» orthodox teachings about the soul The Spiral Path

29 Jan 2012

TBM18: Some Thoughts on Soul Purpose

Soul purpose is one of the least discussed issues of mainstream religion and one of the most poorly understood issues for New Age teachers.

The concept of soul purpose is so deeply intertwined with Divine Love that it can’t be separated from other core spiritual values such as forgiveness, healing, courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion.

Indeed, it wouldn’t be possible for you to know courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion without your own unique “envelope” of soul purpose to hold all these blessings together inside your own consciousness.

That’s a bit of twist on your understanding of soul purpose, isn’t it?

I’ve read many different theories about soul purpose, theories that attempt to explain why you’re here on Planet Earth and what you can do about this painful reality. The core teachings of Buddhism (the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path) are devoted exclusively to the question of soul purpose, even though these teachings don’t include the word “soul.”

Traditional Christian teachings, which are founded on Paul’s theories of sin, separation from God, sacraments, and salvation, are similarly devoted exclusively to the question of soul purpose, though they never actually say so.

The honest truth is, you don’t need a religion founded on a promise of “Escape” from your own corrupted soul unless you believe in the first place that you ARE a corrupted soul.

I grew up in a household that operated according to Northern European Protestant teachings on the sinful nature of humankind and the absolute duty of every individual to crush sinful thoughts through hard work, suppression of emotions, obedience, lawfulness, and the pursuit of excellence.

So my sister and I, we always felt guilty. We weren’t quite sure why we felt so guilty, but we did, and we tried very hard to behave correctly so we wouldn’t have to feel so guilty.

In the Protestant culture I was raised in, it was assumed that individuals, including children, are not capable of generating a sense of duty and service to others — that is, a sense of soul purpose — from within. They’re not capable of finding and living a sense of soul purpose on their own. Duty must therefore be imposed from the outside by the laws and traditions of the culture, we’re told.

This assumption comes, in part, from the orthodox teachings of the Protestant Church, as expounded by men such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and John and Charles Wesley, to name a few. These men believed that human beings don’t have anything to brag about. Ever. They believed that all people are born sinful at the core, and that we as human beings can best serve God by never thinking for a moment that there’s anything good inside us that we can claim as our own. We must, according to these thinkers, take full responsibility for all the “bad” we think and do, but we are never, ever, allowed to take full responsibility for the “good” we think and do. To believe in our inner goodness would be pure hubris — a terrible violation of the laws of humility.

If you’ve been reading my other blogs, you know what I think of the Church’s traditional teachings on humility.

So it would be fair to say that the search to find your own soul purpose is the search to let go of religious humility.

It’s impossible to simultaneously live your own soul purpose AND accept religious teachings on humility (that is, intentional eradication of the self). You have to choose between wanting to learn to like and trust yourself (soul purpose) OR wanting to become “an empty vessel in service to God” (humility). The former choice will take you forward on the Spiral Path. The latter choice will derail you. But the choice is still up to you because you have free will.

When I entered graduate studies in theology in 2007, my original goal was to seek ordination in the United Church of Canada. This was before I discovered that the United Church requires its ministry candidates to choose humility.

I just can’t understand why the Church believes a minister can only be of true service to God if he or she submits to a process of eradicating the core self that is the good soul.

I can understand the Church’s desire to insist on high standards of ethical conduct in its ministers. I can understand the Church’s desire to identify and arrange treatment for addiction problems and major mental health issues. I can understand the Church’s desire for ministers to be reliable and trustworthy and empathetic and genuinely interested in serving the needs of others.

But, you know, the only way to accomplish these worthy goals is to ensure that ministerial candidates know more about themselves, not less.

And this goes for other religions, too, not just Christianity.

The inner soul of every human being is desperate to be kind, helpful, brave, polite, grateful, humble, and not addicted to status. Every. Single. Human. Being.

Young children (under the age of 2), except for those raised from the get-go in an abusive environment, are naturally and instinctively kind, helpful, brave, polite, grateful, humble, and not addicted to status.

I had to wait until I became a mother myself to see this lesson right in front of my face.

My two young sons were really nice people. Sure, they were small and physically helpless. But they were so observant. And so quick to learn. And so kind to me. And so nice.

And soon I would discover, when my younger son was diagnosed at age 2 1/2 with leukemia, that my sons were not only nice, they were trusting and courageous at a level that astounded me. That stunned me. That told me they knew something important that I didn’t — or that I’d long since forgotten.

My sons weren’t “special” or “chosen.” They were just being themselves. They were being their core selves — good souls, kind souls, loving children of God.

Unless you’ve seen for yourself the unrelenting forgiveness offered by a child who’s been trapped in a hospital isolation room for months and given searingly painful medical treatments again and again, who has suffered a massive stroke but relearns to walk anyway without complaint, who is prevented by medical protocols from playing with other children or living a normal life despite his great love for other people, you may not believe me. Until you’ve seen for yourself the courage of a 5 year old boy who gives his bone marrow to his little brother without ever complaining or doubting, you may not believe me.

But I’m telling you the truth my children told me. I’m telling you that you were born this way. I’m telling you that inside your own battered head lives a kind, helpful, brave, polite, grateful, humble, status-free angel who doesn’t need any law books or contract clauses or religious codes to know the difference between right and wrong. I’m telling you that your core self is real and can never be taken away from you. I’m telling you it’s okay for you to believe that, as a soul, you’re a person God not only loves, but that God actually likes and trusts. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.)

You’re richer than you think.

From the earliest months of their lives, my two sons were completely different from each other in temperament and talent. Yet both were kind, trusting, curious, and true to their soul selves. They were my greatest teachers. Photo (c) JAT 1988.

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Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), humbleness, humility, orthodox teachings about the soul, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose, The Blonde Mystic and tagged Divine Heart | Leave a Comment

02 Jun 2011

JR46: First Step in Healing the Church: Restore the Soul

A: Jesus, what would you say to those who are asking how we can heal the church of the third millennium?

J: That’s an easy one. First you have to rescue the soul. Not save it. Rescue it. Restore it to the place of sanity it deserves. Give it some credit. Give it some trust. Be kind to it. Rescue it the way you’d rescue a dog who’s been shut out of the house without food or water. Bring it in from the cold.

A: Or in from the fiery pits of hell.

J: There’s a trend at the moment among Progressive Christians who want to try to rescue me. They want to rescue me from the clutches of the evangelical, charismatic, and fundamentalist Christians. While I appreciate the effort, the Progressive movement won’t solve anything by trying to rescue me. I’m not the problem. And I’m not the solution.

A: In the Christology course I took, we studied a book by Wayne Meeks called Christ Is the Question (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). At the beginning of the book, Meeks identifies this issue. He says, “As a brand of shampoo promises the answer to frizzy hair, a detergent brand the answer to unbright laundry, a new model car the answer to loneliness and (by innuendo) sexual longing, so Jesus is the answer to — what? Whatever you wish. Indeed [mainly in the context of American Protestantism] Jesus has become whatever you wish, an all-purpose brand, the answer to all needs, desires, fantasies, and speculations” (page 2).

J: It’s true. But it’s not really a new development in Christianity. It’s exactly the outcome the apostle Paul desired. From the beginning, Paul’s intention was to convert me — a real flesh and blood person — into the new face of the well-known Saviour brand. Sort of like redoing the label on a familiar brand of soap. You want your target audience to believe your “new and improved” brand of soap can clean away absolutely anything. You know you’re lying, but you hope your audience won’t catch on — at least not until you have their money in your pocket.

A: Old lies beget new lies.

J: There’s nothing to stop people from taking Paul’s imaginary Saviour figure and adding their own imagination to the story. Who’s to say they’re wrong? It happens all the time in story-telling traditions. Somebody comes up with a captivating (but purely fictional) hero or heroine. The character and the plot catch on. Other people start dreaming up their own chapters in the hero’s saga. Some of these catch on, too, and enter the myth. King Arthur is a good example of this. People are still writing their own versions of this story. Five hundred years from now the fanzine additions to favourite comic book heroes will blur together and create one giant new myth about Superman. Traditions evolve. Stories evolve. But story-telling traditions aren’t selling fact. They’re selling story. Fantasy. Speculation.

A: You’re saying that there’s too much story in Christianity and not enough fact.

“Jesus said: If your leaders say to you ‘Look! The Kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds will be there before you are. If they say that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are. Rather the Kingdom is within you and it is outside of you. When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realize that you are Children of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty” (Gospel of Thomas 3a and 3b).

J: Yes. There’s too much story. On the other hand, there’s not nearly enough mystery. When I say mystery, I mean there’s not enough room for individuals to have a transformative experience of redemption. Redemption and divine love and divine forgiveness are emotional experiences that lie well outside the boundaries of pure logic. Words like “wonder” and “gratitude” and “humbleness” spring to mind. But redemption doesn’t just change your thinking. It changes everything — everything in your whole being. It changes the way your physical body works. It changes the way you see colours. It changes the way you see patterns. It changes the way you learn. It changes the way you remember. The way you smell things. The way you feel rain on your skin. The way you eat your food. The way you sleep. The way you dream at night. The way you dream while you’re awake. It changes absolutely everything about your relationship with yourself and with all Creation. Where once you crawled and chewed endlessly as a caterpillar, now you fly with beauty and grace as a winged butterfly and sip from the nectar of flowers. It may sound cliched, but it’s true. The experience of transformation is that profound. You were “you” when you were a caterpillar, and you’re still “you” as a butterfly. But the way in which you relate to the world has been completely altered. Your whole life is completely changed. The change is so sweet. So kind. So mysterious. It takes your breath away.

A (nodding): Even while you’re still living here as a somewhat confused and baffled human being. You don’t have to die to feel the mystery. You have to live.

J: The process of redemption — the experience of mystery — begins for a human being with the soul. The soul is not fictional. The soul is real. The soul — the true core self of each consciousness within Creation — is your laughter. Your empathy. Your conscience. Your curiosity. Your sense of wonder. In other words, all the least explainable, most mysterious parts of being human.

The soul is not one substance, but many substances — many substances of a quantum nature. Its complexity and sophistication at a quantum level lie outside the bounds of current scientific investigation. But this has no bearing one way or the other on the soul’s scientific reality. Scientific researchers have failed to detect many things in nature: the soul is just one of many things on a long list of “undiscovered countries.”

A: How would a renewed understanding of the soul help heal the church today?

J: At the moment the Progressive movement has concluded — based on erroneous starting assumptions — that the past errors of the church include a belief in the eternal soul, a belief in miracles, and (for some) a belief that a guy named Jesus ever existed. They assume that if these “errors” are swept out of the church, and replaced with teachings based on pure logic and pure praxis, or, on the other end of the scale, replaced with teachings based on pure symbolism and hidden truth, then the church could be restored to a state of health and balance. This is not so.

A: They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

J: Yes. They’ve failed to realize that the problem with the church is that church leaders long ago put a lien on people’s souls, as you and I discussed last time.

A: I was pretty indignant, wasn’t I?

J: For good reason. The problem for Christianity is not a belief in the existence of the soul. The problem for Christianity (or rather, one of the problems) is the body of lies being taught about the soul. Over the centuries, Christian orthodoxy has done everything in its power to preserve the lien on the soul so it can preserve its power. The lien has to go. Church leaders are going to have to stand up and be honest about the fact that their teachings on the soul have damaged people’s confidence and trust in God. They need to start from square one on the question of the soul — no resorting to “tradition,” no rooting around in the writings of early Church Fathers for justification. This will be a terrifying prospect for most theologians. But it must be done. The answers to their questions are already there — not in the pages of the Bible, and not in the pages of Plato and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas and Wesley, but in the pages of God’s scientific reality. Theological inquiry must stop clinging to tradition. You’re in the third millennium now. Start acting like it.

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31 May 2011

JR45: Lien or No Lien on Your Soul?

“His disciples said to him: When will the resurrection of the dead take place and when will the new world come? He said to them: What you look for has come, but you do not know it” (Gospel of Thomas 51). In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus talks often about “life” and “beginnings,” yet his sayings involving “death” are not what we typically find in eschatological or apocalyptic teachings. Rather, the sayings about “life” and “death” in Thomas seem closely related to parts of the first century CE text known as The Didache, in which “the way of life” and “the way of death” are used as metaphors for how to live a moral life in full relationship with God. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus spends quite a bit of time and energy trying to persuade the disciples to let go of the eschatological doctrines held by the Pharisees and the Essenes at that time. Photo of my red car. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: Last week, I bought a 2007 Pontiac to replace my 1998 Nissan, which was close to death. The Carproof report found a lien against the Pontiac — a financing lien held by Chrysler. At first I wasn’t worried. I figured the paperwork for the clearance of the lien hadn’t yet made it into the computer system at the proper government ministry. But being a thorough person, I decided to phone the ministry yesterday morning to make sure the lien had been cleared. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the lien was still attached to my car! I quickly got the problem straightened out with the dealer I bought the car from. But in the meantime I had a chance to reflect on my feelings about the lien. In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, a person who unwittingly buys a car or house that has a lien against it can lose the property they bought. It can be legally seized by the lien holder if the debt hasn’t been paid by the original debtor. The car you think you own outright can be towed away in the blink of an eye by the original lender. It’s a scary thought.

Anyway, I was thinking about my feelings around the lien on my car. I was noticing how upset I was at the thought that somebody could — theoretically — swoop down on my little Pontiac and take it away with no say on my part. I was thinking how I’d paid for the car in full, how I could lose all the money I’d invested (unless I were inclined to sue, which would cost me even more money). I was thinking how unfair it would be for such a thing to happen. I’d bought the car in good faith. Why should I be punished for somebody else’s mistake? Or somebody else’s willful fraud?

So I’m standing in the bathroom and I’m drying my hair so I can get ready for work and it suddenly dawns on me that the feelings I’m expressing to myself about the lien on the car are the same feelings I have about orthodox Western Christianity’s teachings on the soul. The Church teaches us there’s a lien on our souls!

J (grinning): Yes. Not a nice feeling, is it?

A: No! It totally sucks. I never noticed till yesterday how deeply, deeply unfair the church’s claims are. I knew their claims about the soul were based on the writings of Paul, Tertullian, Augustine, and so on. I knew their claims were self-serving. I knew their claims were just plain wrong in light of God’s loving and forgiving nature. But I never felt the unfairness of it before at such a deep level — at a gut level, a visceral level. It’s just wrong to tell people their soul can be taken away from them by lien-holders. It’s so . . . so . . . unfair. And cruel. It’s cruel to tell people they have to invest themselves wholly in their faith while at any time the great big tow truck in the sky could show up to haul them or their loved ones away to the fiery pits of hell. Not to pay their own debts, but to pay somebody else’s debts! Namely Adam and Eve’s debts!

J: Ah, the wages of sin.

A: Very funny. This God-and-Devil-as-lien-holders thing means that devout Christians are always looking over their shoulder, waiting for the cosmic tow truck they can’t do anything about. It makes people feel helpless. It makes them feel like slaves-in-waiting. Their soul isn’t their own. Their time isn’t their own. Their life and their choices and their free will aren’t really their own. They’re always on tenterhooks because they think they don’t fully own their own soul. This is abusive.

J: That’s why it works. From the perspective of certain members of the church hierarchy — stretching all the way back to the time of Paul and his backers — it’s an excellent strategy for gaining control of the populace. People who feel helpless and hopeless tend to cause less trouble. They ask fewer questions. They tend to do what they’re told because they’re frightened. Frightened people turn to strong leaders — in this case, church leaders. The Church is using a psychological control strategy that other groups in other cultures have used to similar effect. Paul’s teachings have been particularly successful in this regard.

The teachings of myself and other like-minded spiritual teachers are useless for this kind of psychological strategy. Totally useless. You can’t frighten people into submission if you’re actually giving them real hope. Real hope doesn’t come from words. Real hope comes from actions — from people’s ongoing choices to help their neighbours. Real hope comes from healing and relationship and dignity and change. If the early church had wanted to teach real hope, it wouldn’t have chosen the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Chalcedon Creed as its operative statements of faith.

A: Ah. You mean they might have mentioned the themes of divine love, forgiveness, healing, redemption (as opposed to salvation), and egalitarianism?

J: If the bishops in the first few centuries of Christianity had spent one tenth the time on compassion that they spent on their endless arguments over the “substance” of the Trinity, medieval Europe would have been a much nicer place to live in.

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Posted in "4 S's", free will, hope, humility, Jesus Redux, life and death, occult themes, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, resurrection, Soul, Trinitarianism and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

21 Mar 2011

JR25: Getting Close to God: Finding the Kingdom Within

A: Some readers are probably very surprised that a mystic and an angel are spending so much time talking about academic research and academic sources. How would you respond to that?

J: I respond the same way today as I responded 2,000 years ago. My basic attitude is a pretty tough one: you can’t get close to God if you don’t do the work. You can’t get close to God if you separate yourself from the rest of God’s Creation. You can’t get close to God by snubbing everything God is saying to you in the world around you.

A: The idea that you can’t get close to God if you don’t do the work is a pretty universal spiritual idea. Teachers from a number of different faith traditions have said much the same thing. Various schools of Buddhism are all about teaching the correct way to do the work. But the second idea you present — the idea that you can’t get close to God if you separate yourself from the rest of God’s Creation — that’s a much less common idea among spiritual teachers. Tell me more about that.

“A man said to him: Tell my brothers that they have to divide my father’s possessions with me. Jesus said: Man, who made me a divider? He turned to his disciples and said to them: I am not a divider, am I” (Gospel of Thomas 72). Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: Basically it’s the idea that if you want to get close to God, you have to start with the only piece of Creation that God has given you complete control over: your own biology. Your own brain, your own body, your own body-soul nexus. This little piece of Creation is all you get. The rest belongs to other people — to other souls and to God the Mother and God the Father. You get one little piece of Creation to command — one little Kingdom to be in charge of — and it’s your job as a human being and as a soul to look after your little corner of Creation. It’s a big job. Much bigger than most human beings realize. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes courage. It takes knowledge. More than anything, it takes full acceptance.

A: What do you mean by “acceptance”? Do you mean people have to be resigned to their misery? Do you mean they have to accept the status quo?

J: No. I mean the exact opposite. I mean that if they want to get close to God while living here as human beings, they have to accept that God believes in them. They have to accept that they’re not filled with corruption and sin. They have to accept that they’re not here — here on Planet Earth — as some form of cosmic punishment or karmic journey. They have to stop seeing the glass as “half empty” and start seeing Creation in a positive light. This includes a commitment to seeing themselves — their core selves, their souls — in a positive light. They have to stop feeling so damned sorry for themselves.

A: A lot of pious people I’ve met — mostly Christians, but not exclusively so — remind me a lot of a fictional character from a science fiction/satire mini-series that ran many years ago called “The Hitchhiker`s Guide to the Galaxy. The character was Marvin the Robot. Marvin was always going around feeling sorry for himself. “Oh, poor me!” “Woe is me!” He saw himself as a victim — victim with a capital “V.” I found it hard to like Marvin, to be honest, because all he did was whine.

J: Pauline Christianity encourages people to whine. “Oh, poor me, I’m tainted with original sin, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just a victim. It’s not my fault. It’s Adam’s fault. If Adam hadn’t screwed up and made God so angry, then I wouldn’t have so many problems today. I’ll do my best, Lord — honest! — but please don’t expect too much of me, because, after all, I’m full of inner corruption and sin, and I’m doing the best I can — honest! I promise to go to church every week so you can cleanse me of my sins, but as for the rest of the week . . . please remember that I’m just a frail, weak, ignorant human being who can’t possibly resist temptation and can’t possibly understand your mysteries! You’ve decided to make all life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, so who I am to argue with your wisdom?”

A: Thomas Hobbes.

J: Yes. Thomas Hobbes — the pessimist’s pessimist. Also one of the great Materialist philosophers who rejected outright the relevance of the soul to a functioning, non-chaotic society. He had it all backwards because of his own psychological dysfunction.

A: Progressive Christianity, as this new movement calls itself, is edging in the direction of a Materialist religion — a religion founded on Newtonian science where the words “soul” and “miracle” are considered embarrassing and irrelevant.

J (smiling): Orthodox Western Christianity has in some ways always been a Materialist religion, despite the oxymoron-like quality of this phrase.

A: How so?

J: How often does Paul use the word psyche (soul) in his 7 known letters (8 if you count Colossians, as I do)?

A: Uh, hardly ever. When he does, he describes the soul in an eerie blend of Platonic and Jewish apocalyptic ways.

J: And how often does Paul talk about healing miracles? By that I mean the kind of healing miracles described several times in the Gospel of Mark.

A: Never. Paul doesn’t talk about healing miracles. He talks about sin and salvation and eschatology and Spirit and chosenness for those who believe in Christ. But he doesn’t talk about healing miracles.

J: What about the Roman Catholic Church’s take on healing miracles?

A: Oh, they keep a tight, tight rein on miracles. Nothing can be called an “official miracle” unless the Vatican approves it according to very strict criteria.

J: What’s one of the key criteria?

A: The healing had to take place after somebody prayed directly to a saint. Or a saint-to-be.

J: It’s a closed shop. A closed system. The Vatican has control over all the definitions. It’s not a true miracle unless it goes through the doors of the Church. Which doesn’t happen very often. It therefore forces people to look at the world around them in non-miraculous ways. In Materialist ways.

A: Huh?

J: Think of it this way. Christian orthodoxy has insisted since the beginning that God is to be understood as transcendent — far, far away from this earthly realm, detached from all emotion, detached from day to day concerns with human suffering, distant, serene, uninvolved with the petty concerns of the corrupt material world. This is actually Plato’s idea, but the Church long ago embraced it, and it’s officially part of Church doctrine, so the Church has to take responsibility for this choice. How does this translate for pious Christians? How does it make them feel about the world around them?

A: Well, on the one hand, they’re told by Genesis that they’re in charge of the world and can do whatever they like to it. It’s supposed to be a “good Creation.” On the other hand, they’re told that God isn’t actually “in” this good Creation, but is somewhere else — far, far away in a transcendent realm of pure Mind. I suppose that idea makes it easy for people to make excuses for their behaviour when they mistreat the environment and mistreat other creatures. Something along the lines of “Oh, it’s just a bunch of corrupt, material ‘stuff’ that doesn’t matter to God, so it’s okay for me to take what I want and leave a big mess behind.” . . . Okay, I’m starting to see what you’re getting at. This kind of anthropocentric religious thinking is a form of “state sanctioned Materialism.”

J: Yes. Two thousand years ago, there was no distinction between the political state and the religious state. The two were totally intertwined. So it mattered what religious leaders said about the environment, about the Earth, about the world around us. It mattered that religious leaders told pious followers to ignore all the lessons, all the truths that were being conveyed to them through “the eyes of Nature,” as it were. It mattered then, and it still matters today. God isn’t transcendent. Never was, never will be. God does have feelings. And God feels everything that happens in Creation. Everything.

A: Materialists don’t take God’s feelings into account. They don’t believe God has feelings (many of them don’t even believe that God exists). They don’t ask themselves how God is going to feel when they pour toxic sludge into the groundwaters. Pauline Christianity tells them they don’t have to ask this question.

J: Just as Pauline Christianity tells them they don’t have to take full responsibility for the care, healing, and core integrity of their own little piece of Creation: their biological body.

A: Their Kingdom. Their own Kingdom of the Heavens.

J: Only when you fully understand and respect the core integrity and the core wonder of your own Kingdom will you be able to understand and respect the core integrity of other people, other creatures, and God. That’s what empathy is — the ability to understand that your neighbour’s Kingdom is different but equal to your own. The healing of the Church must begin with a complete overturning of all doctrines that repudiate or undermine the true worth of the soul.

A: The United Church of Canada doesn’t even have an official doctrine of the soul, though the Articles of Faith tell us in one breath that we’re responsible for all our choices (Articles 2.3 and 2.4) and in the next breath tell us that all people are born with a sinful nature (Article 2.5). Talk about a lose-lose situation!

J: My point exactly.

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Posted in brain-soul connection, Buddhism, Church of today, empathy, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Materialism, miracles, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, relationship with God and tagged Divine Heart, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2011

JR22: Why You Need To Know Yourself (Mystical Commentary on Saying 67)

A: Can you please explain as simply as possible WHY it matters that each person has a unique soul blueprint and WHY it’s important for each person on a spiritual journey to uncover the specific details of his or her own unique blueprint?

J: Let’s use an imaginary person as an example to make this simpler. I’m going to call this imaginary person Jane Tamaguchi.

A: Okay.

J: Like all human beings, Jane is a soul. She doesn’t have a soul. She is a soul. She’s an angel — a child of God. Like all angels, she was born as a soul long before she decided to incarnate as a human being. Soul energy isn’t visible in the third dimension — the dimension that human beings live in during their temporary lives as incarnated souls — but soul energy can be felt in the third dimension.

A: Can you give some examples of “feelable” soul energy? (I think I just invented a new word.)

J: Yes. When you feel a deep sense of connection with another person, that’s soul energy. When you feel empathy for other creatures, that’s soul energy. When you feel committed, romantic, monogamous love, that’s soul energy. When you give or receive forgiveness, that’s soul energy. When you’re willing to trust in a loving and compassionate God, that’s soul energy.

Thomas 67: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing. (Photo credit JAT 2015)

Thomas 67: “One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” (Translation by Stevan Davies, photo credit JAT 2015)

A: Those are all emotions. Positive emotions. Uplifting emotions.

J: Yes. All souls are intensely emotional in positive, uplifting, creative, intuitive, loving ways.

A: So much for Christian angelology, that says angels have no emotions of their own and are simply instruments of God’s work and God’s will.

J: Yes. That’s another Christian doctrine that should go the way of the 8-track recording system.

A: But angels also have minds, as you’ve said previously. They have minds plus emotional hearts.

J: Yes. Christians have long believed — based largely on theories of the soul put forward by Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, and others — that the soul itself consists of a single indivisible substance. Arguments raged as to the exact nature of this substance. But the basic idea was that the soul was made of just one thing because — as the theory went — the soul couldn’t really be a soul if it could be “divided” into two or more substances. It should go without saying that this is a ridiculous supposition. There are no analogies anywhere in nature or in the quantum world for a complex lifeform made of a single element such as pure hydrogen or pure gold. All lifeforms, whether they exist in the third dimension or in higher dimensions, are extremely complex. A soul is a quantum being whose “biology” is far more complex than that of any 3D creature — which is pretty much what you’d expect for children of God who were born in the fourth dimension, and who will spend most of their eternal existence in parts of the “implicate order” that can’t be seen or measured by human beings in the third dimension.

A: So people just have to take it on trust? On blind faith?

J: I wouldn’t say that. Individuals who want to take the time to do intensive research into quantum physics and quantum biology will soon discover that the universe being studied by today’s scientists is extremely complex. This isn’t the cosmology of Plato or Thomas Aquinas. It’s breathtakingly complicated and interconnected. There’s plenty of room in there for a modern doctrine of the soul that doesn’t in any way violate the laws of quantum biology.

A: Okay. So tell me about Jane. Who is she as a soul?

J: Jane is a female angel, and for the purposes of this discussion she’s heterosexual.

A: I know what this means for human beings. But what does this mean for angels?

J: It means exactly what it sounds like. All angels are one of two sexes: male or female. Just as with human beings. There are no “in-between” sexes or alien sexes. All angels are either male (the same sex as God the Father) or female (the same sex as God the Mother). This is pretty much what you’d expect by looking at life on Planet Earth.

A: Some creatures on Earth are able to reproduce without a sexual partner. Komodo Dragons, for instance.

J: There are different modes of reproduction for creatures that live on Planet Earth. Reproduction is part of the 3D biological package. It isn’t part of the 4D soul package. We’ll come back to that at a later time.

A: But sexual orientation is part of the 4D soul package. Why is sexual orientation necessary for angels?

J: Because each angel has a soulmate. One true eternal love partner. A divine spouse. The one partner in all of Creation who’s a perfect match in every way, including intimate, private ways. Each angel in God’s Creation is paired with his or her perfect eternal partner. For many angelic couples, the perfect partner is of the same sex. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

A: So God the Father and God the Mother are not a same-sex couple themselves, but it’s okay with God if their children choose a same-sex partner to share eternity with.

J: Yes. God’s children are not carbon copies of their divine parents. God’s children come in every size and shape and colour imaginable. Yet every soul couple is blissfully happy, blissfully complete. This is what God the Mother and God the Father want for their children — bliss. Everybody’s different. Yet everybody’s happy. It’s the perfect divine family when you think about it.

A: So Jane has a specific sex — female — and a specific sexual orientation — heterosexual. What else does she have?

J: She has a soul body. Her soul body has a unique size and shape that’s perfect for her. Her soul body probably doesn’t look too much like her current human body, but that’s okay. She’s very happy with the soul body she has.

A: What else?

J: She has a soul mind. As a soul, she’s pure consciousness — by that I mean she has full awareness at all times of her own thoughts and her own feelings and her own choices and her own needs and wishes. Part of her unique mind lies in the way she thinks, the way she learns, the way she remembers, the way she expresses herself. These attributes lie within the soul mind. Jane doesn’t “know” everything. Nor does she want to. She has certain interests that are hard-wired at the very core of her consciousness, and these are the things she learns fastest and remembers best.

A: Can you give an example of what Jane might be interested in as a soul, as an angel?

J: Okay. Let’s say for argument’s sake that Jane is a gifted musician.

A: There are some angels who are more musically gifted than other angels?

J: All angels enjoy music to some extent. But not all angels want to spend most of the day in classes devoted to advanced musical performance and interpretation skills. As with all things in Creation, it’s a continuum. All angels appreciate music. But some angels want to devote most of their time to it. Which means they can’t be devoting their time to other interests, other skills. There’s only so much time in a day, even for an angel.

A: What other interests does our imaginary Jane possess as a soul?

J: Jane likes to be around a lot of other angels. She gets very lonely if she can’t hear other angels singing. She’s happiest when she’s with a big group of noisy, laughing angels.

A: Are there any angels who are more quiet in temperament, who wouldn’t feel comfortable in large groups?

J: Yes, lots. And that’s okay, too. These angels are quiet, but not in any way unfriendly or unloving. They just need more quiet than other angels do. Nothing wrong with that.

A: Let’s give Jane a third unique attribute. What would you suggest.

J: She doesn’t like the colour red.

A: Huh?

J: All angels appreciate the fact that everything in Creation is beautiful and deserving of respect. So Jane respects the colour red, and she’s happy for her friends who love all things red. But angels have their own taste, their own “likes” and “dislikes.” And Jane herself is under no divine obligation to like red. It happens that she doesn’t. God the Mother and God the Father respect the fact that Jane just doesn’t happen to like red. On the other hand, she can’t get enough black. She’s crazy for black.

A (grinning): I know a certain male angel who happens to love black! And a particular shade of charcoal grey.

J: Yeah, I do like those colours. Can’t deny it.

A: Okay. So we have our angel Jane, who’s passionate about music, loves to be around large groups of people, isn’t fond of the colour red, but likes black. Jane decided a while back to incarnate as a human being on Planet Earth (her choice), and right now she’s 35 years old, is working as a nurse, is taking night school courses so she can apply to law school, and lives with a female partner who has painted the bedroom red. Tell me about Jane’s current brain health.

J: All the things we talked about — Jane’s true soul interests — are hardwired into her human DNA. That’s the junk DNA that geneticists are puzzled by. Her soul’s blueprint is hardwired into her brain and central nervous system. Her brain stem, cerebellum, hypothalamus, thalamus, basal ganglia, and glial cells contain coding that’s unique to her, unique to her true soul personality. If Jane were to make conscious choices that “matched” or “lined up with” her core blueprint, her biological brain would function smoothly. It would function the way it’s supposed to. Her mood would remain stable. Her thinking would be logical and coherent. Her memory would be pretty good, especially around music and musical interpretation! She would have excellent social functioning. All in all, she’d be pretty happy, healthy, and well adjusted.

A: Okay. But right now Jane isn’t making conscious choices that “line up with” her own soul’s core identity. She’s working as a nurse, not as a musician. She’s around lots of people, which is good, but the people aren’t singing. She’s in a lesbian love relationship. And every night she has to go to sleep in a room that isn’t healing or calming for her as a soul. What’s happening inside her brain at this point?

J: There’s a software conflict. On the one hand, the so-called “primitive” parts of Jane’s brain are saying “I want to craft music, I want to find a loving male partner, I want to be around the colour black.” Meanwhile, Jane’s forcing the outer cortical layers of her brain to make different choices — choices that seem logical to her peers or to her family, perhaps, but which make no sense to her core self.

A: So how’s Jane doing?

J: Her brain is pretty messed up. There are competing signals from the different regions of her brain and central nervous system. The signals contradict each other. By now she’s feeling confused and upset with her life, and she doesn’t why. Things seem okay on the outside. But on the inside she’s not happy. She may be having trouble with headaches or poor sleep or depression or one of the many other signs of imbalance that can emerge via human biology.

A: A lot of these medical issues would begin to clear up if Jane were to seek professional counselling and appropriate medical care to help her uncover the choices she’s making that aren’t working for her.

J: Yes. Jane has been making choices based on other people’s priorities rather than her own core priorities — the priorities of her soul. Over the long term, her poor choices have begun to affect her health and her happiness.

A: Can she force herself to “be” a nurse and “be” a lawyer if her soul isn’t wired for healing or for case analysis?

J: No. This is what I meant when I said the soul isn’t malleable in the way that clay is malleable. Jane can only be who she is. If she tries to be somebody she’s not — if she tries to be a lesbian nurse-lawyer who wears red power suits — her biological brain will begin to sustain serious damage from the continuous push-and-pull of her internal “software conflict.” She’ll literally fry her own brain from the inside out.

A: Okay. That’s pretty clear. Be yourself — be the person God knows you to be — so your brain and body will function the way God intended.

J: Simple in fact. Simple in reality. But not always easy to implement.

A: At least it gives people a starting place on the journey. At least it helps them understand where they’re going and WHY. It helps so much to understand WHY.

J: Insight is one hell of an amazing miracle.

Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Davies (Stevan), gender and sexuality, Gospel of Thomas, insight, interoception, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, quantum theory, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose, Thomas 67 and tagged brain-soul connection, Gospel of Thomas | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2011

JR21: Saying 67 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: Okay. Here’s another pretty big question for you. Stevan Davies translates Saying 67 of the Gospel of Thomas as “Jesus said: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” Was this saying central to your teachings? Was it an important theme for you?

J: Yes. I tried very hard to express this idea. I tried to express it in many different ways.

A: Similar ideas have been taught by many spiritual leaders over the centuries. In fact, it’s almost a spiritual cliche. It’s so easy to say, “One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” But what exactly does it mean?

J: It means you have to know who you actually are as a soul — “the core you” that’s left after you strip away all the false, damaging prejudices and religious doctrines and abusive teachings of your family and culture. It means you have to love, honour, and respect the person you are when you remove all the weeds from the garden of your biological brain. It means you have to trust that when you pull out all the weeds, there’s still going to be something left in there. You have to trust that when you pull out all the weeds, you won’t be left with a barren patch of lifeless dirt. Instead you’ll be able to see the flowers of your soul — the lilies of the field — for the first time.

Gardens of the soul (Photo credit JAT 2014)

A: I take it you’re not too fond of the image of Creation in Genesis 2:7: the Lord God forming Adam from dust and then breathing the breath of life into his nostrils so he’ll become a living being.

J: No. The Bible has many references to human beings as dirt or clay or potters’ vessels. Clay is nothing more than a kind of dirt that can be shaped, moulded according to the creator’s will. The message that’s repeated again and again is that human beings are malleable in the way that wet clay is malleable. Wet clay starts out as a lump. It can be turned into any shape imagineable (as long as the laws of physics and chemistry aren’t broken). You can make a plate. You can make a bowl. You can make a large urn. You can make a small storage container. A complex sculpture. A string of beads. Clay is like that. You can make whatever you want. Many people — pious Pauline Christians especially — believe that God intends human beings to be like clay. They believe that each person is basically a lump of malleable clay. Based on this belief, they assume that God can reshape each individual in any way God chooses. It’s the idea of neuroplasticity taken to absurd extremes: “I can be anything God wants me to be if only I try hard enough to surrender to God’s will!!!” How often have you heard a sanctimonious preacher say that?

A: It’s a popular Christian idea.

J: It was a popular idea with many Essene and Hellenistic philosophers in my time, too. It’s an idea that makes it very easy for religious leaders to blame people in their flock for “not trying hard enough.” It makes it very easy to accuse regular people of being “weak”. To accuse them of falling short of true faith. To make them feel guilty for “letting God down.” To point fingers at them and say they’re filled with sin. These teachings are spiritually abusive.

A: You’re talking about the bread & butter of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.

J: And fundamentalists of other faiths, too.

A: You’re saying, then, that the doctrine of malleable clay is factually incorrect. That Genesis 2:7 is wrong in its portrayal of human beings.

J: Both Creation stories in Genesis are wrong. Obviously (without apologies to any Creationists who might read this) there is no literal truth to Genesis 1 or Genesis 2-3. On top of that, there’s no metaphorical truth, either. Human beings are not malleable lumps of clay. They can’t be shaped by God or by anyone else into something they’re not. You can’t force a woman to become a man (though some people would like to try). You can’t force a gay man to become straight (though some Christians would like them to try). You can’t force a musician to become an engineer (though sadly many parents have tried. And tried and tried and tried.) God the Mother and God the Father don’t make souls this way. Souls aren’t malleable. Each soul has a unique identity, a unique blueprint, a unique set of talents and traits and strengths and absences of strengths. Souls are like snowflakes — no two are alike. You can’t take what God the Mother and God the Father made and “fix it.” You can’t turn a bowl into a plate. You can’t turn a sculpture into a wind chime. You are who you are. It’s true that you may not know who you are. It’s true that you may not know whether you’re a bowl or a plate or a sculpture or a wind chime. But your soul knows. And God knows. Between you — between you and God — you can uncover your own true soul identity.

A: I like the garden metaphor better. I’d rather discover what kind of “flower” I am. I’m not sure I really want to “see” myself as a set of dishes in the kitchen cupboard.

J: I hear ya. Nature metaphors are much more natural, much more helpful. That’s why I used so many images from nature in my teachings. There’s a natural resonance, a natural harmony between the images of nature and the soul’s own language. The soul “gets” nature imagery. The soul doesn’t mind being likened to trees or flowers or fruits. Or the totems of Native North American tradition. It helps human beings to have a nature metaphor of their own soul. An image to help them “see” themselves as God sees them.

A: If I were a tree, what kind of tree do you think I’d be? (Not that I’m saying I’m literally a tree . . .)

J: You’d be a yew. A tough, gnarly yew. That reminds me a lot of you.

A: Yeah? Okay, well that makes sense to me. I even really like yews. Always have. Nobody’s gonna believe this when I say this, but to me, you’re most definitely a magnolia. A big, showy magnolia. And damn but you wear it well! Of course, if the shrivelled up hearts of the pious Pauline Christians had their way, you’d be a bleeding, suffering, miserable, ugly thorn bush.

J: What? No burning bush? No branch of Jesse? No grafted grapevine? No olive tree? I think I’d make a particularly fine Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Don’t you?

A: You’re such a cynic.

-2

Posted in "4 S's", Book of Genesis, Davies (Stevan), Essenes, Gospel of Thomas, humility, insight, Jesus Redux, orthodox teachings about the soul, soul blueprint, Thomas 67 and tagged Gospel of Thomas, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

06 Mar 2011

JR18: The "Trilemma"

A: This morning it seemed like a good idea for me to post part of the cognate paper I wrote for my Master’s degree. I’ve included the abstract, the information from the Schematic Model that underlies my argument, and an introduction to the argument itself. This paper has not been published, but, like all original writing, is covered by copyright laws.

This research paper was the product of years of combined academic and mystical research. I got a lot of help from Jesus (though I couldn’t put that in the bibliography!), and I got little help from my supervising professor, who was somewhat bewildered by the paper. The paper was read and marked by a second professor — P.H., a theologian of Pentecostal stripe — who hated the paper and who, strangely enough, accused me of wasting 20 pages in the middle on “nothing” and then in the next breath accused me of not backing up my stated theory about Jesus’ teachings. She literally could not see, with her fundamentalist background, that the “wasted pages” constituted an analysis of radical claims about Jesus made by the author of the Gospel of Mark. People see what they want to see, even in academia.

July 18, 2012: Today I posted the research paper in its entirety. You can access it on the “Doctrines of the Soul” page I’ve added to this site. Enjoy!

ABSTRACT:

This paper compares different theological claims that were made about the soul in Hellenistic philosophy, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity, and shows through the use of a new theoretical model that these claims cannot be grouped by religion. Doctrinal claims about the soul can instead be grouped into one of three main fields of theological inquiry: the physis versus nomos debate; the nomos versus the Divine debate; or the physis versus the Divine debate. These three debates have operated in parallel within Christianity since its inception. The Gospel of Mark provides evidence that Jesus’ own teachings on the soul may have been part of a novel solution to the physis-Divine debate. By contrast, Tertullian’s detailed doctrine of the soul, presented in The Soul’s Testimony and A Treatise on the Soul, draws on the traditions of the nomos-Divine debate, and yields very different claims than those presented in Mark. Tertullian’s doctrine of the soul, and his related doctrine of original sin, have exerted great influence on the orthodox Christian understanding of the soul. The church today has the option of reexamining the history of early Christian soul doctrines and assessing the three parallel strands of thought to uncover a previously overlooked biblically-based understanding of the soul that can meet today’s pastoral needs.

Schematic Model for the Theological “Trilemma”:

1. The Rift Between PHYSIS and NOMOS The Problem: How can we reconcile the necessities of nature with the themes of justice and judgment derived from human laws? The Solution: Elevation of human authority and human status (arete). IN TENSION WITH 2 AND 3.

2. The Rift Between NOMOS and the DIVINE The Problem: How can we reconcile the themes of justice and judgment derived from human laws with the puzzling long-term relationship we have with God? The Solution: Elevation of prophetic authority, and lack of accountability to the necessities of nature. IN TENSION WITH 1 AND 3.

3. The Rift Between PHYSIS and the DIVINE The Problem: How can we reconcile the necessities of nature with the puzzling long-term relationship we have with God? The Solution: Elevation of secret knowledge, mysticism, and cult rituals. IN TENSION WITH 1 AND 2.

The model I propose is shown in diagrammatic format in figure 1, Schematic Model for the Theological “Trilemma.” This figure is elaborated on in tables 1, 2, and 3. Although a much longer paper would be needed to examine this model in detail, in the current paper I will use this model to examine three major streams of theological thought that have all, in their own way, used doctrines of the soul to resolve issues of religious and political authority. By placing the different doctrines of the soul mentioned above into this framework, it is easier to see in what way Tertullian’s theology differs markedly from that of Jesus in the Synoptics. The contrast between these two demonstrates clearly that doctrines of the soul do not line up neatly according to the respective religious tradition from which each emerged. In other words, there is not a soul doctrine that is unique to Judaism, a different soul doctrine that is unique to Hellenism, and a third one found only in Christianity. Instead, a distinctive three-fold pattern exists, a pattern that is shared among Judaism, Greek religion/ philosophy, and early Christianity, and this three-fold pattern is the basis of the model I am proposing. This three-fold pattern, or “trilemma” as I have chosen to call it, partly explains the “why” of fierce theological debate. It also helps explain why we are so confused today about the nature of the soul.

The pattern I am proposing as a theological framework to help us analyse our current confusion arose in response to observations made by Walter Burkert in his book Greek Religion. Towards the end of this important book, Burkert discusses the religious and philosophical crisis that erupted in the fifth century BCE when sophists and atheists undermined Greek religious certainty with their observations about nomos and physis:

Nomos, meaning both custom and law, becomes a central concept of sophistic thought. Laws are made by men and can be altered arbitrarily. And what is tradition if not the sum of such ordinances? Horizons are extended through travel and the reports of travel: with growing interest men became aware of foreign peoples among whom everything is different, witness the ethnographic digressions of Herodotus. In this way the unquestioned assumptions of custom can easily be shaken. The discovery of the changeability of custom becomes particularly dangerous when nomos is set in opposition to physis, a concept provided by the philosophy of nature where it is used to denote the growing of the cosmos and of all things contained in it from their own laws. Archelaos, a pupil of Anaxagoras, is supposed to have been the first to formulate this antithesis about 440 BC: the just and the unjust, the ugly and the beautiful are not defined by physis but by nomos, by arbitrarily changing human convention.

But it was on tradition, nomos, that religion primarily rested, as the Greeks knew well. Its foundations were seen to be threatened, at least in theory, as a result of the questioning of nomos.[1]

Burkert then goes on to outline how pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Sophocles, and Diogenes of Apollonia “delivered” the pious from this crisis of uncertainty by asserting that “[t]here are laws of eusebeia which are rooted in heaven, removed from human caprice, and eternal like the cosmos itself.”[2] Thus, concludes Burkert, “nature speculation provides a starting-point from which to close the rift between physis and nomos, and so to give a new, unshakeable foundation for piety.”[3]

“The rift between physis and nomos” is a phrase so powerful, so meaningful, that it seems almost paradigmatic, and Burkert’s recognition of the pattern opened the door to a pursuit by this author of other such paradigmatic rifts. This line of enquiry led to the observation that there seem to be two other major rifts: the rift between nomos and the Divine, and the rift between physis and the Divine. Each of these rifts is not a simple duality but rather a complex philosophical/theological tension that encompasses perennial questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a human in relationship with God.

The three-fold pattern I suggest here can be represented by the triangle shown in figure 1. Each point of the triangle represents one of the three rifts. Although other writers have proposed three-point triangles to highlight both doctrinal and scholarly incongruities[4], what distinguishes the “trilemma” from other three-point models is the fact that each point in the proposed triangular scheme represents not a single concept but a complex tension between two difficult-to-reconcile concepts that seem to be separated by a rift. Each of these rifts, on its own, represents a valid question. For instance, it is perfectly valid for religious seekers to ask in what way human laws and traditions should (or could) align with the laws of nature (nomos in tension with physis; table 1); or in what way religious laws are (or could be) made in the image of our relationship with God (nomos in tension with the Divine; table 2)[5]; or in what way the actual laws of nature reflect our relationship with a God who allows death and suffering (physis in tension with the Divine; table 3). These are all straightforward and important themes of theology. What is not straightforward is the way in which the answers to these questions gradually resulted in three divergent theological solutions, as shown on tables 1, 2, and 3. Each of these three theological solutions presents a different view of who God is, and how we can be in relationship with God. These solutions are mutually incompatible. For instance, if you “cut and paste” the three different versions of how God is perceived in these three different solutions (that is, if you try to put them all together on one point in the centre of the triangle), you arrive at a God who is simultaneously distant and transcendent, fully immanent, unchanging, emotionally detached, interventionist, emotionally involved, in conditional relationship with us, in unconditional relationship with us, and proleptically in relationship with us. This simply cannot be, unless one resorts to the time-honoured tradition of explaining away overt contradictions as mysterion.[6]

What emerges upon examination of the “trilemma” is the extent to which these three theological solutions are mutually incompatible. The questions that underlie the three points are not incompatible; but the solutions that have arisen and been accepted as dogma over many centuries are very much incompatible. A person who attempts to hold all three solutions together as a unified whole is likely to end up confused at the very least. Yet for centuries Christians have been trying to do this very thing. Before that, the people of Judah/Israel and the people of classical Greece wrestled with the same confusion. This is not a new problem. But until we recognize it as a reality that is causing us problems, and until we look for new ways to de-complicate our Protestant theology, we will continue to be confused about our relationship with God.

This same confusion manifests in our current understanding of the soul, which, as I will show in the next two chapters, presents a theological solution based on only one point of the trilemma – the nomos-Divine rift – while using a confusing blend of vocabulary that seems to point to the other two points as well. Thus we will see the emergence of a soul doctrine that means one thing while ostensibly saying another. The intent of this soul doctrine is to entrench the inviolability of divine contract laws (the nomos-Divine rift), but it refers often to the language of free will (physis–nomos rift) and of mystery (physis-Divine rift). In this context, it is little wonder that today’s church is so reticent about the soul – at present, the orthodox understanding of the soul makes no sense!

[1] Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (1977; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 312-313.

[2] Ibid., 318.

[3] Ibid.

[4]Dr. W. M. pointed out to his Winter 2009 class the triangular models of Mattitiahu Tsevat and James Barr respectively. Tsevat’s model shows the doctrinal dilemma of the Book of Job, which can be summarized as “just Creator, just persons, just rewards: pick two.” Mattitiahu Tsevat, “The Meaning of the Book of Job,” Hebrew Union College Annual 37 (1966), 73-106. James Barr presents a threefold process for studying the Bible – referential, intentional, and poetic – in The Bible in the Modern World (London: S.C.M. Press, 1973), 61. James Rives, however, comes closest to the model I’m suggesting when he describes the three kinds of advantage offered by religion in the Greco-Roman period: (1) traditional benefits, (2) intensification, and (3) salvation. James. B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 168-179.

[5]As the entry on nomos in the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology points out, “[t]he legal, ethical and religious meanings of nomos are inseparable in antiquity, for all goods were believed to come from the gods, who upheld order in the universe and in relations between men . . . . Philosophy (even that of the Sophists), kept alive the awareness that, since human laws are so fallible, man cannot exist unless he conforms to cosmic, universal law . . . . Whereas the Sophists criticized the idea of absolute validity attaching to nomos, Plato and Aristotle each in his own way connected it with the nous, the human spirit, and thereby once again with the divine.” Hans-Helmut Esser, “Law, Custom, Elements,” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 2, rev. ed., ed. Colin Brown (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986),439.

[6]Although I am a practising mystic, I would not want to fall back on the excuse of mysterion to try to force these different images onto a single page. Mystery as a concept can be dangerous when used as a catchall to smooth over doctrinal inconveniences or to uphold church authority at the expense of the oppressed. The church needs mystery – but it does not need the kind that has been used to justify longstanding abuses in the church towards women and the disadvantaged.

-3

Posted in Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Law (Nomos), Mark vs Paul, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

20 Jan 2011

TBM7: Picturing Your Own Soul

If you’ve decided to try the Spiral Path and see if it works for you, how should you picture your own soul?

The short answer is this: you should picture your own soul as yourself — as the human being you are.

Picturing My Own Soul (c) JAT 2013

For example, if you’re an African-American man, you should picture your soul as an African-American man. If you’re a gay African-American man, you should picture your soul as a gay African-American man (because when souls are created by God, some souls are created homosexual and some souls are created heterosexual). If you’re a man who can’t go outside without your beloved hat, you should picture your soul wearing your favourite hat.

Okay. Now for the long answer.

Over the past few thousand years, many different theories about the soul have been presented in many different cultures and religions. If you read enough books, you eventually start to see some patterns that cut across cultural and religious lines. In other words, there’s a selection of soul theories that seem to pop up everywhere. These theories are not restricted to just one religion or one historical period.

Most devout religious believers, regardless of their faith tradition, don’t know this. They believe there’s only one theory of the soul — the theory they themselves have been taught. But factually speaking, there are many theories about the soul. When you line up these theories beside each other, you quickly see they’re mutually contradictory. They can’t all be true.

For instance, if you accept Plato’s theory that the soul is preexistent, immortal, and indivisible, then theoretically you can’t at the same time accept the Roman Catholic belief that the soul is not preexistent. (Sadly, this contradiction has never stopped most Christian theologians from believing in both theories at the same time. But that’s another story.)

Many people, in their frustration about the lack of church guidance on the matter of the soul, have turned for answers to Eastern traditions about the soul. Here we encounter theories about the chakra system — internal “wheels of light” — along with related theories about astral or auric bodies. The goal here is to cleanse the various energy fields and and raise one’s vibration so enlightenment can be achieved. There is always a sense here — as in Gnosticism — that the chakras and astral bodies are in some way separate from and spiritually superior to your physical biology. The doctrine of karma is central to these energy-field belief systems.

I wasted a lot of time — years, in fact — trying to “raise my vibration” and “release my negative karma” through the methods recommended by these spiritual teachers.

I was eventually saved from further emotional and financial hardship by my kick-ass spiritual mentor — and I mean that quite literally. The soul who once lived as Jesus kicked my ass around the block more times than I can count until I finally got it through my thick skull that I was making things way too complicated.

Keep it simple, keep it sane, was his particular brand of teaching on the matter of the soul. Why look at ancient texts and grandiose teachings, said he, when you have perfectly sound knowledge available to you in the form of neuroscience?

It took me a while to accept his no-nonsense, logical approach, but I couldn’t argue with the compassion and trust that grounded all his insights.

“Look,” said he (his command of English idioms being exceptional), “your body is not just some old lump of clay with a spark of light that belongs to God. That’s just stupid. It’s a lot more complicated, and a lot more miraculous, than that. Your inner spark, your inner wisdom, doesn’t belong to God. It isn’t a piece of God. It’s you. That inner wisdom is you — your true self. Your consciousness. Your selfdom.” (Selfdom? thought I.) “Give God some credit,” continued my molecularly challenged teacher. “This is a scientific question. The question isn’t, ‘Do I have a soul?’ The question is, ‘How the heck is it scientifically possible for God the Mother and God the Father to downshift my soul’s 4D energy blueprint into a 3D body?’ Human science can’t answer that question. Even angels have a hard time grasping the science. But it’s science, not some sort of weird cosmological voodoo. Your DNA holds your soul data — the stuff that’s unique to you. Plus it holds all the biological data you need for human survival. Your DNA is a powerhouse miracle. It allows you to live here temporarily as a biological being. It gives you all the basic tools you need for you to be you. It’s totally fucking amazing.”

(Yes, he really does talk like that.)

This is why I picture my soul as a blond woman of Celtic descent. I know that as a soul — as a child of God — I’m female, not male. I know that as a soul — as a child of God — my sexual orientation is heterosexual. I know that as a soul — as a child of God — I “recognize” myself when my hair is blond. Sure, it’s my Irish and French DNA that dictates my fair complexion, and my eye colour (grey-blue), and my height (5’6″), and my bone structure (slim). But it’s not random. God the Mother and God the Father made sure that when it was time for me to incarnate as a human being I would have the correct DNA package for me. The best match possible between human biology and my unique soul blueprint.

Although like so many people I once judged everything about my body (too skinny, bust too flat, eyes too small, skin too blotchy, blah, blah, blah), I now feel terrific in the body I’m in. I feel grateful for the human form I have. I feel grateful because my body allows me to be me. Not just me as a human, but me as an angel-in-temporary-human-form. It’s the best of both worlds, you might say.

Literally.

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Posted in brain-soul connection, Gnosticism, My Spiral Path, mystic, orthodox teachings about the soul, Soul, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

03 Jan 2011

TBM4: More Thoughts on the Soul

I’d like to be able to recommend some well-written books to you about the constitution, as it were, of your soul. But I can’t. Because there aren’t any.

I know this because, for my Master’s degree in theological studies, I recently wrote a long research paper (or short thesis, if you prefer) on the history of doctrines of the soul in ancient Greek, Judaic, and early Christian thought. You wouldn’t believe how kooky some of the ideas were back then — and how kooky they continue to be in major world religions today. These ideas are so kooky that fiction writers — the people who write horror and dark fantasy novels and screenplays — don’t need to invent any new ideas. All they have to do is recycle ancient ideas about the soul that have been scaring the crap out of people for thousands of years.

So ya got yer stories about lost souls. And stolen souls. And soul vampires. And souls detaching from bodies to go on nightly dream journeys. And souls corrupted by original sin. And souls wandering around as ghosts. And souls sent to Hell or Sheol or Gehenna or Hades or whatever. And souls enslaved by the devil. And souls that are demons in disguise. And souls that can be controlled with magic spells, potions, or rituals. And souls that are trapped in assorted jars, bowls, vials, statues, TV sets, cars, and the latest fad, of course — Facebook pages.

These ideas about the soul all have one thing in common: they reek of paranoia and terror. So I’m thinkin’ they have nothing to do with God, and everything to do with major mental illness (eg. psychosis).

In other words, these untrusting ideas about the soul belong in only one place, and that’s the garbage can.

So today’s practical tip is this: when it comes to the constitution of your soul, keep it simple, keep it sane.

Start with the assumption that God is not stupid.

From there, go to the assumption that God only creates good souls that can’t be imprisoned and can’t be stolen.

Then remind yourself (as often as you can) that you are a good soul, too. (In other words, God didn’t turn all of Creation upside down and zero in on you — and only you — just so you can be the one and only soul in Heaven and Earth who’s truly defective. No pity parties allowed.)

After that, there’s only one logical place to go — total confusion! ‘Cause if God’s not stupid, and God only makes good souls, and you are a good soul, but your life is still a complete mess . . . then the problem is that you don’t have the necessary tools — the facts, the information, the knowledge, the insight you need — in order to make sense of who you are and why you’re here.

As I said yesterday, your problems as a human being aren’t caused by your soul. Your problems are caused by poor teaching — poor teaching that makes it almost impossible for you to live a balanced, holistic life with the information you currently have.

It’s not God who has created the confusion within you. It’s all the poor teaching you got when you were growing up. It’s all the black-and-white (dualistic) thinking that got rammed down your throat year after year. All the either-or ideas. All the pure rights and pure wrongs. The winners and the losers. The saved and the unsaved. The righteous and the unrighteous.

Creation isn’t made like that. And neither is your soul. It’s not healthy for your soul and it’s not healthy for your biological body to embrace black-and-white thinking. Black-and-white thinking leads to perfectionism. Perfectionism leads to extremism. Extremism leads to violence and terror.

Better to be confused for a while than to be caught in a nightmare of perfectionism and “Divine Law.”

Living a confused life is much simpler than living a perfect life.

On the Spiral Path, simpler is better.

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Posted in dualism, mental illness, Mother and Father God, orthodox teachings about the soul, Soul, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy, trust and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

18 Nov 2010

CC42: Humility: Vice or Virtue?

Monte Cassino - wide view by Pilecka - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - httpcommons.wikimedia.orgwikiFileMonte_Cassino_-_wide_view.JPG#mediaFileMonte_Cassino_

Abbey of Monte Cassino, Italy, site of the early 6th century CE monastery founded by St. Benedict of Nursia. Monte Cassino was the first monastery founded by Benedict, author of the highly influential Rule of St. Benedict. The buildings were reconstructed after being largely destroyed in the WWII Battle of Monte Cassino. Photo credit: Monte Cassino – wide view by Pilecka – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Ah, the joys of humility, that most cherished of Christian virtues! O ye wondrous affliction, scourge of my heart, desiccator of my soul! How could I envision Original Sin without you, you who from ancient times have trampled all that is good and true and beautiful within me! You who are the very face of Christian orthodoxy! You who demands that I obey my earthly leaders! Fair Humility, you are an idol beyond compare!

Humility, your justness and righteousness have been proved again and again within orthodoxy’s precincts. To you we owe a great debt, for you have protected the Church throughout the centuries from the evils of independent thought. Even more important, you have locked the door to Jesus’ Kingdom of Heaven to ensure that people of true faith and good heart can’t get in. Verily, you are one of the rocks upon which the orthodox Western Church stands.

Hear now a modern summary (written by this humble author) of the famed Rule of St. Benedict, first written in Latin in Italy in the early 6th century. (The reader is referred to the following text: Timothy Fry, ed., The Rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982)).

FIVE CORE CHRISTIAN VIRTUES IN THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT
For St. Benedict, author of The Rule, the most important Christian quality is to place the love of Christ before all else, a point he returns to several times in his book of instructions for beginners (for example,Chapter 4:1, 20; Chapter 72:11). Benedict takes a two-pronged approach – faith combined with good works – to this religious vocation (an approach which turns out to be particularly effective, too, if we are to consider the fact that his Rule is still used by many religious orders today). First, he creates guidelines that affect how the monks will think and feel about their relationships with themselves, each other, and God; in other words, he tries to fulfill the needs of faith. These are the instructions that pertain to renouncing the self and to humility, both great virtues in Benedict’s opinion. In order to follow Christ, monks must renounce themselves, taking no notice of anything good in themselves except to give the credit to God, not themselves (4:42). No one is to follow his own heart’s desire (3:8). Neither should monks expect to have free disposal even of their own bodies and wills (33:4; 58:25). Private ownership is a vice (Chapter 33), and, along a similar vein, a monk may not exchange letters, tokens, or gifts with anyone – or be found to be in possession of such items – without the abbot’s consent (Chapter 54). These rules, if followed, draw the monk’s thoughts and feelings away from anything that makes him distinct or different from his peers, and make it easier for him to practise humility. “Humility” is one of the core features of Benedict’s Rule. Chapter 7 outlines the 12 steps of humility, and many other chapters of the book exalt humility as well. A monk who ascends Benedict’s ladder of humility will find at the twelfth and highest stage an awareness that he is always guilty on account of his sins, and through this awareness of his true unworthiness, he will be able to receive cleansing of his vices and sins through the grace of the Holy Spirit (7:62-70). In this way, the monk will finally know the perfect love of God.

Second, Benedict creates a set of strict guidelines that governs what monks do, when they do it, and how they do it. In other words, he tells them exactly how to perform good works – how to act. Monks who agree to these rules, which can be thought of as the day-to-day tools and practical routines necessary to the vocation of loving Christ, will acquire the essential Christian virtues of obedience and self-discipline. Obedience to the abbot and the rule is profoundly important in imitation of obedience to Christ. Indeed, the abbot is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery (2:2). Moreover, obedience must not be blighted by the evil of grumbling (5:14; 34:6; 53:18) but must be given always with gentleness (Chapter 68) and purity of heart (20:3). Monks who take their final vows must promise three things: stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience (58:17). From that day forward, they are no longer free to leave the monastery (58:15), although they may be cast out or excommunicated after due process if they are sufficiently disobedient. It is therefore in the monks’ best interests to exercise self-discipline, which could perhaps be defined as being “not slothful, not unobservant, not negligent” (the vices that Benedict lists in his concluding chapter, 73:7). In Benedict’s monastic communities, this self-discipline meant more than just “a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love” (Prologue: 47). It meant remembering all the rules, and practising all the rules, even on rare occasions when monks were travelling or were working far away from the oratory; so, for instance, monks on a journey could not omit the prescribed hours (50:4), nor could monks sent on a day errand presume to eat outside the monastery on pain of excommunication (Chapter 51). Self-discipline may also have been helpful when it was time to get up in the middle of the night to celebrate the Divine Office! [from an unpublished paper by the author; italics added]

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The apostle Paul would be proud of you, noble Humility. For you are the theological sleight of hand that keeps good, pious Christians in their place, doomed to feel unworthy, sinful, desperate to be saved, and constantly separated from God.

You are a proud and cruel goddess, Humility.

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Posted in "4 S's", anagogic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, humility, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul and tagged monasticism | Leave a Comment

07 Oct 2010

CC37: More on Harpur’s "Pagan Christ"

I’m still feeling grumpy about Tom Harpur’s suggestions for Christians who want to find “the only way ahead,” so I’m going to talk some more about that.

Early on in my writings on this blog, I stated — in bold letters, no less — that I am NOT a Gnostic (March 6, 2010: Some Reference Books I Read & Recommend). Even though I’m a practising mystic, and even though I believe in a number of things that can’t be seen by the human eye (so sue me — even radio waves can’t be seen by the human eye), this doesn’t make me a Gnostic. It’s only sloppy thinkers who haven’t done their homework on Gnosticisms would insist on calling me a Gnostic. (Note here that I’ve used the plural form of Gnosticism because careful researchers know there’s no such thing as one single historical form of Gnosticism any more than there’s one single historical form of Christianity or one single historical form of Judaism.)

According to Gnostics of all traditions, this is what you look like: old, ugly, stained, and walled off eternally from God unless you accept the cult teachings that will grant you “escape.” Naturally, for the price of your human obedience, worship, and financial contributions, Gnostics will be happy to sell you the secret knowledge that blasts open the door to ascendance. Photo credit JAT 2021.

In order for a person to be included under the umbrella term of Gnosticism, he or she has to hold certain beliefs about the nature of humanity’s relationship with God. Central to all Gnosticisms is the idea that the soul is a tiny piece of God’s essence that is trying to find its way back to God. Immortal souls end up in mortal bodies, but this isn’t really a good thing, according to Gnostics, because our physical bodies drag the soul down into a “prison” of matter. The spiritual task for Gnostics is to recognize the spark of God/Christ/Divine that exists within, and to set about freeing that spark by raising their consciousness to a higher level. The goal is to seek “wisdom” and hidden knowledge (gnosis in Greek). This knowledge leads to transcendence.

If this sounds a lot like Plato’s teachings about the soul’s journey, it’s because Plato’s teachings and later Gnostic teachings have a lot in common. Most orthodox Western Christian scholars don’t want to admit it, but these teachings also strongly influenced the apostle Paul. The famous passage about life after death in Chapter 15 of First Corinthians is a fascinating blend of Jewish apocalyptic thought (future resurrection) and Platonic thought (incorruptibility of the divine): “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” (Cue Handel’s Messiah.)

Tom Harpur is quite up-front about the fact that he admires Gnostic thinking. On page 175 of The Pagan Christ, he says, “What’s really important is that Paul’s spiritual view of Christ (his Christology) and Gnostic Christianity held the early Christian movement up to a truly high standard of intellectual and philosophical excellence.”

Bear in mind that Harpur himself doesn’t believe there ever was an actual man named Jesus Christ who lived in1st century CE Palestine. He believes the gospel stories about Jesus should be read typologically, not literally. He believes the story of Jesus is pure symbol. An important symbol, but a symbol nonetheless. A myth, not a fact.

In fact, Harpur believes that all Scripture should only be read symbolically, not literally or historically. For Harpur, “the enigma of the Bible has been largely solved. Dark passages, cryptic narratives or events — all have been shot through with a new, though long-lost, light because of this awareness that the key to all Scripture is to be found in the doctrine of Incarnation (page 181).”*

And what is the long-lost light that Harpur sees in this symbolic reading of Scripture? Why, it’s the ancient wisdom of the Egyptian mystery cults!

Here’s where I have a really big problem with Harpur’s thesis. He recommends without reservation that Christianity of the third millennium reclaim “the wisdom expounded by the Egyptians, the Orphics, the Pythagoreans and Plato, as well as by St. Paul, the Gnostics, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and a host of others . . . (page 191).” (Can’t argue with the historical links that existed among these groups, although I would have added Manicheans and Albigensians.) He thinks the choice to reclaim this long-lost light will arm us “with the moral and intellectual courage to live our lives to the fullest for the advancement of all . . . (page 193).”

Me, I think such a course of action will demolish whatever moral and intellectual courage Christians have.

Why do I think this? I think this because I’ve lived through the devastating effects of ancient mystery teachings on the human brain, and although I’ve fully recovered from the effects of my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I’m alarmed when I see reputable scholars using their positions of authority to urge dangerous spiritual practices on vulnerable, less well educated people.

It’s irresponsible, and there’s no excuse for it.

Harpur is advocating a return to what is indisputably a cult psychology based on status addiction. He’s kidding himself if he thinks the leaders of these ancient cults were nice people who truly found divine wisdom and willingly shared it with all people. Pythagoras (of whom Harpur seems fond) founded a sectarian cult with strict rules where only a small group of chosen disciples were initiated into the secret knowledge and rituals. (That’s status addiction!) Hellenistic mystery cults such as the Orphic mysteries and the Eleusinian mysteries engaged in bizarre, ritualistic, occult practices that most people would find abhorrent today. Addiction issues and sexual misconduct were rampant in these cults. Later, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, Christian monks, nuns, contemplatives, and mystics separated themselves from regular communities and engaged in self-harming ascetic practices so they could “imitate Christ” and be “closer to God.” (Again, status addiction.) Needless to say, addiction issues, sexual misconduct, and other forms of abuse continued to take place in monastic communities and continued to be blamed on evil forces such as demons, incubi, and the devil.

Is this what Harpur wants? Because this is what he’s going to get if he naively places these ancient mystery cults on a pedestal. Where he sees a “long-lost light” in these ancient teachings, I see only a “darkness of abuse” we’re well rid of.

As for Harpur’s claim that he wants to help bring science and religion closer together and “highlight Nature’s guiding role” in a renewed Christian faith, I just want to choke. There is no hard science in his book, but there are lots of superficial cliches and lots of references to the spiritual symbols seen in Nature. When Harpur says, “I never see the moon without being reminded of its reflecting the solar glory and its monthly telling of the story of our incarnation and ultimate resurrection (page 188),” I gotta say that don’t impress me much. (Cue the Shania Twain song.)

There’s tons of light and wonder and goodness and love in the natural world — the scientific world — that God the Mother and God the Father have created for us. But we won’t find it by looking backwards to the mystery cult teachings of people who believed in a status-ridden journey of spiritual ascent, and we won’t find it by pretending that all Scripture is “good” if only we understood how to read it symbolically! Christianity has been there and done that. It doesn’t work.

You don’t have to choose between mystery and science. Jesus understood this, as did Job before him. The back of the moon wasn’t visible until the space program revealed it. But seeing the moon through the eyes of science hasn’t lessened the sense of wonder and awe we feel when her silvery beauty gleams. Photo credit JAT 2021.

The only way forward for the Church, as I see it, is for us to come at spirituality from a whole new angle. We have to let go of “traditional teachings” and “infallible doctrines” that don’t line up with new findings in neuroscience, quantum physics, quantum biology, astronomy, and so on. Other fields of endeavour have had to let go of cherished beliefs that eventually proved false. Why should Christianity be any different?

Does it make sense to you that God would make special rules for the Church that hold us to a LOWER standard of scholarship than the standard observed by secular researchers in fields such as teaching, environmental science, or psychiatry?

Maybe it’s our unwarranted sense of entitlement — not the devil — that’s the source of our ongoing problems in the Church.

I think I’ll sign off now and go read Discover magazine’s latest special issue on The Brain. Although I don’t always agree with the scientific conclusions I find there, there’s plenty of good food for thought, and I’m grateful for that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

* In his glossary, Harpur defines “incarnation” as “the God within each of us — the ‘Light which lighteth every person coming into the world.'”

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul, Plato, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged ethical mysticism, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

10 Sep 2010

CC33: Paul’s Idea Of "Grace"

By the time Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans (one of his latest writings) his own personal nastiness had seeped into all aspects of his theology. The book of Romans — a book that is central to orthodox Western Christian church doctrine — is not a nice book.

Photo credit JAT 2019

Paul says horrible, nasty, judgmental things about everybody. In Chapters 9-11 of Romans, he specifically targets Jews. These writings have been used for many centuries by the Church to justify its persecution of Jews. These chapters are simply awful, awful, awful, and no person of faith should pay them any heed.

But Paul doesn’t attack only Jews in his letter to the Romans. He targets everyone who doesn’t accept Paul’s own teachings. Ironically, in doing so, he targets God the Mother and God the Father (as they actually are), along with the man who lived as Jesus son of Joseph (as he actually was).

To understand what Paul meant when he used the term “grace” (charis in Koine Greek),* read Chapter 11 of Romans. It’s clear that Paul believes some people have been specially chosen by God. This small group is “the remnant, chosen by grace” (Romans 11:5).

Paul didn’t invent the idea of “the remnant.” The specially chosen remnant had been spoken of centuries before by Jewish prophets (e.g. Isaiah 37:31-32; Ezekiel 6:8; Micah 5:7-8). But in Paul’s head, the chosen people now include only his own people — Paul’s people. The people who follow Paul’s teachings about sin, separation from God, sacraments, and salvation. The people who call themselves Christians. Not the people who follow the teachings of Jesus.

Paul didn’t invent the idea of the “remnant,” an idea that’s very appealing to anyone who’s addicted to status. But Paul did invent the idea of “grace” as it’s expressed in the Letter to the Romans. It’s his biggest contribution to the history of religious doctrine. Paul’s doctrine of grace is the bedrock of orthodox Western Christianity. Remove it and there’s not much left except sin, damnation, judgment, hell, and a nasty, judgmental God.

Grace is Paul’s way of keeping hope alive. Grace keeps your hope alive, your hope that one day, for no particular reason, God will suddenly decide to single you out for special, preferential treatment not offered to your peers at the present time. Sort of like winning the spiritual lottery. One day you’re broke, debt-ridden, and worried sick about all the money you owe. The next day — presto! A million dollars falls into your lap! Yippee! No more worries! For the price of a single lottery ticket (sorry, I mean for the price of a single baptism) you can always hope you’ll score big on the big grace lottery in the sky.

Of course, this means that God would have to be a fickle, immature parent who favours some children over other children as a way to acquire attention and status from vulnerable human beings, but hey — why not, right? Plenty of human parents behave this way, so why not God? Why should anyone expect God to be a parent you can actually look up to?

Paul’s God is so unlikeable that I wouldn’t want to invite them to dinner, let alone call them “Mother and Father.” Paul’s God demands fideism (blind faith). Paul’s God loves people conditionally, not unconditionally, and not with forgiveness. Paul’s God saves only the people who worship at the “moveable Temple” (a.k.a. the body of Christ). Paul’s God insists you obey and respect the civil authorities, because they were chosen by God to look after you (Romans 13:1-10). Paul’s God wants you to ask no questions, make no waves, respect the status quo, and always be vigilant against the corrupting power of Satan and sin and the law. Paul’s God is a status addict who loves to be feared and obeyed.

I’m thinkin’ it was probably Paul who wanted to be feared and obeyed. But that’s not surprising. It’s all part of the narcissistic mindset. Full-blown narcissists carry around a whole raft of nasty thinking, and they’re always looking for ways to raise themselves up at the expense of others. (This often means they try to make other people fear and obey their narcissistic wishes.) Worse, they constantly believe they’re “victims,” and they blame other people for the mistakes they themselves make.

They’re not very nice people (read what Paul says about himself in Romans Chapter 7). Yet they can’t tolerate the idea that some people actually are nice. It sticks in their craw. It makes them sneer. It makes them feel angry and resentful. It makes them feel contemptuous. It makes them want to get revenge.

The real problem is that God the Mother and God the Father are nice people, and because they’re nice people, narcissists (such as Paul) react to them in the same way narcissists react to nice human beings. The niceness sticks in their craw. It makes them feel angry and contemptuous. It makes them want to get revenge against God.

Think the Bible — both Old and New Testaments — isn’t overflowing with the cup of human narcissistic anger toward God?

Who needs a traditional Jewish Messiah — prophet, king, warrior, priest — if not to serve as a punching bag for narcissistic feelings of revenge? This way people can transfer their hostile feelings onto a Messiah figure, and not have to face the fact that they’re constantly angry with God.

The world doesn’t need any Messiahs, and it doesn’t need any Divine Saviours. What the world needs is self-honesty, healing, and a giant dose of common sense.

Plus a whole lot of people who are willing to open their hearts to divine love.

* The Greek word charis can be translated in a number of different ways, including “benefit; charitable act; an act of favour; free favour; grace; graciously bestowed divine endowment; sense of obligation.” These are values commonly associated with PATRONAGE in the first century CE Roman Empire. Paul is presenting God as Patron, Christ as Saviour, and Spirit as in-dwelling Life, thus covering his theological bases in one neat package.

Paul is one clever shark.

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Posted in "4 S's", Concinnate Christianity, hope, Messiah, Mother and Father God, narcissism, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, psychopathy (niceness), status addiction and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

14 Jun 2010

CC20: Further Update on the Vatican’s "Sin Within"

Last Friday, on June 11, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed 15,000 priests who were in St. Peter’s Square to mark the end of the Vatican’s Year of the Priest. In his homily, Benedict asked forgiveness from God and from affected people for the sins of the sexually abusive clerics in the Roman Catholic church. He also promised “to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again” (Nicole Winfield, “Pope Begs Forgiveness, Promises Action on Abuse,” The Globe and Mail, June 11, 2010).

While I’m quite certain that God the Mother and God the Father do, indeed, forgive Benedict for his own errors, and do, indeed, forgive the priests who’ve intentionally harmed the faithful in their care, I’m equally certain that hidden abuse will continue in the Roman Catholic church.

Many Christians want to make this a question of theodicy: how do we explain evil in the world while at the same time preserving our image of God as good and loving? If God allows abuse to continue in the church, does it mean that God is powerless and ineffectual? Impotent against the powers of the devil? Or does it mean that God is actually not a very nice person?

Many of the Christians I know would much rather blame the problem of evil on God and/or the devil than put the blame where it belongs: on the values and moral beliefs held by both individuals and by cultural groups.

The Roman Catholic church is a cultural group. It teaches particular cultural beliefs. (These comprise its theological doctrines). It has a consciously promoted schedule of active teaching. Its goal is to teach its people early on in life how they should conduct themselves in relationship to God, church hierarchy, and empire. Traditionally, it has punished members who question its teachings or its authority (the Inquisition). It has conferred upon itself the mantle of infallibility. It claims it is the one true church, the only legitimate path to salvation.

The Roman Catholic church has long held a vision of how society should be — how society should look, act, and “feel.” Its body of theological doctrines has been carefully cultivated so that only kind of garden can grow in its presence. The church has no one but itself to blame for this.

at the Vatican (c) J MacDonald 2011

The conditions in a garden dictate what kinds of plants will thrive there. A garden that has full sun, lots of water, and lots of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc.) will grow very different plants than a garden that has shady conditions or low nitrogen or a high pH. If you restrict certain nutrients, you restrict which plants will flower abundantly. If you water some plants and not others, you control which plants will flourish, and which plants will live a miserable life of bare subsistence before dying a premature death.

Throughout its history, the orthodox Western church has been heavily committed to the lessons learned from gardening. Hewing closely to the principle that the person who controls the conditions of a garden will control the ultimate harvest of said garden, the church has intentionally chosen a specific blend of nutrients for its religio-political garden. The nutrients in this case are its doctrines. The doctrines are what “feed” the hearts and minds of the faithful. If you precisely control the “mix” of doctrines available to your people, you precisely control the rate at which people’s hearts and minds can grow. If you balance this mix with the precision of a master botanist, you can ensure that the people in your congregations grow just enough to offer you the occasional flower without ever getting big enough to overshadow you.

It’s a new idea, this idea that the introduction of particular belief systems can alter the physical structure and biochemical functioning of a person’s central nervous system and brain. I suppose I should amend that to say it’s a new idea among neuroscientists — unfortunately, it’s not a new idea among history’s power mongers.

Long before the advent of brain scanning technologies, would-be tyrants had empirically observed that people’s behaviour could be altered through the careful repetition of certain ideas. These tyrants didn’t understand the changes at a biochemical or neurophysiological level, and they didn’t need to — all they needed to understand was the result, the harvest of their ideological campaigns. Early orthodox Church Fathers understood this principle well.

Early in the history of the church, orthodox Christian teachers made a conscious decision to take an axe to the teachings of Jesus as represented in the Gospel of Mark, and to overshadow Jesus’ sunny, open “vineyard” with the giant magic beanstalk of spiritual ascent (a beanstalk seen later in the children’s fairy tale of that name). They’ve been feeding this beanstalk of “elevation” for the “elect” with their repeated assertions that the devil exists, that Judgment Day is coming (soon, very soon! — or at least sometime, maybe, we’re pretty darned sure, because it says so in the apocalyptic books), that the soul is tainted by original sin, that Jesus is your only hope of salvation, that Holy Mother Church is the only portal through which you can gain access to the gold at the top of the beanstalk.

This set of teachings was well established by the mid-3rd century CE. It’s not new (and it certainly didn’t originate with Jesus himself!). The problem with the church’s teachings is that their doctrines damage your biological brain. When you fully embrace these teachings as “divine truth,” your brain stops working the way God intends. Your brain responds exactly like the plant that’s been crippled because the gardener has intentionally withheld the water, nutrients, and care you need. Your heart and mind don’t really grow. You spend all your life sitting in the shadow of the towering beanstalk and feeling like crap. You feel like crap because all the truth — all the spiritual nutrients — about the actual nature of your relationship with God have been artfully concealed from you. You wouldn’t recognize the plants that grow in a sunny, lush, well-watered garden if they came chasing after you.

Such as forgiveness. Would you be able to recognize forgiveness if it entered your life? Probably not. Most Christian’s can’t. That’s because the orthodox Church has never taught people about forgiveness (which is why I’m somewhat sceptical about the Pope’s current pleas for forgiveness).

Why hasn’t the Church taught people how to forgive when it’s obvious from reading the Gospel of Mark that Jesus insisted on the message of forgiveness? The Church doesn’t want to teach people how to forgive, because once people catch onto the feeling of forgiveness, they’ll be able to figure out for themselves that divine forgiveness is the antithesis of “salvation” and “grace.” They’ll realize the church has been lying to them for centuries about their souls. The garden of orthodoxy might start to look like a thorny patch of weeds and thistles instead of the prophesied paradise!

It’s no mystery why some church clerics have been sexually abusing vulnerable people in their care. You can’t expect a human being’s brain to produce a harvest of compassion, integrity, inclusiveness, and enlightenment when all you do every day is try to fill that person’s brain with a steady diet of dissociation, lack of forgiveness, hierarchical control, and suppression of learning.

If Pope Benedict really means it when he says he wants to do “everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again,” the only truly effective strategy will be for him to call a Council along the lines of Vatican II, and embark on the painful path of rescinding some of the church’s most cherished doctrinal beliefs.

Somehow I’m not holding my breath.

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, forgiveness, Gospel of Mark, occult themes, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God, Soul, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices, theodicy and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

31 May 2010

CC16: The Difference Between Mystics and Prophets

Washing the windows of the entrance pyramid at the Royal Ontario Museum is no easy task, and you shouldn’t try it unless you’re an expert and have the all the proper equipment. Teaching about the soul, the brain-soul nexus, and ethical mysticism is no different – it takes proper training. Going to a weekend energy-healing workshop doesn’t qualify you as an expert. Be patient, be humble, and take the time to overcome your own status addiction issues before you seek to become a mentor to others. Photo credit JAT 2017.

This morning, I happened to hear a radio interview with Mike Holmes, Canada’s famed “make it right” building contractor, teacher, and advocate for families in distress. Mike Holmes had been asked to speak about the home inspection business, and he was lamenting two current realities. First, many home inspectors have little or no hands-on experience in the contracting industry (so they don’t know what they’re talking about), and second, many home inspectors simply don’t care. The practical and ethical standards aren’t high enough, in Mike Holmes’s view, and this means that home buyers who rely on shoddy home inspection reports will end up with “lemons” — houses with major structural problems.

Anyone who has ever lived in such a house knows how stressful, how exhausting, how infuriating it is to be told there’s nothing wrong with your house, even as you watch your basement fill up with water after every rainstorm.

This is exactly how I feel about the “mysticism business.” Practical and ethical standards are pretty much non-existent in this field. And I’m not talking here about the charlatans and the New Age preachers who knowingly take advantage of vulnerable people. I’m talking here about the church.

The orthodox Western church has given itself prime credentials as THE “home inspectors of the soul” without having any solid knowledge, experience, or compassion to back this up. They hung out their shingle centuries ago, and it’s been hanging there for so long that most Christians just assume the church must know what it’s doing when it comes to “home inspections of the soul.”

But it doesn’t. When it comes to matters of the soul, the church is no different than the slipshod home inspector who tells you that a nice new coat of paint on your outside walls will fix your leaking basement. Just because a home inspector gives this advice loudly and often to all his clients doesn’t make it right. You can paint the upper walls as often as you like, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to your crumbling foundations. The only way to fix the basement, of course, is to dig up all the soil around your house (even though it makes an ugly mess of your gardens for a while) and methodically repair the hidden cracks. It’s a lot of work. But in the end it’s worth it.

If you’re an earnest spiritual seeker who wants to know more about your soul, don’t bother asking the United Church of Canada for guidance. They have no official answers for you. They would prefer that you not embarrass them with your questions about the soul. The soul, you see, is perilously close to being a four-letter word in the United Church lexicon. It’s no longer uttered in polite company. Polite company — which includes professors of theology and United Church ministers and policy makers — wants you to speak about grace and Spirit and God’s justice breaking in proleptically.* But they don’t want you to speak about the soul. They want you to be part of a soulless church — at least, that’s what they’re implying.

Mike Holmes worked as a hands-on contractor for many years before he signed on to do his first TV show. (If I remember correctly, he grew up in a home where his father worked in the building industry. Mike Holmes’s children, now grown, have also been learning the ins and outs of home contracting and home renovation.) People who watch Mike Holmes’s TV shows trust him. They trust him because they can tell he’s not an actor — he’s a real contractor who knows what he’s doing. People learn a lot from watching his shows, because he’s also a good teacher and a dedicated advocate. He puts his money where his mouth is.

I’m not a home renovator (even though I wield a pretty mean paint brush!), but I do have a particular talent, and I’m trained in what I do. My particular talent is mysticism. My talent isn’t better than anyone else’s talent. It’s different, but it’s not better. Like Mike Holmes, I have a set of professional tools, and I know how to use them. I also insist that these tools be used according to the highest ethical standards.

In my view, few Christian mystics in the history of the church have used their talents ethically.

Furthermore, many of the men and women who’ve been traditionally revered as Christian mystics have not, in my opinion, been mystics at all. Rather, they’ve been apocalyptic prophets.

There’s a big difference between a mystic and an apocalyptic prophet. I know this because of my experience, training, and academic research. The church, however, often doesn’t make a distinction between mystics and apocalyptic prophets. The church tends to conflate them — which is kind of like saying there’s no difference between a real contractor and a TV actor who doesn’t know which end of a hammer is up.

This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with the weeds of teachings based on mental illness (i.e. apocalyptic prophecy). This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with ancient traditions from Plato, from apocalyptic literature, from Paul, and from later theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo, all of which have choked out the original teachings of Jesus.

The church’s teachings on the soul are filled with weeds (as on the left). Many people seem afraid that, if they pull out the weeds, they’ll have no tangible mystery teachings left to sustain the spiritual roots of the church. In fact, when the weeds are pulled, what remains is the beautiful underlying structure of the soul’s courage and goodness. Gardens (and churches) are always healthier and stronger when the weeds are pulled. Photo credit JAT 2014.

Jesus was a mystic — a mentally healthy person capable of holistic thought, empathy, intuition, creative learning, logical thought, industrious actions, and advanced philosophical inquiry. Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet — a mentally dysfunctional person demonstrating a consistent pattern of dissociation, dualistic thinking, narcissistic entitlement, anti-social behaviour, and a need to gain attention from admirers by making “divinely inspired” prophetic claims about the future.

Mystics are content to TRUST God, and have no need to make predictions about the future. Mystics know that God will do what God needs to do when God needs to do it. Mystics make no claim to having the keys to the future. Only those who don’t trust God insist on guarantees about what will happen and when it will happen. Bullies and narcissists are drawn to prophecy. Jesus was not a bully or a DSM-IV narcissist.

Mystics believe in the eternal soul in a positive, uplifting, holistic way, and they don’t try to scare the crap out of other people by making dire predictions about what will happen to somebody else’s soul. They believe that all souls are good because “God don’t make no junk.” Bullies and narcissists enjoy making threats about the fate of your soul because it gives them a twisted kind of high. It’s an addiction — not a very pretty one, but an addiction nonetheless — just like any other DSM-IV addiction problem.

Mystics (the real ones, anyway) are emotionally mature. They understand boundary issues. They understand that other people ARE other people. (Seriously dysfunctional people don’t see you as “real” in your own right, with your own distinctive personality — they see you merely as an extension of their own self-entitled needs, which is why they try to force you to comply with their wishes at the expense of yours.) Prophets love to give other people big, long lists of laws — required thoughts, required behaviours, which you’re expected to follow. Prophets tell you that their laws are divine laws. But most often the laws are designed to provide some sort of psychological relief to the prophet himself or herself. Usually, the laws entrench the “divine authority” of the prophet, and place the prophet in an elevated position. This is just narcissistic bullying in a more sophisticated form.

Mystics don’t talk about fearing God. Mystics talk about having a positive, mature relationship with God. Mystics don’t fear death. Mystics don’t believe in cosmic evil. Mystics don’t believe that human beings are more important to God than God’s other creatures. Mystics don’t believe that human laws are infallible. Mystics know that God is always listening and always acting in the world whether we pray for help or not.

Mystics trust in the fantastic goodness of God.

Apocalyptic prophets believe in their own power and their own status. They don’t trust anybody, especially not God.

Jesus was a mystic. He trusted God the Mother and God the Father. It’s time for the church to let Jesus’ teachings about God re-enter the hearts and minds of our community of faith in the twenty-first century.

It’s time for us to learn to trust our beloved God.

* If you don’t know what “prolepsis” means, then I’d like to suggest you’re a lucky person. You’ll sleep much better at night if you’re not wasting your time trying to embrace the scientifically impossible feat of time-travel.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, historical Jesus, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, orthodox teachings about the soul, prophecy, prophets, religion and mental Illness, Soul and tagged ethical mysticism, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

13 May 2010

CC9: "The Sin Within"

At the Vatican. Photo credit J MacDonald 2011

Like many people, I’ve been following media reports about the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

On May 11, 2010, the Globe & Mail published a Reuter’s story entitled “Pope Says ‘Sin Within’ Is Church’s Greatest Threat.” There are two parallel threads in this report. The first thread is the Pope’s statement that “today we see in a truly terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin with the Church.”

The second thread is encapsulated in this quote from the Pope: “We must admit that the Catholic faith . . . was often too individualistic. It too often left concrete things to the world and thought only of individual salvation and religious affairs without realising that there was a global responsibility (for economic decisions).”

Ya think?

Hmmm . . . maybe there’s a connection between the second thread and the first one. Maybe — just to go out on a limb here — maybe the Vatican’s own theological belief structure of sin and salvation is a major contributing factor to the abusive behaviour of some of its senior clergy.

I really, really hope that when Benedict says “the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin within the Church” that he isn’t trying to imply that the true source of this “sin” is Satan, a.k.a. the Devil. It would be typical of orthodox Christian thinkers to try to pass the buck to the Devil. Christians have been pulling this stunt since the apostle Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans. (In Romans, Paul made “sin” a sort of cosmic force, and many other Christian authors followed Paul’s lead.) Yet, before Paul, there was apocalyptic literature. Read that stuff (including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and you’ll hear all kinds of paranoid speculation about the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Long before that, Plato was scaring the crap out of people with his Evil World Soul doing battle with the Good World Soul (see Plato’s Laws). Yup — there’s a time-honoured tradition amongst philosophers and theologians of blaming bad behaviour on the devil. (I’m old enough to remember comedian Flip Wilson’s famous line, “The Devil Made Me Do It.”)

Lest you think I’m being unfairly suspicious about the Pope’s beliefs, the honest truth is that Original Sin and the Devil are still very much a part of official Roman Catholic doctrine. If influential senior clerics didn’t still believe this stuff, they would take it off the books.

It’s too easy to blame bad choices on an imaginary Devil. We have enough difficulty trying to understand our relationship with God without making up stories about big bad scary evil beings. There are plenty of logical scientific explanations for abusive human behaviour — particularly scientific observations related to brain physiology and mental illness.

Occam’s Razor: go with the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions. The simplest assumption in this instance is that the Roman Catholic church has not properly assessed its clerics for evidence of psychological dysfunction. No imaginary Devil is needed in order to explain the abusive behaviour of these men. It’s just plain old fashioned brain chemistry.

An even simpler assumption is to ask what happens to people’s brain chemistry when they’re told over and over, year after year, that human beings are a worthless, sin-ridden lot who may, if they’re lucky, be blessed with the gift of salvation, but could just as easily end up in the eternal torments of hell. I’m thinkin’ these teachings are probably as healthy for the brain as a dose of carbon monoxide.

The reason carbon monoxide is so deadly is that it bonds like crazy glue to hemoglobin in the bloodstream, and hogs the sites where oxygen molecules are supposed to catch a ride to your body’s cells and tissues. You end up asphyxiating invisibly from the inside out because you can’t get enough oxygen into your brain, organs, etc. — even though you may still look normal on the outside.

If the church fills up people’s brains with toxic “carbon monoxide” teachings, there’s less and less room available for the life-giving “oxygen” of Jesus’ teachings about divine love.

It’s well known that people who’ve been poisoned by heavy metals can show marked changes in behaviour. (The classic example is the Mad Hatter who, in former days, used mercury salts to craft gentlemen’s hats, and gave himself mercury poisoning).

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that some Roman Catholic clerics are behaving so badly. Many of them seem to be suffering from a case of self-induced “sin poisoning.”

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, occult themes, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, religion and mental Illness and tagged Jesus vs Paul, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

30 Apr 2010

CC8: The Question of Suffering

This week I was checking out the remaindered book section at Chapters, and I found a copy of Bart Ehrman’s 2008 book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. As I mentioned in my post of March 6/10, I really like Bart Ehrman’s books (though I don’t always agree with his conclusions). So I bought God’s Problem.

I knew a bit about it before I started to read it this week. That’s because last year — in July 2009, to be exact — I bought and read Ehrman’s 2009 book Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). In Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman talks about his earlier book on suffering. Still, it’s always better to read the original book rather than the precis of it, even if the precis is written by the author him/herself. So I was glad to find God’s Problem on the sale rack.

In God’s Problem, Ehrman explains why he lost his faith and now considers himself an agnostic. It wasn’t a sudden decision on his part, nor an easy one. He says, “I came to the point where I could no longer believe. It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.” (page 3)

I think Ehrman clearly expresses a belief shared by a whole lot of people. And who can blame them? There’s no disputing that suffering exists, and there’s no disputing that centuries-old Christian theology has been pretty useless in helping thoughtful, compassionate people understand how to cope with suffering.

Mind you, Christian theology has been pretty useless in helping thoughtful, compassionate people understand a lot of things. Readers who, like me, attend the United Church of Canada (UCC) will understand when I say that the United Church scores a “B” and sometimes an “A” on social justice issues, but earns an “F” on questions about the soul, about death, and about spiritual practices. We don’t get to hear sermons that tell us how to relate to a God who allows the suffering in the first place. But we’re given lots of opportunities to help fix the suffering by rolling up our sleeves and supporting various social justice causes.

Don’t get me wrong — praxis is very important. Good works are incredibly important, and these days a lot of dedicated individuals who don’t even believe in God put the rest of us to shame with their manifold good works. It’s pretty obvious that Christians by no means have a monopoly on “Christian charity.”

In the past 12 years, I’ve asked the same questions about suffering that Ehrman asks. I agree with his questions, and I agree with his willingness to point fingers at the parts of the Bible that simply don’t help. Yet, for me, the end result has not been a loss of faith. For me, the end result has been a sense of frustration and sadness at the obstinate refusal of most Church leaders to be honest — honest with themselves and honest with their parishioners about the history of church doctrine, and the extent of the damage that’s been caused by this body of doctrines.

Never in any of the UCC or Anglican churches I’ve attended have I heard a minister say to the congregation, “Today’s readings will be taken from Plato’s Phaedo. Let us now hear what Plato has to say about the soul.” Yet the Church’s formal teachings about the soul have far more to do with Plato than with the teachings of Jesus. Most Christians (including many ministers) just don’t know this.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the God of orthodox Western Christianity owes far more to Plato’s ideas about God than to Jesus’ teachings on same.

Too often, we think of the human journey as a few fleeting moments of beauty and happiness that are quickly stripped away, only to be replaced by the pain of loss and grief. If we’re patient, however, and wait for the fruits of insight, meaning, and transformation to evolve, we see the many ways in which God’s love sustains us even during the harsh hours of winter.

I sympathize tremendously with Ehrman’s struggle over God, faith, and suffering, and like him I’ve read books such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, but in the end I decided that the problem for people of faith is not the question of suffering.

The problem, as I see it, is that Christianity has not been teaching people anything about God as God actually is. Christianity has instead been teaching its own portrait of God for purposes that have nothing to do with God — purposes such as authority, political power, empire, cultural hegemony, and wealth.

Christianity in the third millennium must be willing to confront its own historical role as a creator of suffering if we are to heal our relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

If I sound a bit like a Liberation Theologian, I suppose that’s because I share some of their reasoning.

Honesty precedes healing. It’s time for the Church to be honest about its past motives and actions, especially with regard to its body of doctrines (that is, its formally accepted truths). Only then can we proceed to a state of full healing.

Thanks be to God.

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Posted in Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, relationship with God, theodicy | Leave a Comment

03 Mar 2010

CC2: Complaint #1 About Orthodoxy: What Happened to the Redemption Theme?

If you’ve read my profile, you may have noticed I’m currently enrolled in graduate studies in the field of theology. This means I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years learning the language of theological study. I want to say right here at the beginning of this blog that I’ve met a lot of wonderful people in my graduate program, and I’ve learned a lot of things that would have been hard for me to learn on my own. I’m very grateful to the people who have helped me in my studies.

I’m not a spring chicken, however, and I suppose it ‘s fair to say that my personal index of suspicion is fairly high with regard to theological claims. This is (I hope) a polite way of saying I’ve observed some fairly major flaws in the church doctrines I’ve been studying. Those who know me from grad school will know that I’m not particularly shy about speaking up when I see inconsistencies and lapses in logic. (I recall one interesting class when I was the lone voice of dissent against Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.) However, there seems to be a general, unspoken agreement, even at the university level in 2010, that theology students should not rock the doctrinal boat. I don’t know about you, but I honestly don’t know how the liberal Protestant church in Canada can survive if we’re afraid to look unflinchingly at the history of our very complicated theology.

So, like Luther posting his “95 Theses,” I’m going to gradually post some observations about the differences between what Jesus seems to have said, and what the church said he said. (I think there’s a big difference between the two.)

To reassure you that I’m not just making things up to suit my own hermeneutical perspective, I’ll try as much as possible to show references for my position. But you should probably know from the outset that, like all writers on the subject of theology, I have a strong personal position that influences my interpretation of developments in church doctrine. You might be able to guess what my position is if I tell you that my least favourite theologians are the apostle Paul, the early church theologian Tertullian, the highly influential Augustine of Hippo, and the early 12th century writer Anselm of Canterbury. I’m not too crazy about John Wesley, either.

(I’ve read some primary material from all these famous male theologians, which is how I know for sure I don’t like their teachings.)

Anyway, the first complaint I have is about redemption — as in, what the heck happened to Jesus’ message about redemption?

Lilies of Redemption – Photo credit JAT 2017

Redemption, as anyone will know who has experienced this life-altering transformative shift, is not the same as salvation or atonement. I’m so darned tired of hearing about salvation, and its bizarre cousin prolepsis, and I am so eager to hear a United Church of Canada minister tackle redemption head-on. This would require a bold statement to the effect that redemption is an experience of ongoing, present-day relationship with God. But redemption is doctrinally awkward because it clashes with the teachings of Paul, Augustine, and other orthodox Christian teachers on the matter of salvation.

What is redemption for me? It is the unstoppable tsunami of gratitude that overtakes your life when you finally, finally, finally let go of your pigheaded refusal to accept God’s love and forgiveness, and you’re finally able to trust yourself as a humble and worthy child of God, a child who is made in God’s image. That’s when the hard spiritual work begins.

I say this, of course, from painful personal experience. In my younger days, I was nothing if not pigheaded.

Another weird thing about redemption is that it seems to need the “yeast” of relationship with other people. Being with other people, sharing experiences with each other, growing deep roots of empathy — all these seem essential to the experience of redemption. It seems pretty much impossible for people to do it on their own without humble mentorship and guidance. (The founders of the Twelve-Step Program understood this clearly.)

What does redemption mean for you? Have you had a transformative spiritual experience that has forever altered your relationship with God in a positive way? Would you be willing to share this with a few friends you trust?

At the moment, mainstream Protestant Christians are not very comfortable with such sharing, but it’s very hard for anyone, even Christians who are “saved in Christ,” to stumble down the path of redemption without a helping hand from their fellow human beings.

I vote to restore redemption as a major spiritual pursuit for today’s Protestant Christians. If the United Church doesn’t want it, the Concinnates will take it! (I’ll have more on this in a future post.)

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, empathy, forgiveness, free will, gratitude, honesty, humbleness, orthodox teachings about the soul, redemption, relationship with God and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “orthodox teachings about the soul”