On Peaceful Unity of Faith

This book [available as a free .pdf online from that link] by Nicholas of Cusa is, as with his other work I recently discovered, remarkably ahead of its time for what it is - what it is being a holistic statement of Christocentric religious universalism. In a series of dialogues between the Word of God and Saints Peter & Paul on the explaining side & various representatives of the nations on the questioning side, we start by exploring the conceptual foundations of what we philosophically and/or religiously consider "wisdom" to be. Cusa defines it as divine oneness, which is the foundation for his next argument for the perfect simple unity of the Trinity, despite it seeming such a bizarre doctrine to people who have grown up in other faiths. Next the conversation turns to Christology, building on conceptions of divinity and common understandings of human nature to sketch a cosmic anatomy of the Son of God that, while far from intuitive, is straightforward enough to grasp, orthodox enough to grow into, and compelling to ponder.

   I won't lie, I was hoping for more interfaith dialogue from this book.* It's not a long read by any measure but I would have happily spent twice as long reading it should there have been considerations of the Indian & Chinese religions - but alas we are left with solely the Abrahamic trio. I suppose Germany in the mid-1400's is quite a way away from the heartlands of Hindu or Buddhist worshippers. Despite this quibble I found this a very engaging and readable text, and though it is nowhere near sufficient as a total apologetic of Christ over the limited fragments of truth contained [spermatikos logos innit] in other religious traditions it does still provide some very deft philosophical ripostes for the two biggest stumbling blocks in communicating intellectually the fabric of Christianity to those of the other Abrahamic faiths.

* Beyond mere apologetic dialogue I was half-expecting it to be in & of itself an attempt to sketch the metaphysical & theological outlines of all religions brought together in peaceful unity, á la Blake's All Religions Are One.

Heresy

This book by Catherine Nixey declares in its subtitle to be a critical survey of "Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God" - so I naturally presumed it would be a pull-no-punches walkthrough of other claimants to Israel's Messiahship and the means by which these wannabes were variably venerated, ignored, followed, killed, arguably successful, forgotten or deliberately buried, etc. and to what extent this groupage of persons' lives undermine the uniqueness or legitimacy of the Christian claim.

   However - though it still pulls no punches, this book does virtually nothing to destabilise the historical or theological tenets of Christianity, and instead, in a manner wholly unsurprising* resorts to exploring the moral and sociopolitical muddiness of Christianity in its earliest centuries. As with the birth of any new religion, those earliest centuries of Christianity, between the floodgate-opening of Pentecost and the diversity-drawbridge-raising of the Council of Nicaea, saw an immense flourishing of diverse and often contradictory flavours of Christian life and doctrine.** This is great for growth but not so good for coherence. With the writings of the Church Fathers in the first centuries CE forming a loose but authoritative foundation for theology, alongside the formation of the New Testament canon, Christianity as a unified body of people and thought began to shave off its rougher, weirder, more questionable or esoteric edges; and once Christianity was established as the official religion of the Roman Empire any remaining hints of those edges were quietly airbrushed out of history by deliberate ignorance or overt suppression (burning of books, excommunication or in rarer cases execution of heretics, etc) and the proto-Catholic Church was born in full shape. Certain chapters of this book are incredibly interesting - I for one had no idea that there was so much early Christian literature about the magical powers of Mary's vagina, or that part of the reason extra-biblical historical sources about Jesus are so scant is that most of the documents that mention him mention him not as a robust historical figure but as a magician of rumoured great power (and thus such sources aren't taken seriously by historians) - but I feel a little undersold on the promised premise. This book did literally nothing to shake or even slightly perturb my faith; it has no clear arguments or evidence against the historical claims and theological doctrines of Christianity. Instead it sits back and points at the authoritarianism of the faith in its earliest centuries, with the faithful expected to buy into full dogmatic conformity with Only The Right Kind of Apostle and allow everything else to be gently forgotten or violently destroyed and never spoken of again: it is not a critique of Christian faith or the person of Jesus, it is a critique of the historical and sociopolitical relationship between truth and power, and as such says nothing remotely damaging to the believer who is broadly smart enough to be able to tell the difference between saying "the Church in the past did dodgy stuff!" and "the Church is wrong about serious things!"

   Worth a read I suppose if you're interested in the historical and sociopolitical influences on the development of religion, but if you're a Christian considering reading this looking to be challenged you won't be, and if you're an atheist considering reading this to bolster your arsenal of tools to undermine Christian faith - unless all the Christians you know are remarkably spiritually immature and bad at critical thinking, this probably will be quite a disappointing resource.

* To people who have read about it in any significant detail, or who follow YouTube channels like Let's Talk Religion or Religion for Breakfast.

** As I noted in my post about Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, interestingly the rate of denominational proliferation since the onset of the Protestant Reformation is pushing up the internal diversity of Christianity to levels that may be starting to come close to those of the earliest centuries before the Cohesion Enforcement - certainly there are groups of people who consider themselves Christian that a mainstream Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant wouldn't consider Christian, but the Church being divided as it is to what authority do we turn to decide who "counts"? Is it time for another ecumenical council?

Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy

This book by Orthodox pastor Andrew S. Damick is, essentially, a more-or-less [as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge] comprehensive survey of Every Christian Denomination And Why They're Not As Correct As Mine [i.e. Orthodoxy]. Instead of cherry-pickingly flattening every different interpretation of Christianity to form a new questionably-coherent picture of orthodox faith as some have, Damick is serious in his assertion that the Orthodox Church is the sole inheritor of an unbroken apostolic succession all the way back to Pentecost and therefore has the best claim today of being the most Christian Christianity out there. Obviously, such a project would lend itself quite naturally to spiritual pride & factionalism, but in my opinion Damick approaches the task with a humility & a generosity of understanding that, while far from ecumenical in scope, lays foundations for conversation such that ecumenical projects in the future might learn about & respect other traditions better.*

   The book's contents, thus, are as follows:

• introduction: brief reflections on the nature/purpose of religious truth.
• Orthodoxy: a portrait of the Orthodox Christian faith - we get the essential non-negotiable doctrines laid out in a mere two pages. This is followed by a listing of all the major heresies, the majority of which were stamped out [or at least argued into ridiculousness] in the earliest centuries of Church history.
• Roman Catholicism: an explanation of the Schism & the differences that both led up to it & developed after it, then going on to discuss the most major of these - those relating to the Pope, the sacraments, the nature of salvation, and the filioque.
• Protestantism: starting with a dissection of the five solas which emerged in the Reformation & the new traditions that sprang up around them - Lutheranism, the Reformed churches, Anglicanism [and its baby Methodism] - but oh no, this revolution won't stop! - as the Magisterial Reformation gave way to the Radical, ecclesiology itself was deconstructed & reimagined, as new denominations continued to proliferate - Anabaptists & Baptists, Moravians, Puritans [including my homefolk Quakers, who don't get nearly enough discussion in here] etc - flippin' 'eck it still won't stop, we get past The Great Awakening & Protestantism is continuing to question itself into fragments along lines of individualistic experiential faith, with this new Evangelical thrust developing theologies like restorationism, adventism, dispensationalism, etc - all the way up into the present & the foreseeable future.
• Pentecostalism: many would lump this in with the rest of Protestantism [even though it's already had three chapters to itself, greedy] but Damick makes a pretty solid case that it's different enough to constitute a whole new fourth paradigm of Christian expression - from its origins in the Holiness movement to its global reach as a charismatic denomination.
• Non-mainstream Christians: i.e. the kind of denominations that most other Christians agree don't count as actual Christians because they're so weird - for a few examples the Unitarian Universalists, Christian Science, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, etc.
• Non-Christian religions: this is easily the weakest chapter of the book - Damick is in his element discussing theological heterodoxies within the umbrella of Christ but his perfunctory surveying here leaves a lot to be desired - Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism & Scientology all only get three pages each [atheism is relegated to an appendix] - but then I suppose this book never claimed to be a full guide to world faiths, rather an apologetic project for Orthodoxy.
• Concluding remarks: a very reasonable & Christlike consideration of how an Orthodox Christian should relate to anyone from any other faith.

   I do consider myself an orthodox Christian, and following reading this book I am highly amenable to Orthodox Christianity - I checked Google Maps to find my nearest such church & it's half an hour down the motorway, which rules out a weekly shuttle as I don't drive, so however much theological unlearning I've been able to do with Father Damick's help I will still be worshipping as a Protestant** for the foreseeable future. This book is one I would recommend as a resource to help those confused about Christianity's internal diversity navigate the complex tangles of difference; just don't use it as such if you don't want whoever you're getting to read it to find Orthodoxy the most compelling expression of the faith.

* Although within the text itself Damick only uses the phrase thrice, the general thrust of potential spermatikos logos is littered throughout - he discusses both all heterodox Christianities as well as other religions not as if they were false, but as if they were incomplete. Very helpful little clarificatory nudge there.

** I'm a member of an Anglican parachurch community as well as a regular attender at both an FIEC church & Quaker meetings. Put me in a box.

the Corpus Hermeticum

This book is one I've read before and thus blogged about before, see prior post - although this text is very easily available for free online, I've not included links either there or here as maintaining an air of mystery seems key for me in these kinds of cryptic ancient documents. I can't really say I got much new out of it on a second reading - it still feels like wisdom farting in your face for fun. To discern anything meaningful from these writings would either take a lifetime of arcane study or an unthought-out kneejerk series of seemingly-brilliant hunches, neither of which I really have time for. As lurid and enjoyable as the Corpus Hermeticum is, I really don't think it has, or arguably has ever had, really that much to offer philosophy, science, or faith. So, yeh. Don't take my word for it - give it a google and read the .pdf of the thing. It will confuse you and illuminate you in equal measure, ultimately leading nowhere special.

the Book of Enoch

This book* - or probably more accurately collection of books - is typically referred to by scholars of ancient texts as 'the Book of Enoch', given the Judaic tradition that has followed them for centuries despite spurious archaeological evidence. Though most archaeological evidence referring to specific people is probably spurious going that far back.

   The claim is that this is a collection of texts recorded by Noah's (and therefore Abraham's, and therefore David's, and therefore Jesus's, etc) ancestor Enoch - during the period of post-exile-from-Eden but pre-Flood strangeness upon the Earth. And strange it is. I won't even try to give a close summary as there is a great deal happening in these chapters and if you're intrigued in the slightest I recommend going to the link above and reading the whole thing for free; but I will give a few flappy hints. Enoch is approached by renegade angels who have been teaching dark arts like astronomy and metalworking to humans; they ask him to help defend against the wrath of the Lord who wants to punish them for rebelling against him. Enoch sides with God. The rest of the (really quite longish) book is a series of spiralling visions where Enoch is shown both earthly and heavenly realms in a past and/or future sense; the metaphors are so dense it's hard to tell really what's going on. There is a section later in the book where several passages of metaphor do seem to prophecy events of the Hebrew Old Testament, using animals as stand-ins for the characters - but I don't know enough about Judaic tradition to confirm this.

   What I can say for certain is that the vast majority of Christians I know from my circles have never heard of this book, let alone would be able to interpret it properly. The text only survives because it was preserved in proto-semitic communities in Ethiopia well before 1000 BCE. So whatever else we might want to think, this is a very old text: and it warrants scholarly and prayerful interpretation. I'm still on the fence myself as to whether I consider it scripture - a big part of me keeps screaming "of course it can't be scripture, look how weird some of it is!" and then the other part of me keeps replying, "um, hello? Ezekiel? Revelation?"

   So.... yeh. This is an ancient text worth thinking about, for whatever it may turn out to be.

* There's a bunch of translations out there on the web and I want you to be on the same page as me reading-wise, so I've specifically linked the Andy McCracken translation above, stored in my own Google Drive as I know the sites that host these kinds of documents can often be somewhat temperamental.

the Book of Chuang Tzu

This book, along with the Tao Te Ching, is one of the foundational texts of the ancient Chinese religion/philosophy called Taoism; traditionally credited to Chuang Tzu*, though in actuality he is unlikely to have written more than the first seven chapters of its thirty-three.

   When I read Lao Tzu's work I reflected that I could no longer in the spirit of intellectual honesty consider myself anymore only a Christian - but that I must be some kind of Taoist as well: and on reading Chuang Tzu's philosophy now too, I wholeheartedly embrace this polyreligious side to my own life and mind. The work presented in this book is utterly unlike any philosophical system or idealized religion anywhere else - it performs its functions through extended usage of parable, often humourous** and somewhat absurd, never less than thrillingly thought-provoking. Many of his little stories revolve around natural phenomena and processes and how they relate to the Tao; many are to do with governance or management and the follies of humanity in regard to these; quite a few are simply sideways (generous but still) jabs at Confucianism, which are among the most radical in their philosophical position. I will make no bones about the fact that this book is one I am completely unequipped to be able to summarize or even overview to any degree that really does it justice - I can only say that this text has stuck in my brain and fundamentally altered my perceptive attitudinal modes of being in ways that very few other things have, perhaps nothing other than the Bible itself. Which is odd, considering that while it has a great deal to imply about the nature of faith, goodness, transcendence, etc - Chuang Tzu says virtually nothing about what Western thought would call God. Instead focus is given to the lived experience of humans as creatures, in their quest for meaning and purpose, failing to find it anywhere they do not surrender themselves to the overriding principles of the Tao - and though "wu wei"*** is a core concept in the work, much of what the thinkers who composed this book have to say is actually of a deep and profound practicality in reference to activity, thought and spirituality.

   I absolutely loved this book. It challenged me throughout, while also liberating me into a bigger sensitivity toward the world and its contents and contradictions. It made me think, made me laugh, made me aware of my smallness as well as my potentialities - all the while being nothing less than a superbly well-written series of supremely idiosyncratic anecdotal little happenings, ponderings, reflections and recollections. If you are the least bit interested in Chinese history and culture, in philosophy or spirituality more generally - I cannot recommend this book enough. Chuang Tzu may not have written the whole thing but his spirit pervades it, and in truth he has become one of my few favourite thinkers from across all time and space.

* For an excellent all-age accessible introduction to this dynamic historic personality, check out this delightfully and appropriately idiosyncratic Chinese (with English subtitles fortunately) cartoon series documenting his life, work and influence.

** I shit you not, in places it is actually hilarious. You'd never laugh this much reading, say, the Talmud, were you to approach them even with the same spirit of openness.

*** Wu wei means "actionless action", "non-action" or something like that - it's a complex phrase to translate, but essentially means not striving toward a pre-determined goal, instead merely being content to follow the natural flow of events and things as they are in themselves, and acting only when spontaneous context compels you to act freely. I think, anyway. If you're a Taoist sage reading this and want to correct me please do so in the comments, though given the inherent notion within the Tao of not contending, I recognize you are unlikely to do so.

the Holy Bible

This book* is, you probably need no explanation, the foundational Scripture of Christianity, the world's biggest (and my primary) religion. It is the most widely-translated and best-selling book in human history. I haven't listed an author for this book for three main reasons:

1. It's not "a book" so much as sixty-six texts, some a page long, others spanning large chunks, all organised together into what is more like a library
2. Many of the texts in the book are either anonymously composed or their authorship (as attested by Judeo-Christian tradition) is contested by scholarship
3. As a Christian it is my belief that the Bible is the divinely-inspired word of God, but it feels odd to list my Creator as a mere author

   What's it all about then? In a nutshell, God's liberation of humanity. In less-of-a-nutshell though, I will try to give a succinct and satisfying summary of the overarching narrative found in this book. Hold onto your hats, this is going to be a long paragraph. You probably know the rough shape of how it starts - "in the beginning" God creates the universe, including humanity. The first humans, Adam and Eve, live in total harmony with God, each other, and the world; that is, until a serpent persuades them to do the one thing they have been told they cannot do - eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - and in punishment they are pushed out into a world that now suffers, as they do. They have children and populate the Earth, etc. The next big things that happen are that God, in frustration at the evil humanity is perpetrating, decides to wipe out humankind with a flood - survived only by Noah and his family, and two of every animal to repopulate the wild; next is again humanity acting out of a sense of cosmic superiority and trying to build a tower to Heaven, which results in God scattering them into a whole host of differing nations and languages. Then we meet a man called Abraham, to whom God promises land, innumerable descendants, and great blessings: so we follow him for a bit, then his son Isaac, then Isaac's son Jacob, who meets and literally wrestles with God and is thus renamed Israel (and yes, I did hear the Bible-novices among you just go "ohhh!"). Jacob's dozen sons settle in Egypt, where they multiply to such an extent that they are made slaves by the Egyptian state. With the help of God sending ten plagues on the Egyptians, a man called Moses liberates the Israelites from slavery and leads them into the wilderness on their journey to the land promised to Abraham: along the way, God legislates a system of laws for them, including the Ten Commandments (which I'm assuming you've heard of) alongside a meticulous programme for appropriate sacrifices and such. Moses dies, but under the leadership of his second, a man called Joshua, the Israelites conquer and settle the promised land. Then things fall apart a bit. Everyone starts eroding in their respect for God's law, and even under the stewardship of a string of prophetic/military leaders called judges, they rebel against it again and again. Eventually the Israelites decide they want a king to lead them, like the other nations; God says this isn't a great idea but nevertheless concedes, but (aside from a short but high-impact Golden Age under the reigns of David, who wrote a great number of poems about the God-ward life, and wise thinker Solomon, who built the temple) the Israelites, just as under the judges, fall into cyclical patterns of rebellion and repentance - with even their kings becoming [a-bit-more-than]-occasional idolaters, tyrants and so on. To nudge Israel back onto the right track, God starts sending prophets - some, like the early Elijah, to confront ungodly kings directly; others like the later Ezekiel and Jeremiah to mourn the godlessness of Israel and expound messages of redemptive hope. In the prophets we read of God's judgement against the nations surrounding Israel as well as against Israel herself - in fact, several of the prophets foretold that Israel would be colonized by the Babylonians and Assyrians, which she was.** Prophets like Daniel continued their work of realizing God's plans for them even during this period of exile; and we begin to see the emergence within God's speeches the specific promise of a messiah, a redeemer, who would wholly and totally liberate Israel from sin and death. Eventually the Israelites are allowed to return home and rebuild their temple, and this more-or-less concludes the Jewish section of the Bible, known in Christianity as the Old Testament - called such because here comes the New Testament. This next (much shorter) Christian section of the Bible begins with the coming in Bethlehem of a man called Jesus, whose birth had been promised to a woman named Mary, a faithful virgin. Jesus grows up and becomes a radical peripatetic rabbi - accruing an enormous number of followers (a core twelve hand-picked by him at the start of his ministry and many more just following him as he goes along because they were intrigued and liberated by what he had to say), healing people, casting out demons, telling parables, pissing off the religious authorities, etc. In a bizarre twist, despite their devotion to him, Jesus's followers didn't really understand who he was - that is to say, the messiah promised in the prophets; especially in the prophetic writings of Isaiah, who had foretold that Israel's messiah would be misunderstood and rejected by them, and ultimately killed. Next, you guessed it - Jesus is killed: betrayed by one of his disciples, taken before the religious and political leaders (at this time in Israel's history it was a Roman colony) and condemned to crucifixion. However our story continues; three days after his death several female followers of Jesus find his tomb empty, and sure enough he then reappears, resurrected from the dead, to his disciples - with the express intent of assuring their conviction that yes he was and eternally is the messiah, and sin has been defeated, and the disciples are to kick-start the task of bringing this good news to the world. Jesus ascends into heaven and the disciples go about their God-given task, only to be heavily persecuted by the Jewish religious authorities and met with ridicule by the predominant Hellenistic culture surrounding Israel. A member of the suppressive class, a man who came to be known as Paul, was challenged by a vision of Jesus, and became a co-worker with the disciples in spreading the good news of Jesus's death and resurrection. Most of the rest of the New Testament is letters written by Paul and other disciples like Peter to various churches around the Roman Empire, exhorting them to continue the work of spreading the good news and developing the huge theological points implied by Jesus's teaching, life, death, and undeath. Finally we close off the whole thing with an apocalyptic series of visions revealed to Jesus's disciple John about the consummation of God's plans for world history.

   I hope that was enough of an introductory overview. Whether you're an ardent Christian fundamentalist who thinks everything I've just talked about is the utterly-literally-true history of our world, or a hardcore skeptic who thinks some (or quite a lot maybe) of it is little more than fanciful myth; it cannot be denied that in the Bible is a wealth of wisdom and historical reflection that can deepen and sharpen our hearts and minds. Reading the Bible is ideally an inherently radical act of self-emptying submission to the truth of God, in our efforts to make sense of its narratives and teachings.

   So, there's an excellent Christian quote by I-forget-whom; "one should visit many good books, but live in the Bible," and I hold to this as an approach to literature. I read parts of the Bible as a regular part of both my devotional life in relationship with God and my philosophical life in all my seeking for a satisfyingly-developed and coherent worldview. The reason I'm doing a post about it now is that I finished reading it cover-to-cover - and while throughout my life I've probably read most of the Bible multiple times or at least once, this was the first time I've worked through the whole thing as a singular entity.

   Would I recommend this book then, verily the book of books? Yes, cautiously, with caveats. It is a complicated library, that spans a narrative of over two-thousand years, and many parts are pretty impenetrable even to people who have devoted their entire lives to studying them; to get the most out of the Bible it is probably recommended (certainly is by me) that you read it alongside commentary, theology and doxology.*** And while I do believe that engaging with the Bible can, in the hopeful light of the Holy Spirit, lead one into a real meaningful relationship with our God - it has to be approached with a certain degree of humility and open-mindedness; as a non-believer who is diving in to try to find justificatory ammunition in their efforts to repudiate Christianity will likely be able to find a lot in there for their purposes, but this would be a misuse/misunderstanding of the text.**** This book is neither a moral rulebook nor a philosophical treatise on reality - it is primarily an account of God's relationship with humanity through the specific lens of ancient Israel, coming to its climax in the life and person of Jesus, who was God incarnate. Come to the Bible with an expectancy that God will meet you halfway and testify to you about Himself, breaking into your heart with liberating conviction, and you're on the right track.

* Over 150 translations of the Bible are available for free from that link. The version I finished was the New King James Version, though for the majority of my reading I tend to use either the English Standard Version or the New Living Translation; as I'm not familiar enough with the breadth of versions out there I can't make any solid recommendations as to exactly what would be the best fit for you, so try out a variety, but for newcomers who have never read the Bible and would like something both accessible and accurate to the ancient texts from which our modern forms are translated, I'd go with the New International Version.

** A quick note on "prophets" - the contemporary understanding of this term has been boiled down to a bastardisation that merely conveys predictions about the future, in a similar kind of category to "seer" or even "wizard". But in the biblical sense, a prophet is someone with a particularly close relationship to God who seeks to share this relationship with those around them by both denouncing the godlessness of others' lives and pointing to the hopes of redemption and true betterness when people return to right relation with God; visions of the future are merely the means by which God's promises and goodness are mediated from eternity into humankind's experience of time.

*** For starters, though there are many theological and doxological texts that I've reviewed for this blog, I wouldn't highlight any one book as I don't know how or where you're going to start your Bible journey - but this YouTube channel, the Bible Project, has some truly fantastic resources for getting to grips with particular books and concepts.

**** Any problems, intellectual or moral or otherwise, that you have with either the Bible or Christianity, are too wide-ranging for me to address here - but if you have a bone to pick do so in the comments and I'll do my best to reply with honesty and humility.

the Lost Art of Scripture

This magisterial tome by Karen Armstrong is to date the best book on comparative religion I've read so far in my life. It's a truly stupendous work of holistic scholarship. She works through the full historical span of recorded religious writings, built out of preexisting oral traditions for millennia already - Israel, India, and China are the big three foci throughout, with all major world religions given ample coverage during the thematically roving chapters.

   The book is prefaced by a couple of quotes from William Blake that really set the tone for the rest of its argument: one hears his decried notions that "all religions are one" resonate through the Poetic Genius of all the texts we might consider Scripture today, so eloquently and rich in detail are the introductions Armstrong makes with each distinct faith. Jainism and the roots of the polycultural faith commonly banner-termed Hinduism are examined with as much diligence as the Hebrew canon, including the Talmudic midrash that later emerged as the preeminent focus of Jewish scripture; or the traditions of China, where Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist ideals grow up around each other and inter-pollinate sociologically across vast areas of human population over time - we witness the birth of Christianity with its own new emergent canon building in the already established edificies of Hebraic tradition; and latterly Islam also as Abraham's God bears angelic witness in an altogether different but ultimately similarly upbuilding revelations to the offspring of Hagar - Isaac's half-brother Ishmael, whose visitation in the presumed descendancy of the Prophet Muhammad of him bears claim to God's faithfulness even to those overlooked by established canonical traditions - Armstrong's framing all this as it unfurls over time has radically influenced my perception of other faiths compared to my own: I cannot but proudly assert that I understand any other religion enough to dismiss its claims entirely unless I put the effort into reading their scripture, observing their rituals and obediences and examining my own psychological and spiritual states as I take part in such things; how can you really know what's on the other side of a door if you won't even approach the doors you start seeing? Scripture is important because it records truths that are all too brilliantly human, but that exist as Truer than reality itself at certain points of belief - the maintenance of religion is not the purpose of any scripture, awakening people to better more peaceable states of collective mind is, through reason, tradition, and the cultivation of virtue. Forging peace between Muslims and Hindus was the sole reason for Sikhism's founding; how sad that as other faiths frictions of extremism do persist in the world... such we may always have to have with us to whatever extent; all the rest of us can do is try to be different and hope that goodness will more or less prevail. Which it does so the more for our faithful participation in Reality as it is. That's all any religion that works really is or does at the end of the day. The ancients knew this - Moses and Chuang Zhu would have seen eye-to-eye on far more than modern, compartmentalized intellects might presume - in any case I'm sure they would have found plenty of generousity to praise each other in the sight of Heaven as they understood it, as compared perhaps to the disinterested, polarized happenstance as much in the world today how there seem to be so many insurmountable obstacles in the way of what we might call Religious Belief - or even let alone Fervour! - I'm rambling. This risks turning into an unwarranted and largely speculative Holistic Essay, so for sake of possible Inquisitorial readership on this blog I'm going to cut myself short here and just end by saying that her chapter on ineffability is the best on the subject I've read outside of the Cloud.

   Highly recommended reading for agnostics or indifferents who may be at all interested in an unbiased, pretty solidly comprehensive guide to the core textual living examples of so-called Holy texts - and it's a diverse bunch but there is so much that unites them in similitude at the same time; a fact that will resonate with anyone of any faith or none from reading Armstrong is that you will develop a much deeper appreciation for the plain facts of how much good, more or less, religious-originating values and ethics still hold fundamentally impressive sway on the vast majority of people in ways we don't perceive - perhaps we don't care to? But it's there, it's a real part of our world and the beyondness past what we know and cannot know. I'm saying all of this as a born-again Christian, without denominational affiliation though I technically do belong to an Anglican monastic community, but my home church situation got complicated and I have been congregationally homeless for over a year. I've got used to it and I'm not sure how spiritually healthy that is long-term, but it'll take a while to get over what happened at and with The Crowded House. That said, I'm steering a pretty orthodox path in my own way, I'd like to think. Even though I am also now a Taoist with possibly a smidge of Sufi too... God, give me wisdom and slowness as I explore the richness and variety of other religions for a spell. Well, okay, for a novel. Or seven. 

The Path

This book by Christine Gross-Loh and Michaell Puett is an unacademic, but unflinching in its acerbic accuracy of phrasal gutpunching to the Western mind; short introduction to the range and content of (an initially-seeming-somewhat-disingenuous but explored with real nuance) ancient Chinese philosophies.

   As readers of this blog will know, while my life is still in Christ Jesus the Tao has helped me walk with God through His crazy-at-times world - and there is a notable lack of talk of God, especially in the kind of personal terms monotheists often attribute to They Who Transcend All Thought - which is to say, this can be safely read by any agnostic on any fence and it will probably help you out in some form or other. We're walked through the as-if ritualization practices of Confucian living; the staunch disciplines and Chuang Zhi and the raw spontaneous whimsy of Lao Tzu clashing in midair as arguments around the Tao fail eternally to Pin it Down; Mencius helps us simplify anxiety-causing choices we have to make in the modern world; while Xunzi keeps the pattern of ethical humanity very much at the core of everyday living. There is a lot in here that a lot of people would find extremely salubrious to their mental health if they drank it in and tried to get it, not by striving to fully understand; but by submitting in ignorance to the mysterious nature of Nature and Humanity itself as we shamble about beneath the Heavens - and obeying. It is not idolatry to comply with ancient wisdoms about how our own bodies and minds work. And if it is, then that might be a jealously too far for whatever that god is - because the God I believe in made Everything for a Reason, and the Tao wouldn't be floating about in the real-spacetime arcane umbra without some kind of purpose.

   The book's subtitle; a new way to think about everything - one could, being generously cynical, argue is the case for pretty much any book assuming it has contents that would seriously affect the contents of the heads of its readers. For me it has not fundamentally altered my worldview - only helped flesh out the carpet a bit better, and vaguely try to grab snatched memories of whatever the wallpaper in Purgatory looked like.

the Corpus Hermeticum

This book, for which I'm not going to provide a link because the whole point of alchemy is to send unexpecting overcurious readers down their own rabbit-holes and where would the fun of that be if I just gave you it that easily?* is probably the foundational text, or at least one of the key foundational texts, for the Western Hermetic tradition by which a true alchemical practice is derived. It takes the shape of a conversation between Hermes and Thoth, on a range of matters - but dealing in considerable depth the natures of Cosmos, Mind, Being, God and Goodness; the language is potently symbolic but not such that it, I don't think anyway, obscures the underlying metaphysical things it is trying to talk about - though the very nature of alchemy means that what I have derived from the text might not necessarily be what any other reader might clearly be able to infer from the words alone; as such, I would not recommend this text with much gusto - despite feeling personally that it has an abundance of Truth contained therein - because for that truth to shine through in a proper way to the Imaginations of its readers they must have been prepared through the cosmic trip of their own life-inner-journeys - but if you have, as I was, been led to the discovery of this text through your own questings, then read it with generous discernment - as I sense this far down the rabbit-hole things do start getting strange, and those who read out of an intellectual voracity and a desire to Fully Comprehend risk dragging their minds and souls into the truly abstract and/or occult which are less than life-giving; but if you have been led here out of a humble expectancy, spiritual curiousity and openness - it may very likely have much of merit to say, but let me say here - nothing which has not been said elsewhere, in many forms and occasions, as the true & proper ground of any alchemical "fact" can only be known exactly as and where it is - which may well be just about everywhere, and if you do not already see that then reading a text like this might not necessarily help you do so, instead just furnishing the strangeness of your mind-soul's quest-loot with an additional bunglage to its burden, which will only be shed when you properly grasp what it's about. God is not gnosis. Nor is gnosis necessary for salvation: only Christ - but the Gnosis spoken about in this text, that is the gnosis of, and in, for and through such things as the mind-soul's Life in Jesus-God; is a real thing impossible to lose when it is found, for it is the truest surest ground of a mind-soul that can be known, felt or said to exist - all of which is to say, be honest in your self-examinations, and quest carefully.

* That said, you do have my assurance that PDFs of it are available online, or it in book form. I read the translation by G.R.S. Mead, if you're interested.

the Gospel of Judas

This book is a non-canonical early work of Christian literature, that some, probably most Christians may like to call "Gnostic" or its close cousin term "heretical"; but I'd rather lump under the generous benefit-of-the-doubt term "fanfic" - if for naught else then to free up myself to do a post on it without getting a new arsehole ripped for me by Protestant gate-keepers of Orthodoxy in the comments, not that these generally exist, as nobody reads this blog. Dear reader - if I'm talking to you, yes, this is your fault; the fact that Christians haven't been crowding the feedbacks on my slowly entropizing rabbit-hole trip down the weirder darker forgotten corners of Christian thinking, and therefore peer-pressuring me back into conformity, has literally been the enabling factor driving me to read ever more 'riskier' shit from aforementioned weirder & darker corners. Only joking, but not really.
   Anyway, I think as a text this is a really interesting piece of literature - it has a strange section with apocalyptic symbolism and stuff, and some nice background conversations between Jesus and Judas vaguely similar to what we see in the perhaps comparable fanfic of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ - though there are levels of poetic poignancy to this text particularly that do provoke some interesting thoughts on the dynamics amongst the disciples in the gospel story, and I personally didn't find it particularly at all hard to read while imagining whoever wrote it to be a properly well-intentioned and orthodox-doctrine-holding Christian of the early Church, but maybe you'll disagree. The only way you'll never know is if you refuse to read it because it's not in the Bible - which is the given excuse I've heard most evangelicals from my upbringing background give in reference to any "fanfic" text or similar like this; which is pretty weird when you think about it, given that they wouldn't bat an eyelid at a text like this, even though it in my opinion takes far greater artistic liberties with Christian doctrinal elements than, say, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, if one was to presume that that was also fanfic and not as is claimed by many scholars to be a relatively cogent compilation of likely actual Jesus-sayings.

Counterfeit Gods

This book by Tim Keller is a fantastically rigorous, counter-cultural deconstruction of probably our three biggest idols in contemporary culture: love/sex, power and money. Throughout he maintains the really helpful standpoint of not only showing why the pursuit of such things as Ultimate Goals is not conducive to healthy biblical living, but have deep-rooted & insidious negative tendencies within even the secular realms of psychological well-being, social justice and long-term human flourishing too. His discourse is replete with examples herein, and lends itself well toward equipping a discerning reader to better identify where idols are being worshiped or followed in their own lives as well as the lives of other individuals or entire cultures around them; as with any theological topic as dense & nebulous as "the god-shaped hole in the heart" it's far from a comprehensive survey of contemporary idolatry, but as a general introduction that isn't academically challenging and maintains Scriptural and pragmatic groundings, it's a really solid text on the subject and one I'd recommend strongly for Christians' fleshing out of relevant apologetics.

Living Dangerously

This book, edited by Alan Jacobs, is a collection of extracts from the speeches & teaches of Osho, also known as Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh - a man who were it not for this excellent netflix documentary series I wouldn't have heard of probably. As you'll know if you've seen the doc - things got strange; but as you'll know if you're read this blog much - I love it when things get strange, and I'm always happy to suspend disbelief a bit when the lines between genuine wisdom & odd cultic dogma seem to be blurry. So, without making any judgments whatsoever - I decided it wasn't worth only having an impression of the man's life and/or philosophy without actually exploring some of it directly rather than just via a probably-somewhat-dramatized retelling of all the juiciest highlights. And my verdict is - I mean, my personal jury's still out on the nature of the cultic community his ashram turned into, but in terms of his actual outlook and ideas? The man makes some excellent points, which are highly uncomfortable to hear for anyone from settled ideological perspectives: his reflections on the nature of meditation, modernity & the mishap-overlap in-betweens therein are some of the most striking new poignancies I've heard from any thinker on the subjects of mindfulness and modernism, and much of the rest of his philosophy in my view does bear striking similarity to the clarity of insight and quasi-prophetic character of properly, dangerously enlightened thinking. That's not to say I necessarily agree with him about all the things he said - far less endorse all the things that happened under his watch - but you know, shit happens when you start trying to fundamentally question & uplift the human consciousness beyond the boundaries of convention, so I'm not gonna throw stones. Think for yourself if you want to dare to try to.

[edit - June: I've lent this book to a colleague of mine who's into spiritual mysticism and all that after we had a conversation about the documentary. He's still very skeptical which is totally fair enough - they did have those pink police people...]

a Generous Orthodoxy

This book by Brian D. McLaren is another truly pivotal vägmärk on my walk with the growing strangeness of my relationship with Christ's body, the Church - as I feel it probably has with a great many of my brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings in the community of us worldwide.
   In it, he dedicates a chapter each to exploring why he can, in the fullness of gospel truth, consider himself to be each of the adjectives in the subtitle of the book: missional, evangelical, postprotestant/protestant, liberal, conservative, poetic/mystical, Biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, anabaptist, Anglican, incarnational, Methodist, catholic, green, emergent, depressed-yet-hopeful & unfinished: - many of these, which are used here as adjectival labels, are more commonly seen and adhered to as "in-group" border-maintenance tools by denominations, and though before reading this book and probably the main thing that led me to reading this book was a sneaking suspicion that if Jesus is truly God's son and the Church his body then humanly-constructed/maintained denominations are kind of a bullshit idea, having now read & digested it I think perhaps there is something else there, something deeper, weirder - so strange, beautiful, sad and perfect that only God could have planned it - that our endless splitting of hairs and ideologies in the bizarre evolutionary tree of Christian history has not led to an inevitably entropic end - but that each strand, each twig, let off freely to pursue its own inklings may do so within the full assurance of Jesus's goodness & promise, to someday, and I pray this might be soon but only God can say - to return home, to a Church unified, where the insights and perspectives of all may be reconciled in Truth and good faith to one another - all having something to share, much to learn, and a great deal more that actually unites them all that they can remind each other of in all joy.
   It's with this book that I can in my brain-heart now rest easier in no longer feeling like I was properly "part" of the ideological-theological community I'd been inhabiting since my home-church joined it nor really a participatingly-up-to-speed part of the one that has since adopted me - I am in Christ, and the labels ultimately, while they don't entirely not matter, don't define me in my being in Christ - and as such I am free to see, and benefit from the insights of, any group that falls under any adjective one might think fit to append to their own particular cell in the great historical body of God's son. How liberating is that?

the Tao of Pooh & the Te of Piglet

This book (or rather pair of books, their having originally been published separately but are nowadays generally distributed as a two-in-one compendium, just like their  founding inspirational scriptures of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), by Benjamin Hoff, is a delightfully accessible and remarkably profound introduction to the general kind of shape and texture and colour of the principles of Taoism.

   Replete with extracts from A. A. Milne's beloved original classics (as well as illustrations from these) as well as from the writings of Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Zhu, and a number of other ancient Chinese sages, Hoff adroitly demonstrates how Pooh lives in harmony with the Tao of the Hundred-Acre-Wood and its various inhabitants in ways that we could learn a great deal from in our crowded rushed modern world; while Piglet's very smallness and oft-fearful-but-never-insincere eagerness to help or reassure insofar as he can encapsulates much of the Taoist virtuosity of Te... all this in ways I would be doing both the philosophy and Hoff's wonderful children's-fictional exposition of it a grand injustice to try to give a pat summary of. But I must say it was quite wonderful to have characters like Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Tigger and Roo, in their deceptive charming simplicity, be shown to quite perfectly embody the positive or negative or fluid aspects of un-Taoist living or un-Tefull being that pervade and restrict so much of the natural mystery of living and being, particularly in our over-intellectualized over-systematized technological mess of what we consider passes for contemporary civilisation.

   Pardon my rant. I kind of gonzo'd this post in an attempt to avoid falling into the very same kind of Heffalump trap that I'm trying to gently warn about, and which Hoff, through Christopher Robin's assortment of imaginary friends and various evasive apothegmic koans or jokey anecdotes about Confucius, will kindly and accurately help you to see wherever they may pop up in the footsteps in the snow you're following round and round the copse. Anyway, this is a fantastic entertaining enlightening book and probably the best introduction to Taoism I could, in my inexperience, recommend to a Western reader.

the Lotus and the Cross

This book is an imagined conversation, by Ravi Zacharias, between Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha - without wanting to deride its author too much, I think anyone will easily be able to instantly recognize that to faithfully and authentic-seemingly construct such a conversation would be an immensely delicate task of anyone's imagination, even without "taking a side" - which Zacharias does, for the Christian camp. That said it is not a dogma-heavy dismantling of Buddhism - or at least not as much as it might well have been if, say, certain other evangelical thought-leaders had written it - and while I think Zacharias's ultimate finished work in this book is a relatively generous, nuanced and thoughtful one, I do not believe he truly grasps the nature of Enlightenment as Buddha taught it, as to my own hunching there would be substantively more fruitful overlap between the thinking and praxis of the two were they to actually have met and talked; it concludes not with an intellectually-humble Kingdom-seeking consideration of possible both-ands, but Zacharias putting the nails into the "Buddha wrong, Jesus right" signpost - which is fair enough given its authorial purpose, but all things considered I think is a very ideologically blinkered way of dealing with both camps - insofar as one wishes them to actually come to respectfully and honestly understand one another, which is presumably sort of the point of writing a book like this.

Another thing, that has virtually nothing to do with this book but which I'm going to talk about on here because I need to process my thoughts on it and this blog has always sufficed as a place to process similar thoughts and this post seems to be a poetically apt place for the discourse I need to shart.
   I've left my church.
   This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
   I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
   I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.

Quakers: Advices & queries

This booklet (available as text online) comprises the introductory guidelines to what it means to be a Quaker or participate in the community, worship or otherwise life/activity of the Religious Society of Friends - 42 short reflections laying out the roots, gists, and thrusts of Quakerism generally - if you can even call it an ism, which I'm growingly sure you can't, not accurately at any rate. I'm still very new to & relatively suspicious of this whole Quaker thing [wQt], and while this short book by no means answered any let alone all my questions it laid out a fruitful groundwork of understanding by which I can now approach the wQt. If you don't know much about the wQt - whether you are irreligious, or a Christian, or whatever - I'd be interested to hearing people's first (or current etc) broad impressions of it in the comments, as I'm still very much an explorer here myself. But as with all things I'd hasten to add a warning that you can't dismiss something out of hand if you don't know what it is from a nuanced, unbiased perspective; and I've not found it very easy so far to get these kinds of views from other Christians about the wQt.

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