Pantheism says All is God.  This is interpreted in two ways.  Classical Pantheists view the universe as illusory while Natural Pantheists equate the world with God.  It’s not strictly adhered to, of course.  But I was always under the impression that the term Panentheism came into being to help theists kind of bridge the gap.

Unlike pantheism, in panentheism, the world is not given value by being equated with God, nor is it being devalued by being viewed as illusory.  The world has value although it is not the same as Reality.  Even if it is illusory, it has value.  Therefore, individuals have meaning and can affect Reality/God at some level.  God isn’t a personal being that can step in and interfere with the goings on of humanity.   We can’t count on some personal being to come in and save the day if we screw everything up or save us if we’ve done all the right things.  (We can’t affect God through any sort of intentional manipulation – as says The Secret or fundamentalist Christians.)  But Reality is always mirrored back to us and if we choose to look at that reflection (awareness), we will know the next best step to take.  We can go forward with trust, if we so choose.  If we don’t, we may make life difficult for ourselves and others, but we are ALWAYS and forever being offered the opportunity to act with awareness.  (We have what Wesley called Prevenient Grace.  Just learned that term tonight and I love it!)

All is In God, but isn’t necessarily God.  But we do have the potential to become God/Reality by fully opening ourselves to it (as, supposedly, Jesus did) – and then it starts looking like a pantheism or monism and gets kind of confusing. 

Totally non-academic and quite possibly wrong.  But works for me!

A large part of the problem is simply that I lack of the intellectual capacity to fully understand the differences.   For almost a decade, I have considered myself to be a panentheist.  But when reading something Kay posted about panentheism, now I’m not so sure.  Maybe I’m a monist.   Or maybe a pantheist?  What’s the difference, exactly.  Maybe I’m a pantheistic monist?

The only “ism” I can definitely rule out of those listed above is theism.  I don’t think there is any chance I’m a theist.  Technically (in the linguistic sense) I’m probably an atheist (because I’m not a theist – I don’t believe in a God “out there”).  And I could also be a monotheist, but I’m not so sure. According to Joseph Campbell’s definition of monotheism, I most definitely am not a monotheist.  But I think that’s because Campbell falls back on a theistic explanation.  If you go by Huston Smith’s definition, then I might be a monotheist – but Smith’s definition is much more general than Campbell’s.

I always fully assumed I was a monotheist so ventured no further until Joseph Campbell (who called himself a pantheist) punched me in the stomach by claiming that monotheism is the single most destructive myth in the history of mankind. I think he’s right.  Do a little digging and you discover that the monotheistic God that demanded no other Gods should come before him didn’t make it’s way into Judaism until 500 BCE.  It was an intelligent political move employed by the exiled Leviticans who had been under Babylonian captivity.  When they re-entered what had previously been their Jewish Kingdom, they discovered that their tribal members had largely reverted to pagan worship.  That was the Babylonian plan.  Exile the priests in order to destroy the Jewish religion in order to fully integrate the Jewish tribes into Babylonian society.  The Levitican priests knew they had to do something if they were to keep Judaism intact.   So they merged the Gods of the northern and southern tribes.  El was the high God of the Canaanites (also known as El-Elohim, Elohe Yisrael, and El-Elyon).  This is the God of Abraham and the northern tribal kingdom.  Martin Buber says it was basically a God cloud – one God containing several (plural divinity without individuation).  Yahweh is the God of the Negev Desert and the southern tribes.  He is also known as Jehovah.  This is the warrior God and the God of Hosts (Armies) and the God of Judah.    Yahweh-Elohim marks the beginning of monotheism.  It’s the Levitican synthesis of the northern and southern Hebrew tribal gods – the synthesis of the mono-pluralistic “God of gods” with the more personal hero warrior God.

Through the aid of the Leviticans around 500 BCE, this deity becomes the Omnipotent, Omniscient God who says “You shall have no other Gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) This sets up a moral and ethical problem because this is the only god in all of the major world mythologies that claims to have dominance over everything in the universe. This gives the Semetic religions the moral right to claim that their God is superior to all other Gods.  See the problem?

I did.  And it hurt.  Badly.  It was a punch in the stomach that kept me doubled over for quite a long time.  I think I’m just now finally recovering.

Richard Rohr claims that Jesus’ teaching stood in opposition to this somewhat newly formed mono – theistic understanding although it had been around for 100s of years by the time Jesus came on the scene.  He says Jesus was the first “western monist” and that at it’s core, Christianity is a monism, not a theism.  I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this, but it’s beginning to make sense.

Politically, it is very helpful to have a God who demands that there can be no other Gods before Him on your side.  Constantine made Christianity the imperial religion of Rome because it made good political sense.  Unification of an Empire with only One ruler is much easier to achieve if there is only one religion and that religion has a God that demands no others come before him.  The European Empire made use of this God, too.  There was ONLY Roman Catholicism in the western world for 15 centuries!  There were no serious challenges to this particular monotheistic view until the Enlightenment.  Can you imagine?  It still goes largely unquestioned in the Christian world even though there is every likelihood that Jesus’ God was not monotheistic.

So anyway, I get this punch in the stomach which leads me to study other spiritual views and I learn that views are loosely lumped into four groups:  Theism, Monism, Panentheism and Pantheism.  I thought I couldn’t call myself a monotheist anymore, but that’s not really true because Huston Smith has a completely different definition for monotheism. For Smith, a monotheism is simply belief in something Ultimate – a Supreme Being.  So even a monistic religion within Hinduism could potentially be considered monotheistic because Brahman is the supreme God in Hinduism and ultimately, All is Brahman.

So really, I’m not against monotheism.  What I have problem with is theism.  Theism is belief in an external personal God  – one with human characteristics that has intentional states and the ability to make decisions and is totally other.  Humanity and God are separate.  Contrast this to monism which does not differentiate between what is “out” and what is “in”.  It’s all one.  When you think about it, the Trinity quite possibly fits better within a monistic view than a theistic view because in theory, the trinity collapses God, humanity and spirit into One.  Yet as Rohr points out, most Christians could easily dismiss the Trinity and it wouldn’t change their Christianity at all because the general Christian view is that God is separate from humanity rather than One with it.  That’s a theistic understanding and makes meditation on the meaning of the Trinity relatively unimportant.  Yet, within most Christian denominations (not all), the Trinity is still considered central to Christianity.

For me, theism and monism are easy to distinguish from one another.  But bring in pantheism and panentheism and it starts getting very confusing to me.  (Although theism and pantheism are easily distinguished from one another, too, because theists believe in a personal God and monists and pantheists do not.)  I often have a very difficult time distinguishing between monism and pantheism.  Both claim Reality is One, for instance.  And there are so many different types of both, one even called Pantheistic Monism.

I often read that the major difference between pantheism and panentheism is a matter of transcendence – that pantheists do not believe there is something transcendent while panentheists do.  But this isn’t exactly correct.  There are definitely transcendent aspects within various forms of pantheism.  What pantheism denies isn’t transcendence.  It denies the idea that a theistic God is transcendent.  So does that imply that panentheism maintains belief in a theistic God?  If it does, then I am definitely not a panentheist.  But I’m not so certain.

Part of the problem is the idea that pantheists equivocate God and the world.  They don’t.  An all-inclusive Unity does not necessarily refer to “world”.  An all-inclusive Unity does not mean the world is all there is. Pantheism simply maintains that everything is divine, but not in the theistic sense.  Along the same vain, because pantheists deny that an external, personal God exists, many think of pantheism as an atheism.  But it’s not an atheism.  It is non-theistic. There is a HUGE difference!

It is my experience that panentheists don’t get super hyper about the difference between pantheism and panentheism when their panentheism leans more toward a monism than a theism.  It’s the more theistic panentheists that insist that they hold the truth while pantheism falls short.

Pantheism says “All is God” and Panentheism says “All is in God”.   There are a bunch of analogies that people use to explain the difference.   The more theistic analogy used to explain panentheism is to compare God and humanity to the ocean and fish.  A fish obviously isn’t the ocean, but it cannot exist without it.  That could also be a theistic analogy, couldn’t it?  A similar analogy is that reality is like the ocean and humanity a drop of water.  When the drop of water falls into the ocean, it is consumed by it.  There is essentially no difference between the drop of water and the ocean.  Couldn’t this analogy potentially work for monism, pantheism and possibly even panentheism? Huston Smith has another way of explaining the analogy.  He says the drop of water opens to the ocean and in the opening, takes the ocean in and becomes the ocean.  That’s the analogy that best suits what it is I believe.  But which label best applies to such thinking?

Our past President (and Texas Governor), George Bush, claimed to be in favor of the death penalty, but against abortion.  But how can this be?  If you are in favor of life, then you are in favor of life.  Therefore, you cannot grant life in some cases but not in others.  Who gives you the right to choose which life is worthy and which is not?

Granted, my views are fairly liberal.  I firmly believe in a woman’s right to choose whether she wants to keep a fetus or not.  The government  has no right to make this choice for her.

On the other hand, I am somewhat appalled by a Christian minister who would seek to help a woman get an abortion.  To me, that flies in the face of what it means to be Christian which I always think of as life giving.  That is not to say I judge a female who has aborted a child, because I don’t.  But it seems to me that there is something seriously wrong with a society that doesn’t welcome in its new members, no matter how it is they happen to get here.  Let’s face it.  Modern society is essentially anti-child.  What mother would abort her child if it wasn’t???

Try nursing your baby in the middle of a popular restaurant.  Even though it keeps the baby happy, those who happen to notice that you are nursing your baby in public are likely to scorn your efforts.   One of the most courageous things I have ever done in my entire life is to nurse my child in public. I’m not sure anything has required more courage from me.  I even nursed my child in a discreet place when touring Buckinghman Palace because I thought that would be better tolerated than my baby’s screaming. (It was not possible to exit the building.)  I was immediately escorted to the First-Aid center which gave me a wonderful view of the palace most weren’t privy. to.  But we do not live in a child-friendly society, no matter how child-friendly it claims to be.   Most of us would rather a baby suffer from hunger than be subjected to a nursing mother.

And if you aren’t compassionate toward the babies within your society, how can you possibly offer compassion to criminals?

Here are the current offenders on Death Row in Texas. I counted over 300 individuals waiting to for the State of Texas to kill them.  Did I count wrong?  If I’m not mistaken, 450 individuals have been killed since 1982. Of course there is something like 80,000 abortions every year in Texas.   But isn’t there a direct correlation?  We think it’s OK to get rid of what it is we don’t like.  So if you don’t like certain kinds of criminals and uphold the death penalty, what gives you the right to make abortion illegal?  That doesn’t make any sense.  Especially since a fetus represents the potential of a living, breathing human individual while that criminal you want dead is already fully human.

God For Us, we call You Father,
God Alongside Us, we call You Jesus,
God Within Us, we call You Holy Spirit.

You are the Eternal Mystery
That enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things,
Even us, and even me.

Every name falls short of your
Goodness and Greatness.
We can only see who You are in what is.

We ask for such perfect seeing.
As it was in the begining, is now,
and ever shall be. Amen.

Also, more thoughts from Richard Rohr on the Trinity from his book, Naked Now (Kay says this makes her think the trinity is a koan – maybe that’s exactly what it is!!!)…

Trinitarian thought was almost made to order to humiliate the logical Greek mind: It said in effect: The Father is the Father, but the Father is also Son, and in fact, he is the Father and the Son at the same time, which relationship is, in fact, the Holy Spirit. If actually encountered and meditated on, the doctrine of God as trinity breaks down the binary system of the mind. For a Christian who lives in a Trinitarian spirituality, it makes either-or thinking useless. Perhaps, in addition to everything else, the Trinity is a blessing, to make us patient before Mystery and to humble our dualistic minds. The unspeakable name of the Jewish God, YHWH, was supposed to have the same effect.

• All saying must be balanced by unsaying, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing.  Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent.
• All light must be informed by darkness, and all success by suffering.  St. John of the Cross called this Luminous Darkness,  St. Augustine, the Paschal Mystery or the necessary Passover, and Catholics proclaim it loudly as the mystery of faith at every Eucharist.  Yet it is seldom an axiom at the heart of our lives.

A few interesting points…

True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now.  The great discovery is that always what we were searching for has already been given!  I did not find it; it found me.

What makes Jesus different than founders of other religions is that he found God in disorder and imperfection and told us that we must do the same or we will never be content on this earth. Hope and union are the same thing.  Real hope has nothing to do with certitude.

Much of religious seeking today is immature transcendence which is dualistically split off from any objective experience of union with God, self or others.  If it is authentically experienced, Christianity is overcoming the split from God’s side, once and for all.  (“Why do you waste time looking to one another for approval when you have the approval that comes from the One God?”  John 5: 41, 44)

Faith is often clarified and joy-filled hindsight – after we have experienced our experiences.  But the path ahead will always be a mixture of darkness and light.

The essential religious experience is that you are being “known through” more than knowing anything in particular.  Yet despite this difference it feels like true knowing.  This new way of knowing is called “third eye” seeing.   We do not pray to Christ, we pray through Christ.

Many are convinced that the correct Hebrew YHWH is an attempt to replicate the sound of inhalation and exhalation.  When you breathe, you are speaking God’s name.  It is our first and last word.  There is no Islamic, Christian or Jewish way of breathing.  There is no American, African, or Asian way.  There is no poor or rich way.  The playing field is utterly leveled.   Breath, wind, spirit and air are precisely – nothing.

The word mystic simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience.  This was Jesus’ entire point.  Jesus was the first non-dual religious teacher of the West.  One of the reasons we have failed to understand his teaching is because we tried to understand it with a dual mind.  Nondual thinking was consistently assumed, implied and even taught in Christianity for 1600 years before it went underground.  Balance is the name of the game.  Not perfection.

Theism believes there is a God.  Christianity believes that God and humanity can exist in the same place.  These are two utterly different proclamations of the universe.  Most Christians are very good theists who just happen to have named their god Jesus….  We think of ourselves as mere humans trying to be spiritual when the Christian revelation is that we are already spiritual.

We do not see things as they are.  We see things as we are.

Three levels of conversion:

1. Intellectual – moving out of the world of sense perception into the universe of being.
2. Moral – purification of motives
3. Religious – transformation into love.  Changing ourselves and letting ourselves be changed by a mysterious encounter with grace, mercy and forgiveness.

Metanoia  – change your mind.  Jesus’ first message in the gospels.

Paul’s word for “ego” was “flesh”.

The “kingdom of God” is not about a place or afterlife.  It is about a way of seeing and thinking now.   The kingdom of God is the naked now.

Prayer is “resonance”.  Prayer is about changing you, not about changing God.

The struggle to forgive reality for being exactly what it is right now often breaks us through to nondual consciousness.

Christianity became rational in order to oppose rationalism, which made it lose it’s secret wisdom.  [Perhaps Wesley understood this and that's why he's called the "Rational Enthusiast"?]

God is the one whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  St. Bonaventure

Religious people today are much more invested in either/or thinking than scientists.

Although Ken Wilber would largely identify as a Buddhist, he is our post-modern Thomas Aquinas, and one of the best friends and loving critics religion has ever had.

We made Jesus into a mere religion instead of a journey toward unity with God.  We became a religion of belonging rather than a religion of transformation.

God regarded her in her lowliness. Luke 1:48

You must seek to be a blank slate.
You must desire to remain unwritten on.
No choosing of this or that.
Not “I am good because.”
Nor “I am not good because.”

Remaining nothing,
An unchosen virgin,
And unchoosing too, just empty.
No story line by which to start the day.
No identity enhancers nor losses
To make yourself valuable or not.

Nothing interesting, nothing uninteresting.
Neither against, nor for something.
Nothing to recall from yesterday.
Nothing to look forward to today.

Just me, naked, exposed,
No self to fix, change or find,
Nothing to judge right or wrong,
Important or unimportant,
Worthy or unworthy,
I stand and wait,
neither powerful nor powerless,

For You to name me,
For You to look upon my face,
For You to write my script,
For you to give the kiss,
In your time and your way.

You always do.
And it is always so much better.

“And she gave birth to her firstborn” (Luke 2:7), who was the Christ.

Most of the sermons are based on understanding, compassion, love and forgiveness.  Wesley says that all sins are forgiven because God does not condemn.  Therefore, there is no reason, whatsoever, to be afraid of your past.  Christ set us free so quit being slaves to sin.  Quit being a slave to the past.

This was likely groundbreaking stuff in 18th century England when church was all about morality.  Wesley was preaching to the poor and outcast and he usually had to do so outside of the church because the Church of England had closed it’s doors to him.  They didn’t like what he was preaching. One time, he went to preach in his father’s church and they wouldn’t let him, so he preached on his father’s tombstone, outside of the church.  He always drew a crowd.  I’m not so sure I totally understand why he always drew a crowd, but he was extremely popular among the poor.  He supposedly attracted as many people as 30,000 at a time!

In one of his sermons, he says that God is not harshly disapproving of you, so why should you be afraid?  Get up.  Leap!  Walk.  Go on your way.  You have no reason to fall into the grip of the fear that brings with it pains of judgment.  Just love God who loves you.  That is sufficient.  Not exactly the message the ruling class wants to send to the lower classes.

This may have been what I was taught in my Methodist Sunday School classes, but it certainly is not what I was taught in all of the many Christian organizations I belonged to in junior high and high school.  I had conflicting ideas about God when I was younger.  On the one hand, I believed God was Love.  I could easily equate the two.  Love is God; God is Love.  On the other hand, I also believed God condemned those who displeased him.  So God was Love and Love was God as long as you were pleasing to God?  It didn’t ever really make sense.   We were told we were saved by grace, but what that really meant was that grace could only be given to us if we first believed in the right things.  It wasn’t really grace because you essentially had to earn your way into it.  Grace, by definition, cannot be earned.

In another sermon, Wesley says that God was revealed to Moses, but not with physical eyes.  He didn’t literally “see” God.  Quoting Exodus, Wesley says that what Moses saw was God as compassionate and gracious, long-suffering, ever constant and true, maintaining constancy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin, and not sweeping the guilty clean away.  I’d never really thought about Moses in this way before.  There are all kinds of stories in the OT of God wiping the guilty clean away, or at least wanting to wipe them away.  Apparently, he would have done this several times if the prophets hadn’t talked Him out of it.  (Noah is the only prophet I can think of who didn’t try to convince God to save his people.  He didn’t argue.  He just built the ark and let God wipe everyone out without so much as a peep.  Noah was an exceptionally wimpy prophet!!)  Maybe Moses represented a new generational understanding of God at that time, as did Wesley for his time?

It would be interesting to go back through history and see how it plays out – is there always a tug of war between those crying out for morality and new voices coming to the forefront insisting on forgiveness?  If so, then it’s kind of interesting that it is currently humanist atheism and progressive Christianity that are the moral defenders of the universe these days.  Neither group is particularly forgiving or tolerant.  I’d never really thought of this before.  Perhaps today’s voices of forgiveness are those of transpersonal psychology (Eckhart Tolle, A Course in Miracles, etc.) and Integral Spirituality?

The last sermon is about working out our own salvation.  That’s kind of like saying, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Quit waiting for someone or something to save you.  Wesley writes, “Even those who have no law – no written law – are their own law for they display the effect of the law – the substance of it, though not the letter for it is inscribed on their hearts by the hand which wrote the commandment on tables of stone. Their conscience is called as witness as to whether they act suitably or not.”… “God works in us, therefore we must work.”  This, to me, is basically the same thing as Richard Rohr’s idea of Contemplative Action.   Trust that inner voice, and it will give rise to action.  You will know what to do.

I’ve been reading John Wesley’s sermons and he says something similar.  He claims that we all go through three stages of the “soul”.  The natural stage of the soul is when we don’t recognize the Holy Spirit.  Essentially, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.  There is no fear because we think we see things as they are.  But once we begin to allow the Holy Spirit into our lives, we begin to see things differently.  Mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers.  Jesus is no longer a human being.  He is now super human.  This is when we take on “the letter of the law”.  We are afraid and the containment of our fear requires belief in the miraculous.  (Jesus walking on water, incantations having the power to evoke the protection of God, following the “right” religion assuring us a safe place in some afterlife, etc.)  But eventually, we begin to question the miraculous, and we realize, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, stories are stories, men are men. According to Wesley, herein lies salvation.  And according to Buddhists, this is true enlightenment.  It requires the courage to accept life exactly as it is, foibles and all.

I have so many thoughts on this.  I’ve especially been wondering about my views of the world had I been able to divorce the idea that Christianity is the only “right way” from my ideas about social justice.  But more on this later when my thoughts are more coherent.

I am in three classes at the church at the moment.  In Sunday School, we are studying “The Uppity Women of the Bible”.  We have only covered Ruth, so far, and it’s fascinating.  I’ll put a post together on what I’ve learned at some point because it is really fun!  I’m in a class on John Wesley which has turned out to be wonderful in terms of the members of the class.  One woman is getting her degree in theology and another in world religions at UT.  The woman teaching the class has a degree in theology so it’s a very informed group of people.  They know much more about Wesley than do I, so I am learning a lot and have been relieved to discover that almost everyone has read Spong, Borg, Rohr, etc.  I had a brief, but very interesting conversation with a well-read gentleman on the differences between Spong and Wesley.  I was thankful to have recently completed Spong’s book Eternal Life because I was fully able to understood the point he was making – that Wesley, Borg, Rohr, etc. are all willing to break down Christianity. But they don’t just deconstruct it and leave it deconstructed as does Spong.  They re-mythologize it, so to speak.

I’m not exactly sure what my thoughts are on re-mythologizing religion, although I very much appreciated Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and think that was what the book was primarily about – re-mythologizing the sacraments in terms that do not conflict with reason and science.  It made sense to me!   Ken Wilber has some interesting articles on why he is against re-mythologizing religion, but I haven’t read enough of Wilber to fully understand his point or if it has anything to do with a Dostoevskyan reframing of the sacraments.  I’ll have to get around to doing that one of these days.

I am also in an Intro. to Spiritual Directions class and this one is posing the most trouble for me.  I am so scared of offending people with my non-belief.  Most people in the class wouldn’t be offended at all, but I can tell that some would, so I don’t really say what’s on my mind and the point of the class is to lay bare what is on your mind.

So what’s on my mind these days?  I’m worried about my health.  Not horribly worried – just worried.  I think I’m more angry with myself than anything.  Why did I allow myself to get to this point?  I keep telling myself not to go there – that it isn’t helpful.  Move on from where it is you are at and don’t look back because the past serves no helpful purpose.  It will simply keep me stuck.  Forgive and move on.  No point in thinking about what could have been.  What is, is.  I suppose there is nothing offensive about that.

But here is what is really on my mind…. I’m worried about a Catholic Retreat my husband is going to attend in March.  I actually woke him up at an ungodly hour this morning to talk with him about it.  His family is involved in a very conservative movement within Roman Catholicism and they have been hounding us for the past 10 years to attend one of the movement retreats.  Neither of us have had any interest.  But just as soon as we join the Methodist Church, my husband’s brother talks him into going on a retreat.  Why would he agree to that now?  Is it some subconscious thing with my husband – that he feels guilty about joining a protestant church?

When we were first married, he would get very angry with me for my issues with the Catholic Church.  For eight years, religion was a huge struggle for us.  I finally decided that I had to leave the Catholic Church and if that meant the end of our marriage (which I really thought it might), so be it.  But it didn’t.  I ended up very involved in a Methodist Church and enrolled in theology school.  But before I even had a chance to attend, my husband decided he was unhappy with his job and made the decision to move us back to Texas.  I can’t help but think there is some subconscious thing going on here.  So I woke the poor guy up in the middle of the night and asked him what made him decide to go on the retreat now, after 10 years of having no interest?  He promises me that he still isn’t particularly interested.  He’s just doing it because he thinks it’s a way to connect with his brother.  He claims to have no interest in going back to Catholicism again, that he’s very excited about our new church.  I’ll be happy when the danged retreat is finally over, however.  If anything has the potential to break us up, it’s religion.  Which is kind of ironic because it has always been spirituality, from the beginning of our dating days, that  has been our glue.  Maybe we are solid enough these days that we could follow our own spiritual paths and not have to travel them together so there is no reason to worry, anyway?   Both of my kids are teens now, and both are firm atheists. There are no worries of being forced to raise my kids in a religion I feel uncomfortable with.  Truth be known, I’m much more comfortable with my kids’ atheism than my husband’s family’s theism.  I can’t help but wonder if that would be found offensive in my group, however, so I don’t share it, even though it is seriously on my mind.

I’ll write more about his history as I learn it.  For now, I’m making my way through a little book I found at the library called The New Birth.  It’s edited by Thomas C. Oden who has attempted to translate Wesley’s writing into modern English. Oden is considered to be the dominant figure in a movement called “paleo-orthodoxy”.  This is based on church teachings prior to the great schism of 1054.   It stresses the interpretations of the Bible in which both the East and West agreed and is supposedly an extremely conservative, non-denominational movement.   Oden claims a literalist understanding of the Bible is a modern theology and therefore rejects it.  He clearly isn’t conservative in the fundamentalist sense.  But that’s all I know about him.  It could be his translation of Wesley is a bit skewed because the book is now out of print, but I’m enjoying reading it.

The first sermon is “The New Birth” (the link provided is to a different translation than Oden’s).  I was supposedly “saved” in the First Baptist Church of Plano my senior year of high school.  I simply repeated some words and a Baptist Preacher proclaimed me both “saved” and “born again”.   I get the feeling this was completely different than how John Wesley viewed “New Birth”.

Wesley says that the essential nature of the new birth is the great change that God works in the soul when he brings it into life – when he raises it from the death of sin to the life of righteousness.  What I find most interesting is this:

It is the change made in the whole soul by the almighty Spirit of God when it is “created in Christ Jesus”; when it is “made new in mind and spirit,” having “put on the new nature of God’s creating, which shows itself in the just and devout life calld for by the truth”; when the love of the world is changed in to the love of God, pride into humility, passion into meekness, hatred and malice into a sincere, tender, disinterested love for all of mankind.  In a word, it is that change in which the earthly, sensual, demeaned mind is transformed into the mind which was in Christ Jesus.  This is the nature of the new birth.  So it is “with everyone who is born from spirit”.

Richard Rohr said that church denominations are very rarely built upon the teachings of mystics.  He says the possible exceptions are George Fox (Society of Friends), Menno Simons (Mennonites) and John Wesley (Methodists).   Based on this sermon, Wesley certainly could have been a mystic!  It seems to me what Wesley is saying here is what all mystical gurus of all world religions teach – in order to see with the third eye, we must transcend the ego.  The New Birth is this new way of seeing through something other than our attachment to the ego (the demeaned mind).

I also find it interesting that he says that through New Birth, we gain a “disinterested love for all of mankind”.   A Course in Miracles frequently refers to the difference between a holy relationship and a special relationship.   A special relationship is based on the specific interests of egoic need – it maintains love for an individual based on what the other person can do for me.   Loving someone, because at you are afraid of being alone, for instance, is based on self-interest.  The fear of being alone keeps you from being able to truly love the other.  Fear can show up in even more subtle ways, but it is always based on the self-interest of the ego.  This disinterested love perhaps points to something similar to what A Course in Miracles calls the Holy Relationship.

Another item of interest:

…all unholy temperaments are uneasy temperaments.  I speak not only of the volatile passions such as malice, hatred, envy, jealousy, and revenge.  They create enough of a present hell in our hearts.  I speak also of the softer passions, which may give a thousand times more pain than pleasure if not kept within due bounds.  Even “hope” when “deferred” (and how often must this be the case!), “makes the heart sick” (Prov 13:12).

Hope when deferred makes the heart sick!  Proverbs.  Of course!  This made me think of Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus, which I spent a lot of time with a few years back.  Camus tries to come up with a reason for people to live despite the hopelessness of the human condition.  Maybe what Camus was referring to wasn’t so much hope, as hope deferred?   I think we have had a tendency to misunderstand hope and faith.  Deferred hope would say, life isn’t how I want it to be now, but it will be one day.  But true hope and faith don’t make any demands on how things are.  They simply trust that all is as it should be – that all is right with the world despite appearances to the contrary.  Those contrary appearances are always based upon the perception of the ego, not the sight of the third eye.

Wesley says that the reason new birth is absolutely necessary is because it is the surest basis of happiness in this world.  He goes on to say, “as well as the world to come”.  But the primary focus is on happiness in this world, now.  The focus is not about achieving happiness in some distant place and time.

Wesley warns his followers not to tell those who seem intent on continuing their willful sinning that they cannot be born again.  Apparently, this was a popular teaching back in his day – that some were beyond “salvation”?  Wesley claims that anyone who tells someone else that they cannot be born again is showing them the way to hell in the name of charity, and that is not charitable at all.