It is the latter that has me blogging about ‘em today. This weekend a couple of Phil’s accomplices on the ‘blog posted a particularly incendiary post, indicting (in the courtroom of their enlightened opinions) Jesus-followers participating in the emerging conversation for favoring style over substance, running roughshod over Scripture and the good news of God found in Christ–accusing of us of virtually everything except for eating small puppy dogs. They baited emerging church conversants/practitioners to come in and make our case, with the stated goal of the whole shebang being to reach 1000 comments through the sheer controversy of it all. And I decided to waste my time participate in the thread.

What does this have to do with design? Well, these Pyromaniacs have created a medium of expression all their own, inspired by the Demotivators, called Po-Motivators (see Andrew Jones recap much about Po-Motivators here and here. UPDATE: Andrew has his own response to this Pyro post here.) Well, no fewer than four Po-Motivators were generated by Johnson in response to the comments thread in this post, influenced in part or in toto by yours truly. In Phil’s own words, “Mike Morrell inspires me.”

This is not meant as a compliment.

Without further ado, here are the brand-spanking new images “inspired” by me:

This is a strange tribute indeed from Mr. Johnson. I have “known” him, in a virtual sense, since the early days of the popular-use Web in the late 1990s, when he maintained his Hall of Church History and Theology Bookmarks. Our relationship has really blossomed since then from one vantage point. I mean, back nearly a decade ago he ignored my emails taking him to task for calling Anabaptists violent extremists (he seems to have cleaned up this rhetoric since then) and saying that those of us engaged in house churches “want to play ‘church’ but despise authority.”And now, look how far we’ve come! He’s creating original artistic renderings in my “honor”! I’m speechless.

While I am unable (and unwilling…see below) to respond in kind, bloggers far more design-gifted than I have crafted their own comebacks to these pithy little postcards. Here are a couple:

And so, the question is begged: Is such debate even helpful? Jesus often refused to answer his critics, even refused to defend himself when he was on trial. He could “read” people’s souls, and know when not to bother. (This is buttressed by the whole not casting your pearls before swine thing.) Fools, it seems, rush into ill-advised conversation where angels fear to tread. There is plenty of sound spiritual precedent to hold one’s tongue and not enter the fray.

At the same time, I’m deeply uncomfortable putting myself in the position of “Jesus” by default and fellow Christians–obnoxious though they can be–as “Jesus’ accusers.” This is rather unreflective and un-challenging hermeneutics. Surely, iron sharpens iron and a three-stranded cord isn’t easily broken. Certainly, it is blessed and good when sisters and brothers dwell together in unity–and sometimes, this cannot happen without soul-searching conversation and–indeed–hard confrontation when the occasion calls for it. Vineyard founder John Wimber wrote a helpful paper 15 years ago, Why I Respond to Criticism, that addresses many of the salient issues at stake.

Criticism of the emerging church conversation is nothing new, though it’s actually a bit newer than some of us may realize, as it’s “felt like forever” since we were free from constant cross-examination. But Stephen Shields was able to write accurately at the very end of 2004 that we “have so far been impressed by how generous and restrained critique has been.” The reason was this: from the 1990s onward, different groups of us began quietly rethinking and reimagining what it means to be faithful to God and God’s work on earth in our postmodern context. Because the early thinkers were church planters, ministers who worked with kids, and other “off-the-radar” folks in praxis, at the grass-roots, we weren’t on the map of heresy-hunting “discernment ministries,” who spent the 90s warning conservative Christians about alleged goddess worship in Mainline churches, laughing revival in charismatic churches, and that crazy liberal innovator Chuck Colson and his Evangelicals and Catholics Together initiatives.

But in 2004 all this began to change–Christianity Today did a cover story on us and Brian McLaren was selected as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Evangelical voices in America. While our numbers may not have spiked considerably between ’03 and ’05, suddenly we were news. And that made us open season for all sorts of people. Not even drummers are safe.

I don’t wish to denigrate the sincere concerns of others who weren’t in our prayer meetings, conferences, email discussion lists, and message boards for all these years prior when we were “subterranean.” But in some ways, it’s been difficult to catch them up to the conversation thus far, particularly when they don’t seem to want to listen. (Lord knows I’ve tried!) And really, I don’t want to give my best and most ardent energy trying to define and defend a paradigm of spirituality. As I said in one of my too-many comments in the Team Pyro post, “I just hate [this mode of discourse], for all of us, because our theologies, spiritualities, and praxes become more like a bad rap song, all self-referential instead of singin’ about what we want to sing. Instead of conversing about what we’ve conversing about (or, if you prefer, theologizing), we start conversing about the conversation itself…which is kinda nerdy and boring…this internet thing sucks for handling disputes.”

And that, my friends, is where I’ve come down. It’s not that the Team Pyro folks aren’t my kin in Jesus. It’s not that, were we part of a single, local church, I wouldn’t spend hundreds of hours hearing their concerns and sharing mine, pleading for common heart and direction. (I happen to expend a ton of such energy in my local church, with great reward. I’d take a bullet for these people, and they know that.) But they’re not local, and none of us are particularly invested in one another’s lives and well-being. Either side of this ramped-up debate could easily find thousands of forums online attacking our lives and theologies, and we could expend a lifetime waging verbal warfare with our critics.

But it isn’t worth it, for me, any longer. After this weekend, I feel drained. Like I’ve undergone a serious spiritual attack with nothing to show for it. I don’t say this to demonize the the particular post-ers/commentors on TP. But I think we can all get sucked into a system, a transpersonal grid that has a collective spirit all its own, manipulating the whole in ways its individual parts would never consent to. I believe this is part of what the sent-one Paul meant when he described the church’s opposition to and transformation of the principalities and powers. Mutual love and respect has to precede any truly transformative conversation, and form the basis for any relationship that might later require painful words of exhortation or correction. The connection just ain’ t there, brothers.

As someone once said, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8

There are literally thousands of blogs updated daily that stimulate, challenge, and edify with spiritual explorations into the heights, depth and breadth of knowing Jesus Christ, loving God and neighbor. Why should I have submit to such spiritual sadomasochism, treading in areas where I know wounded people hang out to inflict further pain on one another? As our apparently-patron saint Bono sings in “One,”

You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

I can’t keep holding on, brothers. And–with God’s grace–I won’t, any longer. I will stick around, if needed, to respond to any comments on that particular Team Pyro post, but–for my integrity and theirs–I can no longer be a party to this level of discourse.

If you find yourself to be a misfit, ragamuffin friend of Jesus, worn-out by religious rhetoric and in need of some kindness and renewing mercy, I leave you the following benediction: An encouragement from one of the more gracious of the postcard replies, appropriately, from Emerging Grace:

This was originally posted on September 3, 2007

See also Resisting the Logic of Heresy-Hunting: A Cautionary Tale

Mysticism is not just a change in some religious ideas or affirmations.  Mystics have no need to exclude or eliminate others, or define themselves as enlightened, whereas a mere transfer of religious assertions often makes people even more elitist and more exclusionary.

True mystics are glad to be common, ordinary, egalitarian, servants of all, and “just like everybody else,” because any need for specialness has been met once and for all.

Adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate

Wish to sign up for Richard Rohr’s daily email yourself? Subscribe to CAC email lists

And illustrating this theme nicely is ‘Chain Reaction’ by Cloud Cult. Enjoy.

You have eyes like mine
Are we strangers or am I you, are I..?

Put your face on mine
Put your face on mine…

What you feel makes part of what they’ll feel
It’s a chain reaction
Put out fear and they’ll feel fear
It’s a chain reaction
Put out love and they’ll feel love
It’s a chain reaction

Put your face on mine
Put your face on mine…

I understand why he wanted to play this game. I’ve been there myself:

When I’m afraid,

Not wanting to lose friends

Not wanting to lose peers and colleagues who are themselves afraid of guilt-by-association,

Not wanting to lose income from being lumped in with the “heretical” people – who might be nice folks, but who are walking liabilities to be associated with. Because even more scared people, without many scruples, wouldn’t think twice from firing you from a project, dis-inviting you from a conference, or dis-barring you from an association.

I get it.

But some time ago – I’m not sure when – I began to have a subtle-but-definite shift in my thinking. I still have my beliefs, I still have my integrity, I still have my scruples; I still have the grammar of faith and cosmology that comprises my orthodoxy…as do we all…

…but still…

…isn’t ‘guilt-by-association,’ in the end, a beautiful thing?

Didn’t Jesus get caught with his hand stuck

in the cookie jar of humanity

enjoying each misshapen morsel?

The real issue, though, is not tolerating demonizing people no matter what, by sheer virtue of their being humans made in the Imago Dei. Calvinists, Arminians, Trinitarians, Universalists, Sufis, Five Percenters, Hindus, atheists – we’re part of one human family; we’re all learning and growing.

Heresy-hunters will never be satisfied by our saying “WE’RE not like THEM” – they’ll keep echoing the fearful voices in our own heads, whittling us down to nothing:

First they came for the charismatics,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a charismatic.
Then they came for the emergents,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t emergent.
Then they came for the universalists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a universalist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

(With thanks to Martin Niemöller)

We can still believe our perspectives; still walk in the truth as we conceive and receive it. We can even discuss and debate, passionately, with those of alternative viewpoints. But let’s not throw anyone of these alternative viewpoints under the bus while doing so. They deserve more compassion than that, and we never know when we’ll be next.

Can poets (can men in television)
Be saved? It is not easy
To believe in unknowable justice
Or pray in the name of a love
Whose name one’s forgotten: libera
Me, libera C (dear C)
And all poor s-o-b’s who never
Do anything properly, spare
Us in the youngest day, when all are
Shaken awake, facts are facts
(And I shall know exactly what happened
Today between noon and three)
That we, too, may come to the picnic
With nothing to hide, join the dance
As it moves in perichoresis
Turns about the abiding tree.

- W H Auden, Compline, from Horae Canonicae

[Note: This was originally posted on my previous blog on May 4, 2011.]

A few weeks ago, Rob was in Atlanta as part of a short tour for his uber-controversial book Love Wins. He stopped by the nationally-syndicated Day1 studio to do this in-depth interview with show host Peter Wallace:

Rob Bell – Day1 Conversations with Peter Wallace from Peter Wallace on Vimeo.

 
(Note: This interview is WAY better than Martin Bashir’s!)

Then last week, I was in Atlanta:  Seeing family and friends for Easter, and sharing about the Wild Goose Festival with a wide variety of people in the area - Punk Torah, Metro Atlanta Emergence (with whom I had entirely too much fun at Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room and Ping Pong Emporium and La Fonda), and KSU professor Derek Spalla.

While in the ATL, it worked out for me to sit in the studio with the good Mr. Wallace and share why the Goose is so important to me, and why it just might be important to – dahn dahn dahn! – the future shape of North American spirituality. No really. Why? You’ll just have to watch & see! But seriously – I’d love your feedback on what we’re discussing here.

Mike Morrell – Day1 Conversations with Peter Wallace from Peter Wallace on Vimeo.

 
Finally, you see that t-shirt I’m wearing? It’s from the local Raleigh-based Guru Guitar, a kickin’ guitar shop that serves the Triangle area and beyond. I do mean ‘beyond.’ My buddy, Guru co-owner Eugene Reinert, crafts his custom-made Rhino Guitars for musicians the world over. So if you’re in the market for peerless sound, come on by. Then you & I could have coffee next-door at Cup-A-Joe afterward.

Update: As I mentioned here yesterday, Maybe you’ve been reading my blog for a few days now, or maybe you’ve been a reader for years. Either way, I’d like to meet you at the Goose this June 21st-24th! If you enjoy (or are infuriated by) what I post here, I’d like you to take advantage of a special ticket offer that my friends at the Goose have granted me permission to extend: Purchase your festival passes by next Thursday, February 16th, and receive 15% off your total purchase (not including camping) by entering “FriendOfMike” at the checkout!  Purchase your passes here, enter “FriendOfMike” where prompted, and save. For one week six more days only. And then we can camp together.   

Want to know more about the Wild Goose Festival this year? A picture’s worth a thousand words…check this out:

The 2012 Wildgoose Festival from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

I think my friend Travis Reed (founder and visionary behind Alter Video Magazine and The Work of the People) did an amazing job capturing the essence of our heart, drive, & passion to create a ‘temporary autonomous zone‘ for freedom, exploration, and action at the intersection of vibrant faith, restorative justice, and generative arts. For the past two years, I’ve been privileged to work with the Wild Goose Festival to help set our tone, create our culture, and expand our space in the marketplace of ideas. I’ll be saying more about my particular passions around the Goose in an upcoming Wild Goose blog entry, but for now let me direct you to our trailer, because a picture truly is worth a thousand words:

If you were at the Wild Goose Festival last year, I already trust you’ll be back. You know as well as I do that there’s simply no other space like it in North America. And if you haven’t been yet, I hope you join us in 2012. I see our little grassroots festival as erasing the sacred/secular divide that so plagues our culture, revealing instead a world that is wholly holy, infused with God’s gracious, transformative presence. These aren’t just words; you feel this as you’re on the 70 acres that is Shakori Hills, taking in music, making art, smiling at a child, hearing a world-class speaker, sharing food with new friends, camping under the stars. By the very way we’re set up to encourage conversation and mutuality, we’re erasing violence in all forms to re-connect with God, ourselves, others and our environment through the way of Jesus. It’s an altered state of consciousness that lasts for four days, and reverberates long after.

Maybe you’ve been reading my blog for a few days now, or maybe you’ve been a reader for years. Either way, I’d like to meet you at the Goose this June 21st-24th! If you enjoy (or are infuriated by) what I post here, I’d like you to take advantage of a special ticket offer that my friends at the Goose have granted me permission to extend: Purchase your festival passes by next Thursday, February 16th, and receive 15% off your total purchase (not including camping) by entering “FriendOfMike” at the checkout!  Purchase your passes here, enter “FriendOfMike” where prompted, and save. For one week only. And then we can camp together.  

I’m going to close with these easy ways to share the Goose with friends & family from our amazing new marketing maven, Sarah Cunningham:

Are You A Wild Goose Alumnus or Supporter?

If you’ve been to Wild Goose or are a friend of the festival, we’re asking you to invite your friends to check out this video by posting it on your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr or Blog.

1. You can click here to share an easy, pre-written tweet inviting people to check out the video.

2. You can click here to share a pre-set video link on your Facebook page.

3. You can email a friend or email list using this pre-written subject line.

4.  You can embed the video on your blog or other pages by pasting the following code into your HTML:

<iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/36375347?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0″ width=”650″ height=”366″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

To which I’ll add a fifth:

5.) If you are part of an organization, ministry, nonprofit, business, or philanthropic foundation that would like to partner with the festival to help make us happen, would you be in touch? You may leave a comment here, or email me at mike [at] wildgoosefestival [dot] org. I’d be happy to discuss opportunities to feature your organization with our growing community.

Thanks for tuning in, dear readers. I love our online interactions, and I’m grateful for the physical space the Wild Goose Festival affords for similar conversations, as well as opportunities for spiritual formation and action. This movement is happening. Our moment is now. Let’s flock together and be the change we wish to see!

Hinduism saved my Christian faith. Like others who have engaged in interreligious study, — most famously of late Paul Knitter, it was the introduction to a completely different strain of spiritual thought that opened up my own Christian faith to new, more complex depths of God. As part of my studies in comparative religions, I sought out an interreligious dialogue partner, and when I came to him, I was on the brink of leaving the Christian faith together.

When I left, his wisdom had so enlivened my soul that for the first time in years, I encountered Christ during Holy Week.

But things didn’t start off quite so easily at first, as I brought with me, a great deal of religious baggage I thought I’d left behind. Growing up, my family read the Bible religiously. We didn’t so much reflect on its teachings, its stories or meditate on its truths to tease out its meanings. We read the Bible. I vividly remember, with no small amount of residual angst, the year our family pledged to read the Bible cover-to-cover and how my brother and I would frantically read five dense chapters in Deuteronomy five minutes before dinner on pain of losing our allowance. The only thing I remember from our readings that year was the uncomfortable silence of not being able to answer a question after speed-reading the scriptures. Nevertheless, we still read the Bible.

When I prepared for my meeting with my dialogue partner, I thought I had left all that behind me, the progressive, enlightened Christian that I was. Yet, as if by unconscious habit, the first thing I did after scheduling my first meeting with Swami Vedananda at the Vedanta Society in San Francisco was to purchase the Hindu scriptures – the night before nonetheless – and try to read as much of them as possible. How very Protestant of me.

When I met Swami Vedananda for the first time at the, I told him I had brought the Hindu scriptures and asked him to suggest some readings in it to start off our time together. He smiled wryly, his kindly face bathed in an earthy orange glow from his monk’s robes and wool cap. “Which Hindu scriptures?” he asked.

The look on my face must have betrayed my confusion as I fumbled through my book bag for the texts and handed them to them with a feeble, “Um, these Hindu scriptures.”

Vedananda chuckled good-naturedly as he thumbed through the book, its spine uncreased and the price sticker still on its cover. Not every religion, he said, viewed their holy scriptures the way some Christians do – as the first, foundational and sometimes only needed ingredient for a proper understanding God and the faith. Hinduism, he explained, was not only ancient, but rooted in a culture that sometimes doesn’t translate readily or easily to other modern cultures, and I probably wouldn’t get much out of reading the Upanishads or the Bhagavad-Gita. It would be much better, he said, to begin to learn about Hinduism from experience or at least the experiences of a Hindu teacher, rather than an ancient book that can’t talk back. During most of our first talk, Vedananda held the book of holy writings in hand, close to his chest, seemingly holding its truths outside my reach. At first, I felt irked. He seemed to imply I wasn’t able to grasp what the scriptures taught without some handholding. But, I was seminary student at the time of our meeting after all, and I had made a few As.

“Hinduism is not an acceptance of a certain set of beliefs. It is a path,” he explained warmly.

Then the dim bulb brightened, and I began to understand him. My mind scurried form one topic to the next, trying to keep up with Vedananda as he spoke extemporaneously and eloquently about the Divine, seamlessly weaving the words of the Upanishads with Christ, Buddha and Swami Vivekananda, who founded the San Francisco-based society. Though it took him years to get around to reading Christ’s teachings, Vedananda seemed to hold a better opinion, in general, of Christianity than I did, perhaps a reflection on his training as a monk and mine as a journalist. He focused on the good in Christianity, holding up mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. I focused on the bad, mentioning people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the Church of Christ, the sect of my birth and childhood. I asked him how a Hindu could see good in these things that seem to repress the spirit rather than give itwings. His answer surprised and pierced me. He said one should look for and treasure the eternal truths each teaches and disregard the temporal fallacies. While I hate to admit it, I have too easily demonized these elements of the Christian faith and refused even to consider whether they do perform some good in pointing to or revealing the Divine.

The ability to see the good, the actual Divine in everything is the most striking, the most attractive and most challenging aspect of Hinduism, particularly for someone brought up in an uber- Calvinistic tradition. The doctrine of Original Sin, though I have had no particular affinity for it recently, still echoed inside my head when Vedananda said the Hindu believes that a human’s true nature is good, that humanity and the world is Divine and that one should strive to see not only that the Divine is in everything, but that everything is the Divine. The two positions seemed at odds. The emphasis on Original Sin in the Christianity seems to impress on the human soul a pessimism, where humankind and the world are broken, fallen from grace and in need of redemption that won’t be truly complete in this life.

This is what brought me to contemplating the central nondualistic philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, the notion that God and humanity are not two, but neither are they one, while, at the same time, holding in tension the unity of reality that, in fact, “this atman (self) is brahman (the Divine).” In other words, God and humanity are best described as more more than one, but less than two.

The striking juxtaposition between the idea that when one does evil, she or he does violence against the soul’s true nature and the idea that one can’t help but do evil because that is our true, inescapable fallen nature gave me pause. I began to wonder which Christ taught. When Christ said that the kingdom of God is within and that what we have done to the least of these, so we have done to him, was he speaking of humans as Divine, the divine in us or of a torn, half-faded carbon copy of God’s image.

Colored by Hindu thought, I began to gravitate more toward the human as divine, seeing Original Sin as implying our true nature as Good and Divine. Original sin and “original virtue,” as Vedananda phrased it during our second meeting, have become opposite ends of the same continuum, trying to answer the same question of good and evil in the world, so seemingly polar that they reach around the mountain and almost touch.

In short, though I did not know it at the time, I was moving closer to the Orthodox notion of theosis.

Viewing Christ’s teachings through the beliefs of a Hindu presented the familiarity of my own faith in surprising newness, giving our interpersonal relationships a sense of holy urgency and joy with the idea of meeting the Divine, not a mediated metaphor of God, when we meet someone. So often an eschatological meaning is placed on Jesus words in the Sermon on the Mount that, “The pure in heart shall see God.” In effect, the pure in heart shall see God … eventually, when the world ends, when we die or when Christ returns. Maybe what he meant was that the pure in heart will see God here, on earth, now, everywhere, as everything and in everything.

Shining the blue of his Hinduism onto the red of my Christianity time and again revealed not only depths to my own faith tradition I had never considered, but also echoed and gave definition to unstructured thoughts about the transcendent Divine that have been slowly forming for several months. God isn’t either/or, but often both/and in some mystical way. Or in the words of scholar of religion Raimon Panikker, “no religion, ideology, culture or tradition can reasonable claim to exhaust the universal range of human experience or even the total manifestation of the Sacred.”

But it did more than that. It forced me to face my past a strident religious literalist and conservative, and it made me look for the Divine even in those experiences for which I so often feel guilty. In other words, to use a Christian metaphor, it redeemed my past and made my faith whole again.

Other posts in the Nondual Week series:

Radical Incarnation: Thoughts on Nondual Spirituality by Matthew Wright
Nondual Week: Ken Wilber on ‘One Taste’
Nondual Week: Panentheism & Interspirituality – What’s Jesus Got to do With It?
Nondual Week: Panentheism – Perichoresis – Christology: Participatory Divinity

“God is love and love is real.” – mewithoutYou

and so

…

could it be?

God is patient

God is kind

God does not envy

God does not boast

God is not proud

God is not rude

God is not self-seeking

God is not easily angered

God keeps no record of wrongs.

God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

God never fails.

- I Corinthians 13 remixed

See also:

Kevin Beck on ‘Agapetheism’

Instead, I wanted to point you to a few of the more relevant videos among the hundreds crafted in response – including one that may not have been filmed in direct response to the video, but should have.

First up is this one:

This is, I believe, a voice-over from John Lynch, part of Truefaced and co-author of the novel Bo’s Cafe. The Truefaced crew recently co-authored The Cure, which I’m reading now at the recommendation of my friend and mentor Wes Roberts. Good stuff so far.

Now – if you’re not offended by the intelligent use of profanity (& here’s Tallskinnykiwi Andrew Jones on why you shouldn’t be - AJ also shares this profane paper written for Barry Taylor @ Fuller), check out Integral trickster Stuart Davis‘s demolishing of the religion/spirituality distinction here:

Stuart, in my opinion, is as funny as he is perceptive. If you’ve never read his now-seminal blog post, Dear God: Five Things Religion-Haters Should Know, get thee to it. It looks like Stu’s Christmas wish for a response from Harris, Dawkins, Maher or Hitchens (RIP) went un-fulfilled. If you like his stuff, it’s worth trying to save his Sex, God and Rock & Roll variety show on HD Net.

Finally, here is a response to the video from a young Muslim:

Like Bethke himself, he pulls no punches and minces no words – which can be as endearing as it is shutting down of vulnerable conversation. (I can see it now – the theological wars of tomorrow will be fought not with swords but with battle rapping! I guess that’s a step in the right direction…) I know that the interfaith friendships I enjoy with my Muslim friends at the Divan Center over delicious food are way more respectful…and productive. Indeed, in two weeks we’ll be sharing our differing perspectives on the Godhead. The young man in this video would probably not like my Trinity-sourced poem You Are the Dance, or the song Tim Coons recorded in response to it. Alas.

That’s it as far as on-topic YouTube explorations. But while I have you here – the Truefaced folks also made this controversial trailer:

It’s controversial because it blasts polarized celebrity doctrinal disputes which serve to sell lots of books…while advertising for a book. I like the book, and I like the trailer, but I agree that perhaps each should have stood alone. Still…how many Christian celebrities can you spot depicted here?

Finally, I leave you with Stu interviewing Kermit the Frog on the latter’s sexuality and spiritual practice, fresh on his tour promoting The Muppets. Enjoy!

Nathaniel, you’re calling me a Calvinist! I don’t know whether to feel honored or slapped in the face. Taking it from your vantage point, I’ll consider it an honor. I get what you’re saying about the ‘slipperiness’ of the term ‘panentheist;’ though I didn’t qualify it with hypens, I think the strong subtext of my post was that I’m not for a squishy, one-size-fits-all pluralism. Specifically, I said “I believe that the Divine which permeates all reality is the God revealed in Jesus Christ.” With that said, true disclaimer: in the intervening years since writing the piece, I am more inclined to nod in Dena‘s direction, that when Einstein or Hawking are sensing the permeating divine, they’re sensing and touching something real – more Way Three than Way Two (in my previous post).

Bert, I hear you! Theodicy (‘the problem of evil’) is with us almost no matter what we believe, and panentheism does not come out unscathed – indeed, it’s even more vulnerable, I think, because (unlike Deism or a highly ‘Sovereign’ removed God concept), panentheism seems to implicate God rather intimately in life’s hurts as well as joys. It’s one thing to say God is in the sunset, dancing in the rays of light; its quite another to say that God is holding the molecules together in the rapist’s knife blade. I want to avoid what I see as the weakest link of Hindu & Buddhist cosmology, that is, “Evil is just illusory,” but I am open to CS Lewis’s idea (developed in The Great Divorce) that evil is perspectival; that all truly will be made well once we have a new way of seeing. The jury’s out for me in how evil fits into panentheism – and yet, I can’t get away from the ‘All in all’ language in Scripture. I think that process theology will have a lot to teach us on this in the coming years. For now, I go back to some of Ken Wilber’s insightsthat kicked off Nondual Week here on the blog:

…that is exactly the core of the answer given by the mystics the world over. If you are the One, and—out of sheer exuberance, plenitude, superabundance—you want to play, to rejoice, to have fun, then you must first, manifest the Many, and then second, forget it is you who are the Many. Otherwise, no game. Manifestation, incarnation, is the great Game of the One playing at being the Many, for the sheer sport and fun of it.

Hi Bram – I know I probably focused on immanence here, but a robust, biblically-informed panentheism certainly includes God’s transcendence. God is ‘the Beyond in our midst,’ a Mystery even in self-disclosure. Jesus of Nazareth obscures as much as he reveals, I think. Dena, I love your thoughts here. I think you hit on something key when you said “Christ is the focus for me … and *yet*, I notice that the goal of Christ is to bring us to the Father — to show us the Father.” I’d personally stop short, though, at saying “Ultimately, it’s all about the Father.” I think I’d say “Ultimately, it’s all about perichoresis, a five-dollar word for the relationship within the Godhead, expanding to embrace humanity & the cosmos. That is to say, when Jesus speaks, he’s always speaking of the Father. But when the Father speaks, he’s always speaking of the Son. And the Father sends the Spirit to reveal the Son, so that we might connect to the Father; the Spirit is our Comforter and our Truest Self, inviting us into the divine fellowship. At least, that’s my read. And it needn’t be so technical – to me, it’s all about the Triune relatedness of God as depicted in The Shack or in the work of Baxter Krueger:

Jesus and the Undoing of Adam P1 – Dr C Baxter Kruger from Perichoresis Australia on Vimeo.

(See this recent poem, You Are the Dance, and the song it inspired.)

Ross, absolutely! Starting in the 1960s, when the West began discovering Eastern cultures & meditation practices – that’s when Christians (and possibly Jews too, though I can’t be certain) began rediscovering their own contemplative traditions – don’t let anybody call ‘em ‘New Age,’ either; they’ve been around in one form or another for at least 1700 years – and arguably, embedded in the culture of those engaged in penning Holy Writ itself. I think that one of the greatest losses of our time is that of ‘contemplative mind,’ the ability to both focus and enjoy the spaciousness of God’s unfolding present moment. There are many more comments here, linking panentheism to Jesus-inspired anarchism as well as Trinitarian spirituality. You’ll have to read these for yourself. Truly an awesome conversation!

David, are you saying that Jesus’ divinity is too much or too little involved in the panentheism discussion? I think that Jesus’ divinity is one of those pesky spiritual themes that panentheism handles exceptionally well, better than contemporary so-called orthodoxy or anemic liberalism. Lemme explain.

Contemporary self-confessed (Western, propositional, truncated, radio) orthodoxy sees God – and by extension God’s self-disclosure in Jesus – as someone (?) to be admired, and trusted in for God’s benefits, sure – but pretty much kept at a remote pedestal. Jesus is the ‘only’ Son of God, who did certain things on our behalf (namely, changing the Father’s mind about us, supposedly) and we worship him in response. This produces a lot of gratitude but very little life-change in my experience. And eventually, the gratitude (read: ‘worship’) turns to boredom.

‘Progressives,’ on the other hand, in attempting to correct the problems with the above view, fall into the opposite ditch – they pit ‘the Jesus of history’ against ‘the Christ of faith,’ placing the Synoptics against John’s Gospel, and emphasize (their interpretation of) ‘The son of man’ against ‘The Son of God’ and certainly against ‘God in the flesh.’ Now don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for most of the scholarship that’s come out of historical Jesus studies – in particular, related to the socio-political culture of Jesus’ day (both Roman and Jewish), which sheds amazing light on both Jesus’ message and the unique set of circumstances that led to his death. I love me some ‘The Human Being by Walter Wink (for instance). But at the end of the day, a confused, solely-human Jesus who’s vaguely ‘connected’ to ‘Spirit’ only to die ignominiously and benefit from a dubious ‘spiritual’ resurrection isn’t too exciting to me. While it might be easier to follow such a Jesus, one isn’t quite sure why or where to follow him!

A third way, it seems, has been with us from the beginning. If Rita Brock and Rebbecca Parker are to be believed (and I think their work speaks for itself), the earliest Christians had “a high Christology and a high anthropology,” summed up in Athanasius’ maxim “God became man so that man might become God.” (He meant you too, ladies!) Panentheism says that Jesus is the uniquely begotten son of God, not the only, echoing Scripture’s affirmation that Jesus is the firstborn among many sisters and brothers of God.  Jesus is glorious, divine, and there are certain unique and unrepeatable things Jesus does on our behalf, but overall, the earliest Christian spiritual thrust was one of participatory divinity. We, too, are to realize full divinity amidst (and because of) our full humanity – just like Jesus. The divinity of Jesus Christ is real – but he’s not hoarding. We all get to share in the love, being fashioned from stardust and becoming partakers of the divine nature just as sure as we’re breathing.

This might sound like ‘New Age’ quackery to the modern ear – but in ancient Christian faith, this was known as theosis or divinization – participation in God via the activity of God in perichoresis – that is, the intent of the Father, the work of the Son, and empowerment of the Spirit. Through theosis, we are partakers of the divine nature – we become incorporated into the very life of ever-flowing Godhead, a dance that goes on from eternity to eternity. If the terminology makes you uncomfortable, think what we might mean by ‘discipleship’ or ‘sanctification’ – only giving much more glory to God and to a full-awakened humanity. If this all sounds rather airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky to you, consider that, historically speaking, the vast majority of temporal transformation happens when people are inspired by, and anchored in, a sense of the transcendant. (For a good read on this, see Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions.) The recovery of a this-worldy, suffering-servant son of man who nonviolently confronts the Powers is a desperately needed image and motivator – this is the gift of liberation theology. But a revelation of the Son of God, vindicated by the Father in peaceful, powerful resurrection, and inviting us on the same path of death and rebrith, this is the gift of the Eastern church and the mystics. Perhaps the call we’ve so often framed as ‘discipleship’ or ‘sanctification’ can be helpfully re-adjusted as a life. Let us embrace both of these gifts fully – they are our inheritence.

Other posts in the Nondual Week series:

Radical Incarnation: Thoughts on Nondual Spirituality by Matthew Wright
Nondual Week: Ken Wilber on ‘One Taste’
Nondual Week: Panentheism & Interspirituality – What’s Jesus Got to do With It?
Nondual Week: Panentheism – Perichoresis – Christology: Participatory Divinity
Nondual Week: David Henson on ‘How Hinduism Saved My Christian Faith’