Theology and Nonduality
So - what are we up to here? We want to talk about Christian doctrine and theology and its relationship with Nonduality. A challenging task. In order to do this I have borrowed heavily from the writings of Marshall Davis, a retired Baptist minister. Mr. Davis, since retiring, has written an impressive number of books on the intersection between Christianity and the nondual understanding.
In particular the summary below is borrowed heavily from Marshall Davis's book "Unitive Awareness: Talks on Christian Nonduality". Reverend Davis describes himself as a Christian Non-dualist. The summary is below.
Theology and Nonduality
What is the relationship between Christian theology and Nonduality. Many would say they would seem to have nothing in common. Theology is a rational discipline which attempts to say something objective about God. But God is not an object. Appropriately Thomas Aquinas, a very influential church theologian, said, “Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not.” Even Aquinas seems to advocate the Via Negativa, also called apophatic theology.
Then he goes on to write his Summa Theologica, which says lots of things about what God is! Oops. Theology is a rational discipline that speculates about God. To do that, it necessarily sets God apart for observation, thereby making God into an object of study (this is dualistic). It assumes that God is “out there” in heaven or the spiritual realm, which the mind can observe and comprehend … at least in part. That is dualistic thinking.
Of course theologians will also be the first to say that one cannot understand God fully. They are quick to quote Isaiah 55:8-9
“’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’”
Then, like Aquinas, they forget that admonition when theologizing. People listening to them believe theologians are actually saying something objectively true about God. Every time we say anything about Divine Reality we do the same thing to some degree. That is why the Tao Te Ching, a classic of Eastern scripture says,
“He who speaks does not know. He who knows does not speak.”
God is Unspeakable. Yet we speak about God. I speak about God. Jesus was a teacher who spoke about God and the Kingdom of God. He spoke in parables, which are an indirect way of speaking about what cannot be spoken of directly. But still he spoke.
Some religious traditions are not so careful about this distinction that I am making. Some nondual teachers seem to be imply that what they say about Reality is true. Not just experientially, metaphorically or mythically true, but philosophically true. But Nonduality is not a philosophy. The descriptions of God put forth by Christian mystics is not theology, even though Christians often mistake their words for that. They are not trying to describe God. They are trying to communicate an awareness of God, knowing all the while that words can only dance around the periphery of the reality to which they point. It is like trying to describe color to the blind or music to the deaf. You can try, and some descriptions appear to work better than others. But talking about light and seeing light are two different things. Describing the taste of grapefruit and tasting grapefruit are very different. That is the distinction between nondual awareness and theology.
Having said that, theology is definitely not a waste of time. As long as one understands the limitations and insufficiency, theology can be useful. It is analogous to the difference between a photograph and what is photographed.
You can take a photograph from a mountain summit and if you are a good photographer, the picture can evoke some of the same feelings one has when standing on a mountain summit. If you are a bad photographer, it may communicate none of the experience. So it is with doctrine and theology. Doctrine is like a photograph of a religion’s vision of Divine Reality. It is not Divine Reality. It is not even close. It is the difference between reading a menu and eating the food. Doctrine is twice removed from Reality. Yet theology often carries a scent of the incense from the Holy of Holies. That is why doctrine holds such a high place in many religions.
For many people, perhaps the majority of people, this second-hand scent of the divine is very important. It is all they know and all they have. Like the aroma of baking bread wafting out of a bakery, it smells wonderful. Those who have never tasted bread think the aroma is all there is. Some follow the aroma through the streets until they find the bakery. They look in the window and see the fresh baked goods. They enter the shop. They pay the price, and they taste the bread. Tasting the bread is nondual awareness. Smelling the aroma is theology.
The price one pays for tasting Reality firsthand is costly. Jesus called it bearing one’s cross and dying to self. You have to give up everything, including one’s self. Most seekers are not willing to do that. The Cross is the symbol of the price one must pay to taste the Bread of Life. The door to this Shop is the eye of a needle. One must give up everything to enter. The rich young ruler was not willing to do that, and he “went away sorrowful.”
Jesus called his disciples to give up everything to follow him. In saying that, he was not just giving instruction to 12 Galileans two thousand years ago. This is true today. To continue the analogy, when one ingests the Living Bread it becomes part of you. The bread becomes you. You and the bread are one. “You are what you eat,” as the saying goes. Jesus talked about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper points to this reality. Christ is talking about himself. Not just his human self but his divine self. Not just the human Jesus but the eternal Christ, because he and the Father are one. This is Non-Duality.
Traditional Christianity has a set of doctrines that one is expected to believe in order to call oneself a Christian. Jesus taught no such creed. He had no doctrinal litmus test for his followers. He simply said, “Follow me,” and they were either willing or not. He did not insist that people believed in his Virgin birth, the Trinity, the inerrancy of Scripture, the Substitutionary Atonement or anything else that Christians deem essential.
After Jesus’ death, Christianity developed doctrinal statements that came to be called creeds and confessions of faith. Those are what define Christianity today. They divide one Christian group from another and Christianity from other faiths. Christians argue over doctrines and how they should be interpreted. Christians split into denominations over which doctrines we must accept. Christians label those who disagree with them heretics and false teachers. Christians label some doctrines as orthodox and some as heterodox. We can follow that theological path, or we can seek to see what the doctrines are pointing to. We can view doctrines as metaphors for the Divine. We can discern the scent of heaven in them and follow the scent into the Holy of Holies. Christian doctrines are not definitions of truth to be used to decide who is in and who is out, who is a true Christian and who is not, who is saved and who is condemned. That is to weaponize theology. We can follow the doctrines to their Source. To use a hackneyed expression, doctrines are fingers pointing to the moon. They are useless unless we look to where they point.
Let’s take one example: the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. This is actually the most important doctrine, historically speaking. The Incarnation and the Trinity consumed much more of the time and energy of the early church fathers, church councils and creed-writers. But in recent centuries the Virgin Birth has become one of the more controversial doctrines. It was one of the so-called “fundamentals” identified by early Christian Fundamentalists. It continues to be a shibboleth for conservative Christians today, as they seek to determine who is a “Bible-believing” Christian and who is not. The doctrine has become central in the controversy over the authority of scripture and biblical inerrancy. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth was not very important for the earliest Church. It is mentioned in only two of the four gospels – Matthew and Luke. It is not found in the earliest Gospel – Mark - or in the gospel of John, which is the gospel most likely to have an authentic connection to one of the twelve apostles.
The apostle Paul – whose letters are the earliest writings in the New Testament - seems unaware of the Virgin Birth. When he mentions the birth of Jesus in Galatians, which may be the earliest book in the New Testament, Paul simply states that Jesus was “born of a woman.” (Galatians 4:4) No virgins in sight. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth states that Jesus was not conceived through the usual reproductive method. It maintains that he had no earthly father; he was conceived miraculously in the womb of a virgin.
Liberal and conservative Christians argue about the historicity of this event endlessly. Conservative biblical scholars make a case that the virgin birth really happened. Others make the case that the doctrine arose later and did not historically occur. That is an historical question that needs to be examined using the scholarly tools of historical science and biblical historical criticism. Whether you believe in the Virgin Birth historically or mythically, it points to Spiritual Reality. It points to the union of a human being – Mary – with God. It represents union with God. The language used in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke has sexual overtones. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” (1:35) Theologians insist that the language refers to the intimate spiritual union of a human being and the eternal God.
The Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke, which describes Mary’s impregnation, is a mystical encounter that a young woman had with God. The Magnificat is Mary’s verbal response to union with God. It begins: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” (1:46-47) Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord. Her innermost spiritual essence serves as a magnifying glass, you could say, to see God. It sounds like Meister Eckhart’s words: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” In her soul Mary experienced union with God more intimate than sexual union.
Yet the Virgin Birth has a physical dimension. She physically births the Son of God. That is why she is called the Mother of God. The Virgin Birth is birthing God in physical life. God is incarnated in the physical, not just in individuals but in human society. Mary’s song is a description of how the unitive life is lived out in community, especially addressing issues of social justice. She proclaims: He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. (1:51-53)
In many religious traditions the spiritual life involves withdrawal from society to live a contemplative life in the desert or forest. Not so here. The Virgin Birth unites the spiritual life with social action. It points to how union with God is expressed in societies and through governments. It is no wonder that the Roman Catholic Church has elevated Mary to such a lofty status. She is an example and model of incarnational spirituality. According to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, God was incarnated in her. We can talk about the Virgin Birth as a physical miracle or we can talk about it spiritually. In either case God was enfleshed through Mary. God came forth from her. There is a wealth of profound truth within the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. It has to do with the enfleshing of the Spirit. Mary’s experience is an incarnation that prefigures the Incarnation of God in Jesus.
The Virgin Birth is a powerful symbol of how God is incarnated in human life and in particular a woman’s life. It is a powerful feminine image in a religion that has tended to be masculine and patriarchal. Mary’s faith is part of this process. When she receives the divine invitation, she responds with the words “Let it be.” These words inspired Paul McCartney’s song. They are echoes of Moses name for God, “I am that I am,” and Jesus self-description “I am.” It is probably no accident that another Mary – Mary Magdalene – is present at the empty tomb of Jesus. The tomb is a type of womb. It was a cave, like the cave which served as a stable where Christ was born. Here is another Mary at a cave/womb/tomb witnessing the rebirth of Jesus from the earth. Jesus comes forth from the tomb.
The resurrection is depicted in the dominant Christian theology as a miraculous physical event, just like the Virgin birth. The resurrection was a powerful spiritual experience for Mary of Magdala, just as the Virgin Birth was for the Mary of Nazareth. I should note in passing that both Mary’s names in Hebrew were Miriam, named after the sister of Moses, who is a dominant figure in the story of the Exodus. Mary’s Magnificat is patterned after Miriam’s song.
This discussion of Mary barely touches the surface of the Virgin Birth. The main point of the doctrine has to do with the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the incarnation of the Eternal in the mortal known as Jesus. When people talk about the Virgin birth, they tend to focus on the “virgin” part, but the “birth” part is more important. It is the heart of the doctrine of the incarnation.
To say that Jesus was physically born guards against over-spiritualizing Christ. That is what the Docetists did. They were a group who said that Jesus only appeared to be human. They said he was a spirit who did not leave footprints in the dust of Galilee. Christianity says that Jesus was real, and the physical world is real - as real as God because it is an expression of God. That is why the Christian worldview gave birth to the Enlightenment which gave birth to science. Both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures say that the universe was spoken into existence by God. The cosmos is the Word of God partaking of the Reality of God. This has consequences in how we interact with the world and how seriously we take the suffering of people and social injustices against groups of people in this world. The Cross of Jesus says that this suffering is real and is of God. The Virgin Birth insists that God became flesh; it therefore sanctified flesh. John’s gospel says that the Word (the Eternal Christ) that made the world became flesh in this world. Christ emerged from the womb of a woman. The Word is not something outside the world; it emerged from the world. The “virgin” part of the Virgin Birth points to divinely enfleshed humanity. There is more going on than physical cause and effect. There is more than the natural process of the evolution of life on this planet. The natural is divine, while not diminishing the reality of the physical. Divinity is at the heart of birth, death and resurrection.
Christian theology can be an expression of nonduality. It can point people to our essential unity with God. But too often doctrine is used to shut off the Christian from knowing this Reality to which it points. It doesn’t have to be that way. One can experience and communicate unitive awareness of God through doctrine. Christian doctrine was originally meant to express divine awareness. For that reason Christians don’t have to leave behind our religious tradition and adopt Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist terminology in order to embrace nonduality. All thought systems and religious traditions fall short. Yet all language and thought systems can be used to express the one reality that we know as union with God or unitive awareness.