mary poplin presbyterian church of the master may 3, 2015 pantheism new age spiritual but not...

Mary Poplin

Presbyterian Church of the Master

May 3, 2015

PANTHEISMNEW AGE

SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS

PANTHEISM – SPIRIT IN ALL NATURE

PANENTHEISM – ALL NATURE IS SPIRIT

Mimics Pantheist Religions

But Less Rigorous

NEW AGESPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS

SPIRITUAL PRACTICES

• Study of sacred texts• Meditation, breathing, mindfulness• Veneration of impersonal deities• Deities govern various spirits• Chants, trances, mindfulness, no-mindness• Ancestor worship

KARMA BY DALAI LAMAThe intentional acts of sentient beings… all of which have impacts upon the psyche of an individual, no matter how minute. . . . The entire process is seen as an endless self-perpetuating dynamic. The chain reaction of interlocking causes and effects operates not only in individuals, but also for groups and societies, not just in this lifetime but across many lifetimes. . . . This karmic causality is seen as a fundamental natural process and not a kind of divine mechanism.

GOALS OF THE PRACTICES

• Abstaining from particular vices

• Murder, malice

• Theft, covetousness

• Sexual misconduct

• Offensive speech, lying, frivolousness

• Holding perverted views (nihilism & extremism)

• Development of particular virtues

• Rid oneself of desire

CAN YOU BE CHRISTIAN AND BUDDHIST?

“Once a certain degree of realization has been reached, a choice between the two paths will become necessary.”

- Dalai Lama

Rid or Redeem?

DESIRES

• Desire blocks enlightenment

• Desire leads to suffering

• Suffering to be avoided

• Four noble truths –

• Misery

• Comes from desires within

• Can be eliminated

• Follow particular path

TO RID DESIRE ELIMINATES SUFFERING

• Recognize right and wrong desires

• Right desire forms basis of life purpose

• Suffering rightly builds character

• God wants to give humans the right desires of their hearts

• Redeem wrong desires

• Transform consequences 1 Jn 1:9

TO REDEEM DESIRE AND SUFFERING

VARIETIES OF PANTHEISM

• Buddhism – Nirvana – complete peace – nothingness

• Hinduism – Atman (soul) absorbed into Brahman – supreme pure consciousness

• Taoism – the way of nature – mind empty of desire so wu-wei can flow unabated (Tai Chi, Kung fu)

• Confucianism – philosophy regarding social order – child to parent, younger to elder; self realization through proper actions, speech and thoughts

• Shintoism – world is filled with essence of spirits (kami) – blessings of buildings, right ordering for spiritual flow, ancestor worship

WESTERNIZED PANTHEISMNEW AGE

• Seek individual spiritual enlightenment

• Mindfulness, Yoga, Tai Chi, Kung Fu, Neo-pagan, New Age, Course in Miracles, TM, magical realism, new scientific mythologies

• Marianne Williamson, Eckhart Tolle, Rhonda Byrnes, Deepak Chopra, Carlos Castaneda, Oprah

• Earlier forms – Gnosticism

JAMES SIRE ON WESTERN PANTHEIST GOALS

• Bring on a New Age via increased consciousness

• Understand the invisible cosmos through altered states of consciousness

• Use the cosmic conscience so ordinary categories of time, space and morality disappear

• Use the cosmic conscious to overcome the fear of death

• Achieve cosmic consciousness via the occult, psychedelics or conceptual relativism

THE ARTIST, THE MUSICIAN, THE POET, THE MYSTIC

Who gets lost here ?

RESEARCH ON SPIRITUAL NOT RELIGIOUS

• Research (7000 people in Great Britain)

• Three Groups

• Religious, largely Christian

• Atheist

• Spiritual but not Religious

• Drug, alcohol, mental health problems, education

Michael King, et al

SPIRITUAL – GOOD OR EVIL

• Some pantheists do not classify spirit as good or evil but as ‘that which is’

• “Spiritual but not religious” the spiritual = good

• Spiritual can be pure and perfect OR demonic

• Spiritual – for what purpose? Individual enlightenment

ECKHARDT TOLLE

“You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are.”

KRISTER SAIRSINGH (PHILOSOPHER & HINDU CONVERT)

For a while I tried to incorporate Jesus into the pantheon of deities arrayed on the altar of the puja room. Each morning, after I offered incense and changed mantras before the altar, I would then turn to recite the mantras to the picture of Jesus beside that of Gandhi. . . . But I had the uneasy feeling that Jesus did not belong to their company, that he was without equal, and that he would not wish to be honored in a way that made him one among many, just another avatar among others. . . . He was unique, utterly different. I did not know how to worship and honor him. And yet in the depths of my heart, I desired to adore him.

ARTISTIC DEPICTIONSVISHAL MANGALWADI

Pantheism Judeo-Christian

SPIRITUAL TRANSACTIONS IN NATIONS, NATURE AND PEOPLE

Deities reside in a Mandala’s Palace to invoke the divine energies of particular deities, spirits and energies in particular geographic regions.

• Land affected by people’s choices, actions

• Spiritual battle– 2Kings 3

• Christ’s forgiveness/grace

• Material world responds to spiritual world

• 9/11 mandalas to draw forth peace, enlighten minds

• Sand dispensed in water disperse spirits in region

• Shinto building design

• Water is conscious

SPIRITUAL TRANSACTIONSPANTHEIST AND CHRISTIAN

SPIRITUAL LAWS – C. KRAFT

• There are dispensers of spiritual power.

• A close relationship between spiritual and human realms.

• A major difference between God and less powerful spirits.

• Authority and power flow from allegiances, relationships and obedience.

• Cultural forms can be spiritually empowered

• Territories and organizations subject to spiritual power

THE HOLY SPIRIT VERSUS SPIRITS

Evidence for the Truth

JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY

CHRISTIANITY IS A STATEMENT WHICH, IF FALSE, IS OF NO IMPORTANCE, AND, IF TRUE, OF INFINITE IMPORTANCE. THE ONLY THING IT CANNOT BE IS MODERATELY IMPORTANT.

C. S. LEWIS, GOD IN THE DOCK

WHO IS JESUS ?

• Fully God and Man – THE WORD OF GOD MADE FLESH

• Every Temptation experienced and overcome

• Not good human teacher – had no questions

• NO wars, writings, never killed anyone

• Challenged primarily the religious leaders

WHO IS JESUS ?

• Signs/miracles – healings, walk on water, calmed storms, cast out demons, raised the dead

• We are given choices – not Stepford wives

• His resurrection opened the way to eternal life for all who believe (not irrational)

WHO IS JESUS ?

• NEVER bent spoons, twirled, trances, became mindful nor overcame desire, not empty His mind

• Reality was inclusive of and beyond human reason

• Suffered, wept, and fought and overcame evil

• Was baby, had parents, was child, knew the Word

• Did only what he saw his Father doing

WHO IS JESUS ?

• “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

• This is either true or false –

Did he ever lie?

Why would he lie as he was about to die?

What would he have gained?

THE WORD OF GOD

• 1500 BC to 0 AD – Prophets silent, Other activity

• “I AM That I AM”

• Reading of Scripture and Being Read by Scripture

• Line upon Line, Precept upon Precept

• Every form of literature

• No mythic beings

FROM 500 BC TO AD

OT Prophets silent, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato

Sophists, Skeptics, Epicureans, Stoics

Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confusius

UNIVERSAL LAWS - THE ORDER OF GOD

• Physical – astronomy, gravity, chemistry, electromagnetism

• Natural – agriculture, genetics, ecology, biology, medical

• Human – health, sociology, psychology, anthropology

• Spiritual – movement of spirit (miracles, creation)

• MoralEthical – “so that it may go well with you”

CHRIST AS UNIFYING FORCE IN HUMANITY

• Samaritans, Ethiopian eunuch

• No Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free; you are all one in Christ Jesus

• Once you were not a people, now you are God’s people

• Geography, race, position, economic statue become less significant in determining identity

• Not pacifists but rules for war

• War is viewed as primarily spiritual (prayer)

• Way to “One-World” – Tower of Babel, United Nations

• Multiple ethnicities, economic conditions, gender, languages in his earthly genealogy

• I Corinthians 12

• MLK – For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be and ….

CHRIST AS UNIFYING FORCE IN HUMANITY

SECULAR V CHRISTIAN REASON

• Chesterton – “Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other…from some supernatural height we behold some more startling synthesis.”

• Justice and righteousness

• Equity vs Equality

• Peter and Paul

• Higher Rationality

JESUS TAUGHT ABOUT EVIL

• We are all living in a fallen world (nature and humanity are in a fallen state).

• Evil began when Satan, originally an angel who was created by God for good, wanted to take God’s place (the very thing with which he tempted Eve—”you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” Genesis 3:5).

• Satan is God’s enemy but not equal to God.


• Satan took one-third of the angels with him in his rebellion.

• Unable to affect God, Satan seeks to recruit and infect human beings, whom God loves, by using humankind for his rebellion.

• Humans are made in God’s image and are special to God.


• Though designed to be good, humans are given free will, which allows the possibility that human beings will choose to do evil.

• The laws by which all creation was made prevail, both physical laws and human ones, and breaking them incurs consequences: “your sins have kept good from you”.

• Nature also groans and is affected by evil in part due to the sins of man.


• We are involved in a spiritual war between good and evil—a war not for or against people but against the spiritual powers that humans choose to serve.

• We are always serving one or the other—good or evil; there is no neutral demilitarized zone.

• There is far more good than evil in the world and far more chance that you will live today rather than die.


• God works so that evil tends to destroys itself—falling into the pit it digs for others

• Evil is irrational (Ex. Tolerance)

• There are authorities (in heaven and on earth), and the moral condition of those authorities influences those under their authority

• There is an ultimate divine justice in eternity

JESUS FOR THE ATHEISTCHESTERTON

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already, but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.

Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.


But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God.


He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power.


They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me”

“Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit.”


SIGNPOSTS OF REALITY

SIMPLE LOGIC – IS CHRISTIANITY TRUE?

• Not enough to have one or two

• Universe had beginning

• Order similar

• 100 billion galaxies in universe that we know

• 248 independent muscles in head of caterpillar

• Looking for an avalanche of evidence

• Nothing we have ever known has come from nothing. Nothing ever created itself, and no ordered, intricate design has ever emerged without a designing intelligence.

• God as Creator is simply the single most reasonable hypothesis.

SIMPLE LOGIC - IS CHRISTIANITY TRUE?

PHILOSOPHER - SWINBURNE’S LOGIC

We find that the view that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just some narrow range of data. It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religious experiences. In so far as scientific causes and laws explain some of these things (and in part they do), these very causes and laws need explaining, and God’s action explains them. The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence.

SIGNPOSTS OF NATIONS

• History of Europe, U.S., Canada

• New histories of South Korea, Singapore, China

• Laws protecting the weak

• 1/3 of world

• Cannot be born a Christian

• Universally available

SIGNPOSTS – WOMEN, CHILDREN, POOR, ALIEN

• Jesus and women

• Deborah, Miriam, Huldah, Esther, Jael, Hannah, Sampson’s mother, Rahab, Daughters of Shallum, Queen of Sheba

• Proverbs 31

• Samaritan woman, woman in adultery, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha…

• Missionaries – here and abroad

SIGNPOSTS OF THE TIMES

• B.C. to A.D.

• Changed Human Possibilities

• End and new beginnings

• Prophecies

• Revelation, Daniel

SIGNPOSTS IN THE ARTS

• Art - Painting, sculpture

• Music - Handel’s Messiah, Bach…

• Cathedral and the Cube

• Literature

• Classical Education – Good, True, Beautiful

SIGNPOSTS IN THE ARTS

SIGNPOSTS IN EDUCATION AND HEALTH

• Origin of schools and hospitals

• Universities from monasteries

• Classical Education

• Missionaries and written languages

• Importance of unity in diversity

• Role of Bible in education

• Faith, Virtue, Knowledge, Self-Control, Perseverance, Godliness, Brotherly Affection, Love 2 Peter 1:5-7

SIGNPOSTS OF SCRIPTURE

• Alexander the Great 400 years

• Christ’s life within 60 years

• Number of manuscripts

• Accuracy of OT/NT and history

• Archeology

• Prophecies

HUMAN DIVERSITY

• Mother Teresa

• Tim Keller

• T D Jakes

• John Polkinghorne, Richard Swinburne, Plantinga

• John Paul, Benedict, Francis

• Brother Yun

• John Mulinde

• Carlos Annacondia

SIGNPOST OF BATTLE OVER TRUTH

• Films’ central themes

• Literature

• Irrational reactions to displays

• War as spiritual battle

• First in ourselves

• Second in the culture

SIGNPOST OF HUMAN TRANSFORMATION

• Millions of stories of human transformation even in the midst of great suffering and even martyrdom

• Corrie ten Boom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Orthodox now

• Prisoners, research Byron Johnson

Christian Thought as Higher Rationality

mary poplin presbyterian church of the master may 3, 2015 pantheism new age spiritual but not...

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