The Non-Dualistic Jesus and the Perversion of Scripture

Some years ago, I met a Hindu guru who informed me that he was writing a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. At the time, this sounded peculiar – as peculiar as my writing a book on Eastern Meditation. However, since then, I have found that this endeavor is almost a rite-of-passage for mystics and Eastern thinkers.

Why should they devote themselves to this task? To demonstrate that all true religion and religious experience are one! Why one? To prove that reality is monistic, and that we all partake of one universal consciousness – the God- or Christ-consciousness!

This is also the task of James Marion in Putting on the Mind of Christ: the Inner Work of Christian Spirituality. He claims that the Kingdom of Heaven is “a particular level of human consciousness” according to Jesus:

• What then is this Kingdom of Heaven, the vision of this world that the mind (consciousness) of Jesus “saw”? First of all and most importantly, The Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus saw so well is a vision of this world that sees no separation (duality) between God and humans.

The goal of mystics and gurus is a change of consciousness through the use of various methods to see beyond the “illusory dualism” of this physical world. Normally, we use our senses to perceive the distinct external physical world. There is me – the observer – and the external world (what we observe). Ironically, this maligned distinction (me vs. the rest of the world) is actually the basis of science, all learning and scholarship, work, and even relationships – everything that we value about this world. For example, when I married, it wasn’t a monistic marriage. I didn’t marry myself (monism) but a distinct human being (dualism) who I vowed to cherish above all others for the rest of my limited life.

In contrast to this, the monist disdains such distinctions in favor of the idea that we are all one – part of one universal consciousness. Meanwhile, Christian dualism maintains many critical distinctions. The Creator and His creation are two distinct entities. Yes, they are closely related, but they aren’t the same. However, Marion attempts to eliminate this distinction:

• Not only did Jesus see this truth for himself, but he saw that this essential non-separation from God was also true for the rest of us. And he actually had the courage to go about the land of Israel telling everyone that this was the case. He asked us, “Do you not know that you are gods?” (John 10:34-35).

According to Marion, Jesus not only taught that there is no distinction between Him and God, but also that there is no distinction between all of us human beings and God. (He doesn’t seem to include parasites, the bubonic plague or other living things in his monistic equation, as other monists do.) In support of this claim that contradicts all of our experience, senses, and reason, he illegitimately appeals to Jesus’ words – “you are gods” - in the Gospel of John.

In this context, Jesus argued against His opponents – the Pharisees – who had understandably charged Him with equating Himself with God (John 10:33). Rather than correcting their estimation of His teachings, Jesus used a rhetorical device, insisting that, according to Scripture, all judges are, in a sense, as “gods,” rendering judgments in the place of God (Psalm 82:6). It is not possible to construe Jesus’ words as implying that he thought that the Pharisees were gods! They certainly didn’t construe His words this way. Instead, they correctly understood His words as provocative and therefore tried to stone Him (John 10:33, 39).

Instead, Jesus maintained an absolute distinction between Him and others:

•  “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. ²⁴ I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.” (John 8:23-24)

• Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?”…  Jesus replied, “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad… before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:53-58)

• “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him. (John 5:21-23)

In fact, even though He called His disciples “brothers,” everything that Jesus taught indicated that He regarded Himself as the unique Son of God. He and only He would die for the sins of the world:

• Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matt. 26:27-28)

Marion’s claim that we are no different than God is entirely without biblical merit. Consistent with this claim is his claim that Jesus taught that there “was no separation between human beings”:

• The Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus saw so well is a vision of this world that sees no separation (duality) between human beings. Jesus saw there was no separation between himself and any other person, again despite all physical appearances of separation to the contrary. He saw every other person as himself (Luke 6:31). In fact, Jesus did not see other persons as “others” at all. He saw all human beings (and indeed the whole created universe) as part of himself.

Marion cites Luke 6:31 in support of his position:

• Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.  And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. (Luke 6:31-33)

Rather than supporting Marion’s case, these verses contradict it. Jesus uses the words “others” and “sinners,” thereby acknowledging distinctions among people, not oneness! And He did this consistently. Right afterwards, Jesus drew a fast line between the good and the evil man:

• “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” (Luke 6:45)

Jesus then distinguished between the obedient whose deeds would stand and the disobedient, whose deeds would collapse (Luke 6:46-49). He also sharply distinguished between the children of the light and children of the darkness:

• Then Jesus told them, “You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. Whoever walks in the dark does not know where they are going. Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.” (John 12:35-36)

Jesus also drew a sharp distinction between the saved and unsaved:

• “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Matt. 7:21-23)

Monism is insanity. It forbids any concrete statements of fact. Consequently, Marion argues:

• Jesus did not say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is this” because “this” automatically excludes its opposite “that.” Nor did he say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is that” because “that” automatically excludes its opposite “this.” He did not say “The Kingdom is here” because “here” excludes its opposite “there.” Likewise, he did not say “The Kingdom is “there” because “there” excludes its logical opposite “here.” So Jesus ended up saying that the Kingdom was “not here and not there” (Luke 17:21).

Marion’s monism rules against making any sharp distinctions. Consequently, he cannot logically make a sharp distinction between monism and dualism as he always does.

Besides, are Jesus’ words of Luke 17:21 anti-dualistic or an affirmation of dualism? Instead, of supporting Marion’s position, this verse asserts that He is the Kingdom of God and not any Tom, Dick, or mystic. Here is the broader context:

• Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, [VERSE 21]: nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.” Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.  People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is!’ Do not go running off after them.  For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.  But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. (Luke 17:20-25)

Clearly, according to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is in our midst when Jesus is in our midst. It is not a matter of ridding ourselves of dualistic thinking but of embracing dualism – that Jesus is our Savior, and that without Him, we non-saviors can do nothing (John 15:4-5)! However, according to Marion, we too can be Jesus by simply seeing a nondual reality as Jesus allegedly did:

• Jesus, of course, did have one huge advantage over the rest of us. He was born with the inner ability to clearly see the nondual vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. Like all humans he probably had to go through the earlier levels of consciousness as a child, but, according to the Gospel, his everyday consciousness “saw” the nondual vision of the Kingdom… If we want to follow Jesus, we have no choice but to go deep within ourselves and, putting on the same mind that Jesus had, come into the nondual, no-separation vision of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Instead, according to the Gospel, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8), even “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven” (Heb. 1:3).

Monism contains its own deadly poison – a rejection of reality, an embrace of darkness in which the believer will fall. Consequently, every monistic culture has faltered.

To believe that there is no distinction between us and God is also to deify all of our thinking and doing. There is no longer good nor evil, justice and injustice, beauty and ugly, guilt and innocence. Everything is the same and there is nothing to change or learn. In order to live in this world, the monist must accept inconsistency, confusion, and incoherence – the price we need not pay.

Although monism is an attempt to see the other as ourself, ultimately, it provides a lonely landscape which turns the monist inward in a vain quest to see reality as it isn’t. In contrast, the Christian can look outside of himself to a Savior who has guaranteed that He will love and protect us eternally.

The Church and its Growing Appetite for Pantheism

The West has embraced pantheism with a full-body embrace. Champion of the environment, Al Gore, stated:

• “Our religious heritage is based on a single earth goddess who is assumed to be the foundation of all life…all men have a god within. Each man has a god within because creation is God.”

For Gore, it is not enough that God created nature that radiates with His wisdom and artistry. Instead, nature is actually God. Everything is God and any distinction must be eliminated.

Why does he go to such a pantheistic extreme? Perhaps Gore expects that if we deify nature, we will also care for it better. However, if everything is deified, then the toxic waste dump is also deified along with every rape, kidnapping and beheading. To deify everything therefore is to deify nothing. It also serves to eliminate any distinction – right from wrong, just from unjust, love from hate - that has built enduring and thriving societies. After all, according to pantheism, everything is God, and God is in every action, even genocide!

Leonard Sweet, a leader in the Emergent Church, also strives to eliminate distinctions:

• For people who understand the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that the earth behaves like a living system and, indeed, that living things regulate earth’s environments, it is not craziness to suggest, as some electrical engineers have argued, that scientists who like their equipment get better results than those who don’t. …--when food, plants, animals, and machines are seen as part of us, and we of them. (Quantum Spirituality, 238)

We are our machines and our machines are us, and we are all God. In a pantheistic world, reason has no part. In fact, it is the enemy. It shows us that we are not our machines. They can be thrown onto the dump heap, and we can go on our merry way.

Reason must be eliminated. It raises embarrassing objections. Reason is eliminated in a variety of ways. We often hear the claim that reason or thinking obstructs the work and experience of God. Professed Christian psychologist, David Benner writes:

• It is a state of active receptivity that opens us up to the sacred. This is exactly how the contemporary Quaker author Douglas Steere understand prayer, describing it as “awakeness, attention, intense inward openness.” Sin, in his view, is anything that destroys this attentiveness. The greatest threat to attention is thought. (97-98)

Prayer is no longer interpersonal – a plea to our Savior. Rather, it is something we do to ourselves – a form of masturbation, a substitute for relationship. We’re in control – the captain of our own ship.

Of course, the big enemy is thought. It raises troublesome questions. While these mystical practices insist that if we are to experience God, we must get our minds out of the way, reason asks, “What is it that I am really experiencing? Can I coerce God into my desired experience through techniques and manipulations? Is God amenable to such things?”

Likewise, the Bible insists that we shouldn’t close down our critical faculties:

• Test everything. Hold on to the good. (1 Thes. 5:21)

The popular Christian mystic, Richard Foster, shares Benner’s warnings against thinking:

• Imagine the light of Christ flowing through your hands and healing every emotional trauma and hurt feeling your child experienced that day. Fill him or her with the peace and joy of the Lord. In sleep the child is very receptive to prayer since the conscious mind, which tends to erect barriers to God’s gentle influence, is relaxed. (Celebration of Discipline, 39)

Once again, the “conscious mind” is the culprit. According to Foster, God has many blessings for us, but He just can’t penetrate our mental barriers. However, Foster’s wimp-god is not the God of the Bible, who declares that there is nothing that he can’t do (Gen. 18:14) and that we cannot erect any barriers against Him. The doors He opens, no man can shut, and what He shuts, no one can open (Rev. 3:7).

Instead, the Bible is consistent in its denunciation of sin and the refusal to believe – the one thing that separates us from God.

Foster’s God is also passive, permissive, and perhaps even pantheistic. He allows us to channel him and his healing benefits through our imagination, as if He lacked any will and character of His own. According to Foster, it seems that the main barriers to spiritual growth and blessing are our minds and our failure to use Foster’s techniques.

In The Signature of Jesus, Brennan Manning echoes the same message:

• “The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God in prayer…” “Contemplative spirituality tends to emphasize the need for a change in consciousness…we must come to see reality differently.” “Choosing a single, sacred word…repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.” “Enter into the great silence of God. Alone in that silence, the noise within will subside and the Voice of Love will be heard.” (quoted from Ray Yungen, A Time of Departing, 83). 

Manning’s advice directly contradicts Scripture, which never advises us to “stop thinking about God.” His recommendation for using a single word (or mantra) represents Eastern contemplative practice. Instead, Scripture prescribes the very opposite:

• Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly…But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3)

According to Scripture, blessedness is a matter of relationship – staying in close contact with our Savior and avoiding sin, not thinking about God.

Manning also violates the teachings of Jesus:

• And when you pray, do not keep on babbling [on a single word or phrase] like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. (Matthew 6:7) 

Evidently, Manning thinks that paganism and its manipulations and meaningless “babbling” are superior to Jesus’ teachings. He emphasizes the fact that prayer is a matter of talking to Another – our Maker and Redeemer. Fundamentally, it is not about a “change in consciousness,” but the acknowledge of our dependence upon our Savior!

Pantheists deride dualistic thinking – the separation of the thinker from the rest of reality. If instead reality is all one, the only thought that we have is what we share with everyone else. Therefore, we cannot talk about the “me-them” distinction, if we are all one. (Of course, the pantheists can’t logically maintain this stance. Whenever they say anything, they are making distinctions using dualist thought. We are also talking to another,  distinct person. Simply to say that some are enlightened and some aren’t or one thought is wrong and another is right is dualistic!)

Emergent Church pastor, speaker and writer, Doug Pagitt, puts it this way:

• We are connected to each other as well. Christians like to talk about community, yet the dualistic [us-them] assumptions surrounding our theology make it almost impossible for us to experience true community. As long as we hold on to “us” and “them” categories of seeing the world, we live behind a barricade that prevents us from joining in with God and others in real and meaningful ways. And it doesn’t really matter who we decide “them” is – the non-Christians, the sinners, the liberals, the conservatives, the Jews, the Catholics, that weird church on the other side of town. Division is division, no matter how righteous we want to make it sound. (A Christianity Worth Believing, 91-92)

Nevertheless, it is dualistic thinking that keeps my marriage going. I try to maintain a sharp distinction between my wife and my neighbor’s wife. To remove all distinctions is to remove real and committed relationships. There is an essential distinction between my children and grandchildren and other children. It’s a human reality, and any attempt to wrest away children from those who love them has always been met with tragedy. Just think of the communist experiment!

However, distinction does not obliterate our responsibilities before all humanity. It affirms it! I respect other marriages because I respect my own. I acknowledge my responsibility towards the children of others because I acknowledge my own responsibility. However, there are concentric circles of responsibility and commitment starting with the most intimate. We must honor, cherish and care for our father and mother. However, because of this essential relationship, I feel for other families.

If instead all distinctions are removed, barriers eliminated and everything leveled – parents with children, husbands with wives – we violate our God-designed selves and everything is degraded.

Even Pagitt creates “us-them” distinctions between his brand of religion and that of the Bible. There is just no escaping it. Anyone who wants to eat must distinguish between food and the one who consumes the food. Dualism is inextricably built into reality.

Emergent Church guru and writer, Brian McLaren, has also stated that dualistic thinking is what is wrong with the church (not his church, of course):

• Religious communities often take a short-cut to building a strong group identity -- by defining themselves in opposition to others. Muslims, atheists and gays are high-profile "others" which can be scapegoated to build a strong "Christian" identity. (Huffington Post Religion Blog, 2/19/03)

McLaren doesn’t seem to see that he too is scape-goating. However, his whipping boy is the Bible-believing church. However, truth always excludes, distinguishing itself against what is untrue. Likewise, justice must set itself against what is unjust. Life demands such distinctions.

Prior to this, McLaren wrote:

• Christians have been taught to see in "us vs. them" terms for centuries, and it will take time to reorient faithful people in a new direction -- "us with them," working for the common good.

Although I make a distinction between his wife and my wife - "us vs. them"- this doesn’t prevent us from working or vacationing together - "us with them." In fact, it is our mutual respect for certain barriers that makes our friendship possible.

Why can’t (or won’t) McLaren and the other Emergents and mystics acknowledge this reasonable fact, that reality is multi-faceted? Reality is not just comprised of universals and commonalities. There are necessary distinctions that must be made between ideas and even people. If this isn’t so, then let’s just open the prison doors and give every student an “A!”

This hatred of distinctions often takes the form of a hatred towards Christianity. Lynn White, Jr., Professor of History at the University of California, claims,

• “…As we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology…joined to give mankind powers which…are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt….Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature… No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

• “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects…The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated” (Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Garrett de Bell, editor, The Environmental Handbook: Prepared For The First National Environmental Teach-In (New York: Ballantine/Friends of the Earth Book, 1970, 21-25)

The West and all other societies make a sharp biblical and legal distinction between humanity and the animal world. Our laws protect humans before all else. While we can eat animals, we can’t humans. We put animals in zoos, but there is not one nation on the earth where innocent humans are kept in zoos. We marry fellow humans, not animals, at least, not yet.

While I appreciate White’s acknowledgment of the influence of the Christian faith on the sciences, his distinctions are far from accurate. While science has given us a greater ability to contaminate nature – and admittedly, Christianity has exerted a tremendous influence on the development of science – this phenomenon doesn’t reflect the teachings of the Bible.

Creation is God’s creation, and we are to admire and preserve it as such. Love also requires that we maintain it for the benefit of others. In contrast, even in the pagan societies that hold the world as sacred, where everything is sacred, nothing is really sacred. This becomes obvious when we investigate the actual practices of pagan societies.

In Whence the Noble Savage, Patrick Frank, writes:.

• “The Southwest [USA] is dotted with finds of people killed en masse…These indications of war, violent deaths, mutilations and cannibalism are form tribal societies that experienced no European or modern contact, thus contradicting the idea that peoples who were free from European influence lived relatively peaceful lives.” (Skeptic Mag. Vol 9, #1, 2001, 54-60)

• “Hawaiians drove to extinction at least 50 species of birds…By the time Europeans arrived, North America was a manipulated continent. Indians had long since altered the landscape by burning or clearing woodland for farming and fuel…Within 1500 years after occupation by Native Americans, for example, North America lost 73% of all large animal groups. About 39 genera were obliterated. Australia lost every type of vertebrate larger than humans following the appearance of the Aborigines…When the Maoris arrived in the late 13th century, the result was the rapid extinction of the moas, other flightless birds, and half of the terrestrial vertebrates.”

Frank concludes:

•   “All this emerging evidence for incessant human warfare from the earliest days, for ancient mutilation and massacre, for cannibalism, for ecological destruction, and for massive faunal extinctions sounds the death knell for the noble savage myth. Human societies have evidently and with negligent abandon despoiled the environment and engaged in pervasive warfare and murder as far back in time as we can detect.”

Why then this love-affair between the post-Christian West and Eastern pantheistic mysticism? We have rejected our Christian roots in favor of the idea of a non-distinct, mushy oneness, one that allows us to maintain our former lifestyles. Eliminating any form of distinction, any “us vs. them,” has become a moral crusade. However, such crusades merely replace the “us vs. them” with a new set of scapegoats and a deep grave for all its victims.