AMERICAN HERESY #2: You Are Here; Heaven is Elsewhere

As noted two posts back, the three American heresies that I described reflect yielding to, rather than resisting, the temptations Jesus faced in the gospel stories often called The Temptation in the Wilderness. The previous post reviewed the basics of the story and the first challenge, turn some stones into bread. This post focuses on the second challenge the accuser suggests to Jesus: Throw yourself from this high, prominent place. You know the angels will catch you … and then everyone can see the proof of God’s promises.

This point of connection might be the most subtle between the ancient narrative and our current one. The road from there to here runs straight through European colonization of the North American continent. To help explain how things moved from ancient times to now, I am indebted to the work of the late Walter Wink and his descriptions of worldviews pertaining to the physical and the spiritual found in his summary work, The Powers That Be.

As Wink explains, the most basic and earliest form of understanding the relationship between observed physical realities and divine or spiritual presence is that the two are essentially one and the same. There is no distinction or separation; everything is divine and the divine is everything.  Religious perspectives that would fit this description are animism in the purest sense (all natural phenomena have souls … all life is the result of spiritual activity) and the true nature worshipers, those who worship nature as divine in its very being. (There is a difference between this perspective and the more integrated world view that will be discussed later. That difference is subtle – and subtle in significant ways.) This unified understanding, where the spiritual and the physical essentially fully overlap and are interchangeable, is often called pantheism, a view in which everything is divine (or God).

Even by Biblical times, most understandings of the physical world and any sense of spirituality had evolved from this early point. In this more developed perspective, the spiritual and the physical are not regarded as one in the same but somewhat separate and distinct. That separation, however, is not complete. There is an area of overlap or intersection. How large that area of overlap is varies, but it is always present to a greater or lesser extent. The spiritual sphere is regarded as higher and superior; however, it is still connected to the physical sphere of normal, daily life. The theme “as above, so below” dominates. What happens in the heavenlies, or spiritual realm, impacts life in the physical realm.

Certain, special places (holy mountains, sacred groves, shrines, temples, other structures) mark the locations of the overlap. Priests and oracles operate in that intersection.  Rituals facilitate interactions between the physical and the spiritual sides in this zone of overlap. Lest we presume this is limited to extra-biblical perspectives, it should be noted Exodus 24:9-11 describes an incident in which Moses, his brother Aaron, and seventy-some leaders of the tribes of Israel go up on the mountain and that they see God… or at least into God’s dwelling.

Ancient fertility cults, possibly the oldest systems of religious thought, regarded the fertility of the earth as a result of the sexual union between (initially) a goddess and her consort. In order to ensure the crops would grow or the herds and flocks would reproduce well, the people needed to act out what the was needed from the goddess (or god) and the consort. That would prompt the divine powers into action. Remnants of these early fertility practices can be found in the ancient mythologies of the Greeks and Romans. In these myths, natural forces are personified as gods and goddesses, who often appear to be not much different that humans with similar drives and failings.

The long-standing concept of the ”divine right of kings” also arises from the point of intersection in this world view. Ancient Egyptians saw Pharaoh as kin to the gods. The Greek heroes, perhaps more legend that fact, were often presented as offspring of a god who impregnated a human woman. However, the very real Roman Emperor Octavian Augustus was hailed in his time as divine, son of a human mother and the god Apollo. This ancient idea carried forward, outliving even ancient Rome and its emperor, as kings (and the occasional queen) were crowned in ritual ceremonies that set them apart as specific bearers of divine favor. Through ritual, leaders were moved from the ranks of normal humanity into that intersection of the physical and the spiritual.

This intersecting world view was the prevailing perspective when the Protestant Reformation exploded throughout Europe. It would be highly naïve think that the various princes and lesser nobility were solely convinced by (or cared for) the theological correctness of the reformers. By supporting the reformers, the lesser ruling nobles could break free from the Pope and the Imperial powers blessed by the pope … or vice versa when the ruling powers had brought a particular pope to the throne of St. Peter.

The most unfortunate effects of the Protestant Reformation were the wars of religion that raged throughout Europe. Catholic nations such as Spain and France sought to bring the emerging Protestant nations, such as England, back toward allegiance to the Pope and the Pope’s designated Emperor. Internal conflicts from the Peasants in Germany to the Huguenots of France to the Marian martyrs sent to death by Queen Mary (Tudor) of England to the Spanish Inquisition and the Thirty Years Wars of religion … all of this and more were actually struggles for political independence and power under the guise of religious truth and the inevitable crackdown by the reigning powers that wanted to keep things as they had always been.

As power stabilized and the active conflicts diminished, the realization gradually spread among the various ruling classes that there had to be a better way. With the emerging middle class, the increase of education within the general population, the renewed access to ancient philosophical texts, the movement now known as the Enlightenment (the triumph of reason over ignorance) began to take hold. With that movement, there also came the complete separation of the physical from the spiritual in terms of how the world was perceived.

In some ways, this was not a new or novel idea. Some of the ancient Greek schools of philosophy shared this perspective. The Stoics were mostly agnostic about the existence of anything beyond the experience of the physical world. Others were more atheistic, denying there was any sort of afterlife, anything more than what could be experienced by the senses. The ancient Gnostics also held the world view of distinction between physical and spiritual realities – but without a zone of overlap; the two realities were completely separate. However, if one knew the secrets and applied that secret knowledge, it was possible to make the leap from the physical to the spiritual.

This view is at the heart of Gnosticism, a variety of belief systems that hold the physical and the spiritual realities to be distinct and separated with hidden or secret knowledge as the means to transition from one to the other. The spiritual is higher and better; the physical is lesser and either benign (at best) or evil (at worst). To become purely spiritual is an appropriate life goal and the way to accomplish that is through mastery of special, hidden, secret knowledge which Gnostic teachers provide.

Certainly, there are parallels with early Christian teachings. The early years of the Christian movement were marked by struggles with the Gnostic traditions. Indeed, many ancient texts that were excluded from the canon of scripture (and were later found in the Nag Hammadi collection) were rejected during the early councils that established the canon due to the obvious influence of Gnostic traditions. The gospel now identified as John’s was the last of the four to be fully accepted into the canon because some early theologians thought it was too influenced by Gnosticism – or at least too open to a Gnostic interpretation.

Centuries later, in the era of the Enlightenment, this ancient idea of complete separation between the physical and the spiritual became the way of preserving Christian faith. By separating the spiritual realm of faith and belief from the physical realm of sense and reason, religious truths could remain unchallenged. However, the price was the loss of a this-world role for Christian faith and practice.

Within American development, this split played out in one of two ways: either a deistic approach in which God set things in motion but has been almost entirely absent from the unfolding events or a more Gnostic approach in which salvation is the process of making the transition from this physical reality into the higher realm of pure spiritual existence. For those who took the latter approach, signs … miracles … obvious blessings were proofs of the existence of that spiritual realm that were dropped into physical existence to inspire and encourage faith. Add in the American impulse to individualism, and here we are today.

Salvation is regarded as solely about answering the question: if you were die to tonight, where would you (or at least your soul) spend eternity? There are two, not just one, distinct and separate spiritual realities. One is the purely spiritual paradise of heaven, often imagined more in personal wish fulfillment in perfected environment with all the good things of earth. Stories of the afterlife in works such as What Dreams May Come or The Lovely Bones might not express traditional faith or match Biblical descriptions, but they do work from commonplace American concepts of heaven. Then, of course, there is the other pure spiritual reality – hell, a place of everlasting punishment in fires and other punishments owing more the Greek myths of Hades than Biblical descriptions. The frightening concept of hell is often employed as a motivator to drive people towards actions and behaviors that will ensure a blessed afterlife.

And because modern rationality needs its proofs, some sort of sign that these things are true is needed. This has taken a number of forms … name-it-and-claim-it theology … the prosperity gospel … however evident signs of divine favor are named, the identified blessings are proofs that the stated “Biblical truths” are true or the theological formula works: follow the instructions and receive blessings now as a kind of downpayment on the heavenly promises to be fulfilled. If it’s not working, then there must be some unconfessed or unaddressed sin in one’s life (you’re doing it wrong) … or, if the formula just doesn’t work, the deprivation now is sure to be even more richly rewarded in the spiritual life to come.

Either way, there is not much need for lived-out discipleship, living in imitation of Jesus, participating in the age-old work of healing and blessing the world. From this perspective, life in this world doesn’t count for much more than determining which purely spiritual realm you’ll inhabit for eternity – and how much of the good things you will have earned when you get there. Faith is proved and demonstrated through obvious, material blessings. “Look at this great thing God has done in my life! See how great God is? (And maybe how good/faithful I am …?)”

Do something dramatic here, Jesus … the ancient accuser suggested … make God prove something so everyone can see.  A lot of what passes for modern American Christian beliefs and teachings is not that different.

However, there was another way things could have gone when Christianity, already being shaped by the Enlightenment, came to the North American Continent. Sometime late last summer or in the fall, on a radio program called Native American Calling (I think the topic was church-run boarding schools and the difficulties between Native American history and Christian churches), one of the panelists described how the Christian missionaries approached the native peoples, saying “We have good news for you.”  “But,” she pointed out, “they didn’t ask if we had good news for them.”

Truth is, they did have good news for those missionaries. That good news can be seen where the heart of the gospel, new life here and now in the ways of the Reign and Realm of God, has connected with the embodied spirituality of native traditions. Such a perspective might have spared Christian faith the worst impact the Enlightenment, that complete separation of physical and spiritual realities. Instead, to return to Walter Wink’s terminologies, Christian faith might have reconnected with an integrated worldview.

In this integrated understanding, the physical and spiritual are one and the same; there is difference and distinction between them. However, they are interwoven, entwined with each other … like one as the woof and the other as the weft in a single woven fabric. From this perspective, the spiritual is not remote or removed or off in some far-off alternate plane of existence. The spiritual is involved in physical reality – and physicality is a part of spiritual reality. How we live and move and go about life in this world is how we connect with the divine and live out the fullness of truth. The technical term for this perspective is panentheism, the divine is present within all things but is not one and the same with any one thing.

In light of the incarnation, it is this view that is more consistent with how Jesus taught and lived and called his followers to do. And it would be far more faithful than the heresy that developed, took root, and has flourished here — on our American soil.