This is the most immediate thing I am thinking through at the moment; so you all are going to get a post from it (and then finally I will do that second installment on Chandler-Piper two wills in god theology). As my last post intimates I had a meeting with a friend from work today. He is a devout adherent to Eastern thought (I would say mostly Hindu influenced), in its Western appropriation; which is what many have labeled ‘New Age’. I will notice some of the basic themes of our discussion, and then provide some follow up. I think sometimes the written word works better to get into issues at a substantial level, simply because unlike face-to-face discussion, the written word is concrete and has a stability to it that forces the engaging parties to stop and think through the concepts prior to moving too quickly to the next point. In other words, for the attentive and intentional reader, writing forces the person to sit and engage through thought, which only later is given articulation (subsequent to the presupposed thought). So what I am saying is that the written word can engender a thoughtfulness that simple conversation often has the capacity to mitigate, since the temptation to move too quickly in conversation is always enticing and inviting—and we all usually give in to such temptations in conversation (especially when competing points are at hand). Here are the themes and my responses to the discussion I had with my friend earlier today.

1) My friend contends that all is one (in Hindu Atman is Braman), and thus all is ‘divine’. A related point, to this, is the belief that the One is impersonal.

2) My friend argues that all there is, is IS; and any concept of Ought is totally foreign to him and reality in general.

3) My friend grounds morality in himself (since he is divine and a participant with the rest of “divinity” which is constituted by the universal mode of self-consciousness). Thus, there are no absolute or universal norms for discerning morality or immorality.

4) My friend grounds much of his belief in an experience he had years ago through partaking of mind altering psychedelic substances that induce an altered state of consciousness; in this altered state of consciousness my friend believes that he was released from his time bound normal self into the transcendental universal soul of consciousness or into the One (force or source, which is impersonal—think Star Wars and the ‘force’).

5) My friend believes that Christianity and all religions are simply mythical metaphors that are merely attempting to give expression to the same underlying reality; i.e. that all is one. Consequently, my friend thinks that Jesus was simply an exemplar of a reality that is true of all of us; viz. that all of us are sons or children of god by virtue of our relation to the universal soul of consciousness (or stated another way, we are all god).

6) My friend believes that Christianity and other world religions (like Islam, Judaism, etc.) are simply man-made constructs used to control man; you know, like Marx’ theory that ‘religion is the opiate for the masses’. So my friend operates with surpluses of suspicion when it comes to ‘Religion’ (except his own of course 😉 ).

7) As corollary with a couple of the other foregoing points; my friend believes that the belief that we are ‘fallen’ or somehow ‘flawed’ (like as a result of Adam and Eve’s Sin in Genesis 3), is simply another man-made construct to hold humanity down, and deny humanity its fully self-actualized divine “selfness.”

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We had other excursions, but in general the above pretty much covers what was on the menu for today. Here were some of my responses to my friend’s points (I will take them in the order I have them listed above):

1) I affirmed for my friend that for the Christian ‘All is not One’, but instead; God is One (and Three, and Three in One), and that we affirm a substantial Creator/creature distinction—such that there can be no confusion or admixture. This is the first point of departure, and probably the most fundamental between my friend and I. Ironically, though, while my friend says that he holds to the unity of all reality, he still maintains that we are seeking to be united with the One; so there is an ontological separation inherent to my friend’s belief system; and I think that this denotes, ultimately, an inconsistency in my friends belief structure about reality.

2) So given the fact that my friend believes that there is nothing beyond what ‘is’, then all forms of dualism, or even a Creator/creature distinction is voided of any reality. Christian theologically this poses a problem since we have teachings that call humanity to be holy as God is holy; which presuppose a distinction between the singular reality (God), and the ‘many’ reality (humanity)—of course there is a way to navigate this in a Christian christological way that avoids a Greek dualism, which is what T.F. Torrance’s articulation of chalcedonian christology and the homoousion help us to do (fodder for another time). Obviously, this represents a massive point of departure between my friend and I.

3) To ground morality in the subjective self is probably one of the most devastatingly weak points in my friend’s position. His way around this was to suggest that we simply follow the ‘Golden rule’ as the normative ground upon which ethical constructs function. But of course when Jesus teaches this he assuming an ethical construct that is grounded in him, as the God-man Theanthropos. My friend suggested that he wouldn’t want to be violated in any particular kind of way, and thus this then should serve as the construct (a situationalist ethic) for all ethics. Of course the problem with this is that, subjectively, we could find various groups of like-minded individuals (like pedophiles, rapists, money launderers, hedonists, etc.), and within their established community of norms, these kinds of things would be acceptable. This is called normative relativism; so the problem is ultimately still present, there are certain universal norms that transcend all personal mores, and it is this kind of ethical construct that my friend’s attempt to counter cannot counter, and thus has no viable response to. We seemed to cut this point of the discussion short for some reason.

4) When my friend had this mind altering experience through psychedelic substances, he said he experienced something that told him that he was divine. My response to that was to explain the Christian concept of the ‘kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light or of the Son of His love’ (Col. 1:13). My point was to alert my friend to the fact that from a Christian perspective he experienced what Paul calls an ‘Angel’ masquerading as light (I Cor. 11); and the way I know this is because this experience told him exactly the same thing that plunged humanity into separation and sin in the first place—that is, that he is divine or god.

5) Upon further clarification my friend explained to me that he thinks myth is just something all cultures use to cope with the absurdity of death (my words)—so this could be mere existentialism, and it is (this is illustrative of how my friend’s viewpoint is New Age, since he appropriates various streams of thought from both Eastern and Western fountainheads). I made clear that Jesus claimed to be the only way, truth, and life. My friend said he believes in Jesus; but I clarified and pointed out that by definition his view of that and the Christian view is sharply distinctive. His belief that Jesus is an exemplar of what it looks like to be enlightened is at odds with the disclosure of what Jesus himself taught in regards to his own self-understanding of the Son of God within a Hebraic understanding of that. This, of course, became another point of heavy departure.

6) The most ironic thing about this point from my friend (that Christianity is a man made religion meant to control humanity)—and it is one of the points we were discussing as we parted ways for the day—is that I am the one, as a Christian, who maintains a Creator/creature distinction. Which means I have the metaphysical material to consistently maintain that Christianity is not man-made since we have a personal God who stands outside of us (extra nos); my friend’s framework of belief does not have this distinction, and thus collapses its concept of god into humanity. So my question to him is; how can you say that my view is man-made? When your view of god is that man is god; while my view necessarily believes that God is not man. I have the resources to maintain a view that is given shape by something other than man; or a belief system that is based upon Divine Revelation. My friend’s view does not have this resource; in fact, of necessity, and definition it is his perspective that requires that his system be man-made since all is one and one is all and the human self is the only divine reality there is.

7) My friend could finally agree to the idea that we are separated from God (or his ‘Force’ or ‘Source’), but he couldn’t agree that man was in need of outside source (from humanity) to break the vicious cycle of self-domination. He still believes that we are divine, and that we can actualize our own ‘salvation’ through becoming conscious of the universal One that envelops all of us.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I will continue to pray that my friend will finally have eyes to see and ears to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is exceedingly difficult to engage a belief system whose defining feature and hallmark is given shape by the seeming virtue of alogic and contradiction (or cognitive dissonance). When you believe that the word that satan spoke to Eve in the garden is the truth and not the lie, then you are in a position that will never allow you to see that the Christian God is good; because you are God. Chaos ensues from this point onward …