Quite often I am asked whether or not I am a Christian. My typical response is that I consider myself a Christian insofar that I act like one. I am not a Persian, Greek, or Roman—their values are unknown to me. I am, however, a product of the Christian revolution, as Christianity has intimately shaped my assumptions and values about the world. As for the resurrection, I find the account fascinating, but at the same time, l am often leveled by the outrageousness of the claim that I am unsure what to make of it. Did the disciples really witness a physically risen Christ? Or was the resurrection more of a potent psychological experience? Since none of us were there, we really cannot know. If I am asked what sort of Christianity I affirm, it would be more of a bare Christianity. By bare Christianity, I mean a Christianity that focuses solely on loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul as well as loving your neighbor. This here is the very essence of Christianity.
I am not a fundamentalist, dogmatist, or religious exclusivist. I believe we should doubt our beliefs rigorously while, at the same time, extracting wisdom from religions all over the world. Expanding further, I can say for certain that I do not believe in a literal garden of Eden, moral transgressions involving talking snakes, a worldwide flood, the defense of a clearly evil Old Testament God, eternal hell for finite infractions, young earth creationism, the creation of languages at the Tower of Babel, the shunning of homosexuals, lesbians, transgenders, and so forth. For these reasons, among others, I have become largely ambivalent about my religious identity. This is not about a lack of love for Christ—whom I consider the greatest person to have ever walked the face of the earth—but a lack of trust in so many Christians and institutions. But who can we genuinely trust anyway? After all, Nietzsche said that the only true Christian died on the cross.
By and large, I am a theist who embraces the mystery and ontological otherness of God. But what I have noticed is that once one affirms the existence of God, the need to conform to a particular religion emerges. Why is that? Why maintain that your own religion is superior to others in the sense of it being the only true religion? Why not affirm the reality of God’s mystery and embrace the experience of trying to capture that mystery through various paths? I see very little reason to adhere to a particular set of religious propositions over another set of religious propositions. The religious orientation I hold reverence for would be something akin to Perennialism which is the view that all religions teach the same universal truths, or that religions are in some way different paths up the same sacred mountain. Religious strife between competing religions and even within denominations is senseless and strikes me as incongruous with the core belief that all of creation is a contingent extension of God himself.
“God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.”
―John Shelby Spong
I’d love to hear from some who have trouble with Eric’s last paragraph. I grew up a devout atheist, convinced math and science held the keys to the universe.
On the other hand, I thought theists believed in some horrible, psychopathic old man in the sky who loved nothing more than to smite those he called evil (who he created) and send them to eternal torment.
If I had read a paragraph like Eric’s even as a very little kid I would have competed agreed.
In fact, I DID read a paragraph just like that, though not till I was 17. That very moment (May 10, 1970) i looked up from the book (remember, not having read any philosophy or theology, so my vision was not put in any formal terms) and I knew as clearly as I knew I existed that “God” was the walls and ceiling and floor and the book and my body and mind and all the trees and houses lining my street an the hundreds of people I saw in my mind blindly crossing streets in Tokyo and New York (I don’t know why those cities came to mind but that’s what came to me)
Now, was that pantheism or classic theism or panentheism or non dual Vedanta? Yes, no aAll of the above and none of the above.
I KNEW at that moment, though I was preparing to be a music major at Juilliard, that one day I woudl work on integrating psychology and spirituality And it was just about 30 years later to the day I received an email from the head of a foundation who had gone to South India where he met a friend of mine, and told him he wanted to pay someone to write a book on Sri Aurobindo and my friend said, “Talk to Don, he’s obsessed with Sri Aurobindo and psychology.” And I received enough money to not work for a year and ended up spending 5 years on the book.
And that’s only one 100th of what I saw that day 54 years ago. This is all so obvious to me - it was even obvious in 1975 when I came across the first book I read by Sri Aurobindo and REMEMBERED having worked on the same topics in another life time in the 1930s or 40s.
Is the Divine confined to one reilgion? How could She be? Are we not all equally Her children (yes, all of us)? Was Christ not, as Eric stated, asking us to love God with all our mind, heart, body and life and soul? And our neighbor - LITERALLY - as ourselves? And hasn’t She spoken something fundamentally similar (though individualized, specialized, unique-ized, for each culture, for each era) to all?