Believe Again: A Journey Back to Faith

This is what I believe: I believe the Christian Bible to be sacred and of divine origin. That is my belief. Now let me unpack those terms. Sacred Sacred: Holy, hallowed, blessed, and consecrated. Sacred is an adjective that indicates the potential to do something very much like potential energy. (Potential energy is stored energy or gravitational energy.) In this case sacredness is the potential to bring you to a higher place. A higher place in the spiritual sense is a place closer to your Divine Essence where you are better able to experience total unconditional positive regard (love). A higher place is also a state of consciousness where you are better able to nurture self, others, and your environment. In behavioral terms a higher place is an increased display of caring and compassion acts. Anything that moves you closer to these higher places can be considered sacred. The words and ideas that peek out from the pages of the Christian Bible are sacred. However, plays, movies, books, music, and a variety of experiences can also bring people to higher places. No, I am not putting the Christian Bible on the same level as a Harry Potter book (although I did like them). What I am instead doing is inviting you to think more broadly about the holy experience and the sacred encounter. Think of the times when you were deeply moved. Think of the times when you left a movie or concert knowing that you had experienced something profound, something larger than yourself. Think of that which resulted in an indescribable feeling of awe. Think of the moments when you encountered acts that touched you, when you wept for wonder, when you were left speechless. Think on these things. These are sacred moments tucked away in our minds like pretty Christmas decorations. We need to take them out every now and then and touch them to remind us of what really is. They can help us see the abundance of God around us and enable us to be moved to higher places. The Subjectivity of the Sacred Experience It is possible for two or more to have the same experience and yet be moved in different ways and to different degrees. I recently attended the Sunday service at Faith Lutheran Church in Grantsburg, Wisconsin. The words spoken by the pastor along with the music and liturgy moved me such that I wept. Imagine that. (If you can make a male Scandinavian weep in a Lutheran church in a small town on a Sunday morning you have certainly done something.) But looking around I saw that the church was not filled with weeping people. (I was the only one.) Not all were moved to higher places. Why? In experiencing the sacred, what one brings to the encounter is just as important as the encounter itself. We project our Divine Essence onto the object or event. Like a tuning fork the object or event touches something of similar frequency within us causing us to vibrate like a guitar string. What is sacred to one can be mundane to another. In the same way the Christian Bible can also be used (and has often been used) to bring people to very low places. Clean water poured into dirty cups creates a cup full of dirty water. The KKK, angry people with political agendas, and others have used Christian scriptures to bring people to places of anger, violence, hate, and ignorance. Extremists of all religions have used their holy books to justify the darkness within them (what Carl Jung calls shadow) and their cruel acts. # # # Michael Servetus: A Human Pronto Pup Michael Servetus lived from 1509 to 1553 C.E. He was a very religious fellow who, upon further review, came to the conclusion that the doctrine of the holy trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) was not quite accurate. Instead, he proposed the concept of God manifest as unity. Thus he because the first Unitarian. The good Calvinist Christians of the time would have none of this. They promptly carted him off, tied him to a stake, and burned him. Imagine that. # # # Divine Origin Divine origin means it is of God. We have God within us in the form of Divine Essence. Humans in touch with their Divine Essence created the documents in the bible that speak to Universal truths. As well, there are other holy books that are also of divine origin. But is the Christian Bible (the very document upon which Christianity is based), the inerrant word of God? Inerrant mean not liable to error; it is true in the absolute sense. So, is the Christian bible absolutely true in every case and in every sense? A case can be made for biblical inerrancy if we first expand our definition of truth to include Platonic idealism. Platonic idealism describes two levels of reality: the physical and the metaphysical (or spiritual) levels. Physical reality, as we know it, is a mere shadow of ultimate reality. Metaphysical reality is where ultimate truth exists. The Christian Bible speaks to truths found here. Plato used the allegory of a cave to explain these two dimensions of reality. According to him, humans stomping about in the physical world are living inside a cave. Those things that appear to us to be real in the physical realm are only shadows on the walls of this cave. These shadows are caused by the sun shining on the true things outside the cave in the spiritual or metaphysical realm. Everything inside the cave is temporary. Everything outside is forever. # # # The Cave “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. Four our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18). Quantum Physics Underlying the reality that we perceive is a deeper order of existence - a more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearance of our physical world. This deeper level is call the implicate (which means “enfolded”) order. Our own level of existence is explicate or order unfolded. # # # You may look at the chair you are sitting on and say, “Wait a minute, how can this be? This chair isn’t temporary. It’s right here and I’m sitting on it.” But consider this: even as you sit, that chair is in a state of decay. Eventually the chair as you know it will be like the wave that has crashed upon the shore. Its form will be dissipated and its parts scattered. Like the wave the chair is real, but a very temporary manifestation. The very transitory nature of what we call the physical realm is described aptly by Stephen Hawkings (1988) in, A Brief History of Time. Think of a puddle of milk spilled on a table top spreading outward as the beginning of what we know as the beginning of time in phenomenal reality. But instead of two dimensions, think of it expanding in three dimensions like a balloon. As this puddle expands outward it becomes thinner. Thus, the universe and all that are in it are essentially fading away like the Cheshire cat. Hawkings posits that reality as we know it is moving from perfect order (the pre-spilled-milk-condition) to chaos (spilled-milk and beyond). According to Plato, the only truly permanent manifestations reside outside the cave. Outside is the Kingdom of Heaven, elysium, nirvana, regno caelorum, paradisum, Zion. This is where the sun shines. But in terms of physical or metaphysical, one is no more real than the other; however, the metaphysical or spiritual is permanent. Asking the Right Question Is the Christian bible the dictated word of God? This is the wrong question to ask. The right question is this: Does the Christian Bible as you currently read and understand it bring you to a higher place?