The Third Way

Perhaps there is a way to understand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that is somewhat different than it has been understood in the past. A way that takes mystical experiences more seriously, clarifies our relationship with the Divine, alters our understanding of the Christ event, and re-envisions the reality and purpose of life. Theology is not simply an intellectual exercise, but an experiential one.

Church, when done well, achieves three main outcomes.

1)    It draws people closer to the God who is love, and in doing so, articulates people’s own identify vis-à-vis the Divine and all else in existence.

2)    Secondly, it creates community within the church, expressing love for each other.

3)    Finally, it offers healing, restorative justice, and love out into the world.

When done well, a Christian church is a beacon of hope and love for all in its orbit. The challenge for American Christian churches today, broadly speaking, is they tend to fall into two camps. Each of these camps fail in one or more of the above three areas. I posit that this is a main reason for the decline and increasing irrelevance of the Christian church in the States today.

The first camp are the “conservative” churches. This is a broad generalization, but they tend to fail in the first outcome because of their focus on an angry God, judgement, sin, and the depravity of humanity. They lift up the importance of drawing close to God, and they insist it is a God of love, but the God they articulate does not seem very loving. Millions of people have left conversative churches, often scarred for life, for fear of the judgement of an angry, transactional God who will happily send them to hell unless they do what they are told. I have met, served, and counseled those who have left such churches, and what some of these churches have done to innocent people is spiritual violence. People are often told to do and be things which are soul crushing: that women are secondary citizens, that homosexuality and transgender people will go to hell, that divorce removes you from God’s grace, that unless you are baptized or belong to their church you will go to hell, and so on. This then distorts their third outcome. They may, in fact, do brave and meaningful work to help those in need, but they also promote their hurtful theology out in crippling ways to the world. Conservative churches, however, often do take seriously transcendent mystical encounters, but usually only in approved formats, with approved outcomes. Salvation means going to heaven when you die. They understand salvation as having little meaning for this life.

The second camp are the “liberal” churches. Again, broadly speaking, they tend to also fail in the first outcome, which then also distorts their third outcome. They articulate a God of love, who loves everyone regardless of who they are, however, this God is stripped of all Her power, and operates more like a distant loving uncle who benevolently shines down on earth. Healing the earth, righting wrongs, fighting evil, falls on the shoulders of humanity alone. God is a loving cheerleader for our efforts. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but for liberal churches it is humanity’s job to make it so. This creates an emphasis on ego. Liberal churches at their worst end up being more like social service agencies, with a little bit of prayer thrown in. This emphasis on ego and the lack of a real transcendent experience of the divine, burns people out. God ends up being perceived as weak and meaningless, and the job to fix the world by themselves is too large. Soul work is discounted in favor of forcing the material world to bend to their (generally) benevolent desires. Certainly, great things are accomplished to alleviate suffering, but the third outcome becomes the focus of liberal churches. People stop attending liberal churches not because of the negative vision of God, but because of burn out, because there are other social service agencies which are more effective than a church, and because their souls are not fed. Liberal churches are often too educated or worldly to take seriously the transcendent and mystical. Salvation means healing the world by yourself while God cheers on your efforts; it means that Jesus saddled humanity with bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth by ourselves.

There is a third way. God has been reaching out to humanity in love over and over again, in countless ways, touching our souls, inviting us deeper. The Divine is daring us to leap beyond the materialism boundaries we have created for ourselves and to embrace an expanded understanding of the Gospel. God has been sending people near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, spiritually transformative experiences, dreams, visions, and communication with the dead for millennium. It is time we listen. There are countless academic studies and peer-reviewed papers on these phenomena. Studies in recent years in quantum physics further supports these experiences as being real, actual events that point to an understanding of a reality dramatically different from how humanity has traditionally understood it. Philosopher and Scientist Dr. Bernardo Kastrup notes, “materialism is baloney.” Nothing is actually solid. All is energy. In the words of priest, scientist, and mystic The Rev. Dr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.” The implications are astounding.