What is Christianity within the community of religions and spiritual beliefs?
Religion is, of course, a construct of civilization. As the mind and knowledge of humans developed over time, spirituality was segregated and institutionalized under the control of the power structures that the mind has built. Christianity is no different. It is as much a mind institution as it is a spiritual one.
The wealth of the Church is not in its golden cathedrals or expensive real estate in downtown cities. It is in its ideas, what it has figured out from the scant experience of Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago.
Its vast riches for the mind to chomp on are as infinite as the meaning you can apply to wisdom. It is probably the king of the aristocrats of world religions, with the most adherents, the greatest successes, the most offspring variants, including secularism and imperial business, etc. It is a cultural institution that can absorb its opponents from Aristotle and Plato, to modern science-based critical skills, and still stay fundamentally intact.
From these rich robes and sumptuous banquets, it understands that its wealth comes from its worldview, that reality is God, humans and objectified matter. It has pioneered its existence out of the panoply and debauchery of countless other civilizations to alter the mind of civilization categorically, because of its unique internal dialectic.
If Christians today look around, they don’t see that much has changed in the scheme of things. The two-dimensional world of non-spiritual people still run rampant, needing instruction into the deeper meaning of life. Other spiritualities have merit, but are still missing the mark that Jesus set for the truest fulfillment.
Its spirituality is confined to its interpretation of the Bible, viewing all spiritual experience through its lens. It has pretty much covered all bases, and today is quite adept at meeting any challengers to its cosmology.
It is an aristocrat of civilized spiritual institutions. It has the strength of its wealth, its culture, its reasoning, and its heritage. It is like the British aristocracy of the late 19th century, sending its children to tough boarding schools to prepare them for governing the world from their inherited position.
And like all aristocrats, it sits down at its table to eat, not knowing or seeing where the food was grown, the labor that it took to prepare and serve it. It is Provided. A blessing to their Divine Right in relation to God.
Its children may rebel like 19th century revolutionaries. But this rebellion is always founded in the assumptions of its social class. Communism, of course, was just a version of the bourgeois ascendancy taking place in the Industrial Revolution.
And like all aristocracies, it faces constant threat from those who wish to assume its position of dominance. So it must constantly exercise its intellectual power to keep its position.
Christianity does not like being objectified. No one like to be. We like to do the objectifying of others. That is why no one accepts theories of the mind solely based on chemical firings of synapses.
The spiritual truths in Christianity are obvious. God is the one God. He exists. Ditto Jesus. What the Church struggles with is its ‘humanity.’ What it really is struggling with is its mind. But does it clearly understand these parameters, or just be involved within it. Does it see itself as an institution of civilization, and what civilization actually involves? How it creates the questions, the conditions, and thus compromises the perceptions? How much does its faith, its yearning from unanswered questions, get in the way of seeing what it is from the outside? Can it emerge from its ‘mere Christianity,’ in all its spiritual sumptuousness, its intellectual challenges that in the end become self-referencing, but was fun figuring it out again?
I’m not sure it can. The world doesn’t seem to have changed that much. The secular mind has moved on, not needing spirituality in its quest for material health and success. The Church struggles to get its political agenda as the focus of society again. But in a culture that the mind is supreme, the Church struggles with its own mind, despite its Good News. Its intellectual wealth is a burden, a crutch, something that it doesn’t realize is compromising it. Theologians may be able to perceive much of this. The Reformation was in protest of this. But no one seems to be able to break out of civilization’s grip. We see the two, mind and spirit, knowledge and wisdom, as equals in power and might in our pursuits. Even when we know that spirit is the center, and the mind supports it, we do not truly appreciate just how tangled we are in the dominance of the mind in our quest for Salvation in Christ.
We can only get to Christ through Christ. That is our objective. Is there any other way? We have satisfying proof that what we have deduced is true. But do we understand that Christ was sent to get mind-man through civilization in one piece? Christ and civilization go hand-in-hand. Can Christians actually see this, and if this is so, what are its implications? If we can see ourselves from outside of ourselves, what freedoms in perception then become available to us? The satisfaction of the Christ experience may be holding back our ability to move forward in understanding what Jesus was really all about. This, in turn, would affect our spirituality in new ways.
Everyone can understand the statement that ‘God is All.’ But we do not dare to challenge the notion that we cannot perceive more of ‘All’ outside of the God-human-inert matter paradigm. We have too many complex rationales in the way.
As I have pointed out before, civilization is divided spiritually in two. The West, including Islam, believes in the specific Consciousness of God. The East believes that God does not have a specific consciousness, but is manifested in all of Creation. Nothing is whole.
In between there are the Buddhists, who believe that merging into undifferentiated Consciousness is our goal, and the aboriginal, which is not from civilization, but possesses the wholeness of spirituality about God and Creation that civilization lacks.
Can Christianity break out of the intellectual vice that it is in? Can it see beyond the human-centered spirituality to see what is in the darkness that the spirit of Christ is standing in?
This is a very large question that separates us from the intellectual security of our theology, and the ‘will’ of faith in it. We love the nimbleness of modern intellectual perception to fortify what we believe. But what are the implicatons of ignoring what we are now capable of? God is All. What is All?
A critical mass is building between religions, as each recognizes the similarities in each other. Hindu India still faces-off with Muslim Pakistan. Secular West now dangerously faces religious Islam. The peace of spirituality simmers in mutual recognition below the power politics. Which religion will be the first to make the leap out of its comfortable pew? Will the Hindus be the first to recognize a specific God Consciousness? Or will Christianity wake up to the reality of the spirit world? The Internet is an Act of God. If you look at the coincidences that brought it about, its rapid growth in one decade because of a miscalculation by phone companies ten years earlier, you will see the Hand of God at work in history today. The shocking peaceful conclusion to the nuclear threat of the Cold War, totally unheard of in typical behaviors of great powers, shows the Hand of God again. The nimbleness of the modern mind is now capable of making the leap. Can Christianity emerge from the tarpit of its ideology, light the spark in the gases of ecumenism now filling the air, and ignite what God wants to happen? Or will it leave it to others to do the work? There is tremendous intellectual might in the Church. But it is focused on its navel, not realizing where it is.
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