Hi Friends -
There are 2.19 billion Christians in the world today. And some of them walk into your church every Sunday. When they do, they want to know what you teach and they want to know how what you teach relates to what they already know.
This post is a short lesson on how to understand what visitors to your church already know and how to explain to them how our teachings fit into their beliefs. It also explains why Emilie Cady’s Lessons in Truth has been so successfully used to bring visitors on the next level of joining your church.
Most of these visitors come out of mainline, Catholic or Evangelical Christianity. They have learned about four “sources” or “authorities” for our religious beliefs: that they are shaped by the teaching of the church (tradition), by the Bible (Scripture), by our rational thinking (Reason) or by the evidence of our everyday life (Experience).
This four-source framework for understanding theological beliefs is nearly universally taught in all of Christianity. I first learned it in the Episcopal church (from which I believe it originated) but I’ve heard it used by Catholic priests who define and defend the teachings of the church, by Evangelical pastors who wish to explain why Scripture ranks above tradition, and by Methodists who want to explain why experience is necessary for understanding the opening of the heart in the Christian journey. What’s more, this model is taught not only to lay people; it is also taught in theology classes and graduate level education.
It is especially valuable for those of us in Metaphysical Christianity. It seems that if we can identify how our teachings fit into the universally-held four source model then we would have a basis for introducing ourselves to the broader Christian audience.
If so, then we are likely to think that the “source” or “authority” of our teaching is Reason. After all, our Metaphysics classes are largely an exercise in rational thinking, inherited from Platonic Greek philosophy, that was revived and reformulated by Aquinas before the Reformation and by Enlightenment thinkers after the Reformation.
But maybe the source or authority of our teaching should be based on Experience. Experience came to be recognized as a valid theological source with the rise of Romanticism in the early 1800s, which we know in north America as American transcendentalism and especially the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had such a great influence on New Thought.
Reason and Experience as sources of theological understanding may be enough, but there is something better. And it is revealed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address and from the two chapters written by Emilie Cady on The Secret Place of the Most High and Finding The Secret Place, which we know as “The Silence.” Let’s start with Emerson. He writes:
“The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself...”
“Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”
Intuition, for Emerson, is a gateway to spiritual understanding. That is another way of saying that Intuition is a source or authority for Christian theology. As we read these words of Emerson, most of us who have studied Metaphysical Christianity will recognize why they have resonated so much with Emilie Cady and Charles Fillmore. Rather than interpret them, I encourage everyone to read and reflect on Emerson’s Divinity School Address. It is truly the foundational document for all of New Thought theology.
If Intuition is a gateway to spiritual understanding, then Emilie Cady explains the source. The source of Intuition is our Spirit nature. She writes in chapter 8 of the original edition of Lessons in Truth, Secret Place of the Most High:
“Beloved, that which you so earnestly desire and seek will never be found by seeking it through the mental side alone, any more than it has heretofore been found through the emotional side alone. Intuition and Intellect are meant to travel together. Intuition always holding the reins to guide intellect. “Come and let us reason together;” saith the Lord. If you have been thus far on the way, cultivating and enlarging only the mental side of truth—as probably is the case—you need in order to come into the fulness of Understanding, to let the mental, the reasoning side rest awhile. “Become as a little child,” and, learning how to be still, listen to that which the Father will say to you through the Intuitional part of your being. The light you so crave will come out of the deep silence and become manifest to you from within you if you will but keep still and look for it from that source.”
This passage from Emilie Cady is especially important because she relates Intuition to Intellect, which is Reason—one of the universally accepted sources and authorities for theological thinking. Her claim is that Intuition and Reason work together in the revelation of Truth, but that Intuition guides the process. That which is revealed by Intuition will come to be understood by Reason. “Faith,” as they say about theological reflection, “seeks understanding.”
What I’m introducing here is expanding the list of sources or authorities for theological reflection and discourse—that we should rely on tradition, Scripture, reason, experience and intuition when speaking and writing about God.
What right do we have to do that? One well-respected, contemporary theologian explains that the list has grown over time. Theologians began with tradition and Scripture, but Reason was added when science and Enlightenment thinking emerged in the 17th century and Experience was added when Romantic thinking emerged in the early 19th century. (Elaine A. Robinson, Exploring Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 91.)
We’re now in the 21st century. It just may be that we’re in a new era of spiritual understanding as well. Describe it as we may, it’s en era of information and ideas—an era of Divine Ideas. And it just may be that we are seeing a move from the era of Evangelical Christianity to the era of Metaphysical Christianity. If so, we should do what Christianity has done throughout it’s entire history: advocate for the adoption of a new source and authority for understanding truth: Intuition.
I believe that people today will understand and relate to the idea that Intuition is a valid source and authority for their spiritual journey. They will go to where Emilie Cady led them many years ago—to The Secret Place Most High, and they will find there a new source and authority for their beliefs—Intuition. Further, their beliefs, revealed by Intuition, will be confirmed by all the scientific modern truth revealed by Reason—their Intellect.
That is faith seeking understanding for the 21st century.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
