Thanks for the essay. Very interesting.
I think the Trinity can help us here. We're all created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). That provides us with a common humanity that's grounded in the facts that (1) we're created hungry for God, and (2) God the Holy Spirit is working everywhere in the world to draw all people to God.
So if we feel reverence toward a certain place or situation that's sublimely beautiful (earth mystics aren't we all, to a certain extent), that's God the Spirit working in our spirit (the image of God in us) -- wooing us to God the Father.
These underlying facts (of Holy Spirit and us being made in God's image) remain true and don't change, no matter what worldview, religion or philosophy we might profess and follow.
Moreover, since God as Trinity is everywhere present, I'm not sure what the great advance of panentheism is supposed to be. Panentheism doesn't add anything to what the Scriptures, Christian tradition and the joint Holy Spirit/image of God experience teach us -- but panentheism does take away from the transcendence and personality of God, especially as God has chosen to be revealed as God the Father and God the Son.
Agree that this essay was an interesting read.
I'd like to propose another alternative to the 4 responses to other religions -- mix choices 2 and 3. What I mean is this:
All religions contain some aspects or shades of truth -- that's what makes them appealing. But just like the fact that the most effective lies are the ones that are most nearly true, the most dangerous religions are the ones that offer the most subtle lies.
Now when it comes to Christianity, I consider myself a 'traditionalist' or 'fundamentalist' or whatever label you'd place on me that means I take God at His word, as expressed in the Bible and the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. This raises some complications - I don't know biblical Hebrew or Greek, I don't have immediate access to the original texts, and as a result I must rely on a potentially faulty translation of the Bible prepared by a well-intentioned but invariably biased human. But I have to trust that the core information -- Jesus actual words and the accounts of his life -- are preserved by God's divine intervention. And I'm left to learn by trial-and-error and rational inductive application just what it is that the Holy Sprit is saying to me.
So where I live now is in a state of skepticism of the traditional church - a responsible church would never have lost its' ability to dialogue with the lost world due to blind adherance to tradition.
But I also have a skepticism about post-modernist and emergent philosphy. Discarding old models of church in favor of new ones is only rational when the old ones aren't working. If the goal of every church is to be 'the church' and produce God-following disciples, the use whatever model that requires for your local conditions. The criteria becomes only: 1. not engaging in biblically-defined sin, and 2. producing God-following disciples.
I don't care what name you call God. He has several, and several more beyond what our world calls Him. And 'He' is probably both more masculine and more feminine than anyone of us will ever be until we match Christ's image.
Having said this, there is a huge advantage in dialogueing with adherants of other religions:
perhaps in something they say, the Holy Spirit will ignite something in our hearts. But the reality is that watering down facts or our position to communicate with others is simply ridiculous. The church (imho) needs to practice soft and hard love in radical and personal ways. The church needs to declare the known truth revealed in the Bible (Without Christianese, and in terms that any can understand). And the church needs to be less tolerant while finding ways to be more truly loving. If one way really is right, and another wrong, it does no good to say 'you're simply on another path and that's valid'. But nobody's going to listen to anyone who can't relate to their pain and meet their real and perceived needs.
Jesus called his disciples to preach the 'good n
And it is a good'n indeed! 
Great Post! Of course, anyone who quotes (er... refers, actually) Hieromonk Damascene is otay by me!
Wow. I started smiling as I read this. You see, many years ago (like 1980!!) I wrote, along with Eric Pement, a treatment of Norman Grubb's "Union Life" group for our Cornerstone magazine (http://www.cornerstonemag.com -- now only archival, alas). It was that article that introduced me to panENtheism, Alfred North Whitehead (who came up with the term, I believe), and so on.
If you were to talk to the 1980 version of me vs. the 2006 version, well, I know a lot less now than I did then. For instance, the words "heresy" and even "cult" were far easier to use back then. Nowadays, I hate the last term -- living communally may explain why in part -- and use the other term only with many caveats and in the (to me) right context.
But Union Life, alas, was a mess. They were, for lack of a better term, antinomian to an extreme. That is, they thought that God saw them as sinless no matter what (this from their own mouths in interviews we did with their leadership). They were literally, again in their words, "Jesus in Dan or Norman form." High-flying concepts of panentheism aside, what ended up happening was sadly predictable. Their leaders fell into immorality and the movement foundered. Soon after, Grubb died.
I tell this story -- a very truncated form of it -- in order to raise some questions for myself and others here. I admire emergent folk, as I've been a bit of an alien among evangelicals for years now. The 2000 and 2004 elections frosted the cake for me, but it had been baking for many years before that. My fervent admiration for Christian (and many non-christian) feminists led to me becoming involved with Christians for Biblical Equality (http://wwww.cbeinternational.org ), a move which further revealed that mainstream evangelicalism is hostile to women.
The 'pomo' proposition that words are often about power-mongering seemed to have abundant real-life evidence among evangelicals. A movement led mostly by white, conservative, middle-class American males, I didn't as much leave evangelicalism as it seems to be leaving me.
So all that as background...
Here are my questions. Sorta.
I recall reading Walker Percy's "Second Coming" -- fabulous novel by this ironical soul who happened to believe. And in it he has a character deeply existential, deeply yearning for belief yet unable to find it anywhere. And he offers to me a warning there. The character looks around him, around the "new south", and finds rather than Flannery O'Connor's Christ-haunted souls a people who "believe everything, and so believe nothing at all." That is, belief becomes merely a set of clothes we put on and perhaps take off again.
Christ is the burning heart of Christian faith. But what Christ? The non-historical Cosmic Christ of old-school liberal Christianity? The muscular he-man republican Christ of evangelicalism? Some sort of mash-Christ, blended in with New Age, eastern, and maybe a little positive confession thought and so rende
[oops, that'll teach me for posting such a long one. Here's part II, for the thousands who wait with baited breath...]
Christ is the burning heart of Christian faith. But what Christ? The non-historical Cosmic Christ of old-school liberal Christianity? The muscular he-man republican Christ of evangelicalism? Some sort of mash-Christ, blended in with New Age, eastern, and maybe a little positive confession thought and so rendered harmless because he demands nothing of us except that we smile alot and speak in gentle, tolerant tones of voice?
I personally struggle very much with feeling that emergent / pomo folk are so involved with the inclusive project (my term) that they forget to include some biblical warnings that are non-inclusive. I almost hate to say it, because the evangelical project (at least in its more fundie forms) has been about little else than warning, condemning, and such.
But I remember Norman Grubb's Union Life. And it really was bad doctrine, bad teaching, and led to bad consequences on any number of levels even while we watched. I am "judging" I realize even by saying such things. But I don't know what else I can do. This life is real, has real ramifications. And what we believe really, truly, does matter.
If Jesus, for instance, did not historically rise from the dead, then Christianity is a pile of dog poop. I was raised in a "liberal" Methodist Church where such discussions were regularly indulged in from the pulpit. And I -- a non-believer at the time -- shook my head in complete amazement. The only hope for Christians is that Jesus is / was God's Son, Divine and sinless, and that he really was crucified and really did rise from the grave.
Bonhoeffer said it best: "Christ is the only significance." While I do indeed believe that all spiritualities can lead to Jesus, I also believe (speaking for myself) that all spiritualities can lead away from Jesus, away from truth, away from love. There is a radical surrender to Christ that is alien to us utterly, yet must occur in order for the frontier between true belief and lip-service to be breached.
Well, this is all quite inarticulate, for which I apologize. I enjoy The Ooze, and appreciate deeply what you are doing for the Body of Christ and the world.
Have anyone checked out www.starvingjesus.com?
It is from the guys over at XXXchurch.com…
They say some pretty crazy stuff…like people are stuck in the“Christian Ghetto” and that some people would say “Church Sucks.” I heard a pastor got fired after using some of stuff from the website in a sermon.
What do you guys think about all this stuff, whacked out or legit?
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