THE BIRTH OF TRANSCENDENTALISM

The big problem for Christianity today:

it has its roots in a first-axial-period consciousness

(500-300 BC when the great world religions formed

including Judaism, Christianity’s precursor)

and Christianity’s cosmology is outdated and irrelevant

according to many postmodernists.

 

Therefore, you sometimes have to use apologetics

(Christian philosophy) to open peoples’ minds

before you can be kerygmatic

(proclaim Christ to them).

 

Ascending religionists (working their way up to God

through more and more perfect virtue)

and descending religionists (working their way down to God

through greater and greater humility)

try to convert each other

but their salvation truly lies in their unity not division

both morals and mysticism are needed.

 

Fifty years before Pentecostalism birthed

in the 1850s, liberal Protestantism birthed

experiential American Transcendentalism with its love of

nature/poetry/spiritual solitude/mysticism

and liberal Protestantism rejected

the spiritual ennui of organized religion/church.

 

The Transcendentalists (Emerson/Thoreau/Whitman/Melville)

urged self-transcendence, a magnificent gift

but one always limited by the realities of life –

transcendence shows us the possibilities

but personal and social limitations

restrict our ability to fulfill the possibilities.

 

But exposing our limitations/mortality/hidden wounds to God

allows us to experience in our shame and brokenness

the unconditional love of the only One

the only truly Transcendent One.

 

Two tenets of Wisdom:

There is a God

You are not God.