[MD] are theism and mysticism mutually exclusive notions?

[Case]

[dmb]
The following is from "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy"...

"Mysticism of the theistic, dualistic sort seems to generate no particular 
difficulty for Christan metaphysics, and indeed ofen includes specifically 
Christian elements, such as visions of Christ. Strongly monistic mysticism, 
however, is harder to square with a Christian view, and when such mystics 
have themselves been Christians they have often een suspected of heresy. 
This sort of mysticism is likely to find a more comfortable religious home 
in the great non-theistic religions." (p.600)

[Case]
I think you are making much ado about nothing with this quote. To be
suspected of heresy is not the same as being accused of heresy. While
private mystical experience is not emphasized in many Christian traditions
it has always had its place from the Apostle Paul to Thomas Merton. It can
in fact be argued that Christianity is in large measure a synthesis of
Judaism and Platonic mysticism. Ideas like the immortality of the soul and
the God-Man have no place in Judaism. The conception of the material world
as evil and ugly compared to the eternal ideal is similarly Greek in origin.
When the Jewish God created earth, he said that it was good. Even an idea
like Satan is not original to the Jews but was picked up from the Assyrians
during the inter-testimental period. There is virtually no mention of a
devil in the Old Testament but the idea seems to have been common by the
time of Jesus.

[dmb]
In a theistic, dualistic religion we get a picture of man in a RELATIONSHIP
with a divine creator, very much like the basic SOM picture where subjects
exist in a relationship with an external, objective reality. By contrast,
monistic, non-theistic mysticism says that it is not a matter of
relationship between man and god, between man and nature, but rather a
matter of indentity. 
Instead of saying we have contact with god or with the world, this sort of 
mysticism says you are god, you are the world. Thou Art That. You are 
indentical to that. Or, at least, the distinction between Thou and That is
conventional and therefore illusory.

[Case]
Your statement above highlights what I have said to you several times
already. Theism is anthropomorphic mysticism and mysticism is narcissistic
theism.

To say the enlightenment is the belief that one is God/is the world, is not
only narcissistic the Jews would regard it as blasphemous. Identifying with
the eternal is not the same as being eternal. 

Theists on the other hand are definitely concerned with their relationship
to the eternal and in the Judeo-Christian tradition they are concerned about
how men related to God. By ascribing to him human traits they make this
relationship more accessible to just plain regular folks.

Also as I have pointed out repeatedly both of these approaches rely on
personal experience and in the absence of any means of testing the claims
made by either one of them they just spiral down the hole in the middle Ian
mentions so often.


dmb says:
Right. Being too static with respect to politics or other conventional
realities is bad enough, but I think when references to DQ itself become too
static something has been killed. In the class I'm taking at the University
of Colorado we just finished looking at how this process occured in our own
tradition. We looked at work of "The Jesus Seminar", a large group of
scholars who set out to determine, through testual analysis, what the
historical Jesus actually said. (For the sake of brevity i won't describe
the techniques they developed.) They determined that he said less than 20%
of what is attributed to him in the tradition that's been handed down to us.
They found that nearly everything he did actually say could be found in the
parables and they even assert that the historical Jesus never spoke publicly
except in parables. And it just so happens that the recently discovered, in
1949 if memory serves, Gospel of Thomas is one of the earliest known
Christian texts and it consists of nothing but parables. It is something
akin to authentic, according to these scholars.

[Case]
Glad to hear you are learning about the Jesus Seminar. I was an associate
member and subscribed to their newsletter for many years. I have also
attended lectures by many of the voting members and their critics over the
years and read quite a few of their books.

I do not believe the Gospel of Thomas as we have it dates much before the
second century. One could argue that the core of the present gospel is
similar to Q but if that is the case one could regard Q as the source of
Thomas as well as for Matthew and Luke. There is little in Thomas to offend
the average Christian and these are more in the spin Thomas places on
certain passages as you point out. But you see this same kind of thing
happening in the existing gospels Mark's is frequently watered down, respun
or reinterpreted by Matthew and Luke.

Stephen Mitchell in the Gospel According to Jesus make an effort to place
Jesus within the mystical tradition. He "edits" the gospels and just by
reordering familiar passages casts Jesus in a very different light. You
might find this worthwhile. Jesus does speak in koans and aphorisms. And if
you listen to them as such they have deeper meaning than you are likely to
get out of most pulpits.

On of the unique features of Jesus' teaching does speak to the issue raised
above. In the synoptic gospels Jesus does not refer to himself as divine. In
fact when the young man asks him "Good Master what must I do to attain the
Kingdom?" Jesus says, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but the
Father." Or when Jesus performs a few miracles and this disciples ask him
about it he tell them that they will be able to perform even greater
miracles by the power of heaven. Or in Mark when Jesus asks, "Who do men say
that I am?" Peter said, "You are the messiah," Jesus rebukes him and says
get thee behind me Satan."

On the other hand Jesus calls God "Abba" which is other translated Father
but is more like Daddy. The term implies a friendly loving personal
relationship with the divine.

[dmb]
But then when we turn to the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Luke and Mark) we 
can see these same parables, except that they have been drained of their 
mind-shattering paradoxicality and are instead softened and/or turned into 
allegorical tales in support of conventional morality. 

[Case]
If you read the parables a fresh in the regular canon they are mind
shatteringly paradoxical. I do not think they were drained of it at all. In
fact the differences between the stories in Thomas and the other gospels are
very slight and there is virtually nothing in it that is not in the
traditional gospels.

[dmb]
I mean, its pretty easy to see that Christianity was drained of mysticism
fairly early on and it has been treated with great hostility ever since.

[Case]
On the contrary in some respects Christianity is Judaism infused with
mysticism and this happened very early on. The whole idea of Jesus as fully
human and fully divine was a compromise between the Arians who thought that
Jesus was a man who became godlike and the docetics who thought Jesus was
God pretending to be a man. The Gnostics where on the fringes of the later
view and it was indeed deemphasized. But at the same time the Ebonites and
others who thought Jesus was merely human where also deemphasized.

[dmb]
We have to persuade ourselves to be truly persuaded, which is to say we have
to work through the concepts and reach the conclusion for ourselves rather
than just be told. Others can help to set out the hoops, if you will, but no
opinions will be altered unless and until you decide to talk a walk through
those hoops.

[Case]
Or as The Boss put it:
"At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe."