow. I have already stated that it is going to take several generations for evolution theory to be absorbed into the evangelical church. So we need to take a look into the future, if you will, and find out how that will take place.

Here in the future, we find there has been a complete reversal of the old evangelical view about evolution. Instead of being the nemesis on the other shore where science and humanism lay, evolution has been appropriated as the property of the church. How have we accomplished this? By claiming the process of evolution for the glory of the Creator God our Father. Now that we have appropriated evolution for God, we make our contribution to the theory.

That means we help people understand that evolution is a process with a purpose created by God, and which accomplishes His will in salvation history, as the Catholics call it, or the plan of salvation, as evangelical Christians call it.

We do not decry the scientist for doing his or her job. We don’t expect the scientist to prove the existence of God because God cannot become the subject of scientific investigation. God is not in the domain of science. It is our job in the evangelical church to provide a meaning for evolutionary theory by relating it to the sovereignty of God. We no longer refer to “creation vs evolution” but “creation and evolution.”

We assert that the theory of evolution does not discredit the Genesis creation account because we interpret that account in the light of evolution. We assert that the point of the story in terms of man’s creation is that God created man from the earth in a day; the process by which God created man was evolution and that “day” lasted a million years or whatever. We have released the Bible from that ill-placed shackle of “scientific accuracy.”

This is nothing new. As early as the second century, the Church father Origen said that the world could not have been created in six days as we know them because God did not create the sun–the means of measuring days–until the fourth day. Origen produced an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account.

Here in the future we find that an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account is perfectly consistent with evangelical theology. I will provide that interpretation later, but first I must explain the prescientific view of the world at the time that the Genesis creation account was recorded.

As I said earlier, the Bible teaches us about eternal truth concerning God and his relationship to humankind, and humankind’s relationship with his or her fellows. It is the eternal truths that are the unchanging truths of the Bible. It seems very reasonable to me that God would inspire the sacred author of the Genesis creation account to write in accordance with his own understanding.

The earth was believed to rest on giant pillars atop an abyss of waters. Above the abyss of waters the earth was surrounded by the seas. Underneath the earth there existed Shoel, a dark netherworld believed to be the abode of the dead. The sky was covered over by a giant dome.  The sun, moon, and stars traveled along the ceiling of the dome from one horizon to the other. The dome structure had giant gates placed at intervals. There were waters above the dome and it rained whenever the gates opened. God’s abode was believed to be above the waters atop the dome. A reading of the first chapter of Genesis, especially from the New American Bible will reveal how this worldview fits into the creation account.

In the fourth and final segment of this series, I will provide an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account that is consistent with evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 2

It is now time to address the theological implications of evolution. Unfortunately, the whole controversy about evolution has been misframed into “evolution vs creation” or “evolution vs Christianity.” There are Christian fish symbols matched against Darwin fish (which have legs) on car bumper stickers. One fish is devouring the other. Some folks believe that evolution disproves God’s existence and discredits the Bible. Darwin himself was not an atheist and made no such implications. In Darwin’s own words,

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” (The Origin of Species)

I rather think that taunting Christians is a favorite pastime of evolutionists. But I must say that, in the attempt to shore up the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith, fundamentalism has painted us into a corner by the introduction of its version of Biblical inerrancy. For background purposes, here is a quote from Wikpedia:

Fundamentalism is a movement that arose in the United States, starting among conservative Presbyterian academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. It soon spread to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations during and immediately following the First World War. The movement’s purpose was to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and zealously defend it against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other “-isms” which it regarded as harmful to Christianity.

One of the five fundamentals were: The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.

Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that in its original form, the Bible is totally without error, and free from all contradiction; “referring to the complete accuracy of Scripture, including the historical and scientific parts.”

This gave rise to the belief that Scripture was not simply inspired by God but was spoken by God word for word. The “complete accuracy” of its “scientific parts” forces the Bible, however well-meaningly, into a losing position because the Bible has no “scientific parts.” The Bible was written in a pre-scientific age, as I will demonstrate later. But first it is time to say a few words about divine inspiration and revelation.

It has been said that “everything is inspired, but not everything is revealed.” (Benoit) The sacred authors of Scripture were writing under divine inspiration about a revelation they received from God, but textual criticism reveals a process that was not dictated word for word as from an oracle.

It is incontrovertible that God allowed the sacred writers the freedom to form ideas according to their own understanding. The quality of writing, grammar, and style varied from one author to another. It should not be surprising that, like all humans, they committed errors. Some evangelical theologians propose the existence of original manuscripts that were “without error as originally written,” though none have ever been found.

But this is where the fundamentalist concept of inerrancy misses the point entirely. The Bible is not the revelation as the Koran claims to be. The Bible is a testimony to the revelation–i.e. Old Testament and New Testament. What, then, or who, is the revelation? The revelation is God in Jesus Christ.

I propose that it is misguided to expect the Bible to be scientifically accurate. We have no sound basis for expecting it to be. As we shall see, the sacred author of the Genesis creation account wrote in terms of an entirely different prescientific world view. But isn’t this reasonable? The Bible does not teach us scientific facts–although there is a lot of historical information in it that is increasingly verifiable by archeology–the Bible teaches us about eternal truths. We ought not to lose sight of the forest for the trees or mistake the map for the treasure.

Part 3 of this series will propose how to absorb evolution into an evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 1

For the record, I am an evangelical Christian, and I affirm the Apostle’s Creed. I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I believe in the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith as handed down by the Apostles and attested to in the Bible. However, I often find that what the various denominations define as fundamental doctrines are not always so, but are additions to the fundamental doctrines. You will see shortly why it was necessary to say these things.

I am not a scientist, so I am not qualified to enter the conversation about evolution on that basis. What I seek to contribute here comes from the perspective of a student of religion and its history. The situation that the Church faces has happened before: there is a scientific theory that is a threat to the existing paradigm–which some see as a threat to the very foundations of Christianity itself–but it has the consensus of the overwhelming majority of scientists. I will say a brief word about Creation science momentarily. What I propose is that, from the standpoint of Church history, it is reasonable to assume that the Church will ultimately capitulate to that theory and absorb it into its theology.

As for Creation science, the vast majority of the world’s scientists have rejected its evidence on the grounds that it does not meet the rigorous standards of the methods of scientific investigation. One of the claims against scientists who accept evolution theory is that they are all part of a worldwide humanistic conspiracy. No doubt science has its politics like everything else, but I find the conspiracy theory to be highly unlikely.

In its history, the Church has reacted vehemently and even brutally against science. Because his discoveries about planetary motion supported the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, Galileo was told by the Church in 1616 to refrain from publically stating his views. Finally, in 1633, because Galileo continued to publish his findings, the Church Inquisition tried and convicted him for heresy, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In spite of the Church’s battle against the heliocentric theory, the Church ultimately had to acknowledge it.

As I look into the future of the evangelical church, I see a church that will ultimately have to acquiesce to evolution theory. When this will happen, I do not know, certainly not in my lifetime. Those who have invested so much time and energy into fighting evolution will not capitulate. It will fall to succeeding generations to absorb evolution theory of some form into evangelical Christian theology. They will have to because the time will come when the denials have exhausted their credibility. It will be comparable to a church today claiming that a flat earth is part of their essential doctrine.

In absorbing evolution theory into Christian theology, the evangelical church will have to find a new way to interpret the Genesis creation account. I will propose a new interpretation later in this article, but I must first explain the mechanism by which the evangelical church will come to this revolutionary change.

It is virtually impossible for the evangelical church to change its view on evolution any time soon. None of the existing evangelical leaders will be able to change their view. Even if they could, it would only ruin their careers in the church. The change will happen generationally, and so slowly that the process will remain undetected for a long period of time. Individually, one by one, educated young people of succeeding generations will quietly acquiesce to the theory, but those who remain evangelical Christians will work out the theology for themselves. One day it will be realized that the change is an established fact and pastors will begin to say, “If there were evolution–which there is not–but if there were, God is still the Creator of the universe.” And so on. This is, of course, scandalous today. The future is always scandalous in terms of the past.

In Part 2 I will address the theological implications of evolution and move towards that seemingly impossible task: describing how evolutionary theory will be absorbed into a living evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Divine Unity in Islamic Mysticism

Behind the doctrines of Sufism–the inner teaching of Islam–is a rather sophisticated metaphysic. Central to esoteric as well as exoteric Islam is the Unity of God or Unity of Being.

The condition in which humans now live is the world of multiplicity–the manifold reflections of the emanation of God. The phenomenal world is a “mirror of nothingness” which reflects the self-disclosure of Allah.

In Islamic mysticism the term Allah has similarities to the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. Allah not only refers to the personal God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad; it also signifies the Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, the impersonal and unmanifest Godhead. This primordial God of the highest order exists as Beyond-Being. God as Ultimate Reality is beyond all attributes and can only be realized in the unitive state of the mystic.

The first determination of this Beyond-Being is Being itself, God as Supreme Person and Creator. This is God with attributes: the All-Merciful and All-Compassionate. The second determination is quite similar to the Word in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, for it is the Logos. Just as John says that all things were created through the Word, it is the Logos in Islamic mysticism that originates the Universal Existence, which consists of all worlds in their multiplicity.

It is essential to understand that everything from the Ultimate Reality to the Universal Existence is contained within the Unity of Being. This is not by virtue of a pantheism but by way of the mirror of nothingness in which existents are a reflection of the Divine Unity. This posits that all existent entities are non-being in that they do not exist in themselves. The only reality is God. So the Koran says that everywhere you turn their is the Face of God. Contemplation on God’s reflection leads to contemplation of the Source.

The goal of the Sufi is to journey home from multiplicity to Unity. The saint is a person who, having achieved Unity, returns to the world of multiplicity, abiding there and serving humanity.

It can be said that humans have a higher self and a lower self. Put another way, she has a face turned inward and a face turned outward. The face turned inward looks into the Face of God as reflected in the mirror of nothingness. This reflection is her true Self, the Divine Unity. This is the only sense in which the human being has a real existence.

The lower self is the face turned outward towards the world. The lower self is also called the ego. The ego represents the fallen state of humankind. The illusion of the ego is an existence apart from God. Although the lower self has a relative existence, it has no ultimate reality and as such is non-being.

The negative characteristics of the lower self–i.e. lust, greed, and anger–are veils that cause us to forget our primordial existence in the Unity of Being. One of the goals of the Sufi is the removal of each veil and its replacement with a corresponding positive quality–i.e. compassion, generosity, and patience.

The journey of the Sufi, then, involves one of the remembrance of who we were in our primordial existence. We still contain that existence beneath the veils in its potentiality here and now and in the multiplicity of our world. Our souls contain the imprint of the memory that, before our creation, God said, “Am I not your Lord?” to which the response was, “We witness it.”

The remembrance can be engendered in the practice of recollection–the repetition and undivided concentration on the statement of faith, “There is no God but God,” and in the repetition of the Names of God. Through the process of self-annihilation we experience our nothingness before God, whereby we witness to the truth of the Divine Unity, “There is nothing but God.”

God bless.

Why Evangelize?

I am a Christian. I believe in the Christian doctrine and profess the Apostle’s Creed. Yet after studying religion over a span of thirty years, I have reached the inescapable conclusion that God expresses himself or reveals his nature in various ways and at various times in every religion. If anyone has spent the time that I have investigating religion, I would be honestly amazed if they did not reach the same conclusion.

But how does one account for the different doctrines in the world religions, each within its own culture? One answer is that human beings will filter their revelations or the movings of the Spirit in terms which they can understand. A culture which does not believe in the killing of animals, for example, is not going to be able to understand a system of blood sacrifice as payment for sin. The Koran says in so many words that God reveals himself in an intelligible way to every culture.

But how do you account for the claim of Christianity that Jesus is the only way to the Father? Well, he is, and it is the same Spirit that is flowing through the world religions, the same grace, in different forms. The Upanishads say that God is the source of all the religions, all scriptures, and all the creeds. The Golden Rule occurs in one way or another in each religion.

Jesus makes this statement about the Spirit in John 3:8:

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. (NIV)

The Spirit comes from wherever it wants to come from and its destination is wherever it chooses.

Here is a mystery that we do not understand, as it does not fit into the rules of logic constructed by the mind. We say that a thing has to be either A or B exclusively, not both A and B or, worse yet, not  sometimes A and sometimes B. If our doctrine is true, the others must be false. If our doctrine is true for us, our doctrine is therefore true for all people everywhere and everywhen.

The mystery is that, while my Christian doctrine is true in every way, it is also true that the Spirit may operate independently of doctrine, because doctrine is made for man, not for God.

The church fathers discovered truth outside the Christian religion very early, even calling Aristotle and Plato Christians before Christianity, and adopting many of their ideas into Christian theology. St. Paul borrowed from pagan religion the verse, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) St. Ambrose said that all truth comes from the Holy Spirit regardless of what religion or philosophy it comes from. The famous early American preacher Jonathan Edwards, who served as a missionary to American Indians, concluded that God reveals himself in every culture, and salvation is not restricted to the Christian religion. To paraphrase Hans Kung, “Why don’t we just admit it?”

The inevitable question is: Then why evangelize?

Part of the answer is that I don’t think we should try to convert those people who are devout Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, etc. if they are at peace in their faith. Mahatma Gandhi used to tell Christian missionaries, “Instead of trying to make us into Christians, help us to become better Hindus.”

The other part of the answer is that there is a need–and it is urgent–to bring the message of the Gospel to those people who don’t have any faith at all, who are caught up in the word and searching in all the wrong places for peace of mind.

God bless.

Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy

For myself as a Christian, Jesus Christ is my only way to the Father. He is the only way by which I may be saved. My profession of the Apostles’ Creed is an expression of my faith and belief in my own redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,

A Muslim’s profession of faith is: “There is no God but God; and Mohammad is his Prophet.”

A Hindu’s way may be the practice of complete devotion and worship of Krishna as an incarnation of God, among other possible paths.

A Taoist might say that the Tao is the way of God’s working in the universe that existed before God had a name and before there was any religion.

An adherent to the Jewish faith believes in Jehovah as the Creator and Lord of all things, and who revealed his Law through Moses.

A Buddhist takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the spiritual law of the universe), and the Sangha (the spiritual community).

As Aldous Huxley stated in his famous introduction to Swami Prabhavananda’s and Christopher Isherwood’s translation of the Bhagavad-Gita that was first published in 1944:

But happily there is the Highest Common Factor of all religions, the Perennial Philosophy which has always and everywhere been the metaphysical system of the prophets, saints, and sages. It is perfectly possible for people to remain good Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims and yet to be united in full agreement on the basic doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy.

In Huxley’s opinion, “The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy.” Father Bede Griffiths noted in his book, River of Compassion: A Christian Commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita:

A Christian who is open to the message of the Gita will find that it throws new light on many aspects of the Gospel.

Aldous Huxley identified four main characteristics, and later added a fifth, of the Perennial Philosophy that he sees as not only the common ground, but the highest common ground, of all religions:

First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness…is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.

Second: human beings are capable of not only knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

The above principles of the Perennial Philosophy are stated in philosophical rather than doctrinal terms so that they may be compatible with the various religions.

An example of its application is that, just as Eckhart and Ruysbroeck describe a Christian Godhead underlying the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Bhagavad-Gita states that Brahman is the Godhead which underlies the Hindu trinity of Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (dissolver).

Another parallel can be found in that the Atman, the spark of divinity residing in the heart and which is directly related to Brahman (uncreated God in his unmanifest state) can be compared, not doctrinally but philosophically, to the indwelling Christ (”I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Galations 2:20).

Yet the language about the Divine Ground, and indeed all four characteristics of the Perennial Philosophy, are of a decidedly impersonal nature. It is indeed a valid spiritual practice to meditate on the impersonal aspect of the divinity; that is, divinity without what might be called anthropomorphic attributes such as love, goodness, compassion, and mercy.

But rare is the individual who can continuously maintain an impersonal approach to the divine. Even Buddhism developed bodhisattvas, beings who have achieved nirvana but have voluntarily postponed their entry into it until all beings are saved, and so are at the service of humanity.

And so Aldous Huxley identifies a fifth characteristic of the Perennial Philosophy, which is the belief in, and worship of, the divine incarnation. The Bhagavad-Gita describes the sacrificial worship of the divine incarnation–God taking birth as a human being for the sake of humanity–in great detail, and is known in Hinduism as bhakti yoga. The concept of sacrificial worship is mentioned by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers (and sisters), in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. (Romans 12:1, NIV)

In “Appendix 1″ of Prabhavananda’s and Isherwood’s translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, it says, “Hinduism accepts the belief in many divine incarnations, including Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus, and foresees that there will be many more:”

In every age I come back

To deliver the holy,

To destroy the sin of the sinner,

To establish righteousness.

This is problematic for Christians, who believe that Jesus is God’s only begotten son, and also for Muslim’s, who do not accept the concept of incarnation. It might even seem problematic for Hindu’s as well in terms of the number of gurus in the modern age who have claimed to be divine incarnations.

Father Bede Griffiths, in his book, Return to the Center, does not oppose the possibility of more than one divine incarnation. But he does argue that, among the major claimants–he names three: Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus–Jesus Christ, through his life, death, and resurrection, represents the most perfect incarnation of God. His view is that Christ expresses what is most perfect in every religion.

All things considered, Aldous Huxley, in discussing the Perennial Philosophy–in his book by that name and in his wartime introduction to one of the best ever translations of the Bhagavad-Gita–makes an important contribution to interspirituality and to the peaceful coexistence of religions by seeking to define the Highest Common Factor that represents a metaphysical basis by which all religions can enter into the conversation.

God bless.

Zen and Christianity

The relationship between Zen and Christianity is complementary. Since they begin as polar opposites in the theological sense, their mystic convergence is more difficult to uncover, but quite striking once apprehended.

Christianity is a religion of the revelation, as testified to in Scripture, of God to man through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Its doctrine is centered in objective truth and historical occurrence whereby, through the “hearing of the Gospel,” one arrives at conviction, belief, surrender, and salvation.

Salvation is not the end of Christian life, but its beginning. For the Christian mystic, the journey continues towards the “mystical marriage,” the union of the soul with Christ through the progressive annihilation of the ego and its surrender to the lordship of Christ.

Zen is not a religion of revelation and, as such, is not anchored to its scriptures or even its doctrine. Zen is based on a direct experience or intuition (prajna); that is, seeing into one’s original nature, none other than the ground of being, reality itself.

One’s original nature is beyond all conceptual thought and prior to all names and categories. “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” Since Zen is not tied to scripture and doctrine, one can be fully Christian and also a practitioner of Zen.

The convergence between Zen and Christianity begins to emerge as the Christian approaches union with Christ through contemplative prayer and meditation. The Christian begins to apprehend that one’s original nature is in fact the Christ nature that resides in him or her and is communicated through the Holy Spirit. Our Christ nature within us then leads us towards the Heavenly Father–the Godhead: the ground of all being. Thus, having begun at opposite directions, we arrive at a point of convergence between the experience of Zen and Christian mysticism.

We can also compare St. Paul’s experience of having the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:15) to the Zen experience of the Buddha mind that exists in prajna, the mystical insight of Zen. The experience of prajna can also be spoken of as giving one the eye of the Buddha or the Zen eye. As D. T. Suzuki noted, the Zen concept of prajna can also be expressed in the words of Meister Eckhart: “The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me.”

God bless.

Jonathan Edwards: Mystic, Interspiritual Christian

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a key figure in the American Great Awakening of the 1740’s, is famous for his Calvanistic sermon entitled, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), which imprinted upon the American imagination graphic descriptions of the terrors of hell.

Few Christians realize, however, that he and his wife Sarah were both mystics; fewer still, that Edwards was probably the first American Interspiritual Christian and, therefore, hundreds of years before his time. There is no little surprise in this since he is such a towering figure, impeccably credentialed, and a stallwart hero of evangelical Christianity.

Jonathan Edwards was both the son and grandson of Congregational pastors. He graduated at the age of seventeen from Yale University at the top of his class. In 1739, Edwards wrote of his “two seasons of awakening” in his Personal Narrative.

The first awakening occured as a boy, during a period when he prayed five times a day, retiring to a solitary place in the woods. The second awakening took place during his last years at Yale:

There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being….I thought with myself…how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be wrapped up to God in heaven.” (Pg. 193, Steven Fanning: Mystics of the Christian Tradition)

Thereafter, and throughout his life, Edwards experienced

a new kind of apprehension and ideas of Christ…an inward, sweet sense of these things…and my soul was lead away in pleasant views and contemplations of them. (Pg. 194, Fanning)

He often read the Song of Songs; and he would take solitary walks in the woods, because God

seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water, and all nature. (Pg. 194, Fanning)

Jonathan Edwards was ordained in 1727, and he also married Sarah Pierrepoint. In 1729, Edwards succeeded his grandfather as pastor of Northampton Church, where he stayed until 1750. He then moved his family to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he served as a missionary to Indians and pastor to settlers. He died in 1758, shortly after becoming the president of the College of New Jersy (Princeton University).

As for the interspiritual thought of Jonathan Edwards, he believed that–beyond God’s revelation to Christians and as testified to in the Bible–God also reveals himself to every religion and every culture in the world. He further held that there were non-Christians who were gifted by God with an “inner religious consciousness,” and that this was “the only prerequisite to salvation.”

He therefore did not restrict salvation to Calvanists or even Christians in general, but held that salvation was possible, through the agency of God, for all peoples.

It is amazing that this great precursor of evangelical Christianity held interspiritual views. Equally amazing is that he arrived at the apprehension of salvation in other religions over 200 years before Vatican II.

God bless.

The Unity of Religion in the Interspiritual Age

One goal for this interspiritual Christian weblog is to make the case that one can be wholly Christian without having to be exclusive. It is my hope that there are interspiritual Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, etc. who are making the same case for their own faiths.

We now live in a time when the influences of exclusive religion on milatarist thinking poses an actual threat to the survivability of the human race. This is because religion needs to be leading the way towards peace instead of apocalypse.

For example, whatever case I hear being made for an exclusivist Christian faith or an exclusivist Islamic faith, I am absolutely certain that neither case is within the will of God, whether I address Him as Allah or Jehovah. Whatever name I use, He is still the All-Merciful, All-Compassionate One who seeks to save.

The Interspiritual Age we live in necessitates that every religion must re-examine itself and its Scriptures in the light of the present state of human affairs. See “On The Nature of Scripture” as an example.

I pray for prophets of peace within all religions–such as were found in Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.–to replace the prophets of apocalypse. No doubt such prophets will be persecuted, first and foremost by the religionists in their own faith. It is to be recalled that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu terrorist for seeking Hindu-Muslim unity.

There are serious obstacles to the interspiritual movement, and they must be faced with the overwhelming power of love. The unity of all religion is to be found in love. The tribalism of the past must be absorbed into love; tribalism always takes the relative view whereas love is universal.

God bless.