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mysticism for materialists
29 July 2010 in Writing | Tags: agnosticism, Buddhism, materialism, meditation, metaphor, mysticism, panentheism, philosophy | 24 comments
[note: I wrote this last January. I would write it differently now, but I still find it thought-provoking and think it offers insight into some of the stuff I've been thinking about.]
I will tell you that I am a Christian. I am not an orthodox one. I am so far gone into what I hope to be heterodoxy (and fear, at times, to be heresy) that many would say I am not a Christian at all. But I identify myself as one because at the core of my world is Jesus of Nazareth.
I’m agnostic more often than I’m comfortable with. I might even say that I’m an agnostic Christian. I have faith in many stories and many people, but I don’t have beliefs about some propositions that are central to many people’s conception of Christianity. I have faith in the story of Jesus and faith in “God”, but I’m not sure what it means to believe that God “exists” or to believe that the supernatural is “real”. I’m not a dualist – I don’t accept the strict distinction between soul and body, between spiritual and physical. (Indeed, I argue that the fact of the Incarnation, which is the starting point of my theology, politics, etc., necessitates the rejection of ontological dualism. This is connected, at some level, to my somewhat panentheistic understanding of the Trinity. My theories about the nature of God are of course in tension with my feeling that at some level saying that God exists (or doesn’t exist) is meaningless or useless or irrelevant.) I might even be a materialist, in the ontological sense. At any rate, I’m not comfortable saying that I’m not a materialist.
Mysticism is an important component of Christian religion. Obviously a central challenge for non-dualist, materialist, (pseudo-)agnostic Christians such as I is the question of how to make sense of mysticism and make mysticism relevant in our own religious lives. What is the nature of spiritual experience, which cannot in itself be discounted even as most frameworks for interpreting it are rejected?
I propose a materialist mysticism, a mysticism of symbol and metaphor. For the non-dualist, the material is the spiritual; no distinction can be made, no separation posited. Thus, all material experiences can be understood to be spiritual ones. (This act of understanding or of seeing in a different way, with the result that we orient ourselves different toward that which is ultimate, is what we call “faith”.) This is why, as poets have long understood, the contemplation of nature is an intensely “spiritual” experience that reveals to us whatever it is that we know as “God”. This is why living in poverty or walking down a street at night serve as vehicles for theological reflection.
Tonight I meditated in a Buddhist chaplaincy, sitting on one of a circle of pillows enclosing a group of shimmering candles. (My prayer was that a parable, or story, or metaphor about these candles might come to me.) I understood the candles to be like stars, shining in the night. I saw them as universes going in and out of existence. They were atoms, tiny particles, constituents of something grander. They were moments in time, infinite futures stretching from the present, infinite pasts converging to the now. They were both cosmos and microcosmos. I saw in them the glory of something that I have elsewhere called “God”, but any conception of God or Brahman or universe or humanity is inadequate to express fully the mystery and truth that we call by so many names.
This was of course a metaphor. Just a story, or a product of linguistic associations of meaning. It was material and physical. This means of course that it was spiritual and mystical.
Why Calvinists Aren’t Atheists After All [Guest Post]
3 July 2010 in Guest Authors, Writing | Tags: atheism, Calvinism, Kristian Canler, panentheism, pantheism, resurrection | 15 comments
It’s pleasure to present this guest post by my good friend Kristian Canler, hopefully the first of many to come.
My early impetus for theological reflection was the question of freewill. In elementary school I considered that perhaps everything I did was a series of causes and effects tracing all the way back to a cause I had no control over and was frightened. Could this place, the mind in which my introverted psyche spent so much of its time and attention, be a mere metastasis without independent form or merit? Yes, it must be. So I selfishly held out hope for God and Heaven. I readily admit my position is no courageous one. It is the Calvinist who throws absolutely all worth and identity directly on God, not an inch remaining. It is I who protect my insular identity so I may have enough time to think for a while longer about God, the Universe, and where my final allegiance lies if I am generous enough to grant it.
I have bared before you my original motive for mounting the ambitious project to equate Calvinism and atheism. But I do myself I disservice: I came on the synthesis by surprise after a long chain of conclusions. People presented me with Calvinism hard and soft, but the latter theories were ambiguous, arbitrary, or eventually collapsed into hard Calvinism. In short I found that if God has a motive to predestine some he must predestine all, otherwise he is creating a superior race with full right to subjugate the elect and damned that posses no freewill and thus no reason (see Aristotle’s defense of slavery), clearly contradicting imago dei. But if God controls our destinies he is also controlling our actions. Those who have received Christ will bear the fruits of conversion while the pitiful ones will remain lost. We have no choice whether to live a good or evil life, and all life on earth acts upon God’s determination. The entire Universe identical to God’s will.
Where do we fallible creatures draw the line between the sovereign God and what God wills? There is none. God is holy from beginning to end and God’s will is just a way we talk about God’s nature in the context of how it relates to the Universe. If the Universe is God’s will and God’s will is the Universe, the Universe is God. This is pantheism equating to atheism by the logic that if God and the Universe are the same thing, and the Universe is real to us and God is only an idea, then it is useless to claim anything supernatural. The most realistic way to speak about the Universe in this scenario does not require God.
My heart has softened and I realized that Calvinism intuitively feels not so much like atheism than its antithesis. What is that? Many have said theism, but that is not enough. Calvinism is as fixed, stone-faced, and absolute as atheism, but on the other end of the conceptual spectrum. The point I overlooked in my original analysis is that the Universe is by no means the entirety of God’s will, though no part of it is not God’s will. The Universe is encompassed entirely within the identity of God, though it is not the entirety of God, what we know as panenthiesm. The most realistic way to speak about God in this scenario does not require mention of the Universe because the concept of God includes the concept of Universe.
If atheism is all Universe and no God, Calvinism is all God and no Universe.
When I consider that Calvinism might not be atheism after all, a passageway opens. I used to only be on one side of the creek, hoping to group all my opponents on the other side far away from me. But now Calvinism and atheism now occupy the right and left banks, and I am plunged cold and uncomfortable in the current in between. And there is a way out.
My faith is greedy. I want to have all the glory of God and all of my own identity so that I may fully appreciate it: all God and all Universe, separate but fully realized. Though they seem in extreme contradiction, I desire both Calvinism and atheism. I want God and I want the Universe, separate but deeply connected entities in a beautiful relationship of love and teleological exchange. It is my faith that this is not a contradiction but a paradox. To ask how I can delight in both a God of Life and a Universe of formless waters is to merely ponder again the holy mystery of God’s creative power. Under the rule of atheism all is chaos. Under the rule of Calvinism all is order. Under the direction of this greedy, age old Christianity, order assembles from chaos, matter emerges from the abyss, and a simple man stands blinking in the sudden daylight of a garden after death on a Roman cross.
