Understanding Paul Non-Dually
Paul’s Universal Message
Friday, April 17, 2015
It seems to me that Christianity in the West suffers from two very foundational problems, which were not problems for Paul. First, we do not seem to believe in the active, dynamic reality of the spiritual world. For most of us, the “real world” is this physical, material world. So when I use a word like consciousness or the collective unconscious, many Christians are afraid I must be some kind of New Ager.
Christians should be the first ones to understand that the first and final state of reality is spiritual, or the unmanifest, as some have called it. But we have been so caught up in the world of forms, or the manifest, that it becomes all we take seriously. If religion is to be reborn at any dynamic level that is really going to change society or change the world, we must understand that spiritual reality, consciousness, or Spirit, if you will, is the true reality; all the rest, including the material world, emerges from it. That’s a switch even for people who think of themselves as religious. True spiritual cognition does not come naturally to us.
The second foundational problem is individualism. What Jesus refers to as the Reign of God or the Kingdom of God and what Paul refers to as the Body of Christ is first of all a corporate reality. “Salvation” is taking place systemically, collectively, and historically. How did we miss that? In the Hebrew Scriptures, Yahweh made promises to Israel as a whole; very few were made to individuals. The prophets usually criticized Israel as a whole. But by the sixteenth century, Christianity was primarily focused on how individual people can go to heaven, which is sad in its smallness. The corporate, collective, social, historical, cosmic message was largely lost, and remains forgotten and hidden.
Paul recognized this cosmic, universal truth, which was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We are all collectively jumping on the “Jesus train” and letting him carry us forward, because his pattern is the inevitable pattern of all reality and every human life.
Jesus, for Paul and for us, is a stand-in for everything and everybody. Jesus is “the promise,” “the guarantee,” and “the pledge” (Paul’s metaphors) for what God is doing all the time and everywhere. There are really two resurrections in Paul’s view: the first is the private resurrection that seemingly happens after we die, and the second, and much more important one for Paul, is his cosmic hope that all of history will end in resurrection—just as it did for Jesus, who is the prototype for everything else (see 1 Corinthians 15:12-58).
Paul doesn’t seem to worry about whether you are going to heaven, and he never once mentions hell. For Paul, it’s all about the final resurrection, the cosmic resurrection, the end of time where what God did in Jesus (namely to raise up what humanity crucified), God is going to do in all of history and all of creation. It’s a universal message! Paul believes he’s giving a message for the salvation of this world; and we minimized and trivialized it into a private evacuation plan into another world.
Gateway to Silence:
“When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
Reference:
Adapted from In the Footsteps of St. Paul (CD)
