[Dialogue] 11/05/2020, Progressing Spirit, Rev. Mark Sandlin: Eternal Totality: On a More Rational God; Spong Revisited

Thu Nov 5 06:24:15 PST 2020

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Eternal Totality: On a More Rational God
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|  Essay by Rev. Mark Sandlin
November 3, 2020
Religion prefers a definable God. By definition, one of the purposes of religion is to draw us closer to God. The way religion has typically been practiced, this implies some degree of “knowing” God. To know God we must be able to define God. The problem is, in the act of defining God, we are limiting God.

What kind of god is a limited god?

Is that even a god at all?

For me that is one of the downfalls of most religions. They tend to be rooted in our need for a personal god. One that actually is knowable. Ultimately, a knowable god is a slippery slope. If we know God, we can begin to define God. Those who are tasked with defining God can then begin to shape God. In shaping God, we control certain things about God.

What kind of god is a controllable god?

Is that even a god at all?

It seems to me that religion, by its very nature, is predestined to feed us a less than nuanced, less than thorough, less than authentic understanding of God. In short, a god that is less than god-like. Our need to personalize, understand, and (ultimately) control God removes much of the divine from God.

I am left to wonder if Jesus told parables to teach us about God because they are more open-ended than just stating “facts” about God and defining God. Could it be that that is the reality that Jesus' Jewish ancestors are trying to teach us with the story they told about finding God in a burning bush. A story in which God itself proclaims the divine name to be, יהוה – YHWH, “I am” or “I will be what I will be.” The scene is rooted in nature and the name of God is open-ended, practically undefinable. I'd even argue that the storyteller(s) made them so intentionally undefinable that it should preclude much of the anthropomorphizing of God that happens throughout the scripture as well as throughout history and religions.

Perhaps, that is the God Albert Einstein said he believed in, “Spinoza's God.”

Buruch Spinoza was one of the most important philosophers of the early modern period of philosophy. At the age of 24, his religious leaders excommunicated him for “monstrous deeds” and “abominable heresies.” No one is quite certain what these “monstrous deeds” and “abominable heresies” were, but based on his later writings, it doesn't take much imagination to surmise that they had to do with his early philosophical and theological ponderings which ran heavily against the teachings of the religion and the leaders that gave him the boot.

Spinoza's God stood over and against much of what traditional Judeo-Christian theology taught. Creation was not something separate from God which God caused to happen out of freewill. Rather, Creation was God in that it was of God and from God and of the substance of God. It formed because it could do no other. Creation flowed out of the nature of God, out of the all-ness of God, the everything-ness of God.

The philosophical/theological impact of that understanding is massive. Creation just is. It wasn't created with a specific purpose as traditional Judeo-Christianity taught, rather, its full purpose was being. Extending that a bit further, it should no longer follow that an anthropomorphized understanding of a god who stands in judgement over us is necessary more or less a rational presumption. Would God need to stand in judgement of godself?

In terms of modern religion, much of our teachings and time are spent in the space between hope and fear. It is in those very spaces that much of our beliefs/superstitions are born. The tension between hope and fear gives rise to some extremely problematic and hurtful emotions. Those very emotions can become prohibitive to fully experiencing joy and peace and love in this life.

I have to say, Spinoza's God seems much more rational and life giving than the version of God that has been grown out the space between hope and fear by organized religion. Unlike the god of many religions, Spinoza's God is not a God of judgement in need of adoration and obedience. Instead, Spinoza's God is the substance from which all is formed, from which all flows. It is to be experienced, not feared. It calls for our curiosity and fascination, not our adoration. In that, Spinoza's God is understood through philosophy and science, rather than through religious institutions and “personal relationships” with God.

For some, that god flies in the face of some of the attributes they associate with God. As an example, that understanding of God has no room for miracles. All that flows is from God. The laws of reality (physics) stem from and are of the substance of God. How then could we expect God to bend the laws of reality just for us. Or, worse yet, for us and not for others?

That also implies that the way many modern prayers approach God are useless. Flinging out wishes that ask for reality to be altered to the source from whom reality extends is futile at best. For Spinoza, rather than asking for favors from God, our focus should be on understanding what God wants. We do this through science, philosophy, and psychology.

A rather creative and beautiful meme written by Michelle Fortes that made its way around social media over the last several months provides what I believe to be an imagined, contemporary quote from Spinoza on what that looks like. For me, it leans a bit heavily toward the writings of Neal Donald Walsh and ironically anthropomorphizes God, but I appreciate the extrapolation of what understanding Spinoza's God could look like and what that God might tell us:

“Stop being praying and giving you blows in the chest, what I want you to do is to go out into the world to enjoy your life.

I want you to enjoy, you sing, have fun and enjoy everything I’ve done for you.

Stop going to those gloomy, dark and cold temples that you built yourself and that you say to be my home...

“Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you you were a sinner.

Stop having me so scared. I do not judge you, nor criticize you, nor anger me, nor bother me, nor punishment. I am pure love...

“I have made you absolutely free, there are no prizes or punishments, there are no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one carries a record.

You are absolutely free to create in your life a heaven or hell...

“Respect your peers and don’t do what you don’t want for you. The only thing I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert status is your guide. This life is the only thing there is, here and now and the only thing you need....

“Express your joy! That’s the way to praise me.”

It's a beautiful expression of what life can be or even what life should be. The difficulty comes in our humanity. We have two approaches to life that pulls us in very different directions. Spinoza defines them as the “aspect of time” and the “aspect of eternity.”

Our immediate, experiential life encourages us towards a time-bound, more person centered view of life. A great deal of religious teachings about God are based on this here-and-now perspective. On the other hand, our intellect and ability to reason draw us toward a fuller understanding of existence and our place in it. Or, as Spinoza poetically puts it, they invite us to take part in “eternal totality.”

As it turns out, approaching life through an aspect of eternity rather than an aspect of time, will actually guide us in a way that makes it easier to follow the lessons of great spiritual teachers like Jesus.

When we focus our attention too finitely on the here-and-now, the things that bring us the most joy, happiness, and satisfaction tend to be things that impact us the most positively as individuals. They also tend to be based more on emotion than on reason. Conversely, when we focus on the eternal nature of Creation and the divine, the things that bring us the most joy, happiness, and satisfaction tend to be the things that impact the universal good the most positively. They also tend to be based more on reason than on emotion.

I'm not arguing for a purely logical theological outlook, but I am suggesting that a more rational theological outlook is much more likely to enable us to follow the lessons of Jesus and other great spiritual teachers.

As Spinoza put it in his Theologico Political Treatise, “I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.”

This more rational, eternal understanding of theology should not only lead us to more readily put into practice things like equality, love, peace, and joy, but should challenge us to dig deeper in our understanding of God.

In the end, for me, Spinoza's God is a god that is much more likely to be the god to which Jesus was trying to point us toward than the God that is professed and praised in far too many religions.

~ Rev. Mark Sandlin

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin.

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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

I embrace today's "new age spirituality" where Mind, Body and Spirit are aligned under a new paradigm of oneness with all -  that no longer supports the dogma of traditional religious institutions. My question is whether there is still room for my bible from which I have found so much comfort and wisdom? 

A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox

Dear Reader,

Of course there is room for the Bible, properly treated and understood, in a more “new age” philosophy—after all there is plenty in the Bible, especially the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible that nurtured the historical Jesus and the mystical meanings of the Cosmic Christ in the New Testament; and that supports the sense of “the all” (a term used by Paul) and the holiness of all things. (Consider my and Bishop Marc Andrus book on The Stations of the Cosmic Christ to see the mysticism behind all the great events recorded in the life of Jesus and the “I am” sayings of the Christ.)

In addition, much of the prophetic tradition recorded in the Bible offers a needed balance to “new age” which often suffers from too much basking in the “Light” and not enough acknowledging of darkness and suffering—a “Cosmic Christ” that is all light and no wounds.  A weakness of new age is that it can  sometimes withdraw from acting for justice - the prophets of Israel, Jesus included, did, stood up to injustice and distorted power of their day. 

Remember what Gandhi said: “I learned to say No from the West.,” meaning, from Jesus and the prophets of Israel.  “No” is what prophets do, they “interfere” as Rabbi Heschel puts it.  So the prophetic tradition of the Bible is very important.  So too is the Wisdom tradition important at this time in history, because the wisdom tradition is about finding the sacred in nature.  It is understood to be the spiritual lineage of the historical Jesus.  “Taste and see that God is good,” as the psalmist sings.

At this time of climate emergency (climate change has provided the incubator for the coronavirus and many other viruses that will be coming), of racial reckoning and Black Lives Matter, of the demise of Mother Earth and the untold extinction spasms of millions of species, of misogyny and matricide (the killing of Mother Earth), clearly a prophetic lineage is necessary to go along with the mystical (which new age is more at home with).  A mature dialectic between the two, the mystical and prophetic, makes for a truly spiritual gifting to the world.  The Biblical tradition has something solid to give the East and to New Age.  “The prophet is the mystic in action,” said American philosopher William Hocking early in the twentieth century.

Much of “new age” appeal has been, as you point out, moving beyond dogmas and stale doctrines from another era and worldview.  And its willingness to be open more to the body, to science, and to mysticism than has mainline religion of late.  It is also open to wisdom teachings from an interfaith or deep ecumenical perspective.  To begin with the experience of awe, wonder and goodness (the via positiva of the mystics) is a necessary counterweight to so much of western religion that begins with anthropocentric sin and redemption, guilt, shame, patriarchal pessimism and “fatalistic self-hatred,” to use Adrienne Rich’s strong words. 

Addressing the via negativa, including the dark night of our souls and the dark night of our species and the suffering of so many beings on earth today, is very important.  Hopefully, the new age movement can mature and face the shadow and address it.  The Biblical tradition, with its insistence on standing up to injustice and developing warrior energy along with mysticism, can assist in that process. 

~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox - See Welcome from Matthew Fox.
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|  Authors who have broadened our understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus

Think back to the moments when your ideas of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus began to expand. Who helped to broaden your horizons? Diana Butler Bass? Marcus Borg? Phyllis Tickle? John Dominic Crossan? Yvette Flunder? John Shelby Spong?

How have you nourished your search for truth since those first moments? We hope that the resources that ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit provides have helped you continue to expand your definitions of what Christianity is and should become.

The truth is that in order to continue the momentum of the Progressive Christian Movement, we need your help and support. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christians often have the loudest voices and it is more important than ever before to have an organization like ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit that proclaims an authentic, intellectually honest faith.

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XV:
Who Is Christ for Paul? The Gospel in Romans

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
February 11, 2010
It was Paul’s experience-based conviction that somehow and in some way everything that he meant by the word “God” had been met and was present in the life of the one he called Christ Jesus. “God was in Christ” was the way he referred to it rather ecstatically in one of his earlier epistles. Of course, as a citizen of the first century, Paul believed that God was a supernatural, external being who had by some means been met in human history in the person of Jesus. Part of what this Christ experience meant to Paul was that “in Christ” all human boundaries disappeared. As Paul wrote to the Galatians several years earlier, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free.” That was for Paul “a new creation” that had overcome the deep-seated human sense of being separated, alone, broken and in need of restoration or healing. In Paul’s mind only God could do this act of healing or be the healer to bring about this sense of a new wholeness. Because he believed that he found this healing in Jesus he was driven to the obvious conclusion that through some means or by some process God must be uniquely present in this Christ. This was in a nutshell Paul’s thinking process.

How did the holy God become present in Jesus so that this gift of salvation in Jesus could be offered? That was not so clear in Paul. He gives no evidence that he had ever heard of the late-developing (9th decade) tradition introduced by Matthew that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin, who had conceived by the Holy Spirit. Of Jesus’ origins Paul says only that “he was born of a woman,” like every human being is born, and that he “was born under the law” like every other Jew. The word Paul used in this reference had absolutely no connotation of “virgin” in it. Paul also appears to have no knowledge that Jesus was a miracle worker. He never mentions a miracle attributed to Jesus in the entire Pauline corpus. Miracles appear to be an 8th decade addition to the developing Jesus story introduced primarily by Mark, then copied by Matthew before being developed in more detail in both Luke and John. For Paul, Jesus was not a deity masquerading as a human being or a divine visitor to Earth; he was rather a human life in whom God had been experienced as present. As I mentioned earlier in this series, Paul seems to say in the first four verses of Romans that God actually incorporated Jesus into God at the time of the resurrection. Whenever Paul talks about the resurrection, he describes it as an act of God, not an act of Jesus. God raised Jesus from the dead for Paul; Jesus never rises from the dead by his own power. Paul did speak in Philippians, in a passage that I will get to soon, about God somehow emptying the divine presence into Jesus of Nazareth, but the words there do not mean preexistence as they are so often interpreted to suggest. There was, however, a God presence that was in Christ of which Paul was certain, and in that God presence he rested his claim for the salvation that he was certain Jesus came to bring. Can we translate Paul’s experience of being made whole in Christ Jesus into an explanation that is appropriate to our time, when to speak about God as dwelling above the sky violates everything we have learned since the days of Galileo in the 17th century? Can we speak of God as intervening in life and history in a supernatural way without violating everything we have learned about how the universe operates since the days of Isaac Newton? Can we still speak of the original perfection of human life and its subsequent fall into sin without violating everything we have learned about human origins from the time of Charles Darwin? That is our task in this column.

We begin by turning the religious question around. What was there about Jesus that caused the people who had experienced his presence to explain it in supernatural terms? What was there about him that caused people to assert that human life alone could never have produced what it was they met in Jesus? That was what virgin birth traditions were designed to do. What was there about Jesus' life that caused them to attribute miracles to him; nature miracles, healing miracles, raising of the dead miracles? In the climax of the Jesus story, what was there about Jesus' life that caused them to believe that death itself, what Paul called the last enemy, was overcome byhim? Paul was certain that wholeness was the gift of Christ, that in this Jesus the world that had long been separated from God was now reconciled, that in Jesus God and human life had come together and that humanity and divinity had entered one another. The eternal and the temporal had in the life of Jesus touched each other.

In seeking to understand how the disciples of Jesus tried to communicate this truth, we have to look at the way the Jesus experience was described in the later gospel tradition. First, tribal boundaries were transcended. The call of Christ was to a new humanity in which tribal identity mattered not at all. We see this all over Mark's Gospel, as he has Jesus heal the daughter of a Syrophoenician Gentile woman and then raise back to life the daughter of a Gentile named Jairus. It is Mark who has Jesus feed a Jewish crowd of 5000 people with five loaves on the Jewish side of the lake and then feed a Gentile crowd of 4000 with seven loaves on the Gentile

side of the lake. It is Mark who puts a Gentile soldier underneath the cross to watch Jesus draw his final breath and then to pronounce that truly God was present in this life. "Surely this man was the Son of God", he is quoted as saying. This soldier was not engaged in a 4th Century Christological debate, as he is so often interpreted to be doing. He was rather describing the new God-filled humanity found in the human ability to give life away, to escape the survival-oriented reality of humanity. It was Matthew who has Jesus' final words be the divine commission to carry the meaning of Jesus, the life-giving love of God, beyond the boundaries of our tribal security by going into all the world - to those who are different, unbaptized, uncircumcised, unclean, but still not beyond the love of God, as this Jesus revealed. It was Luke who suggested that the story of Jesus was not complete until it had rolled from Galilee, where it began; to Samaria, the home of those who were the objects of the deepest Jewish prejudice in the 1st Century; to Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish world; and finally to Rome, which was then the center of the world itself.

The Jesus experience that would ultimately dominate the gospels would set aside human prejudice against Samaritans, against lepers, against women, because human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another. The Jesus of the gospels would transcend the boundaries of religion in the name of humanity, best symbolized in the words attributed to him that all religious rules are finally in the service of expanded humanity. Even the Sabbath day laws must always be set aside if they ever diminish human life.

These were the things that seemed to flow from the life of this Jesus, bearing witness to the fact that his humanity was full, complete and free. He did not need the sweet narcotic of human praise in order to be whole. He did not have to build himself up by tearing down another or even lording it over another. He embraced everyone just as they were, from the rich young ruler to the woman caught in the act of adultery. He loved them into being all that they could be.

This quality of the life of Jesus is more profoundly recorded in the story of his crucifixion than anywhere else. Jesus was betrayed and he loved his betrayer. Jesus was denied and he loved his denier. Jesus was forsaken and he loved his forsakers. Jesus was judged worthy of being condemned, mocked, persecuted and murdered and he loved those who condemned, mocked, persecuted and killed him. That is not the picture of a broken human life, but of a whole life, a complete life, one free to give life away because that one possesses life so fully.

The quintessential essence of his life comes in the portrait of his dying. Jesus is not pictured as grasping at life or seeking to extend it another minute; rather as his life is draining away, he is still portrayed as giving life and love to others. As he dies, he is pictured as speaking a word of forgiveness to the soldiers, a word of hope to the penitent and words of consolation to a grieving mother. That is a life power in him that death cannot overcome. Those who do not know how to live cling to life with a desperation born out of fear, but those who possess life are free to lay it down because death no longer has dominion over them. That is what people saw in Jesus.

These were also the things about Jesus of Nazareth that grasped at the heart of the fragile, self-denigrating Paul, the Paul who felt fragmented, who experienced a war between the law that governed his body and the law that governed his mind, the Paul who cried out in anguish, "O, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" In and through Jesus, as Jesus had been presented to him, Paul experienced the healing presence of the love of God, a love that accepted him as he was and called him into being all that he could be. That was the meaning of salvation for Paul and since only God could bring that salvation, so Jesus must be of God. Paul opened himself to that experience and lived into it. That is why he claimed that he lived in the glorious liberty of the children of God. That is why he could write that nothing could separate him from the love of God. It was out of Paul's sense of having found wholeness, reconciliation and atonement in Jesus that he wanted to bear the Jesus message to the world. All human life, he believed, quite accurately, must find a way to be lifted beyond its survival mentality into the ability to live for another, to give life away to another. Paul found that power in Jesus.

The Christian Church lives today but for one reason: To make people aware of the love of God that accepts us as we are and then calls us to life fully and to be all that each of us can be. Then we give that gift away to all. That is what it means to say God was in Christ.

~  John Shelby Spong
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