The major challenge to Immanuel Kant’s view of religion
as morality came from Friedrich Schleiermacher
the greatest theologian of the 19th century
who conceived of religion not as morality or belief
but as an immediate awareness of our absolute dependence
on God – religion is thus pre-moral and even pre-cognitive
and expressed everywhere in different ways
we are absolutely dependent on God
but in human relationships co-dependency is a betrayal
of wholeness because co-dependent people
have no personal center
whereas the enlightenment we seek already dwells within us as our center
like a mustard seed/treasure buried in a field/pearl of great price
when Jesus said “if you call another ‘fool’ you are in danger
of hellfire,” he did not mean “if you get angry, God will condemn you
to hell,” he meant that “unjustified and indulged anger
is hell” – you put yourself in hell and hell in your self
to break through into nondual consciousness
we need to overcome the domination of ego and reason
and forgive ourselves and reality
for being exactly what they are: a mixed bag
of goodness and darkness –
we are all simultaneously sinners and saints
even proto-saints like Thomas Merton
who never wanted to be a plastic saint
on the dashboard of someone’s car
finally realized after nine long years as a monk
that penance is pleasing to God
and “enables God to take undisturbed possession
of the soul” because in penance
your ego is reduced to nothing
unlike the Pharisee who thanked God “I am not
a sinner like that tax-collector” who at the back of the synagogue
beat his chest and cried out “Lord have mercy on me
a sinner” – Jesus said it was the latter not the former
who went home justified in God’s eyes – for penance tells you
“the old sinful self is not dead”
but absolution tells you
“God’s love is greater than the old self.”
Intelligent Christian Spirituality 