Hi Friends -
I am convinced that the religion we know as Christianity is entering into a entirely new era, which can be called metaphysical Christianity. Christianity’s first era, the catholic era, ran through the first 1,000 years. The catholic era grew out of the Roman Empire and eventually overran the 1,000 year Roman rule of power and oppression with a Christian rule of oneness and order.
The second era, the era of evangelical Christianity, began to form with the expansion of trade, the revival of classical philosophy and, especially, the wide-spread use the controlled experiment to discover new knowledge. I know it’s difficult to associate the term evangelical with such progressive trends but what we know today as modernity would never have come about without the rebellion of Luther and Calvin against the suffocation of catholic order.
The third era, that of metaphysical Christianity, is emerging from the limitations of modernity. It is emerging to provide solutions to problems that modernity has not been able to overcome: deeply rooted racism and hatred, uncontrolled destruction of nature and the environment, persistent alienation and meaninglessness.
Metaphysical Christianity is based on a new sense of the reign of God, not on the order of the catholic era, nor the discovery and intellectualism of the evangelical era, but rather on the sense of pervasive divinity of this new metaphysical era in which we are rapidly moving. The roots of metaphysical Christianity, at least in the United States is transcendentalism,
“A philosophy based on the idea that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition.”
That quote is from a beer mug I picked up from the Thoreau Society gift shop at Walden Pond a few years ago. As crass as its container may be, the words describe metaphysical Christianity better than just about anything I’ve read. And it’s no wonder that Emilie Cady repeatedly quotes Emerson, transcendentalism’s great philosopher, in Lessons in Truth, Unity’s foundational metaphysical textbook.
Chapter one of Lessons in Truth is Statement of Being; Who and What God is, Who and What Man Is. This chapter is essential reading, for it explains how “divinity pervades all nature and humanity and assets the existence of an ideal spiritual reality.”
Emilie Cady explains the pervasiveness of divinity in two sentences, each two words long—God is. Man exists. It doesn’t get any tighter than that. What God is—life, love, wisdom and power—becomes what each of us is destined to be. Father God, expressing such divine qualities, is made pressed out in us as Mother God. God as transcendent spirit becomes Christ in us as immanent substance, the very foundation of our spiritual Reality.
How we exist, how "we stand forth out of God" as expressions of the pervasive divinity of God, enables us to take on racism and hatred, loss of compassion, the destruction of our environment and our alienation from life. The era of Metaphysical Christianity is here.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
