The Three Pillars

In my Introduction [previous, and first godpuddle posting] I referred briefly to what I called “The Three Pillars” and today I would just like to say a few words about what I mean by the use of that phrase.
But first I think it may be important to say a wee bit more about my own personal religious history. I do this mostly because I think it may really help with a reader or two who may come to the conclusion that I am a poor benighted soul who has not been correctly instructed in the higher realms of salvation-theory. [Soteriology, for those way in the loop!]
There may be another reader [or perhaps the same one] who feels that my other problem is that I only started thinking about theology the day before yesterday, or maybe as far back as Wednesday or Thursday of last week!
But neither of these things are the case, I can assure you, and I want to set your mind at ease on that score.
From a Christian perspective, there is nothing about being properly evangelized and/or “saved” that I not only know, but have also thoroughly experienced. Not only so, but in the course of my life, I have brought many others to similar points of life-changing “decisions to follow Christ.”
For now, suffice it to say that since mid 1984 I have been on a very conscious journey. As I have mentioned earlier, this is when I began to read and study the Bible, began first to pray and “seek” God, and attend church.
In short, to be a Christian.
[For more about my illustrious Christian life, see the Introduction, below].

There are many “types” of Christian…. really there are, I hope that we do not ever need to argue that point.
Someone: “We’re all the same, if we love Christ, brother.”
Me: “Sorry. I do not agree.”

What I mean is that you may come in the Christian door through Catholicism, or through Pentecostalism, or Presbyterianism, or even some of the more diverse types of “churches” such as Mormonism or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Point being that all of these people are “loving Jesus” in their own way.
And that is just it. On finer points of theology, members of these various sects and groupings can have viewpoints as irreconcilably different as are tractors from peacocks!
The door I went in, was the door of Pentecostalism.
One way that I would define Pentecostalism [and there are many ways to categorize it, this just being one] is that God is a being who intervenes in the daily life of the believer. Very much so, in fact. Or perhaps it may be more correct to say that He can do this, according to Pentecostal theology… and furthermore, He ought to be doing this.
Why ought He to be doing this?
Well, because that’s what Pentecostalism is based on. The “baptism” of the Holy Spirit into the lives of believers, the initial evidence of which, is the fact that these believers speak in other [earthly] languages, as God, through the action of the Holy Spirit, grants them the supernatural power to do so.
Does that sound to you a little bit whacky?
Well, it sounds whacky because it is whacky.
But this is the door I opened, and the room into which I stepped.

Now, I say all of the above to get to the point where I can now tell you that the real cornerstone of my “faith” as I percieved it was that the Bible is the “literal” Word of God, and by that, I am saying that I took it to mean that every single story… yea, every single sentence in the Bible that was not CLEARLY understood as “metaphor” was “literal” or, to be understood in a literal sense.
By this I mean to say that if [just to choose one example] the Red Sea parted in the book of Exodus, if you were there that day with a camcorder, you could have got the whole thing down on videotape.
It not only really happened, but it really happened exactly as described in the Bible.
Similarly, if Genesis tells us that there was a point in history when there was only two human beings on the face of the earth, and they were named Adam and Eve, then that means that there was a time in history when there was only two human beings on the face of the earth, and [by golly] their names were Adam and Eve.
For me, this story was not telling us anything of “type” or “archetype.”
It was delineating literal historical truth.
As you can imagine, I could go on nearly forever with examples.
I believed in the thoroughgoing literal interpretation of Scripture as 100% surely as I would have believed that I am not an aardvark!
Some of you reading this will be, by now, snickering to yourself and simply saying that I had some sort of brain damage.
Uh-huh.
The thing is, there are seriously not only millions, but BILLIONS of people that have this exact same sort of brain damage, and they exist not only in Christianity, but in many other religions as well.

OK, fast-forward the tape to August of 2004.

While there are several other factors that lend themselves significantly to my overall RE-CONVERSION experience, I am going to focus upon one that proved to be truly cataclysmic.
While other things had been moving me forward (and I do believe it is forward, and not backward, as some may see it), this next thing sort of catapulted me forward, so to say. Launched me into new and invigorating realms of understanding.
I was at work when the phone rang, and a friend of mine told me that he had just heard Tom Harpur interviewed on a radio program.
“We should go out and get his new book, and read it together,” my friend suggested.
At first I was hesitant because I had already observed the book in the bookstore and I dismissed it as being scary, and/or too heretical, or [at the least] too New-Agey-ish for my tastes.
But curiosity prevailed, and I met my friend within the next hour, and together, we each bought Tom Harpur’s controversial new book, The Pagan Christ: Recovering The Lost Light.

I [we] read the thing.
I [we] have never been the same since.

The book revolutionized my thinking in so many ways that at many points in the reading, I wanted to set the thing down and weep for joy. The only reason I refrained from doing so was because I was wary of leaving one form of brain damage to possibly embrace another.
I did not want to become a Harpurite, or join any kind of thing ending in “ism”.
I have zero desire to be fanatical about religion, or lack of religion.
Neither am I [now or ever] angry at God or angry at religion. [Well, actually, I am angry at religion, when religion makes people do harmful things to other people.]
This may be a good place for me to say that I do not currently attend church of any kind, nor have any desire to do so.

I do not even fully endorse every single aspect of Harpur’s book, nor am I even recommending it here, to other readers.
What the book DID for me, however, is that it allowed me to see that there are other ways than the purely “literal” to approach and examine Scripture.
Revering the Bible as a sacred text does not necessarily have to mean that we treat it as the infallible WORD OF GOD.
And I guess that the first time I really grasped this concept was when I read The Pagan Christ.
Hence, I think of it as my [no disrespect intended]… my being born-again again!
I have, since that time, been on what I would call an exciting journey of reconciling faith with understanding. Harpur’s book set me on a course whereby I can still believe in God, but not necessarily the kind of God who values most our unwavering ability to believe things that do not make sense.
In other words, when things that are meant to be religiously believed, do not make a shred of actual sense, I am now free to acknowledge that.
And that is a tremendous, wonderfully liberating experience.
It is no exaggeration for me to say to you that since I have opened my brain pathways to the possibilities inherent in the non-literal interpretation of Scripture[s]… I feel as though I have been born-again again.

Since reading Harpur, and subsequently hearing him speak in person, I have read the writings of numerous other well-known and respected authors, and continue to find that there is an entire WORLD of scholarship out there that was not granted entrance into the narrow hallways of my former mind.
These would include the writings and ideas of people like Leon R. Kass, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Elaine Pagels, Marcus J. Borg, Karen Armstrong, Joseph Campbell, and many others.

In all of the various reading I have done since August, 2004, I have noticed a grouping of three central ideas, at turns covered one way or another by all of these authors. Combined with all of my own thinking upon the subject of God and our human spirituality, I have come to think of these three things as “The Three Pillars” or somewhat of a common denominator of a new and liberated approach to “the spiritual” side of life.
These Three Pillars constitute the three areas in which my own thinking has shifted the most, as a result of my study:

1) The thoroughgoing literal interpretation of Scripture. That’s got to go.

2) The exclusivity of Christianity, or for that matter, any one religion. That’s definitely got to go.

3) The ineffable nature of God. That’s got to displace the dual fallacy that we can know everything about who God is, and adequately define God in human language.

On this blogpage, I want to take each of these “pillars” and elaborate upon them, outline for you why I think they are such important areas to focus upon if we are ever to [personally] make sense out of what sectarian religion has made to look like so much utter nonsense.
It is not nonsense.
It only looks like nonsense.
God is not ever going to make sense in a collective sense. For that to happen, every human being on earth would have to be on the same spiritual journey, and because of differences of religion and ethnicity, not to mention history and a myriad of other factors, it is simply unrealistic for religious and/or spiritual harmony and accord to ever exist on this planet.
I believe that all true spiritual understanding is only experienced and understood by an individual.
In this realm, mine is not yours.
And yours is not mine.
Nor, when we get together and find that our experiences are quite similar, does that make them, in a collective sense, TWICE AS GOOD!
This latter perception is the very error of religion, from time immemorial.
The horror of Religion is that, by subscribing to it in one of its many forms, we deny God the very diversity He has seen fit to allow us.

[Here is a disclaimer that I only want to mention this one time. I use the pronoun “He” in reference to God, not because I think “He” has a penis, nor even because I think “God” is otherwise more male than female, but simply because using “It” seems sort of wrong in some way, and using “She” is no better nor worse than using “He” in my opinion. God, given that one believes “He/She” exists at all, surely transcends all gender, and gender, when all is said and done, is merely a terrestrial condition that exists in the first place because of the need for procreation…. and because someone, after all, needs to do the dishes!]

Just wanted to end with some humor there….

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