APRIL 2013

    Several common ideas weave together to form this eclectic tapestry of modern spirituality. One such idea is the portrayal of God as a generic deity, thus driving the belief in the commonality of all religions. Another idea is the deification of the individual, often veiled in language that claims that people can hear god’s (or “a god’s” or “a goddesses’”) voice and thoughts, or that this voice radiates from inside of each one of us. As we will see in this article, emotions and experience are held in high regard, making meaningless the ancient experiences of others who wrote dusty religious documents. Another aspect of modern spirituality is the rejection of formal religion, and any accoutrements of such, including religious books (i.e., the Bible), regular worship gatherings, denominations, and doctrines.    One of the more recent fountainheads of modern spirituality is Neale Donald Walsh’s 1996 book Conversations With God (hereafter CwG). In CwG, Walsh purports to be literally dictating his interaction with God who patiently, thoroughly, and sometimes snarkily answers his questions. The result of this alleged conversation is a worldview that jettisons formal religion, and provides a soft, fuzzy deity, who is enormously appealing, but who is also an idolatrous fiction. We will discuss the basic content and implications of CwG in this article and in a “Part 2” that we will provide in the next edition.

    My first approach to CwG was to discover all the ways in which it contradicts orthodox, Biblical Christianity. I thought that if I could point out a few doctrinal errors in the book, then that would undermine its validity. I quickly came to realize that the book had little concern to align itself with Biblical orthodoxy. It rejects the Bible’s authority (page 8), denies that Christ was perfect (192), repudiates the existence of hell and the devil (51) and even makes a blatant potshot at the doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Christ (136). This book sought to transcend orthodoxy, and thus, to be impervious to orthodoxy’s criticisms.

    CwG spotlights the role of experience in one’s life, which is a primary plank in the platform both of New Ageism and post modernism. It defends the role that experience and feeling increasingly plays in both secular as well as evangelical discussions of spirituality (especially in Emergent spirituality and practice). Walsh’s deity states, “My most powerful messenger is experience” (p. 5). Dealing with how one can achieve certainty in life, he states, “Mine is always your Highest Thought, your clearest Word, your Grandest Feeling” (4). Thus god’s thoughts, voice, intentions and feelings are blurred with those of the individual. Meaningfully, in the 2006 film about Walsh’s life, also called, Conversations With God, actor Henry Czerny portrays both Walsh and also voices “God”; the two entities, human and divine, are precariously blurred into one.

    CwG also asserts the unconditional free-will of human beings. Walsh’s god states, “I have given you free will – the power to do as you choose – and I will never take that away from you, ever” (p. 5, see also p. 13). The desire for free will leads to assertions of self-authority, whereby truth is determined by the “voice within you” (20). The reverse side of unfetter human will is the complete lack of accountability. Walsh’s deity asserts, “There is no judgment in what you call the afterlife . . . There is no accounting . . . Only humans are judgmental, and because you are, you assume that I must be. Yet I am not – and that is the truth you cannot accept” (183).

    Walsh launches a barefaced assault against traditional religion as well as common sense when he utilizes his god to justify self-love: “Let each person in a relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about Self . . . The most loving person is the person who is Self-centered” (124; note his capitalized “S” in the word “Self”!). Later he states, “And so I tell you this: be now and forever centered upon your Self. Look to see what you are being, doing, and having in any given moment, not what’s going on with another” (127). I appreciate the attempt to encourage introspection, but by taking that too far, Walsh encourages a destructive egotism.  The ultimate goal, then, seems to be the deification of human beings, not just of the race, but of individuals as well. Walsh’s god comments, “The promise of God is that you are His son. Her offspring. Its likeness. His equal” (75). He points to religious teachers, such as Buddha and his taken-out-of-context Jesus who have allegedly proclaim this idea: “Every master has likewise had the same message: Who I am, you are. What I can do, you can do. These things, and more, shall you also do” (86). God says to his pupil, “I tell you this: You are already a God. You simply do not know it” (202).

    Thus Walsh crafts a cult which satisfies every self-indulgent inclination of the post modern world: Our life is an experience, wherein we can create our own meaning, but are accountable to nobody for it. We can love ourselves and even makes ourselves god, without the shackles of organized religion. One can easily recognize the appeal and marketability of this system. Unfortunately, far fewer recognize the false premises and the destructive practices that drive it.

    So what manifestations have you seen of “modern spirituality” in a book, movie, song, or even in church!  Send your feedback about this article or your general thoughts about modern spirituality to feedback@eclectickasper.com.  

WHY MARBURG MATTERS: The Tone

    The German and Swiss Protestant Reformers fought over several issues, but few divided them as much as did the issue of Communion, or the Eucharist. While all of the Reformers got a bit punchy, Luther especially demonstrated a sectarianism and divisiveness that helps explain why the Marburg Colloquy collapsed.

    So, quick review: The Marburg Colloquy was held in 1529. It was convened by Philip I to end the divisive dispute over the Eucharist between the reformers, especially German professor and monk Martin Luther and Swiss theologian and pastor Ulrich Zwingli (see our article here). Luther championed the view called consubstantiation, that Christ's presence was mystically intermingled in the communion elements.  His opponents rejected this view, suggesting that it was too much like the medieval Catholic understanding of transubstantiation.  Of course, by 1529, hostilities were already high, and the fires of division had been stoked by the various works that had been written in the few years before Marburg.

    For instance, in 1527 Luther wrote a work called, “That These Words of Christ, ‘This Is My Body,’ etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics.” The fact that the title itself suggests that his opponents are fanatics, sorta tips us off as to where Luther was coming from (he didn’t have much of a Poker face either). The following year, he published a treatise called “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper.” More than the mere content and arguments of these two works, the tone of these efforts reveals Luther’s vicious divisiveness that sheds light on the failure at Marburg.

    Throughout both of these works, Luther calls his opponents “fanatics,” “false prophets,” “deceivers,” and “fickle windbags,” who “flutter about and slobber something irrelevant” (“That These Words,” 118). He says that their arguments are “empty prattle” and “sheer lies and slanders” promoting “poisonous, deceptive teaching.” 

    I will merely mention of few of the choicer remarks that Luther used in his agitation with his adversaries (and there are some statements that I won’t even reproduce here!). *** WARNING: The following quotes are not for the faint of heart! I list some of them here simply to demonstrate how harsh and crass Luther’s rhetoric was. *** Speaking of the efforts of Reformers who espoused the memorial view Luther states: “May God repay you, Satan, you [explicative] wretch, for the shameful and cocksure way you ridicule us!” (“That These Words,” 48). He says of his opponents: “I am through with them . . . lest Satan become still more frantic and spew out still more lies and follies” (“Confession,” 162).  At one point Luther compares the Swiss reformers’ sermons to toilet paper (“That these Words,” 67). After describing one of Zwingli’s arguments, Luther cries, “The children should pelt it with dung and drive it away!” (“Confession,” 212). Of his opponents, he comments, “They are exactly like a person who, just as I was about to greet him, would turn around thunder with his backside and then walk away. Well, they will not run off so insolently and leave their stench behind them, if it be God’s will!” (“Confession,” 349).

    Occasionally in these two works Luther uses careful theological arguments. However, both of these works are also saturated by petulance, arrogance, vulgarity, and slander. Luther’s own arguments are often tainted with venomous sarcasm, childish overstatement and rhetoric that hardly seem befitting Christian scholarship in any era. Some sections were even omitted from subsequent editions of these works because they were considered so harsh.

    The divisive tone in these two works was not exceptional to Luther’s style, but were part of Luther’s writing and interpersonal interaction. Of course, not every work of Luther’s are like these two works; his commentaries, for instance, are relatively tame. But he definitely had a temper, and was not afraid to let it come through when he wanted.

    We must be honest and concede two different realities about Luther that history seems to want to sweep under the rug. First, Luther was a prolific and undeniably brilliant figure, much more so than he is given credit for. However, and perhaps this is what historians most want to hide, he was also a very divisive figure, as well. Other political and theological leaders of the infant Reformation were concerned about Luther’s angry rhetoric, and they recognized that his rancor could shatter the Protestant movement. Thus, the Marburg Colloquy was convened; but by then, chances for Protestant unity were probably too late.

INSIGHTS ON ISLAM: Iterations of Islam

    *** This article was already written before the Boston Marathon bombings that took place on Monday, April 15. While it is now known that the perpetrators of this act were Islamic terrorists, their specific affiliation and motivations remain unknown as of the publication of this edition, and thus, we do not attempt to address them specifically below. Nonetheless, it is a reminder that terrorism in the name of religion is alive and well, and Americans ought to be informed about Islam in general as well as some of its innocuous as well as dangerous manifestations. We mention some iterations of Islam below, and we encourage the reader to do her or his own research on this subject, as well. ***

    In addition to the three branches and two offshoots of Islam mentioned in the last installment of this series, there are extreme manifestations of Islam closer to our own time.

    The “Nation of Islam” is a radical black group founded in the 1930s in Detroit that often mixes principles of Islam with some of the teachings about justice from the OT prophets. They believe that black people were the first ones created, and that white people were created later. God allowed the white people to rule, but Nation of Islam leaders proclaimed that it was time for blacks to rise up against the white oppressors and restore the world to black leadership. Adherents include Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. I have been informed by a good friend with a Muslim background that Farrakhan is embracing something closer to a Sunni position and that he is distancing himself from the idea that Caucasians are “devils.” I guess that’s improvement. But here’s a really weird twist: Nation of Islam is teaming up with, of all groups, Scientologists! A March 2012 edition of The Final Call, one of Nation of Islam’s publications, announced an effort to certify 1,000 of its members to become Scientology “auditors.” According to the Dianetics system of Scientology founder (and, ironically, science-fiction writer) L. Ron Hubbard, auditors can help people identify and overcome painful subconscious scars, or engrams, from their past, which are prohibiting them from functioning at full capacity. I don’t know what attracted these two groups toward one another, but, Muslims and Scientologists are odd allies, indeed!

    I found this style of history writing itself both sublime and nerve-wracking. On one hand, Morton’s prose is elegant and delectable. One frequently feels the wink of the author, as though the reader is being let in on an inside joke. On the other hand, the conspicuous break from modern, scholarly historiography triggers both the thrill and the nervousness of “doing history” without a net. Echoing these concerns regarding the style and genre of A Nervous Splendor, reviewer Jeffrey B. Berlin asks, “Is it intended to be an account of history or a creative work? Clearly Morton intends the former, yet sways, it seems, frequently to the latter” (Jeffrey B. Berlin, Review of A Nervous Splendor: Vienna: 1888/1889 by Frederic Morton, Monatshefte, Vol. 74, no. 2 [Summer 1982], 212). The insight into private events and the omniscient author’s revelations about people’s hidden thoughts blur the lines between verifiable history and speculation. 

    “Nervousness is the modern sickness . . . . It is the sickness of the century,” speculates one Viennese newspaper from which Morton quotes (315). More so than mere sickness, the story of A Nervous Splendor careens toward a seemingly inevitable conclusion: the macabre waltz wherein the romantic murder/ suicide of Prince Rudolf parallels the fragility and decay of Viennese society. The corporate and personal nervousness betrayed an anxiety-filled, decaying culture lurking behind the cheery eulogy: “It was a beautiful Austrian day” (109).

    At precisely the same time in France, it was a booming time for dynamite and an explosive era for social tensions. John Merriman’s The Dynamite Club explores the juxtaposition of those two phenomenon in Émile Henry’s 1894 bombing of Café Terminus, a popular haunt for upper-middle class patrons in fin de siècle Paris. Merriman investigates the multilayered motives behind Henry’s anarchist attack in order to comprehend terrorism against random and peaceful citizens both at that time and our own (3, 205). In Émile Henry’s case, some motives were related to difficult economic and social circumstances, including general social decay and interpersonal disconnection (16). Other motives were deeply personal such sorrow over his father’s death, the spurned love of Élisa Gauthey, and his pervasive sense of isolation. Anarchism connected Henry with a broad social angst of the booming Parisian anarchist community, but also forged a deeper bond between himself and his brother, Fortuné. Émile’s confident convictions that the destruction of the bourgeoisie would herald more equality for everyone found traction in French society, which resonated with his concerns without condoning his deeds. Yet, even his mother’s rationalization of his foul deeds betrayed a realization bursting with irony, namely, that Émile “was bourgeois to his soul” (201); he was bred from the same social strata that he wanted to destroy.

    The style of The Dynamite Club was similar to Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor; both read more like a novel or a historical fiction piece because of their less technical style. Even without the footnotes, Merriman’s extensive exploration into newspapers, letters and police records is evident. The author’s thoroughness sculpts a textured and dramatic account. My main criticism of the book is that it never satisfyingly revisits the question it raises about Henry’s motives for embracing violent anarchism and bombing the Café Terminus, except in a single rushed paragraph (215-216). The author leads the reader through a maze of possible factors and motivations only to provide a generic answer in the end. Perhaps the author wanted to leave the mystery open-ended, or to suggest that such a motive cannot reasonably be discovered; nonetheless, a more satisfying summary of the author’s quest and findings would have been helpful.

    While in prison, Émile Henry wrote to his mother: “Motives that you cannot understand won out, and I threw my bomb into the Terminus” (167). It was an inexplicable act against the innocent by an isolated and desperate individual. Both Morton’s and Merriman’s books raise the question of whether anyone can ever truly find a rational explanation to such irrationality and whether acts like terrorism or suicide simply shroud layers of complex mental anguish, which defy reason.

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT: Better Than Gold, Proverbs 3:14

    . . . because it is a better profit than the profit of silver and its revenue than that of the best gold.

    Have you ever thought how valuable virtues like faith, love and wisdom really are? Perhaps if we had a monetary value attached to every good decision or every kind act, we would truly appreciate their worth.

    In Proverbs 3:13, the author affirms the overwhelming value of attaining wisdom. The detractor, however, may scoff at the assertion that an intangible virtue such as wisdom is worth more than monetary gain. Then in the next verse, Proverbs 3:14, he addresses the materialistic cynic in every human soul.  It features commerce-oriented diction to negate the cynic. Another feature of 3:14 is the absence of any verbs, a clear-cut approach that may pacify bottom-line accountant types.

    The reason (note the word ki or “for”) an individual who pursues wisdom will be blessed, is because the intangible virtue of wisdom is a “better gain” or a  “better profit.” The Hebrew word tov, or “good” is used here as a comparative adverb rather than an adjective; wisdom is not just “good” but “better than.”

    The word “profit” translates sachar, which means a “commercial gain” or “a business profit.” The cognate verb sāchar, means “to go around” or “to travel about.” It is almost always used in the context of trade or of commercial enterprise, and specifically of a merchant or a merchant ship. The word is repeated twice in the first phrase relative to the gain of wisdom and “silver.” The author is not necessarily comparing wisdom to gold and silver, which would be comparing the tangible to the intangible, or the proverbial “apples to oranges.” Rather, he is minimizing the market discrepancy between silver and gold, and suggesting that the “gain” of wisdom is worth far more than either of these precious metals. The counter-intuitive conclusion is that on the whole, gaining wisdom is a grander and more profitable pursuit than gaining wealth.

    While one may dismiss the acquisition of silver, the author suggests in the parallel phrase that gaining wisdom is even better than receiving “a revenue of gold.” The word “revenue” refers to the income from business or produce from crops (Deut 22:9; Josh 5:12; Ps 107:37; Prov 3:9; 8:19; Eccl 5:10; Is 23:3). “Fine gold” or “high quality gold” translates the word charuts. It may be related to the Greek word kerátiōn, from whence we receive the word “carat,” a measure of the purity and worth of gold.

    What is in view here is high quality gold, though Proverbs 8:19 uses yet another verb that is seen as superior to charuts. Wisdom is portrayed as preferable to gold in Prov 8:10 and 16:16, also. In a modern setting, a crumpled $20 bill is as valuable as a crisp, new $20 bill. However, in ancient times, the worth of gold was defined by its quality as well as its amount. Wisdom is not merely a better pursuit than mere gold, but even better than fine gold. 

    The author asserts, again counter-intuitively, that striving to find wisdom will be more profitable for the individual than striving to make money. How much different would countries, churches and individuals be if we placed as much attention on acquiring knowledge and wisdom from God’s Word as we do gaining wealth and goods from the world?

    In a world dominated by material pursuits, we can stand out as individuals who pursue wisdom and who apply it in our interactions, relationships, and business practices. Scripture is clear that increasing in the knowledge of Christ and growing in wisdom and understanding the are worthier pursuits and better than the acquisition of anything that this world could offer.

QUOTE FOR CONTEMPLATION: What the TV says about TV

    The following is an amazing admission several decades ago from someone who made their living off of TV viewership. So what’s the moral of the story? Watch less TV, and spend more time reading web journals!

Television may have made us a nation of spectators. That’s the real danger. All those evenings, weeks, months, and years of people sitting there passively staring at a screen cannot help but numb the brain. This is not an indictment of talk shows, but I suppose many people cannot make conversation, so they watch other people talk on television. Or perhaps they have no sex or violence in their lives, but they would like to—so they watch television and are vicariously thrilled or repulsed by it. It’s quite possible that the mental and intellectual health of the country would be better off if people didn’t stare into that glowing box for so many hours.

- Talk show host Dick Cavett, June 4, 1979

FEEDBACK: Even More Post-Election Thoughts

    Yes, some of us are still mulling over the November 2012 elections, though, to be fair, the person who sent in the following paragraph did so over a month ago.  Below is one reader’s musings on some of our articles but especially in response to our December 2012 article, “The Bright Side of Getting Your Buns Kicked”:

I like your statistical analysis, but at the end of the day, Republicans have to ask themselves how they could have lost an election to the first ever openly anti-American president we have had. Even Woodrow Wilson was never perceived as being “aginst us” like this guy. This then goes to your previous article about a country divided [One Nation Divided, from the October 2012 edition], which we really are now more divided in the sense that we aren’t merely divided within an acceptable range of, for example, one candidate wishes to raise the minimum wage to $9, and the other candidate wishes to keep it at $8. Now we are divided over issues to which there is no easy compromise (kill the baby or don’t), or worse, we are divided over whether or not to observe our own constitution, or ignore it, and the majority is no longer even informed about the underlying issues. So, statistically we may not seem more divided, but the divide which exists is more likely to be fatal to our form of government.