Judaism and the Mystical Christ, Ch. 2: The Bible and Communication Theory

Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "Judaism and the Mystical Christ".  I have created a blog entry containing the table of contents linking to each article which may be accessed here:
 
Table of Contents

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The Bible and Communication Theory
In my last post, I explored the topic of what is called a paradigm shift, and mentioned that I had experienced a few of these myself.  The overarching theme of this series has to do with how gaining a perspective on Judaism reshapes the way we perceive the meaning of the Bible, Jesus, and faith itself, and leads us towards what I will call "Mystical Christ".

But before I begin to explore these ideas I would like to address the elephant in the room - namely, the way that we read the Bible.  It has become a very popular notion within Western Christianity that the Bible functions in a way that is very similar to a gavel - one slams down a Bible verse taken out of context and then triumphantly shouts "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!"  Case closed.  The one who struck the gavel now expects their "opponent" to walk away in shame while they may now hold their head high.

This attitude and behavior is usually the result of being steeped within a culture that teaches that the Bible is "inerrant".  But there are a few problems with this starting point - the first of which, I'd like to point out, does not require that we reject the term "inerrant" when describing the Bible.  It has to do with a theory for how communication works.

J.L. Austin was a British philosopher of language who lived in the mid 1900's, and whom developed a theory of speech acts.  The theory states that when a "speech act" occurs, there are multiple things happening simultaneously.  The first part of a "speech act" is referred to as a locution, and this is the "material" of the act.  It could be a physical and audible utterance of words, a writing of some sort, or some form of art (such as a painting or play).

But for this locution to be a speech act, it requires a bit more.  First of all, it cannot be a speech act if there is no audience.  But secondly, there must be some meaning which the locutor intended to convey to his or her audience.  This intended meaning is the second part of the speech act, and is referred to as the interlocution.  But interlocution is a bit more than the intended meaning - because in order for a speech act to be considered successful, we must endeavor to ascertain whether the meaning intended by the locutor is the same meaning that was perceived by the audience - so the interlocution is not only the intended meaning but it is also the perceived meaning, and these may not always match up.

The final part of a speech act is called the perlocution.  The perlocution is also broken up into two parts, as in the case of the interlocution - it is both the desired effect or result of the speech act, and the actual effect or result of the speech act.  So for us to deem a speech act to be successful, we ought to try to match up the locutor's desired effect with the actual effect it had on the audience.

One of the common fault lines where a speech act breaks down and fails to be successful is when it is "taken out of context".  Let me give you an example: let's say that I dramatically blurt out with a tone of despair "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"  The locution is not merely the collection of words, but it is also the mannerism in which I said these things - my dramatic tone of despair.  Without this context, one might miss the point and incorrectly perceive the interlocution, as well as failing to perform the correct perlocution.  But the problem of correctly perceiving interlocution and applying perlocution does not end there - we should also ask where and when I made this speech.  

Let me give you a few examples where the context completely changes both the interlocution and the perlocution of the statement I mentioned.

In the first example, I'd like you to imagine that I have been having dinner with my wife and some good friends at my house, and we have been having a very enjoyable time.  At some point during the evening, I ask for the salt to be passed to me.  When it arrives, I turn the salt shaker over only to discover that no salt comes out.  This is the lead up to my dramatic exclamation of despair: "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"

With this setup, one might guess that my tone of dramatic despair is hyperbolic and meant to be humorous. Thus, my interlocution - or intended meaning - could be a joke, meant to result in a multifaceted perlocution.  If the result of my utterance is for everyone at the table to laugh, and for my wife to refill the salt shaker, this actual result is very likely a good match for my desired result.

Now, before I move on to my second example, I'd like my readers to imagine that one of the people at the table decided to quote my exact words on Twitter or Facebook without any of the setup.  How likely do you think it would be that the online audience would perceive the correct interlocution and perlocution?

In my second example, let's say that we place my words in a completely different context: I have been participating in a Bible study group that has just been studying and discussing Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount", and after discussing Matthew 5:13 where Jesus says that his disciples are "the salt of the earth" for a bit, we begin to discuss how so many people who claim to be Christians do not resemble the things Jesus mentions in the rest of his sermon.  It is within this context that I then dramatically blurted out "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"  Within this new context, do you think that I am hoping that everyone in the room will laugh, and then someone will run home to grab a salt shaker and bring it back to me?

In addition to the context in which the locution occurs, we might also want to pay attention to the context of the locutor - the character we are able to know about the person who spoke.  In the example I gave of the dinner party where I dramatically and despairingly uttered "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?", those who know me (perhaps even just from one dinner) might have perceived that I have a certain sense of humor, and this context might have given them more of a foundation on which to build the assumption that I was being hyperbolic in an attempt to cause laughter.

Another example of how context changes meaning - I'd like you to consider the following conversation:

Jane: Would you like some coffee?
John: That would keep me awake.

Do we know at this point whether John wants coffee?  The answer is that we don't, because this conversation is too ambiguous.  Even if we had access to John's tone of voice and facial expressions when he answered, it would still be very difficult.  However, if we knew whether this conversation occurred in the morning or in the evening, this context would give us a fairly accurate idea of whether John actually wanted coffee or not (keep in mind there could be other factors, i.e.: is this in the evening, and John and Jane are on a road trip and need to stay awake?).

In the case of the Bible - if we wish to ascertain the interlocution and perceive the desired perlocution of a writer such as Paul, we might want to pay careful attention to his other writings so that we do not make a judgment call on one statement that contradicts a large portion of his other writings - to do this would be to completely ignore the context of his character.  But we also need to know as much as we can about Paul's Jewishness, as well as the history of the time period he lived in, and the common traits of the environments of the various places his audiences resided in.  Because without this context, we may have completely missed the desired interlocution and perlocution and substituted our own.

One final and very simple illustration might help drive the point about the importance of context home.  In the parable of "The Good Samaritan", Jesus says that "a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho" (Lk. 10:30).  With our modern context and the access we have to maps with north being located "up" and south being "down", we might assume that Jericho was located to the south of Jerusalem.  But one look at a map challenges this:

Now what do we do with this challenge to our assumptions?  One option might be to declare the mapmaker a heretic who has challenged the integrity of God's Word™ and is denying the authority of the scriptures (hey, the Church did this to Galileo and Copernicus).  We might demand that people ignore such maps and draw maps placing Jericho to the south of Jerusalem.  Another option would be to say that Jesus was ignorant, and thus was wrong.  Another might be to say that Jesus never said this, but rather it was Luke who was ignorant and wrong.  And yet another option might be to say that either Jesus or Luke were trying to deceive us.  Or, we could attempt to place ourselves within the historical context and realize that because they did not have the access to maps in this period that we do, and because Jerusalem was at a higher elevation than Jericho and thus the experience of walking from Jerusalem to Jericho was a journey down a very long hill, the assumed meaning of down in that culture had more to do with elevation than with geography.

It is for this reason that I will be attempting to enlist the help of Jewish thought throughout this series - because I believe that without understanding Jewish thought, we cannot help but misunderstand the Bible.  Westerners - thinking through a very Western lens - cannot possibly understand the very Jewish and Eastern Jesus if we do not attempt to immerse ourselves within their thinking.  The modern Western versions of Christianity have all too often suffered from the arrogance of thinking that they hold a monopoly on truth and do not have to listen to any outsiders.  And when we do this, we forget how our traditions have grown out of much older traditions.  As the English writer Aldous Huxley once put it:

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim insofar as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness.

The Finger is not the Moon

I have written before on why I reject the idea of "inerrancy" (see here, here, and here), so I am not going to rehash this debate again here.  But I would like to try once again to offer an alternative vision for the purpose of the Bible. 

I believe that we are meant to see an overarching story within the Bible - an ongoing narrative the leads up to the person of Jesus.  But it doesn't even stop there!  I believe it continues on in the narrative of the "body of Christ" - the church!  We are meant to carry on the story! 

So for me, I believe that if we take any section of the Bible and treat it like a "stopping point", we have made an idol out of that scripture.  Consider the Bible as if it were a telescope - the point is not the telescope itself, but what it enables us to see!  If we revere the telescope too much, we will completely miss the point!  I believe that "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" is essentially holding a telescope up to our eye while covering the end with our hand - at that point, you're really just making up fantasies about the heavens in your own head.

This idea is very similar to something the Buddha said: 

[M]y teaching is a method to experience reality, and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. An intelligent person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon. My teaching is a means of practice, not something to hold onto or worship. Only a fool would continue to carry his raft around after he had already used it to reach the other shore, the shore of liberation.

If we do not open ourselves up to the various possibilities of what the symbolic language of the Bible is pointing to, it is like worshiping the finger that is pointing to the moon.

I think it helps to understand that all our words are symbols.  Louis Chauvet describes the meaning of symbol in "Symbol and Sacrament" as follows:

If one construed it transitively, one would translate it, according to the context, as "gather together", "hold in common", or "exchange". The substantive symbole designates the joint at the elbow or knee and, more generally, the whole idea of conjunction, reunion, contract, or pact. The ancient symbolon is precisely an object cut in two, one part of which is retained by each partner in a contract. Each half evidently has no value in itself and thus could imaginatively signify anything; its symbolic power is due only to its connection with the other half. It (can thus be described) as an agreement between the two partners which establishes the symbol; it is the expression of a social pact based on mutual recognition and, hence, is a mediator of identity.

The idea that the words we use are always inadequate for describing the reality they symbolize is even a concept many scientists have grasped - as is illustrated by the following quote by Sir James Hopwood Jeans (known for the Rayleigh-Jeans Law):

The essential fact is simply that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures. Most scientists would agree that they are nothing more than pictures - fictions, if you like, if by fiction you mean that science is not yet in contact with ultimate reality. Many would hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of relativity with its welding together of space and time, or the theory of quanta with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are not what they seem; it is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality.

To apply this to the Bible, I would like my audience to consider that the Bible may function as a scatter plot pointing off into infinity.  A scatter plot is a tool that enables us to see how many samples of data over time show a trend that is occurring:

To use another, similar analogy, if you have seen the movie "Gravity", there is a scene where Sandra Bullock's character is trying to reach a space station.  Before firing thrusters, she lines up her cross-hairs with the tiny speck that she sees of the space station in the distance.  She does this very carefully - making sure to get the sights lined up perfectly before firing her thrusters.  And yet, when she is close to the space station, she ends up having to jump out of the ship's side door and do some tricky maneuvers in order to get to the station because her course was not perfect.  I believe that what many people do with the Bible is like sailing right on past the space station while insisting that your course was perfect and therefore while it may look like the space-station is over there, that's just Satan lying to us!  This displays a remarkable arrogance!

As I spoke of in the last section, I believe that God may be described best in various terms of infinity.  And thus, logically we may conclude that any single description which tries to solidify the infinite concepts of God into a solid form will ultimately fail.  This is why I believe that over the course of the narrative of the Bible, we will see a trend developing that points off into infinity, much like a scatter plot.  But if we take one of those points of data and solidify it into a definitive concept, we couldn't possibly understand the path of the trend.  Or, if we point the line of the scatter plot trend in the wrong direction (as in, we take "the wrathful God of the Old Testament" as our defining image rather than the God Jesus shows us who loves enemies perfectly), we have also missed the trend of the scatter plot.

To say this is not to say that the Old Testament passages have no value or do not help us to see God!  Rather, we must understand that God is present within the Old Testament, but as God is infinite, these old understandings had to be transcended - and we see these understandings continually being transcended, just as we are called today to transcend old, limiting understandings of the infinite.  I believe this attitude of recognizing the finitude of our current understanding in order to transcend it is what Paul was speaking of in I Corinthians 3:18:

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise.

Paul recognized that "for now we see in a mirror dimly" (I Cor. 13:12), and that God - being infinite - was fully outside any man's ability to grasp truth.  And so in order to continually grow closer one must become "foolish" in the eyes of the world, in order to, paradoxically, become wise.

This attitude of continually transcending our limited understanding transforms the language of the Bible from a dead, rigid form of stone into living, breathing truth.  And for those who have been trained their whole life to be dogmatic, while treating the Bible in this way may be difficult, I would like to remind you that Abraham negotiated with God (Gen. 18:23-33), Jacob wrestled with God before he was blessed by Him (Gen. 32:22-31), Moses negotiated with God more than once (see Ex. 3:12-16 and Num. 11 for two examples), the Psalms and Lamentations are full of pleading and even accusation against God (shocking!), and even Jesus is said to have plead with God to change the course he was on.  

I think that the Jewish attitude towards the Bible is much healthier than "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" - recognizing how various figures in the Bible negotiated with God as I've just mentioned, they seemed to understand that the Bible is up for interpretation and that newer understandings may trump older ones.  We'll get into that a bit more as this series progresses, but for now I'd like to share a story from the Talmud.  The Talmud is a very interesting collection of commentaries on the Torah, and is revered by modern Jews as being a work every Jew should study.  And what's interesting about it is that the Talmud doesn't hide disagreement, but preserves it - often polar opposite views of a passage or idea are kept side by side.  And there is one beautiful story that demonstrates perfectly how the Jewish view of the Bible flies in the face of "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" - the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven, which I will retell in my own way.  

The story goes that Rabbi Eliezer had a disagreement with a group of other scholars over whether an oven was pure or impure.  Rabbi Eliezer brought the other scholars all sorts of proofs to his point of view, but they still disagreed.  At one point during the disagreement, Eliezer said "if the law is as I say, let the river prove me right!"  Instantly, the river reversed its course.

But one of the other scholars said "one cannot prove a matter of Torah by the flow of water!"

So Eliezer said "if the law is as I say, may the walls of the study hall prove me right!"  Instantly, the walls of the study hall began to cave in, but one of the other rabbis, Rabbi Joshua, stood up and rebuked them: "if Torah scholars are debating a point of Jewish law, what are your qualifications to intervene?"  The story goes that the walls, in respect to Rabbi Joshua, did not cave in, but in respect towards Rabbi Eliezer they remained at a permanent slant afterwards.

So Rabbi Eliezer tried once more: "if the law is as I say, may Heaven prove me right!"  A booming voice filled the room and reverberated around them all: "why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer?  Don't you know he's always right?"  But once again, Rabbi Joshua stood up and intervened, saying "the Torah is not in Heaven!"

We might fail to follow the logic here, given the Christian over-reverence of the Bible that turns it into an idol.  But Jews interpret Deuteronomy 30:11-14 to mean that Torah was given to us so that we could interpret it.  In other words, the popular understanding of this tale from the Talmud is that Rabbi Joshua was rebuking God for not allowing them to do the job He'd given them to do!  Note how Jesus actually supports this idea when he tells his disciples in Matthew 18:18 that "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven" - in Jewish terminology, when a Rabbi "binds" something, he is declaring it forbidden by his interpretation of the law, and when he "looses" something he is declaring it allowed.  So here, Jesus is giving us permission to interpret!

The story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven goes on from there to arrive at a conclusion many "Sola Scriptura inerrantists" might find shocking - Rabbi Nathan is said to have experienced a vision wherein he meets the prophet Elijah, and at one point Nathan asks how God reacted at the moment that Rabbi Joshua rebuked Heaven.  Elijah responds: "God laughed and said 'my children have bested me!  Haha, my children have bested me!'"  

This picture of a God delighted with His children for exercising their wits and even disagreeing with their Heavenly Father is altogether foreign from many forms of Christianity, sadly.  We cower in fear underneath a tyrannical Molech that we've slapped Christian branding over.  But the God of Judaism wants us to negotiate with Him.  This God wants us to think for ourselves!  This God wants us to cry out for justice - because it is at this moment that He can invite us to join him in the cause!

Dr. Ismar Schorsch, the sixth chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, put it this way:

[I]n Judaism precisely because the Torah is revered as divine, it becomes susceptible to unending interpretation. It would be a denigration of God's word to saddle it with just a single meaning. In contrast to human speech, which carries a finite range of meanings, the language of God was deemed to be endowed with an infinity of meanings. This theology freed the Rabbis to do midrash, creating the anomaly of a canon without closure. The vessels kept changing their contents. New challenges elicited new insights into a text inviolable only on the surface.

If we can just remember that the words we use for Theology are not what they represent, but are symbols for what we are speaking of - like a finger pointing to the moon - we can ease so much tension.  And then we may not feel the need to demonize those who use different words.  If we could just remember that the point is not the words themselves, but the way of life that these words are supposed to lead to - maybe we'd stop judging people by what words they use but put emphasis on conduct instead.  Because the point is not words or "beliefs" - as James 1:27 points out:

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

And later on in James 3:13, the author writes:

Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom.

George MacDonald - a member of the Inklings whom C.S. Lewis called his "master" - picked up on this principle and wrote in one of his "Unspoken Sermons" titled "The Truth in Jesus":

Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by; and that which the man I mean lives by, is the love of God, and obedience to his law, so far as he has recognized it. [...] What a man believes, is the thing he does.

In "Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian", Dr. Paul Knitter writes about this attitude of allowing words to be symbols that point to a way of life:

[I]f a new interpretation of – that is, new words for – a traditional Christian belief enables people to live their lives according to the spirit of the Gospel, it’s probably a faithful “reinterpretation” or a valid new understanding of that belief, no matter how different the words may be. In theological jargon, right acting (called “orthopraxis”) is more important than, though it is dependent on, right believing (“ orthodoxy”). Or in contemporary jargon, walking the talk is more important than talking the talk. So, if the new “talk” enables us to keep walking, it’s probably okay. It’s probably “orthodox.”

To illustrate even further how the Bible is not "The Truth" but functions as a finger pointing to the moon, I'd like to consider the words of Jesus in John 5:39:

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.

We see here that Jesus himself challenged an idolatrous relationship with the Bible, but tells us that the Bible functions as a finger pointing to the moon.  As George MacDonald - who is credited with the conversion of C.S. Lewis - puts it:

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

This idea is further reiterated by authors John Kronen and Eric Reitan in "God's Final Victory":

[W]e think that the way in which Scripture contributes to the formation of doctrine is far more complex than the 'plain sense' view would have us believe.  The whole text must be read in light of what is central, namely Christ, and in light of the theological tradition that has struggled, and continues to struggle, to integrate the experience of the Christian community and its members as they have endeavoured to live out their understanding of what it means to be the body of Christ.  Reading the text in the light of these things requires a practice of receiving inherited theological conclusions with respect and honour; but it also requires critical engagement with that inheritance.

Even Augustine saw that we must identify the guiding principles of Scripture which take precedence over the peripherals:

But any who understand a passage in the scriptures to mean something which the writer did not mean are mistaken . . . but all the same . . . if they are mistaken in a judgment which is intended to build up love . . . they are mistaken in the same sort of way as people who go astray off the road, but still proceed by rough paths to the same place as the road was taking them. God spoke the true word, in spite of the reader’s error.

Here we see that Augustine paid careful attention to the priority of love - as both Jesus and Paul said that the principles of Scripture are summed up in love (see Mt. 22:36-40 and Gal. 5:14).  If the thought of prioritizing principles in the Scriptures that take precedence over peripherals makes you uncomfortable, I'd like you to understand that you do this as well even if you're unconscious of this.  It's highly likely that if you're reading this post in 2015, you prioritize monogamy over the passages within Scripture that seem to support polygamy, you don't support slavery (even though Scripture seems to be ok with it), and if a male joins your church you probably don't take him into a back room and have him pull his pants down so that you can make sure he's circumcised before allowing him to join.

If you're still not sold on this attitude towards the Bible, I'd like to come at this from one more angle before we break.

Paradox
One of the ways that the Bible - and not just the Bible, but all Eastern religions - hints at a "truth beyond words" is through the use of paradox.  To illustrate how a paradox works, I'd like you to examine a famous illustration called "My Wife and My Mother-in-law":

You've probably seen this before, and the question that is asked is: do you see the back of a beautiful young woman's head or the side of an old woman's face?  And the answer is: it depends on how you're looking!  It's actually both.  Now we could say "well, it's supposed to be one or the other" and then explain how one view must be the correct one - but that wouldn't do the illustration justice!  Because the illustration is meant to illustrate a profound truth - that the mother-in-law has characteristics very much like the daughter, and the daughter has characteristics very much like the mother-in-law!  Or to put it another way - one can see the daughter in the mother-in-law and the mother-in-law in the daughter!

Now what many theologians all too often do is very much like insisting that the illustration above must be either the daughter or the mother-in law.  And so they'll often try to pretend that Biblical evidence doesn't exist - much like if we were to erase a few lines from the drawing above (maybe the red part) and then insist that it is only the daughter.  But what if the only way to communicate the profound mysteries of spiritual truth were to use two seemingly opposing ideas (a paradox)?

There are many paradoxes within the Bible, but I am going to focus on one very important one - a paradox that is foundational for "Mystical Christianity".  It is the paradox of kenosis and God's sovereignty.  

I argued in the first "chess move" of my series on Hell that verses like Job 42:2, Psalm 135:6, Isaiah 14:24-27, Daniel 4:35, Matthew 19:26, Romans 11:36, and Ephesians 1:11 imply that in the end, God gets everything God wants - or in other words, God is sovereign.  Another way of saying this is that God is omnipotent - this is a popular way of putting it in theological terms.

But an interesting paradox presents itself when you consider that Jesus is, as Colossians 1:15 puts it: "the image of the invisible God."  Because we know that Jesus emptied himself, as Philippians 2:7 puts it.  The Greek word used in this verse is kenosis, and it implies a self-emptying.  The passage in Philippians goes on to explain that because Jesus humbled himself, he was exalted - which matches quite well with Jesus' saying that "whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted." (Mt. 23:12 and Lk. 14:11).

If Jesus is indeed "the image of the invisible God", then would this imply that God's nature is a self-emptying one as well?  Many theologians have concluded that the answer to this is: yes!  And this presents us with a profound mystery - because in God we see power in a way of being that looks to us like weakness!

If this sounds like nonsense, then I suggest you re-examine Paul's words in 2 Cor. 12:10 - he implies that Christians are to emulate this strength through weakness!

Let's come at this from another angle - I John 4:8 and 16 tell us that God is love.  If you have a hard time with this idea, I'd ask you to read another post I wrote titled: "Yes, God Really IS Love!"  But if this is true, then I believe that, logically, when we read Paul's wonderful poetry on the nature of love in I Corinthians 13, we can take this as a description of God's character - in other words, wherever it says "love", we can substitute the word "God".  And if we do this, we find a profound paradox - because God does not demand His own way (verse 5 in NLT, or as the NASB puts it: "love does not seek its own"), and yet God never fails! (I Cor. 13:8)

Somehow - though it may make no sense to human logic - though God does not force His way into being or coerce others to do His will, God still gets everything God wants in the end!  And as Christians who are to be followers of Jesus, I believe that if we align ourselves with this way of being - by taking on the nature of a servant and gaining through losing (Phil. 3:7-8) - we will have aligned ourselves with the will of God and will receive the inheritance of the kingdom of God (Col. 3:23-24) - which is the realm in which, as the Lord's Prayer puts it (Mt. 6:10), God's will is done.  Through kenosis - the self-emptying nature of love - we may become conquerors (Rom. 8:37) - just as Jesus conquered through emptying himself even to the point of death!

To see the truth in the Bible, we cannot deny one side of the many paradoxes it contains - but rather we must see the "radical middle" - the truth that is communicated in between the two seemingly opposing ideas.

There is another Buddhist story that illustrates what I've been trying to get at.  The story goes that a young, single father had a son whom he loved more than anything else in the world.  One day, while he was away, some plunderers came to the father's village and burnt most of it down - including the father's house.  When the father returned, he could not find his son, and mistook one of the burnt corpses for his son's body.  He was completely devastated, and during his mourning he had the body cremated and the ashes put into a silk bag that he kept with himself at all times.  But what he didn't know was that his son was alive - he had been kidnapped by the plunderers!  

Later on, the boy managed to escape and returned home to his father.  But the door of the house was locked, and so the boy knocked.  "Who is it?" the father asked.  "It's me, your son!"  The father had been sitting in the room weeping while holding the bag of ashes, and he said "you wicked boy!  How could you play such a horrible trick on a heartbroken father - go away!"  The boy continued to knock and cry and plead to be let in, but the father continued to rebuke him until finally the son left and never returned.

In "No Death, No Fear", Thich Nhat Hanh tells this story and concludes with this thought:

The Buddha said that if you get caught in one idea and consider it to be “the truth,” then you miss the chance to know the truth. Even if the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will refuse to open your mind. So if you are committed to an idea about truth or to an idea about the conditions necessary for your happiness, be careful. 

Likewise, the medieval German mystic Meister Ekhart once said:

If you want to get at the kernel of something, you must first break the shell. Only then can you enjoy its true benefits. Symbols of reality are not the same as reality itself, so they must be destroyed. Then you will come closer and closer to what truly is. When you finally reach the One, there your soul must remain.

Next Chapter: What is Christian Mysticism?

Judaism and the Mystical Christ, Ch. 1: On Paradigm Shifts

Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "Judaism and the Mystical Christ".  I have created a blog entry containing the table of contents linking to each article which may be accessed here:
 
Table of Contents

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Introduction
What is to follow is the product of thousands of pages of reading, many hours of deep thought wrestling with the very toughest of questions, and much love.  I've struggled with how to open this series - it's always hard for me, as an introvert, to get things going.  And then once I do, the words start to flow quite naturally - this is why I always force myself to put my foot forward and just take one step at a time (sounds like a good motto for life).  But my hope is that what is to follow will help some who are struggling to find their footing, and that for others who are too sure of their footing, it will cause them to stumble (see I Cor. 1:23).  Because I have learned that our purpose is not to remain on the firmest of ground, but in the end we are meant to have the ground ripped out from under us so that we can discover that we were always meant to fly.

If you disagree with everything that follows, but can agree with me on the primacy of love as the foundation of the Christian faith (or, even, for anyone) - we are not so far apart.  If there is any way to summarize the rambling, amateur rhetoric and stumbling attempts to explain that which is unexplainable in human language that is to follow, it is through the words of Marcarius the Egyptian:

All mystic charisms are worthless compared to the love of God. They are as a string of pearls adorning a hungry infant who does not heed the pearls but only wants his mother's breast.

Or as the Apostle Paul put it in I Corinthians 13:2:

If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

The main thrust of this series is difficult to sum up.  What I want to do is to, hopefully, lead some of my readers to a mystical understanding of the message of Christianity, and I want to do this by bringing a Jewish lens to Christianity, as well as by attempting to enlist some contemporary scientific ideas.  But first, I'd like to lay some groundwork by thinking about how theological thought experiences shifts (if you know your history, you'll know that it always has).

Paradigm Shifts
When mankind became self-aware, he¹ began the search for understanding.  He sought understanding of the world around him, of how he became, and of who he was.  But most of all, he sought understanding of himself and what his purpose was.

He looked out at the world around him, and he noticed that every day, the sun would rise in the east, and would set in the west.  Man concluded that the earth was an immovable object at the center of the universe, and that the sun traveled around the earth each day.  This was the accepted wisdom for millennia - it was considered to be reliable and right, and if anyone would question this, they would be considered mad.

But in the 3rd century, someone did question this - Aristarchus of Samos proposed the earliest known version of the heliocentric model (the idea that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun).  But this idea gained little attention, until being revived by Copernicus in the 16th century, and then being further defended by Kepler and Galileo in the following century.  It was Galileo's observations that were the nail in the coffin for the competing views.  Galileo noticed that sometimes, as one of the planets crossed the sky, it would double back a bit.  An earlier attempt had been made to explain this by another Greek astronomer named Ptolemy - Ptolemy believed that the planets didn't just orbit the earth, but did little loop-de-loops as they went.  Never-mind explaining the physics that would be necessary to cause this - the church loved this model because they believed that the Bible made it necessary to believe that the planets and the Sun revolved around the Earth, and promptly declared Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to be heretics (they kind of love to throw that term around like it makes them powerful or something).

An old picture of Ptolemy's model

But Galileo noticed that there were more loop-de-loops than had originally been thought, and the Ptolemaic model started to look more and more ridiculous.  It became much easier to explain this phenomenon by accepting that the earth and all the other planets actually revolved around the Sun, and that the earth's spin was what caused the illusion that the Sun was going around the Earth.  It was the context of new information that required a rethinking of the old information.  Those who fought for the Ptolemaic model did not want to challenge their assumptions, and so they resorted to increasingly complicated explanations of what was happening - and these explanations could not sustain the model.  Galileo challenged the paradigm - and I'm sure people told him he must be seeing things.  His observations couldn't be accurate, I'm sure some said.  But he insisted that people check his work, and over time the heliocentric model became so accepted that it is now taken for granted.

Often when you are on the other side of a paradigm shift, and you are trying to persuade someone who has not experienced this shift, it can feel a little like Dr. Huxtable in this video clip from the Cosby Show:

In the clip, we see that no matter what objection Dr. Huxtable raises, there is always an immediate and exasperated answer from the young Rudy.  This is often the problem with magical thinking which refuses to challenge its assumptions - the one engaged in this kind of thinking can always think of a way to explain away every difficult situation.  But the explanations become more and more complicated - can we ever stop to notice when we are doing this?

As Daniel J. Boorstin writes in "The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself":

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Marilynne Robinson also writes about this problem of refusing to challenge assumptions in "The Death of Adam":

We routinely disqualify testimony that would plead for extenuation. That is, we are so persuaded of the rightness of our judgment as to invalidate evidence that does not confirm us in it. Nothing that deserves to be called truth could ever be arrived at by such means.

I've written before about the current phenomenon in the church dubbed the Rise of the Nones, and I believe that the current dominant form of Christianity has become unsustainable - a paradigm shift is required in order for Christianity to survive.  I've written as well about some of my own paradigm shifts (of specific interest might be my series on Hell, and my series on Satan), and I wish to note that I feel that many of the ideas I've written about before build upon each other and lead to the subject matter which will be included in this series.  

Unfortunately, while it seems to be more and more obvious to those of us who have experienced the paradigm shifts of our day and moved on that these shifts are necessary in order to answer the existential crises of our generation, it seems that the institutional church is taking the opposite approach and doubling down on the old paradigm.  The threshold guardians of the institution are circling the wagons and warning all within their walls to avoid all contact with the world outside.  But this can only work for so long - information will get in.  Rationality, unfortunately, seems to have been lost within the church - but with it, we are losing the younger generation.  We can no longer say to them “you just have to accept it on faith” and expect this to be effective.  And Jesus commanded us to love God with all our mind - so why wouldn’t this include using it?

"The problem, Cayleb, is that if your faith in the lie you’ve been taught all your life is too strong, you won’t believe any proof I could show you."
- David Weber, Off Armageddon Reef

If we remember how the church has so often fought paradigm shifts, but later on accepted them and revisited their interpretation of the Bible based on evidence external to the Bible - just as the Church at large is very comfortable with taking the Biblical passages that seem to indicate the belief in the geocentric model as metaphorical now - then perhaps we can learn the lesson that Peter Enns teaches as the main theme of his book, "Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament":

The problems many of us feel regarding the Bible may have less to do with the Bible itself and more to do with our own preconceptions.

I have found again and again that listening to how the Bible itself behaves and suspending preconceived notions (as much as that is possible) about how we think the Bible ought to behave is refreshing, creative, exciting, and spiritually rewarding.

Enns argues for an incarnational view of Scripture - just as Jesus is "fully God and fully man", he argues that Scripture's origins are fully human and fully divine.  He states that "the human marks of the Bible are everywhere, thoroughly integrated into the nature of Scripture itself. Ignoring these marks or explaining them away takes at least as much energy as listening to them and learning from them."  But Enns wants us to see that God spoke within the context of history, not fully independent of it.  It is important to note at this point that context is different from background.  To understand this difference - a background for a photo would be like when you go to a photographer's studio and he drops a large vinyl curtain with a picture of the beach behind you.  In this case, it wouldn't be much of a big deal to use a computer program to remove the background of the beach.  But if you had a photo of your family physically at the beach with the waves splashing over your bathing suits and soaking them, this context of the beach would not be so easily removed, and if you were somehow able to remove it, some things about that photograph (such as the wet bathing suits) would cease to make sense to someone who didn't have that context.

Likewise, when we seek to remove the Biblical writings from their historical context, we may often miss the point and end up with ideas that just don't make sense.  Efforts to put the Scriptures back into their historical context in order to seek their meaning should not make us uncomfortable (though it often does - but this is an irrational and instinctual fight or flight response).  But if we see the Bible as incarnational, we might realize, as Peter Enns puts it:

That the Bible, at every turn, shows how “connected” it is to its own world is a necessary consequence of God incarnating himself.

When God reveals himself, he always does so to people, which means that he must speak and act in ways that they will understand. People are time bound, and so God adopts that characteristic if he wishes to reveal himself.

Enns points out later on that to those who find the human side of Scripture to be disturbing, he might ask:

How else would you have expected God to speak? In ways wholly disconnected to the ancient world? Who would have understood him?

Using the Spectrum
One of the things that bothers me about the responses I often get to my writings is how those who oppose my conclusions will completely ignore most of what I've said and focus on little details that they somehow think will unravel the entire thing.  To illustrate what is happening here and why this is completely foolish, let me summarize the logical points I've made to reach my conclusions on hell - I basically start with a logical structure of "A is true, and B is true, therefore C must be true" in the first section of my series.  But because this raises problems with "D" and "E", I then move on to address problems D and E by proving "-D" and "-E" in the second part of my series.  I then move on to address a number of other problems for the traditional views on hell, as well as including other information that I feel are logical proofs for my conclusion on hell all by themselves (see Part 4 for an example).  After my series was finished, I even wrote up a quick summary of a completely different logical path for reaching my conclusions on Hell.

What I've typically seen in the responses to this blog series is that someone will become hyper-focused on one particular Biblical passage I used and they think that by attacking my use of it with vigor, they can ignore everything else I've said.  But here's the problem - I don't need that verse.  I have other tools for arguing A and B, and I don't even need A and B.  I have -D and -E, and I have two completely different logical structures for proving my point - so the best that my attackers could possibly do for me would be to prove that Christianity is a bunch of nonsense and that any wise person should run like hell in the other direction from it.  Of course they don't think of it this way.

Allow me to give a simple analogy for what seems quite often to happen with religion.  In episode 5 of the recent TV series "Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey", the various spectrums of light were discussed.  At one point in the show, Neil deGrasse Tyson presented a beautiful demonstration where the skyline of New York City was shown using photography that captured different spectrums of light - so you could see what the skyline would look like if, say, you were able to see the gamma ray spectrum:

Another good demonstration of how different spectrums are utilized to create a composite image.

What this helped to illustrate is that different spectrums of light allow us to see differently.  In fact, modern astronomy uses the various spectrums to help us form models of distant galaxies (for more information, see here, and this article will give you a good idea how this works as well).  If we did not use these spectrums, there would be certain astronomical bodies we would not be able to see, and certain phenomena we would not be able to understand.  

What religion all too often seems to do is to say "thou shalt not try to see in any spectrum other than the one we have said that thou shalt see in."  And in this way, the religious elite are able to lock down knowledge and keep people from ever growing.  But if you have any understanding of how tricky seeing can be, you should realize that this almost always results in seeing the wrong thing.  Our eyes are known to play tricks on us - as many optical illusions can attest to.  One of my favorite optical illusions is the checkerboard illusion:

If we only use our "natural" form of seeing, the square marked "A" seems to be a much darker shade than the square marked "B".  But they are in actuality the exact same shade - various methods have been used to demonstrate how this illusion works, one being to paint connecting lines around the two squares:

Still having a hard time seeing it?  Try looking at it with some of the squares blacked out:

What often happens with religion is a refusal to examine methods like the ones demonstrated above, and an insistent dogmatism that shouts out words like "heresy" at those who challenge the established views.  Religion all too often will not only refuse to use alternative methods of "seeing", but insists that everything "seen" by those who have is wrong.  But I believe this is a misuse of religion.

Related to the study of how optical illusions fool our brains, psychologists have studied how our intuitive mode of thinking usually operate as the primary role to the secondary role of our methodical, rational mode.  In "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Psychologist and researcher David Kahneman refers to these modes of thinking as "System 1" (the intuitive mode) and "System 2" (the rational mode).  To demonstrate how this works, he gives the following word problem:

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The common answer most people give to this is $0.10, but this is the incorrect answer - because if the ball cost $0.10 and the bat cost $1 (which does add up to the total of $1.10), the bat would only be $0.90 more than the ball.  The correct answer is that the ball costs $0.05, making the bat $1.05 (a dollar more, and adding up to $1.10).

This problem is a very good demonstration of how prone to error we can be.  Kahneman notes how, when this problem was presented to groups of students at colleges, over 50% got it wrong at "Ivy Leage" schools (such as Harvard, MIT and Princeton), and over 80% got it wrong at less selective universities.  The problem is really not that difficult to solve, it just requires stopping for a moment to double-check your work and think a bit.  Furthermore, once I demonstrated how the intuitive answer is incorrect, I'm sure that it would be unlikely for anyone to argue. 

In the area of religion, however, the "problems" are much more complex - and yet many people seem highly reluctant to "double-check" their work, or to stop and engage "System 2" for a bit.  But I think it's important to remember, as H.L. Mencken once said:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Related to the problem of our fast-thinking, intuitional "System 1 brain" overriding our slow-thinking, logical "System 2 brain" is the problem of inattentional blindness.  One of my favorite illustrations of how this works is the Invisible Gorilla Test.  In the late 1990s, psychologist Daniel Simons and his student Christopher Chabris asked study subjects to watch a short video of two groups of people passing a basketball around.  The subjects are asked to either count the number of passes made by one of the two teams (differentiated by their white and black t-shirts), or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes.  During the video, a woman walks onto the screen wearing a gorilla suit and dances around - she is on the screen for a total of 9 seconds.  But when asked at the end of the video if the subjects noticed the gorilla, over 50% of the subjects did not notice at all, and were not only surprised to find there was a gorilla, but were surprised that they didn't even notice.  These were Harvard students, by the way.  The point of the study is to illustrate how, when we are concentrating on certain details, we become blinded to others.

I believe that when it comes to studying the Bible, quite often we've missed the gorilla because we were told to pay attention to how the ball was passed and how often.  So I am asking my readers to look again, and this time look for details you may have missed.
 
Changing Your Mind and Repentance
One of the reasons it's so hard to experience a paradigm shift, I believe, is that you are becoming a new person when you do so.  Dr. Joe Dispenza writes in "You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter" about how habitual thought patterns form synapses in our brain, and in essence become our "self" - and he points out how hard it is to change this:

The hardest part about change is not making the same choices we made the day before. The reason it’s so difficult is that the moment we no longer are thinking the same thoughts that lead to the same choices - which cause us to automatically act in habitual ways so that we can experience the same events in order to reaffirm the same emotions of our identity - we immediately feel uncomfortable. This new state of being is unfamiliar; it’s unknown. It doesn’t feel “normal.” We don’t feel like ourselves anymore - because we’re not ourselves. And because everything feels uncertain, we no longer can predict the feeling of the familiar self and how it’s mirrored back to us in our lives.

The point is that often new conclusions are not arrived at simply or easily - it takes recognizing the connections between multiple points of data and really wrestling with this.  And unfortunately, I think modern society has become quite horrible at recognizing how connecting data points form complex ideas.  I think the way our education system splits subjects off as if they had nothing to do with each other, and encourages highly specialized fields of studies that often feel as though they are in competition with each other is a big part of the problem that leads to this inability to grasp more than the most simplistic of ideas.  

But my hope is that someone out there is tracking.  And if that is the case, I hope that what is to follow will be helpful.  The following series will explore yet more paradigm shifts I have personally experienced - I believe that many of the other subjects I have written about in my blog are all interconnected, and I hope some readers out there will see how that is.

To move forward, we've got to challenge the way we think of concepts and even words.  As Thomas Merton wrote in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite":

The convenient tools of language enable us to decide beforehand what we think things mean, and tempt us all too easily to see things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and our verbal formulas. Instead of seeing things and facts as they are we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds. We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and our formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we see only what conveniently fits our prejudices.

There is even a connection between changing our minds through a paradigm shift and the Christian concept of repentance.  In "Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power", renowned scholar Marcus Borg writes of how we all too often misunderstand the word "repentance":

[Repentance] means “to turn, to return.” The word directly relates to ancient Israel’s experience of exile in Babylon . To repent meant “to return”— to embark on a journey of return to the “homeland,” the Holy Land, where God is.

Further on, he writes:

It also has a second resonance that flows from the roots of the Greek word in the New Testament commonly translated into English as repent or repentance. Its Greek roots mean “to go beyond the mind that we have.” The phrase is both provocative and evocative.

Indeed, the very meaning of the Greek word that is often translated "repent" - metanoia - is "to go beyond" or "to expand" (meta - beyond or above) "the mind" (noia - awareness, consciousness).
How would it change religion if we considered outside points of view in order to "go beyond the mind that we have"?  If, rather than stigmatizing anyone who saw things differently, we carefully and compassionately considered their perspective?
 
As we move forward, I'd also like my audience to consider how, as Robert M. Price puts it in "The Historical Jesus: Five Views" (noting that I do not subscribe to Price's theory on Jesus):

[C]onsensus is no criterion. The truth may not rest in the middle. The truth may not rest with the majority. Every theory and individual argument must be evaluated on its own. If we appeal instead to “received opinion” or “the consensus of scholars,” we are merely abdicating our own responsibility, as well as committing the fallacy of appeal to the majority.

I would like my audience to test out every word I say, but to make it a valid test.  Do not reject it merely because it is not the view you started with.  Do not reject it because of a perceived majority that you believe you are part of (see the "appeal to authority fallacy").  Simply test it based on the merits of the argument.  And if you reject one point I make, do not assume this means you can reject all the others (see the "fallacy fallacy").

And finally, before I conclude this section, I would like to mention that at the very heart of Christianity is a belief in infinity - what we call "God" is often spoken of in a number of "omni" words, like "omnipresent" (in all places), "omniscient" (all-knowing), "omnipotent" (all powerful).  And I believe that the Hebrew concept of idolatry was not so much about not physically bowing down to stone figures as it was about solidifying finite concepts and freezing them in stone rather than accepting the mystery of the Sacred.  So I think it would be healthy to remember that, as Paul Knitter (Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary) wrote in "Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian":

When Buddhists who have had something like an Enlightenment experience, or Christians who have stepped into realms of the mystical, try to talk about what’s happening to them, they start stuttering. They discover that though their experience may have been prompted by words, it is always two steps ahead of, or it wiggles away from, any words they may use to describe it.

Later on in the book, Knitter goes on to explain how language can actually prevent us from experiencing the Divine:

[T]he crux of my difficulties has been not in a lack of meaning but in an excess of meaning; not in the possibility of meaning but in the determination of meaning . The image that comes to mind is of a beautiful tropical bird – in a cage. Able to soar, it’s not allowed to.

We kill religious language when we don’t allow it to soar. If that can be a problem for any religion, for Christianity it’s a major problem.

So I ask that my audience try not to cage their religious language, but to consider other possibilities for meaning as I bring reasons to.  I think Neil deGrasse Tyson laid out a plan for what I am trying to do on "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" when he ended the show with this set of scientific principles:

Question Authority. No idea is true just because someone says it is. Think for yourself.

Question Yourself. Don’t believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn’t make it so.

Test Ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well designed test, it’s wrong. Get over it.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads – If you have no evidence, reserve judgement.

Remember you could be wrong.

Next Chapter: The Bible and Communication Theory

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1 Note that "he" is a language of convenience - I do wish inclusive conventions like these were more common^↩

Judaism and the Mystical Christ: Table of Contents, and About

"Judaism and the Mystical Christ" is a blog series (that should really be a book) I have been working on for over a year.  This post will serve as the table of contents for the series, as well as providing an "About" section below, describing the project, how I came to write it, and a Bibliography of sorts.

You will note that I have divided the posts up in, what I think is a good outline.  You will also note that I have divided the project up into two "Books" - at the time of the original publishing of this post, the first "Book" will have been completed, but the second will be ongoing.  I will probably not release anything from the second "Book" until I am far enough into writing it that I can be confident that publishing at a regular pace will not result in overtaking myself.

I will keep this table of contents up to date as I publish more sections.

Table of Contents
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Book I - Mysticism and Judaism

Part I - The Paradigm Shift of Mysticism
Chapter 1: On Paradigm Shifts
Chapter 2: The Bible and Communication Theory
Chapter 3: What is Christian Mysticism?
Chapter 4: Mysticism, Fundamentalism, and Judaism
Chapter 5: Pardes, the Garden of Jewish Biblical Interpretation

Part II - Judaism's Mystical View of Creation
Chapter 6: Creation
Chapter 7: Beginning
Chapter 8: The Image of God
Chapter 9: Let There Be Light
Chapter 10: The Tree of Life
Chapter 11: Concluding Thoughts for "Book I"

Book II - The Mystical Christ

Part III - The Jewish Background of Christ

Part IV - The Mystical Christ in the Gospels

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About the Project
I have put more work into this project than anything else I've written on here, and while I am very proud of it, in many ways I feel like it is just so inadequate.  There is so more more I could have written about, so much I had to summarize, and there are parts I really struggled to write.  

I'd like to explain here how the project happened, and what I'm trying to do here.

In the last few years, I have become a high volume reader, consuming over a hundred books a year.  About a year ago, I happened to be reading, simultaneously, two books that seemed to almost be talking to each other - it was a profound and moving experience for me, especially considering the fact that the two books were coming from separate traditions. Those two books were: "God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism", by Rabbi David Cooper, and "The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic", by Bishop John Shelby Spong. 

I found so many parallels between the mystical view of Judaism that Rabbi Cooper wrote about so beautifully and poetically, and the mysticism that Bishop Spong pointed out within the Gospel of John so magnificently.  My imagination had been captured.  As I read the two books, I had been taking notes - and when I was finished, I decided that for a larger blog project, I wanted to work the notes I had taken on these two books in with a few other things.

The first thing I wanted to do was to try to combine these mystical views with the amazing scientific discoveries of Quantum Physics.  Prior to reading the aforementioned books, I had read a mind-bending book entitled: "The Self-Aware Universe", by theoretical quantum physicist Amit Goswami.  Every chapter of this book was like finding out I lived in the Matrix - it was truly mind blowing.  Goswami combines quantum physics (which he explains very well for a layman like myself, even though it is truly complex stuff that was difficult to grasp) with a masterful knowledge of philosophy and mysticism (he comes from a Hindu background, but seems quite knowledgeable on the mystics of other traditions).  And he even writes about the science and benefits of meditation.

So I decided that I need to read up in three areas for this project: science (specifically searching for books that outlined the intersection between science and religion), Judaism, and mysticism (both Jewish and Christian).  

I would like to note here that I found writing about the science of Quantum Physics to be the hardest part of this project.  I did not want to over explain - I wanted to keep my explanation at a level that any layman could understand.  At the same time, I wanted to be very careful, because I recognize that I am largely ignorant in this area and am merely going off of the word of experts that I have only half-understood.  So my explanations felt, to me, like I was leaving out too much - like I was over-summarizing.  And I felt very inadequate.  But perhaps my readers will find them helpful, and my fears and feelings of inadequacy will be misplaced.

The following list of books I read in preparation for this project will serve as a bibliography of sorts (minus the books I've already mentioned).  I will break this list up into categories of Judaism, Mystical Christianity (and other Christian and Mysticism resources), and Science.  Note that I am sure this is not a "proper" bibliography - I may miss a book or two that I used somewhere in the series, and might list a few that I read but did not use (but which helped me conceptualize for this project, nonetheless).

Before I even go into the Bibliography, I must mention one name not listed: Thomas Merton.  I can't even list a book by him, because he has so influenced my thought that he just seeps through.  I have a document with pages and pages of quotes by him.  He was my first introduction to mysticism, and may have influenced me more than any other author.

And one final note on the "Book" format of the table of contents above - if you happen to be reading this and have connections in the publishing industry, and if you like my writing and think any publishers would too, please do let me know.  I would love to publish a book, but I do not want to self-publish.  I simply do not know where to start when it comes to looking for a publisher.

Bibliography

Judaism
"The Secret Life of God: Discovering the Divine within You" - Rabbi David Aaron

"The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism" - Daniel C. Matt 

"Kabbalah: A Brief Introduction for Christians" - Tamar Frankiel

"The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us" - Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine
This is written by a Christian Professor and a Jewish Professor who have neighboring offices on campus - this is an excellent resource.

"The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality" - Gershom Scholem

"The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India" - Rodger Kamenetz

"Restoring The Jewishness of the Gospel: A Message for Christians Condensed from Messianic Judaism" - David H. Stern Ph. D.

"The Art of Biblical Narrative" - Robert Alter

"Tales and Maxims from the Midrash" - Samuel Rapaport
 
Mystical Christianity (and other Christian and Mysticism resources)
"The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality" - Carl McColman

"The Essential Mystics, Poets, Saints, and Sages: A Wisdom Treasury" - edited by Richard Hooper

"Eternal Life: A New Vision", "Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes", "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?", "Why Christianity Must Change or Die" - Bishop John Shelby Spong

"The First Christmas", "The Last Week" - Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan

"Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally", "Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary" - Marcus J. Borg

"Dynamics of Faith" - Paul Tillich

"The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology" - Jürgen Moltmann
 
"The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church" - Gregory A. Boyd
I did not expect to use this book for this project, but it proved useful anyways.

"Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament", "The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins" - Peter Enns

"The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate" - John H. Walton

"God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship" - Kenton L. Sparks

"Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?: The New Testament Evidence" - James D.G. Dunn

"How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee" - Bart Ehrman

"Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition", "The Practice of Prophetic Imagination" - Walter Brueggemann 

"Christ in Evolution", "The Emergent Christ", "The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love" - Ilia Delio

"The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus" - John Dominic Crossan

"Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life", "Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self" - Richard Rohr

"One Minute Wisdom" - Anthony De Mello

"Did Moses Exist?: The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver" - D.M. Murdock
Another resource I hadn't expected would be useful for this project, but this proved very useful when dealing with the Exodus stories.

Science
"Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe" - Robert Lanza, M.D.

"The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All" - Bernard Haisch

"Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death" - Sam Parnia, M.D.

"At the Hour of Death: A New Look at Evidence for Life After Death" - Erlendur Haraldsson Ph.D and Karlis Osis Ph.D

"Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment" - John Horgan

"From Science to God: A Physicist's Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness" - Peter Russell

"You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter" - Dr. Joe Dispenza

"The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind" - Michio Kaku

"Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives" - Mario Beauregard 

"Quantum Physics and Ultimate Reality: Mystical Writings of Great Physicists" - edited by Michael Green 

"The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life" - Timothy R. Jennings M.D.

"Is There Life After Death?" - Anthony Peake

"Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions About God, Science, and Belief" - John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale
I actually did not use this one in the series, but it really helped me to see the intersection between the Christian faith and science, as well as to understand some of the scientific concepts.

What "The Jew in the Lotus" Can Teach Christianity

I just finished reading a book called "The Jew in the Lotus", which is the true story of a group of Jews - coming from Orthodox, Reformed, and secular, as well as JUBU (Jewish-Buddhist) traditions - who go to visit the Dalai Lama, as told by Jewish poet Rodger Kamenetz.  The Dalai Lama was interested in learning how Judaism survived in exile for so many centuries, considering that Tibetan Buddhism was now in a similar position after their own holocaust and exile at the hands of the Chinese. It is so interesting to see how, throughout the story, the various Jewish figures in the story learn more about their own tradition through the experience - not only because they are now seeing Judaism through each others' eyes, but through Tibetan Buddhist eyes as well. The author, a secular Jew, comes out of the experience with a deep appreciation for the mystical side of Judaism - which he had never known anything about. And it is incredible to see how accurately he pinpoints a diagnosis of the problems with his own religion - he spends much of the book questioning why so many Jews were leaving their faith for Buddhism in the 60's and 70's, and why Judaism has not survived well in America.

One of the more interesting points in the book for me involved the discussion - prior to meeting the Dalai Lama - of what to call him.  The conventional way to address the Dalai Lama is "His Holiness".  And while some of the members of the group were fine with this, others were uncomfortable with this form of address - they were concerned with "being halakhically correct" (conforming to Jewish law).

The group asks Karma Gelek, the Secretary of Cultural and Religious Affairs, what he thought, and he admitted that there were other titles for the Dalai Lama, but said "if you could say His Holiness, that would be the usual way."

Kamenetz writes:

It wasn’t so much words as their historical resonances. How could Karma Gelek ever understand how Jews felt about “His Holiness,” or the association Jews would make immediately with the pope and from there to the long history of persecution, proselytization, inquisition, and martyrdom? How to explain the peculiar tang of a title like kap gun once it got translated to “saving leader”? When Zalman heard it, he immediately asked, “Are there other forms, not weighted with salvation?” To a Jew living in a Christian world, this was a perfectly understandable reference, but in the ears of a Buddhist monk, Zalman’s question must have sounded puzzling.

However, Karma Gelek did notice the various reactions and retreated on the “His Holiness” front, observing quietly, “If you would say rinpoche, nothing’s wrong.” (Rinpoche, which means precious one, is a general honorific for tulkus.)

But it was too late. Now Zalman Schachter was hot on the case, taking up Blu’s cause as his own—driven too by his curiosity and loving to explain Jews, Judaism, and himself to Karma Gelek, “We would like to say a word in honor—it’s not that we don’t want to honor—it’s like saying we understand, we honor you as a source of teaching and blessing for your adherents. Could we say, great teacher?”

By now, Karma Gelek had become totally flexible. “Yes, yes,” he said, barely audibly.

But Lieberman and Sautman objected. “That’s too low.”

So Zalman raised the ante, “How about illustrious teacher?”

Unfortunately, “illustrious teacher” was not a traditional Tibetan phrase. “Jewel of wisdom” was offered by Michael Sautman, but finally Karma Gelek ended the discussion when he observed that all such names were very formal and that “His Holiness usually doesn’t like formal things.”

I took a walk with Yitz Greenberg after the meeting with Karma Gelek broke. We walked for a while in silence. Something about the whole focus on this tiny point bothered me. It reminded me very strongly of what I didn’t much like about religious Judaism, an obsessive, niggling quality. Or as a young woman learning about Jewish culture had told me once, to her, Judaism is an old man saying no. With Jews so divided into factions, and some of the factions so self-preoccupied and self-obsessed with tiny points of practice and law, how could we reach out to other groups?

I knew that in some ways that same intensity about language was also what I relished and delighted in, in both Jewish religion and the Jewish mind. It had delighted me that morning with Moshe’s and Zalman’s midrash. But when the guidance system failed, Jewish verbal intensity seemed to nosedive, spiraling down into smaller and smaller circles.

Rodger Kamenetz

I loved getting this little glimpse into the paradox of Kamentz' struggle, because in so many ways it mirrors my own.  I love exploring the sacred language of the Bible, and discussing the finer points of language and meaning - but this can so often devolve into obsessive and petty arguments that either seem to have absolutely no relevence to life, or seem to ignore how certain points of view are causing real damage to people (the LGBT issue is a perfect example). 

But what's so fascinating about the story is that as it proceeds, the dialogue with the Dalai Lama ends up helping this diverse group of Jews to learn more about their own religion.  Through seeing their religion through the Dalai Lama's eyes, as well as learning about Buddhism, they end up learning more about the beauty of their own tradition then they ever imagined.

Kamenetz writes about how one of the Rabbis - Rabbi Yitz Greenberg - processed this phenomena:

“All religions,” he said, “not just Judaism, are now being placed in a new situation. At first I thought the culture was forcing us. But I’ve come to believe this pluralism is God’s will. Can you learn to propagate your religion without using stereotypes and negative images of the other? If we can’t, all religions will go down the tubes - and good riddance - because we’re a source of hatred and demolition of other people.”

One thing Yitz had done was demolish my own prejudices about Orthodoxy, at least his brand of it. His Judaism was not an old man saying no, but rather an extremely intelligent and very real engagement with contemporary life.

Other, more fundamentalist Jews, as well as Christians and Muslims, resist pluralism as yet another seduction of contemporary life to be shunned. They view themselves as pious keepers of the faith in a world of sinful secularists.

By contrast, Rabbi Greenberg was finding true piety in dialogue. He told me that afternoon at Thekchen Choeling, “Dialogue is an opportunity to learn the uniqueness and power of the other and then see if I can now reframe my own religion to respect that power, to stop using negative reasons why I’m Jewish. It leaves me no choice but to be a Jew for positive reasons.” Pluralism challenges Jews to discard old stereotypes about themselves and about others.

Later on, Kamenetz says that "[h]is experience was that dialogue with other religions could be deeply clarifying of his own."  (This is an experience I share.) 

It is so fascinating to me that the generous spirit of the Dalai Lama - who invited these Jews to come share their "secret" with the Tibetans - is what opened them up to looking at their own religion with fresh eyes - as if seeing it for the first time. 

After their visit, Kamenetz undertook a quest to give "exit interviews" to Jews who had left the faith for Buddhism.  The insights he gains from this are invaluable in many ways.  He found that many of them were frustrated with the rigid adherence to tradition that was so irrelevant to their current context.  Kamenetz writes of how, after the Holocaust, Orthodox Jews became very suspicious of outside culture and in many ways contributed to a protective withdrawal from the world.  They pushed for a very strict, legalistic form of Judaism that claimed to be the only true form of Judaism (sound familiar, Christians?).
Kamenetz relays a fascinating illustration from one of the Rabbis, Zalman Schachter:

“We’re invested in a tradition so we have a continuity. The best people to invest in tradition are conservative. But the best people to spend it are those willing to take a risk.

“Our treasures - what a fantastic bank account we have grown. The past and the tradition have a vote but can’t have a veto, because we are in unprecedented conditions. Now there’s an understanding emerging that we are an organic part of all species, that religions are the organs of humanity.”

Later, he writes:

Jewish Buddhists felt that the bank account of Judaism had been empty for them when they came to make a withdrawal, whereas they had found real spiritual wealth in Buddhism.

When Kamenetz conducted his "exit interviews", one of the things he found was that most often, they'd never even heard of the teachings of Kabbalah (a mystical tradition of Judaism), which interestingly enough seemed to be the area that the Dalai Lama was most interested in.  Kamenetz speaks of mysticism being a "back door" that was kept secret in Judaism, having been viewed negatively by the status quo of Judaism.  There was a scorn towards Kabbalah because it rejected a literalistic and legalistic attitude towards their scriptures and as a result was seen as very eccentric (hmm, that sounds so familiar to me...).  Meanwhile for Buddhism, mysticism was their front entrance.  Kamenetz writes of the result for these Jews who had left their background for Buddhism:

With their own esoteric teachings inaccessible, most JUBUs grew up with a Judaism heavy on ethnic pride, obsessive about preserving itself, about maintaining Jewish identity at all costs. And Jewish pride, Jewish chauvinism, Jewish particularism - the idea that we are special, a chosen people - seems to contradict the very universalistic prophetic messages Judaism also teaches. Perhaps they wouldn’t put it this way, but if examined closely, it appears that some JUBUs left Judaism because of their Jewish ideals.

On the other side of this problem, Kamenetz sees that "the Reform Jewish strategy pretty much succeeded in assimilating Jews into American life. When JUBUs spoke against Jewish particularism, one could feel that Reform Judaism had succeeded all too well. An ethical ideal of universal justice, freed from the particulars of ritual, left many Jews free to leave the fold. We could be secular, or Buddhist, and still feel connected to these universal values."
In one particular exit interview, Thubten Chodron said, regarding "the Old Testament God", that she "didn’t like his personality. He was vengeful, he had qualities I wouldn’t want to develop, that my parents taught me were wrong. Harming others because they harm the people that you like. Smiting others because they criticize you or worship somebody else. When you’re a kid on the playground, because somebody plays with somebody else, that doesn’t give you the reason to jump in and assault. This kind of jealous, vengeful God - I can’t worship that. I can’t see that as holy, I don’t want to become like that.”

Kamenetz says:

I tried to suggest that “people evolve different conceptions of God” and wondered if “the God and Judaism you rejected is one most Jews would reject also, if it isn’t a very unsophisticated child’s view of Judaism. As we mature, we realize that concepts of God as father, king, or ruler are baby steps toward some greater understanding.”

Chodron answered, “Then they should teach that to people. If there are wider notions of God, that’s what they should teach to the children - not that God is up there watching you and you be good or you’ll get punished.”

Kamenetz diagnoses the problems of his own religion with an ingenious precision, and his diagnosis sounds so similar to the problems I see in Christianity today:

I began to suspect that Jewish identity, as it has evolved in the West today, could be a real barrier to encountering the depths of Judaism. In other words, being Jewish could keep you from being a Jew.

[...]

But after talking to Pemo, Chodron, and Alex Berzin, I was also convinced there was a more fundamental problem: a defensive attitude. Young Jews growing up in America are intellectually curious and they demand a more open-minded approach to spirituality. The questions about God that Chodron had asked should have been answered - I gathered that instead they were ignored or suppressed.

The challenge that the Dalai Lama offered these visiting Jews was to make Judaism more beneficial instead of asking Jews to hold on to tradition out of guilt. Kamenetz writes:

One of the members of the party - Professor Nathan Katz - stated the lesson the Dalai Lama had taught them in terms of communicating the beauty the Jewish traditions had to offer, rather than teaching their people to be on guard all the time - "If you have nothing to offer them, there’s no sense holding on to them. And if you have something to offer them, there’s no reason for them to leave."

In today's religious climate in the West - with millions of the younger generation leaving the church (this has been dubbed the "rise of the nones" - I've written about this here and here, and see this recent article from the Pew Research Center), and with the pluralism that cannot be hid from in the face of the internet age - Christianity could learn much from this story. I highly recommend this book to anyone of any religious background - it is about finding yourself through open and generous dialogue, and that is an important lesson to learn.