God, Consciousness, and Sacred Plurality

A meditation on God, the Bible, and the problem of doctrinal pluralism

O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

For I have sinned. For I am captured by the enslavement of sin and bad habit. And yet, still in my bodily prison, I know through faith I have received the free gift of Grace, by Jesus’ Blood, which has cleansed and purified me, so that I may have everlasting life in and through Christ. 

How do I know this? Is it primarily a matter of Reason? Or of faith? As I see things, it is faith which comes first. It is basic to me. I know its truth the way I know the truth of my own consciousness: it is simply there, before me, given before all else as a transcendental principle through which and upon which I have knowledge of anything existing at all.

My belief in Christ is like the light of the Sun, through which and by which I am able to see anything at all. Christ as Logos, as eternal Word, is like the light of Consciousness itself, which is pure and immediate, and makes awareness of all things possible. It is through God’s awareness that anything exists at all, with God existing outside of all contingency, finitude, and limitation by means of space and time.

One might profitably think of God as the ontological ground of Consciousness and Existence itself, indeed thinking of God as Consciousness itself and as Existence itself; God as One with All Reality, the ground of being through which it’s possible to have any conscious experience whatsoever, and thereby God as the transcendental limit that makes it possible for our consciousness to be aware of existing things in the first place.

So, I do not so much consciously believe in God as I simply wrestle in mystery with an understanding of God being the ontological foundation that makes conscious belief possible in the first place, God being Absolute Consciousness itself, without division, limitation, or finitude, unifying all things in Oneness.

This is the essential mystic attitude: to see God baked into the very fabric of our direct conscious experience, indeed being the fabric itself, being the eternally existing screen upon which the light of Absolute Consciousness is projected, and thus, seeing God as inseparable from our most intimate reality of experiential awareness, through which all experience of reality is made possible, being the conditions for the possibility of extant awareness, the very medium through which the world shows up to us.

In the Vedanta tradition, this conception of God is called Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, understood in an Absolute Way, abstracted from all limitations of contingency and particularity, admitting of no distinction or duality, where God becomes the principle of Oneness which transcends even the very distinction between the One and the Many, Absolute and beyond all finite human comprehension, necessitating a properly apophantic attitude of negative theology, saying what God is not: God is not finite, God is not contingent, God is not limited by space and time, God is not particular, God is not mortal, God is not a discrete entity with discrete properties, etc., etc.

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There is a part of me that longs to be Catholic. The same yearning is there for the Eastern Orthodox tradition as well. The Episcopal Church scratches the same itch, but doesn’t fully scratch it, though, in my humble assessment, comes nearer than any other form of Protestantism I am aware of. It is a tradeoff: sink into the welcoming arms of infallible tradition, letting the Mother Church tell me what to think, letting it become my authority and resolve all my questions and doubts, and on the flipside, losing my deep-seated need to think independently, to acknowledge the plain fact which is fallibility of the history and present Church, being composed of finite and fallible and sinful humans like any other community of humans, to hold true to my moral duty not believe things that do not accord with my God-given faculty of reason.

How then am I supposed to decide? What outweighs what? Does the desire for a higher authority and resolution of doubt outweigh the need for critical thought and theological freedom according to my moral conscience? Which is the greater sin? I certainly do cherish Reason. And I cherish my independence. But is that pride? Is that my sinful nature lusting after its own desires and my mind rationalizing those desires with theological liberalism to justify itself so as to be not accountable to God’s Will? Or is it God’s Will that I only believe with what sits right in accordance with the moral intuitions He wrote on my own individual heart and the faculties of reason He gave me?

But that begs the question: How do we know God’s Will in the first place? That is not an easy thing to come to know with any certainty, protestations to the contrary. We must properly humble ourselves before the task of gaining knowledge of the divine and utterly transcendent and therefore incomprehensibly unknowable Mind of God.

Nevertheless, we as Christians, through tradition and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, take certain Scriptures to be supernaturally special and given to us as a sacred Gift from God for purposes of guiding us to salvation and eternal life.

But as Christian Smith decisively argues in The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, the Sacred Scriptures, as it is known to us as a community of Christian believers, has over the centuries given rise to innumerable and diverse interpretations and differences of doctrine on essential matters of all kinds, such that, even if Scripture was completely without any error or fallibility whatsoever, it would be impossible, given the sheer pluralism and diversity of interpretative disagreements among sincere, intelligent believers, to have any epistemic certainty that we have, via our finite minds and cultural boundedness, arrived at the Absolute truth in regard to God’s Will about any particular ethical matter or theological doctrine.

As a functional matter, the Bible is simply too diverse and multivocal to admit any theological convergence in core Christian doctrine, hence the proliferation of denominations and the natural tendency and tension within all Christianity for doctrinal schism.

Imagine you grew up unaffiliated with Christianity and completely on your own had a sudden conversion experience from reading the Bible without any knowledge of all the various ways in which Christians have disagreed with each over the centuries. How are you to then pick out a Church with “correct” doctrine on all matters of essential theological fact? What are the chances that any given selection of a Church tradition will get you closer to the truth on all essential doctrinal matters, especially when one’s beliefs are necessarily filtered through the theological and intellectual leaders of particular Church traditions, all of which disagree with each other in essential matters?

Thus, we cannot just rely on the Bible itself for final answers on all things doctrinal. For any approach to the Scripture must be done in accordance with the interpretive assumptions and frameworks of the spiritual and intellectual leaders of any given tradition we have already been influenced by, including the entire presuppositional apparatus of the modern, educated, Western worldview, which by default is empiricist, scientistic, and materialist in orientation, a worldview stripped of all sacredness and reduced to a technocratic bureaucracy of extraction that treats reality as dead raw matter we can manipulate for profit, wealth, and pleasure.

Depending on which tradition you are situated in as a Christian, you will likely arrive at wildly different conclusions about the same “inerrant” text. As such, any theological claim of inerrancy is made functionally and pragmatically irrelevant in the face of overwhelming interpretive diversity and therefore the doctrine of inerrancy becomes less a useful epistemic tool so much as a way to virtue signal in the Culture War.

For me, the overwhelming interpretive fact of intractable doctrinal diversity within Christianity is deeply humbling, and suggests that a good response to such a fact is not as a challenge for the intellect to overcome with great struggle, but a reason for letting go of pretensions of theological certainty, prompting instead an attitude of humility and awe in the face of incomprehensible spiritual mystery that we must accept in the fullness of faith, prayerfully asking for mercy from Lord Jesus Christ to send His Holy Spirit to dwell in us and lead us to understanding at the level of wisdom and holiness and not just intellectual propositions that do not impact our lives spiritually or ethically.