Addendum to "Smart Heart" -- The Fantastic Four

New Template: Scripture - Tradition - Experience - Reflection

When Jesus recommended that the individual should go into a closet and pray to God in secret, he assumed the Jews he was addressing had already studied Torah and the Writings regularly since they were 10 years old. Shall Metaphysical Christians admire someone who travels 8,000 miles to "study" with a guru, but disparage the systematic study and reflection on treasures of Western spirituality? If our primary tool for spiritual experience is a feel-good event with modern music, how do we differ from Pillar of Cloud Independent Fundamentalist Tabernacle down the street, which offers the same feel-good package, and pulls in a much bigger crowd?

It is simplistic to think people are flocking to fundamentalist and evangelical churches because they are afraid of hell. If you listen to the preachers at those cathedrals-in-the-cornfields of America, what is striking today is their upbeat message. God is a God of redemption, healing, blessing, and love. Yes, they do filter it all through an archaic, dualistic theology, which does contain eternal doom for the unsaved, but that is NOT where the emphasis is placed in many, many conservative churches today. They are selling joy, not fear. And their Jesus-rock, hand-waving, praise-the-Lord worship style is doing exactly what our people do when we sing "I release and I let go..."

It is all about engaging the worshiper at the emotional level and giving them a taste of the sweetness of God. Some would argue that without an encounter with the Divine, it's all an abstract word game. God's Presence and Power must be apprehended first in regions of the heart. But the process doesn't end with emotion; it only begins there.

UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION: NEW THOUGHT

It is not emotions which make Unity unique--it is ideas. And ideas MUST be tested, refined, discussed, applied, re-assessed, re-defined, cussed and discussed again. Jesus discoursed with the learned men of his day. True, he lambasted them frequently, but he engaged them in dialogue instead of dismissing their enterprises as folly. If Jesus showed that much respect for the process of theological discourse, how can his followers settle for happybabble and joy songs? There are so many great ideas, so many great issues, where is the prophet to bring us the word of the Lord for today?

My suggestion is that we continue to do the outstanding work we are doing in prayer, meditation, joy work (yes, joy WORK! ), healing, and prosperity-wholeness. And we add to the mix an intellectual dimension, which has been absent since the earliest days of the Fillmore revolution. To read Charles Fillmore is to engage a mind that thought things through before arriving at very definite conclusions. Myrtle Fillmore, too. In one of her earliest letters, long before they were married, she wrote to warn Charles that she was quite eclectic in her theology.

TRANSCENDENTALISTS

The intellectuals of their day were not all stuffy traditionalists, either. It was the era of the Transcendentalists, which included such intellectual luminaries as Louisa May Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. And, of course, the greatest of them all, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson is quoted frequently by the early-modern founders of New Thought Christianity. Marcus Bach said Emerson was the actual father of New Thought, although one could argue that P.P. Quimby and Emma Curtis Hopkins are also contenders for that honor.

Even a cursory reading of the ideas of the Transcendentalists will show how very much in their debit we are today. One of my hopes is to offer in the near future a whole course in the relationship of New Thought Christianity & Transcendentalism at Unity Institute.

My point here is that Unity and New Thought in general did not begin as some feckless brew of mawkish sentimentality and nugatory anti-intellectualism. As one YOU'er said to me in California, "Dude, we got us some seriously smart people up the family tree..."

New tools are needed to release the power of those ideas once more, and with all the resources and technologies coming online today, I believe the time is now. If New Thought Christianity learns how to think as deply as it feels, bringing balance between head and heart, the lonely and spiritually hungry multitudes who long for a thoroughly modern, intellectually solvent, spiritual home will flock to our ministries. And we're not talking esoteric science here. Simple techniques are available to assist ministers and teachers to explore metaphysical theology more deeply.


SCRIPTURE - TRADITION - EXPERIENCE - REFLECTION

For instance, decades ago our friends in the Methodist camp discovered a straightforward, four-part program for doing theology, which has yet to be improved upon. Because of its Wesleyan origins, the system has been called the Methodist Quadrilateral, but this template seems to have broad applications beyond the UMC. I like to call it the Fantastic Four. It works like this: Whenever considering a concept or practice which has spiritual/religious dimensions (as everything, properly understood, pretty much does), the procedure is to run the idea under consideration through the Quadrilateral machinery, i.e., scripture, tradition, experience and reflection.

For example, suppose we were considering an issue related to war and peace today. Should a person volunteer to serve in the military forces of his or her country? According to the mission statement of the US Army Infantry, the purpose of combat soldiering is, "To close with the enemy by fire and maneuver to destroy or capture him.” Is this compatible with a Christian point of view?

All right, class, before you raise your hands to answer--relax! It's only a rhetorical question. We're not going to slug it out war-and-peace here and now. (Believe it or not, there are good people on both sides of almost every issue, this one included.) I am a retired US Army Chaplain, so I have some ideas about this topic, but they can wait for another time. The above is provided as a subject to enter into the Fantastic Four/Quadrilateral machinery. I can start anywhere, since all four parts are interactive. However, I'll take them in the sequence given.

SCRIPTURE
Although this is primarily the First and Second Testaments (Hebrew and Christian Bibles), by no means would I rule out the sacred writings of other traditions, which may have something quite profound to say on war and peace. Time and place are important, too. Both biblical Judaism and classical Islam will likely have a different take on the subject than modern Buddhism. And modern interpretations of the Bible shed a lot of new light. For example, the Hebrew text translated "Thou shalt not kill" in the King James Version is usually rendered "You shall not commit murder" according to newer translations. I'd take a look at passages where people were faced with choices involving violence, and see what the tone of the author's message seems to be.

I would NOT simply take anybody's scripture as an absolute mandate from God, and I am OK with saying, "That's what this biblical author said then, but today I disagree..." The idea is to let the words of Judeo-Christian Scripture and the inspired writings of other faiths inform my thoughts as I process the questions at hand. But I am also aware that other people have thought about these issues before me. That's why I need the second factor in the process, tradition.


TRADITION
Talk about a term which has fallen on hard times! Tradition is almost a cuss word in some people's minds, and with good cause. However, what I am talking about here is not blind obedience to hidebound conventions. Tradition refers to stuff that happened and things people thought about it. What did Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Quaker founder George Fox and Mohandas K. Gandhi say about war and peace? What have people on both sides of this issue
thought and done? As I reflect on tradition, I realize I'm not in this alone.

EXPERIENCE
The world has changed radically in my lifetime. When I went to Germany as an 18-year-old Army private in early 1965, my high school peers (class of '64) all had short hair and did NOT do drugs. Kids today don't believe the latter, but it's true. When I returned two years later--1967--the anti-war movement was beginning, the Beatles had revolutionized hair-and-lifestyles, and pot was everywhere. I've still never done any recreational drugs, and never will. It just isn't part of my life values. But I am aware that those values were shaped by experiences--in the military, in my German-American upbringing, in the teachings of the liberal Protestant church which I attended.

Society and individuals have experiences which shape their beliefs. Were all the people in the Old South evil because they by-and-large supported slavery, even those who owned no slaves? Were all the people evil who were caught giving the "Seig, heil!" salute in those grainy, black-and-white photographs at 1930's NAZI rallies? The culture and community experience is a powerful factor in formulating values and beliefs. As the sociologists say, "There are no tiger gods where there are no tigers."

Examining an issue to see the cultural and experiential influences upon one's thinking is part of the process of doing theology via the Quadrilateral. But even the process of examination itself is a factor.

REFLECTION (Reason)
I divide reflection into two parts: intellectual reasoning and creative intuition. Any problem or issue must think right and feel right. The head and the heart again.

And as I said the whole process is interactive. Scripture provides paradigm stories and teachings by which to evaluate Tradition, which in turn gives its verdict on the meaning of those stories and ideas. Experience of the community and individual shapes the way we look at Scripture and Tradition, but each of these also provide tools to evaluate the highly subjective experiences of life in a concrete historical and cultural expression. Finally, Reason gives the tools to think critically, creatively and intuitively about all these categories, while being reined in from flights of fantasy or excesses of emotion by the more earthbound elements of the process.

It is a kind of checks-and-balances system for theology, and I heartily commend the 4-fold process to spiritual seekers and students at all levels of mastery.

The "Fantastic Four" is another way for Unity and the other New Thought churches to be "Smart with a Heart" in the post-modern age in which we live, move, and have our being...