CHRISTIANITY BEYOND DUALISTIC THEISM:
PREACHING FROM A NEW PARADIGM

by David R. Inglis

Theologically, Christianity is at a crisis point. The language that we have used to talk about God and Jesus Christ were formed by a paradigm that has become obsolete. For example, how can we sing "Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne," in an era where subservient obeisance to a monarch is seen as regressive and repressive, and where the imagery of a sacrificial lamb whose blood atones for our sins is as foreign to the way our world operates as an abacus is to a market analyst?

Attempts are being made to escape some of the patriarchal limitations of our traditional religious language by changing some of the He’s  to She’s  and mankind  to humankind.   But the patriarchal paradigm is rooted in an even deeper dualism that divides reality into the presumed opposites of not only male and female, but also sacred and profane, good and evil, heaven and hell, earthy and spiritual, purity and sexuality, spirit and flesh, saved and damned. Such dualistic thinking forces us to "choose sides," identify with the "right side," and deny the deeper truth that both sides participate in the dynamic dance of the whole.

Our God language has been formed by a potent combination of dualism and theism. A theistic God, envisioned as a personal being, becomes little more than an object of our projections of all of the "positive" poles of our dualistic thinking. We value strength and abhor weakness, so God must be Almighty. We long for happiness and shun sadness, so God must be infinitely kind, wanting only good things for His/Her beloved children. God acquires the attributes of perfect purity and holiness and light as we struggle with our shadows. God becomes omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent as we struggle with our limitations, vulnerability, and loneliness. We anthropomorphize God, and imagine God’s feelings to be hurt if we don’t pray and thank God enough, and we imagine God to be angry if we disobey and defy God’s statutes.

Modern science has operated on the premises of a-theism (e.g., that human and natural phenomena can be explained by natural law rather than divine intervention). However, it has retained and carefully honed and refined the dualism of our culture’s heritage. In science, dualism divides mind from matter, subject from object, humanity from nature, intuition from reason, and wisdom (and ethics) from information.

In academic, philosophical and artistic discourse, dualistic modernism has inexorably led to the spiritual flatland of postmodernism, which has collapsed the depth dimension of meaning, purpose, and values onto a single plane, giving all voices equal significance, and hence rendering them all equally insignificant.

The God language that has shaped and been shaped by the premodern naivete and the dualism and theism of our past seems woefully inadequate to offer the power of hope or metanoia in today’s world.

For example, it is difficult to speak of "acts of God" when complex computer models of climate and weather patterns can predict the weather all over the world. Prayers for healing feel very ineffectual when an arsenal of CAT scans, microsurgery, organ transplants, genetic manipulation, and sophisticated pharmaceuticals are available to deal with our illnesses. It doesn’t take much psychological sophistication to discern unresolved authority complexes, dependency needs, codependent tendencies, projection, repression, and denial in much (most? all??) of the typical Christian’s religious thoughts, language, attitudes, and behavior (even including our own!). The rod of divine punishment makes no sense in the face of the wanton destruction of super storms, earthquakes, and AIDS. Even seeing the hand of a sovereign Creator in the beauty of a sunset or the songs of birds feels like poetic fantasy when one can explain gravity’s distortion of light rays and territorial signals and mating calls in feathered descendants of dinosaurs.

This crisis in God language is experienced as a crisis in faith for many people in our churches. If God is an omnipotent Supreme Being who watches over us in love, intervening, guiding and protecting, and "not giving us more than we can bear," why did Sue die of breast cancer, despite all our prayers, leaving her three young children so bereft and vulnerable? And why did Kathy sink into depression and then commit suicide when her husband and son were killed in an auto accident? And why do so many innocent people die in school shootings, earthquakes, and wars? If the Bible is the God-inspired basis of our faith and Christian practice, why does it so often contradict itself, as well as contradicting known facts of science and history? If God’s truths are universal and eternal, how can Christian morals and ethics keep changing over time? And how the Bible speak prophetically to such issues as environmental destruction and economic justice when its own stories include the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the total annihilation of Canaanite cities, and slavery, all supposedly conducted or condoned by God?

Is the God of our Judeo-Christian heritage indeed dead, as the theologians of the 1960's pronounced? Is the Church that was shaped in an era of superstition, patriarchy and hierarchy a dinosaur destined for ever-more defensive and regressive expressions on its way to eventual extinction? Or is there a Truth and a Hope at the heart of our faith that lies deeper than its current enculturated manifestations, and that can speak in a saving way to human beings and to societies in the Third Millennium CE?

Personally, I believe the latter. I believe that God is greater than our simplistic, theistic, dualistic, anachronistic theological constructs. I believe that the Truth is deeper than the sum of the insights and beliefs claimed by the Church from ancient times to the present. I believe that the Divine Spirit has much to reveal to this reductionistic, materialistic, artificial, superficial age. The saving word for today’s post modern world must be spoken from a depth that is not known by today’s mass culture. But to be heard and to be prophetic, it cannot be spoken in the pre-modern language of yesterday’s ecclesiastical culture.

And here is the crisis--both the danger and the opportunity. The danger comes from breaking loose from a paradigm that is dependent on and controlled by the "authorities" of tradition and formal or informal ecclesiastical hierarchies. Unless we break loose from that past, or radically evolve out of it, Christianity is destined for the fossil beds of history. But when we do break out of the old paradigm, we are thrown into a seemingly trackless frontier of subjectivity where we are no longer dominated by "objective" or outside authorities. This, I believe, is the very danger that the early Church, with its councils and confessions, heresy trials and inquisitions, was so very frightened of. Subjective experience can scarcely be dominated and controlled. And there is of course the very genuine danger of people getting lost in their own delusions.

But in truth, this frontier is not as trackless as it at may at first seem. Others have journeyed in it before--pilgrims and mystics from many times and places. The God they encountered was ineffable. Yet they couldn’t avoid offering names for this transcendent reality--names that were neither patriarchal nor hierarchical, neither theistic nor anthropomorphic--names such as Ruach, Sophia, Logos, Holy Spirit, Ground of Being, God in Process, etc. in our Judeo-Christian tradition, and Brahman-Atman, the Tao, God without Attributes, Higher Power, etc. in other traditions. These understandings of God are at once immanent and transcendent, subjective and objective, personal and transpersonal.

Speaking of God in such terms encourages religious expression through personal, direct experience, rather than requiring mediation through and control by the authority of the Church and tradition. This is the "danger." But in the burst of creativity, diverse revelations, and fresh insights that this approach engenders, new language, new thoughts, and even a new consciousness can be born that has the potential of moving the human race forward along its path toward at-one-ment. This is the opportunity.

This theological crisis that is facing today’s Church leaves the Church in an ironic position. Its first choice is to tinker with the old paradigms and language to make them more "relevant," and/or use modern technology and artistry to present them to "today’s market." Its results can be dazzling and cute, but this does not resolve the real predicament. The alternative is for the Church to help and encourage people to move into a different paradigm, in which they are equipped and empowered to search beneath the language of theology, beneath the beliefs of faith, to discover the ineffable God Who is as close as our own breath, Who is as dependent on us for divine revelation as we are on God, Who is a Co-creator with us in bringing a new world into being. The irony is that to choose such a path requires true faith in the "objective" reality of God, Whoever or Whatever God may be, and it requires trust that in the variety of personal spiritual experience, traces of God’s nature and movement will be revealed. It also requires the humble acknowledgment on both the church’s and individual members’ part that no human experience of the Ultimate is the ultimate experience, no individual insight is the whole insight, and no revelation of wisdom is the final revelation of wisdom. Spiritual guidance, accountability to the Body, and corporate discernment must provide checks and balances in the heady arena of spiritual experience.

The sermons that follow are an attempt to articulate to my congregation the basic differences between the traditional and emerging paradigms of God language, and to open up avenues in their own prayer and spiritual life for accessing a God who is not conceived in hierarchical or even theistic terms. The sermons were offered to my congregation after many years of preaching, group leadership, and pastoral care that emphasized a faith that is deeper than beliefs, spiritual awareness that is more immediate than tradition, and a Truth that transcends human thought and words. The people were ready, I was ready, and so the sermons "worked"--i.e., people seemed to mull over them and appropriate them personally. They would not have "worked" if they had been presented in an attitude of "out with the old, in with the new."

I offer these thoughts and these sermons to you in hopes that they will help open new ground in your own search for God and in your search for ways to open people to experiencing God anew.