One thing we learn from scripture and see played out time after time in history is that if you really take the spiritual life seriously you set yourself against the world and the world will dislike you for it. It may even hate you for it, the obvious example being Jesus himself. It may also brand you mad or inhuman because your conception of what a human being is bears little resemblance to the worldly one, and that includes most conventional religious conceptions which really just add on a bit to the worldly version instead of replacing it entirely.
When you read the story of Jesus's life you see his only concern was doing the will of his Father. This means everything was submitted to the overriding reality of the spiritual world. Everything he said and did was to further the aims of that world as played out in this one. We have to understand that the priorities of the spiritual and material worlds are completely different. In fact, they are often diametrically opposed and this is something that worldly people do not understand. For them religion, if it exists, must just build on what is normal in secular life. It might challenge it a little but it would not do so radically, and yet this is exactly what religion should do. It should completely reframe what it is to be human and this includes concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood and so on, which are now seen in terms of the soul not the earthly human being with its likes, dislikes, hopes, fears and ambitions.
This is why the words of a genuine prophet upset the people. They consider themselves to be leading reasonable lives. They know they're not saints but they don't think they are sinners. They have their earthly values and priorities and live in the world as it is. But the prophet, and all religious people should have something of the prophet within them, really does march to the beat of a different drum and he doesn't care about excuses such as we have to deal with this world first before we can have the luxury of thinking seriously about the next. To him that just means you will never think seriously about the next world, and the next world is the only real meaning of this one. As a consequence, his thoughts and words and behaviour can seem not just extreme to worldly people but positively dangerous which is why he has in the past even suffered death at the hands of the world.
That won't happen to such people now but anyone who takes the spiritual life seriously to the point that they reject the values of this world will be looked at askance. They are rejecting worldly order and that is disturbing. In a certain sense they are telling people that they are ignorant and bad and no one likes to be told that. But religious people who make an accommodation with the world and its priorities and put worldly ideas of good on a par with spiritual ones are really just imposters like the Pharisees of old. The spiritual and the worldly can never form an alliance and that is going to be increasingly obvious in the coming months and years.
It's amazing how much of a radical Jesus was.
ReplyDeleteAlso the original depiction of the 'one true God' among the 7 or 8 gods listed in the Bible, that unusual God with a name, that has a specific character and dispositions in the Old Testament is something very un-modern.
Most people are describing their own fantasy world with their supposed spirituality, not anything based on scripture.
The question that arises is what is the genuine spiritual? Some believe Trump is sent from God, others that he is an affront to the divine. Some believe that being a Christian means importing "refugees", others keeping such out.
Today we have to outgrow spiritual clichés and find the truth within our real self (not outer mind) and this will, in many cases, be radically different to the popular stereotypes. For instance, these days everything including truth is subordinated to a vague and often sentimental idea of compassion but that is by no means sufficient for real spiritual insight.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting question, seldom considered, is why the Old Testament was included in The Bible, where it dominates in terms of volume. This is a sub-set of the whole question of scripture - and the decision of whether to make a Holy Book, who made the decision, who decided what went into it (plus the scribal aspects of changes made to early writings). These decisions were made by men (not by Jesus, and not apparently by any of his disciples), although the sequence and process was essentially unrecorded.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I feel it is essential to 'test' all of scripture with our deepest possible intuition (including by the guidance of the Holy Ghost). Only that which passes this rigorous and detailed test should we regard as genuinly canonical.
Yes, I agree. It's a balancing act in a way. Scripture does have a certain authority but the ultimate authority is that of God or the Holy Ghost within ourselves.
ReplyDeleteBelloc greatly regretted that the Church has decided to "swallow all that Hebrew folklore" by including the Old Testament in the Bible, an opinion that caused him to be denounced as "anti-Semitic." There were schisms among the early Christians over this inclusion also. Who made the ultimate decision? Who, in fact, assembled the canon of the Old Testament to begin with? No one seems to know, at least among the ordinary lay community of Christians. Nor does anyone seem to much care. Few Christians read the Old Testament, for good reason. It's often very uninspiring, tedious and irrelevant to any spiritual practice. There are, of course, good things in those old books, but selectivity and discernment must be brought to bear. The difficulty of assessing Scripture is that Christianity makes historical claims based on written records, which elevates those records to a position of authority that cannot be denied without calling into question the basis of doctrine.To decide, based upon one's intuition and reasoned judgment, what in Scripture is true and reliable transfers the authority from the documents to the individual. This happens in any case, which is why we have had tens of thousands of Christian sects, all claiming a biblical warrant for their teaching. There are self-evident first principles which most everyone accepts: the so-called universal truths - love, goodness, justice, etc. Just what Scripture adds to these appears to be something that each one must decide in his own case, especially at this time in history. The Catholic Church has always denounced what it calls "the principle of private judgment" that Protestants tend to champion. But is it not a private judgment that the Catholic Church represents Christ in a uniquely authoritative way? We cannot get away from individual conscience and the necessity to rely upon our own judgment.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with the Holy Ghost within approach is everyone will just justify whatever it is that they want.
ReplyDeleteScripture is clear on some things. For example the Bible both metaphorically says don't listen to women about spiritual matters; and it says literally to avoid women being ministers.
Yet almost no one, especially in the declining West, adheres to that bit of scripture.
The Bible also is clear about type of government and a few other hot topics of our time.
Without the Old Testament the question cannot be asked whether such a God is real.
It is assumed that the Old Testament is how implicitly less evolved people viewed God and that God somehow changed into reflecting modern values.
The specific claim of the Old Testament is that modern views of god would be incorrect and instead that there is one True God.
Faculty X, I know exactly what you mean when you say that "The trouble with the Holy Ghost within approach is everyone will just justify whatever it is that they want. "
ReplyDeleteBut actually that's not the real trouble. The trouble is the misinterpretation of the Holy Ghost within approach and the belief that personal prejudices/wishful thinking is the Holy Ghost within. That's the problem. The approach that truth is within is valid but to know that truth we have to a.) thoroughly purify the lower self, and b.) get out of the way. All the difficulties arise when people don't do that or don't do it sufficiently.
As for the idea that the OT reflects a less evolved attitude there is surely some truth in that but it doesn't mean that modern views of God are more evolved because most of them are not based on spiritual insight but on secular humanism. So they have no spiritual valifdity at all.
The crux is: What does have spiritual validity? On what basis? How do we know?
ReplyDeleteSecular humanism is easy to discard because it's secular; no Higher insight can come from such base materialist assumptions.
It gets more complicated when many Christians have beliefs that they think the Holy Ghost tells them to be true. Yet those beliefs seem to others to be barmy.
I wonder what the Holy Ghost would clarify - in general with consistency for all spiritual people - if people purified their lower selves and got out of the way...
"I wonder what the Holy Ghost would clarify - in general with consistency for all spiritual people - if people purified their lower selves and got out of the way..." When we do it we'll find out.
ReplyDelete