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February 25, 2004
Hello everyone,
There are times when I become especially critical of “organized religion.” More specifically, there are times that things seen on the local level begin to gnaw at me. Often it is not some colossal breach of faith or obvious carnal action: most often it involves some small, petty detail that doesn’t square with the world as I see it. The latest example? I frequently hear of believers posing the question: “If you were to die today, do you know where you would spend eternity?” when embarking on witnessing campaigns. Normally, when such a sentiment is expressed, I think my own thoughts and let it roll off my back. But this past week, I was feeling especially disgruntled by evangelical Christianity and its methods of “soul winning” that seemed to me trite and unduly confrontational: setting a person on the defensive from the onset. Of course, I see such things from the standpoint of someone who choked to death on Christianity before ever seeing it incarnated in his own life. When you start from a jaded perspective, it is unlikely you will end on a much higher note; I guarantee such questions as “If you were to die today . . .” would have instantly set me on edge in days gone by. Though my outward demeanor would have been polite, my one thought would have been how to rid myself of your well-meaning nuisance—posthaste!
For the past several weeks now, a discussion group has been meeting in my home on Wednesday nights and we have been reading C.S. Lewis’s 1947 effort Miracles, a book we all agree is getting progressively better as it goes. This past Wednesday, one of the members stayed over after the others had left and listened as I vented all the negativity I felt about evangelical Christianity. The question “If you were to die today, do you know where you would spend eternity?” was my main rallying cry. I railed about its assumption that a person already believes in heaven and hell and an afterlife. I went on to protest that such a question would never have worked with me or likely my pagan friends, adamantly maintaining that a far better approach was to dialog with others to find out what beliefs they hold. If they accept some sort of Judeo-Christian viewpoint, I said, such a question might then have validity. Otherwise, I maintained, it assumes a premise that might not even be relevant to the moment. I ranted and raved about how trite this question was, about the predictability of evangelical Christianity, about how the latter’s methods often dehumanize people by jumping on their backs with rote recitation one could easily mistake for a sales pitch. I talked about my past and my agnosticism and my own rage against the Gospel and how I was looking for something more than mediocre Christianity: I had heard all these one-liners before. These and a number of other things I said as the final member stayed and patiently listened to me.
Do you know what I soon realized? The more I talked, the more it became apparent I really wasn’t upset about these things at all. I mean, they do have a degree of validity in my estimate (though as presented, they were sadly lacking in balance), but they were ultimately a smokescreen I had erected that effectively disguised my own inner negativity. I was angry, seething: and for no apparent good reason. The aspect that floored me was that I did not even realize there was so much negativity inside of me. As I have written in Holy Discontent: The God Question, I was scapegoating—armchair critics abound by the dozens—and the scary part is that I did not even realize it. The problem was not outside; it was inside. Seeing this aspect in others is easy; long have I maintained that the uglier a person is outwardly, the more in need of love inwardly. But in myself? My own propensity for self-deception staggered me. It took the sympathetic ear of a brother in Christ to safely release the venom and restore my sensibility and equilibrium. I would never have known I was coming unhinged had it not been for the atmosphere of acceptance that allowed me to unburden the things on my chest.
The pastor of the local church I attend said something in his message this past Sunday that resonated with my recent observations. He was interested to learn that a person suffering from paranoia typically has very few people with whom to rub shoulders and thereby round off the more irrational edges. It seems that among the reasons for fellowship, we need others to help us remain rational. In my observation, irrationality is usually the reflection of a lack of proper perspective in some other area of life. And a proper perspective is one that balances: it may not be symmetrical to the eye, just as a “teeter-totter” or “seesaw” may have different sized children sitting at different distances from its fulcrum, but if we are to find true balance, the center of gravity—the meeting point of proper perspective—will always be centralized regardless of outward appearance.
So then, at the Wednesday discussion group in my home, face to face with another sympathetic human being, the poison was allowed to spew safely from my system and in its place flowed release and recognition of reality. Again, it is not that my ideas had no validity: it is rather that what was eating at me had nothing to do with what I thought it did and I was consequently unbalanced for the lack of proper diagnosis. This realization fueled my introspective tendencies and I asked myself from whence such negativity arose. Nothing seemed out of whack. I hadn’t gotten angry with anyone recently that I could remember. I never arrived at any obvious answers, though I think to large degree it is explainable in the everyday rough and tumble of my world. So many late nights, so many deadlines to meet, nearly constant stress and pressure to jump through this hoop and then that one. (Remember my hoops?) I suspect that stress itself begins to build up a “charge” a bit like static electricity and far more lethal; whatever the origin of such negativity, it must be released: it requires an outlet. To this end, I say that if we are to be a true friend to another, we will cultivate the rare art of really listening far more than we do. And, if I may be allowed one last irrational stab: I believe listening would revolutionize our efforts as we desire to be good and faithful servants, pleasing our Lord by fulfilling our part in the great commission; active listening might well render exponential increase to the effectiveness of any number of questions we have been trained to pose; such questions might then sound a bit more sincere and concerned and not quite so contrived to corner, capture, and wrangle confessions.
When left to myself, I have a tendency to ruminate and mull over things again and again in my mind. Such introspection can quickly become morbid and lead to a downward spiral. But in a small group setting, we can come alongside one another and bear each other’s burdens. There we can foster an inward examination that, because it is done in the positive company of like-minded seekers, leads to a healthy introspection. The rough edges begin to be knocked off and our perspectives are tested and tried, illuminated by the insights of others. It forms, if you will, a system of checks and balances. For all these reasons, I think that is why I have long since noted that support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous often have a rapport sadly missing in many of today’s churches. The air at such meetings is often blue with smoke and perhaps more than a few stray words, but there is often a gut-level honesty that is beautiful beyond description. Gut level honesty is not appropriate everywhere, for in the wrong company one may be torn to shreds: one is unwise in casting his pearls before unappreciative swine. But in an environment where everyone is seeking after the gain of that which is good, it is almost always constructive.
We were never designed to live in isolation. Created in the very image of God as we are, we were created for unity, harmony, and fellowship. God is not one but three. From beyond the furthest reaches of time—indeed, beyond time itself—God has always lived in fellowship with Himself. All things flow from the Godhead and it is to the Godhead we may turn for the illumination of any answer we seek: all streams flow from this Fountainhead. What is more, not only are we created in the image of God, we are to be imitators of God. We are to seek to become more like Him, for it is only in the fulfillment of our inner character that we will find completeness—and therefore contentment. What does it look like to become more like God?
Jesus tells us that if we were to summarize all the laws and the prophets, reducing them to their most salient points, we would find that we are to love God foremost and unreservedly and to treat our fellow human creatures likewise. Theologians often conceptualize the first point as being in proper vertical alignment, a factor that will naturally inform our horizontal alignment with our fellow man as if by magic. When these pieces are truly in place, we will find in the assembly of the like-hearted that “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there I will be also.” There is much to be said for this abiding and unity. We will begin by examining the doctrine of coinherence and see how it extends to the mystical church.
On the website Applied Christian Truths [site since obsolete], coinherence is summarized quite nicely using the teaching of Witness Lee, a prominent Chinese evangelist who was a disciple of the late Watchman Nee. While each of the excerpts is drawn from different books written by Witness Lee, we’ll simply put them in one continuous paragraph with a brief citation at the end of each excerpt. If you would like to see these excerpts in the order they appear on Applied Christian Truths, additional quotations on the subject of coinherence, and reference Scripture, see the source page Keyword — COINHERE:
In John 15:4a the Lord Jesus said, “Abide in Me and I in you.” This mutual abiding, this mutual dwelling, is a matter of coinherence. In today’s Christianity, Bible teachers may use the word coexist but seldom use the word coinhere. To coexist is different from to coinhere. To coexist is to exist together at the same time. To coinhere is to exist in one another, to dwell in one another. Coinherence, being a mutual dwelling or abiding, is therefore a mingling (The God-Men, 60). . . . Although God is triune, He is one. The Father is not separate from the Son, nor from the Spirit. The Spirit is not separate from the Son, nor from the Father. The Three have never been separated. The Three coexist and coinhere all the time. When One is here, all Three are here (The Divine Dispensing of the Divine Trinity, 127). The Christian life is actually a life of coinherence because we are in Christ and Christ is in us. We and He are coinhering (The Crystallization Study of the Gospel of John, 111). As the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son in the way of coinherence, we also must be one with the Lord in this way. We and the Lord Jesus should coinhere; that is, we need to be in Him and have Him in us. Then truly we shall be in the Lord’s name (Life Study of Philippians, 372).
(Note: Over 230 of Witness Lee’s books can be freely read online via his publishing company Living Stream Ministry, as well as those of his mentor, Watchman Nee.)
As Witness Lee bears out, we often hear that the members of the Godhead are eternally coexistent. But there tends to be a certain slipperiness when it comes to the idea of coinherence. Part of the reason could well be that the Trinity is so enigmatic to us. In any case, let’s examine this concept a little more closely. God the Father is the first person of the Trinity. He seems to be the mind behind the Godhead, the backbone of the Trinity, if you will. His role is no more or no less important than His fellow members though He always appears (at least in theological exegesis) in the first position. The second person of the Trinity is the Son, the incarnation of God. We recognize Him today as Jesus but He has likewise been eternally coexistent and coinherent with the Godhead. He is called the Son not because He had a beginning, but because He is the “fruit” of the Godhead. It is He who became flesh and bone and made His dwelling among us: it is for Him and through Him that all things have been created. He is the manifestation of God, the creative agent, the living word of God, the will of God made known. The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. He embodies the presence and the creative power of God and it is He who comes to live inside of us when we invite Christ to rule and reign in our lives. And because the Godhead is coinherent, it is not incorrect to say that we have invited Jesus into our heart, for where the Holy Spirit is, there the Father and the Son will also be and vice-versa. Of all the members of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit is perhaps the least understood and most misrepresented.
So then, we have these crude pictures to help simplify our understanding of the awesome God: God the Father as mind, God the Son as word (or body), God the Spirit as creative force. God exists throughout all things and by Him all things were created. Yet He is not all things, for if all created things were to cease their existence, He Himself would not cease to exist. All things owe their composition to Him and He constantly sustains all things. While it is impossible that He should ever cease to exist, for the sake of a conceptual understanding: if all things ceased to exist, He will still exist; if He ceased existing, all created things would likewise perish. Yet, for the believer who walks closely with the Lord and is empowered by the Holy Spirit, there is a reason why his language might tend at times to slip dangerously close to pantheism. Catholic Christian apologist Peter Kreeft captures the idea well in Surfing and Spirituality in which he identifies what he sees to be twelve stages to the Christian journey, each paired in series of threes corresponding to faith, hope, and love. (Incidentally, when I first read the title “Surfing and Spirituality,” I am so much of un accro du web—“an Internet addict” in plain English—that I assumed Kreeft would be comparing Christianity with surfing the Web: such is not the case.)
The last three stages [of the spiritual life] cover what is usually called “mystical experience.” Getting in over your head (10), with your feet no longer on the ground, symbolizes the mind plunging into the divine mysteries, the “dark night of the soul” that no words can mediate. We lose all footing. We are no longer in control. We’re a part of the sea, it seems. Thus, even the orthodox mystics say pantheistic-sounding things, for they see and feel only God, not themselves at all. Of course, they’re still there—who’s having the mystical experience, anyway? But they don’t know or feel themselves there any more. They’re in over their heads. This sounds scary only as heaven sounds scary. For it is heaven, the beginning or foretaste of heaven. All of us will be mystics there.
Even for those of us “ordinary mortals” whose most exquisite spiritual sensation is the acute pang of our own spiritual inadequacy and how little we feel like Christians at any given moment, there is still a reason our theology shares some common ground with the pantheist who maintains that God is everything and everything is God. The pantheist is only half correct, which, cast in its alternate perspective, makes him half wrong. Christianity has long since identified two distinct and paradoxical elements of the Godhead: He is at once immanent (everywhere at once like the pantheist claims) but He is also transcendent (separate and apart from His creation, something the pantheist denies). Staunch moralists often stumble over the aspect of immanence whereas “free-thinking liberals” are often reluctant to pronounce God’s transcendence. We do well to consider them both, for to take one without the other is to have half the truth; and again, if we pronounce the half to be the whole, what is the other half with which we’ve been left if not falsehood? With these considerations in mind, we will turn our attention today to the immanent aspects of God, implicitly contrasting them with the transcendent aspects we have been sure to tuck in the back of our minds for the continuation of our discussion today.
If God is coinherent within Himself as well as coexistent with Himself, and if, once we have voluntarily accepted God into our lives and strive to walk in His ways we also share of His Spirit which coinheres with our own, we have a perfect pantheistic-sounding portrait we will again call coinherence, this time as an extension of our original meaning. Of course, we are not God per se, nor is He “us” per se, yet we coinhere and are one and a part of the other, His Spirit and our spirit intertwined, if you will. Now then, if this is true of any one believer who has the deposit of the Holy Spirit living within him and thereby enjoys the mind of Christ in increasing measure, then the same must be true for every person who enjoys such fellowship with his Creator. And if each believer separately coinheres and is coinherent in Christ via the bond of the Spirit, then the same Spirit that gives to each is One and the same Spirit uniting this believer and all others in the body of Christ. So then, you and I are not so separate after all. We have a limited transcendence: I am not you and you are not me, but in the same sense, you and I (if you have the same Holy Spirit living within you as I do) are also coinherent with one another even as we are (and because we are) coinherent in Christ. Once again, we can expand the range of meanings of Jesus’ statement “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I will be also.” Christ is literally the Head—the Central Point, the Control Tower, the Vine—of coinherence; we are the body, the bride, the branches on the Vine, the “sap” of the Spirit flowing betwixt us and the Vine our mutual point of coinherence.
But we are forgetting something else as well. In the book of Luke, we are told that the Sadducees, a sect of religious Jews who denied the resurrection of the dead, began to question Jesus. In His extended reply, Jesus tells them plainly:
But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the burning bush, where he calls the Lord THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB. Now He is not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live to Him. Some of the scribes answered and said, “Teacher, You have spoken well.” For they did not have courage to question Him any longer about anything. (Luke 37–40)
Jesus tells them that God is not the God of the dead because there is life beyond the grave. Our Lord has been given the keys to death and Hades. Therefore, the saints that have passed on before us yet live with God, and where two or three are gathered in His name, there He will be also. So the doctrine of the mystical church recognizes that coinherence exists not only between the members of the Trinity and between the Trinity and the living believers, but between the Trinity and all believers uniting both sides of the great veil in the church universal. This teaching would all sound so very much like pantheism if it weren’t for the fact that all retain their identities even as they coinhere, for they likewise coexist—microcosmic reflections created in the image of their macrocosmic Maker who is at once immanent and transcendent. Lewis likes to say that Christianity is the only religion that allows the paradox of such unity amidst such diversity. In fact, he goes on to write in Mere Christianity:
But you must not imagine that the new men are, in the ordinary sense, all alike. A good deal of what I have been saying in this last book might make you suppose that that was bound to be so. To become new men means losing what we now call “ourselves.” Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts, to “have the mind of Christ” as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be “in” us all, shall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it is not so.
It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no other two things are related to each other just as the Creator is related to one of His creatures. But I will try two very imperfect illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply “In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else.” But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)
It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
The dual aspects of immanence and transcendence make it all possible: coinherence and coexistence, human creatures created in the image of God, imitating God, polishing the mirror that reflects His heavenly rays. And what, you may ask, is the source of this cohesion? What holds it all together? Now if you are asking me from the standpoint of physiology or physics, I must beg off with the answer of “God Himself,” for I surely don’t know what God is “made out of.” How could I? We’re made out of Him, if not out of any direct part of Himself, out of the creativity of His mind. (We have already addressed the “God creating out of nothing” issue to some length in Faith, Doubt, and Suchnot.) But if you want to know the virtue that makes such things possible, what holds the Godhead together in perfect unity, what forms the perfect system of checks and balances, well then: that is a question I can answer. We read in Colossians 3:14 this statement in a discourse about how we should treat one another: “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” But I believe we can look at this statement on another level and realize that love is what binds everything—from the Godhead . . . down to our brotherhood—together in perfect unity. Love is the only aspect of existence that equalizes all things without diminishing them; quite the contrary to diminishing all things in fact, love by its very nature always elevates the focus of its adoration. And love calling out to love results in mutual exaltation.
There is one further aspect of God and humanity we must examine as well. Neo-Platonists, some of the mystics, and other assorted seekers sometimes fall into an error where the world in which we live no longer has any bearing upon the affairs of earth, or, more specifically, on the physical elements of the universe and the recognition that we have bodies. But certainly at least for those of us who are yet alive, we have two very real elements to our persons. While we have a mind that is capable of traveling into the past, forecasting into the future: in sum, suffering from none of the limitations of space and locality ordinary matter does, we also have physical bodies that cannot possible be in any moment other than the immediate present. This aspect plagued the poet W.H. Auden for years, as we read in a previous issue of Le Penseur Réfléchit. And, as that article bears out, it is an aspect that troubled Kierkegaard before him. If you really want to take this reflection on body and mind out on a limb, I might recommend lesson number sixteen, Kierkegaard: Truth Is Subjectivity and Beware of the Crowd, in Dr. Gordon L. Ziniewicz’s excellent series Shadows on the Wall, his choice of names an obvious allusion to Plato’s cave. (Be forewarned: it is not for the philosophically faint of heart.)
In any case, we are very real physical creatures and we should not despise this element as being any less sacred than the spiritual aspect of our being. It is the same God who created both and it is with both that we can honor Him. When we speak of the weakness of the flesh, we are not literally referring to the weakness of our physical bodies per se, we are more referring to the vulnerability of being human, and, depending on how we use the term, the sinful tendencies inherent in our natures. In fact, we could say that the distinctions we force on many things are not truly warranted in any literal sense, short of helping our conceptual understanding: sacred versus secular, natural versus supernatural, physical versus spiritual. These elements are all part of the same continuous whole, the natural versus the supernatural and the physical versus the spiritual, different to some degree as the colors of the rainbow are different but similar in that they all reflect the same white light that shines from beyond.
There is so much more that could be said and we have but gotten warmed to the subject. Whatever the case, we are to bear one another’s burdens in love, for we are not only one family but one body: like the colors of the rainbow we are all unique and yet we are all united in that we reflect the same white light from which all springs that is. What is more, death does not separate us in spirit, nor in the end in fact, for living and dead alike are alive in Christ. This is the ordinary conception of immanence transcended and the beauty of it all is that it is but mere Christianity. It is we who carry on the tradition of the saints, co-laborers with our Lord in a field ripe with souls, other colors of the eternal rainbow that could shine with us forever in heavenly glory. May our vision rise higher and may our harvest be filled to capacity, empowered by the Spirit and emboldened by the testimony of the saints who together bear witness with us of the fullness of God. May our ultimate focus never be blunted or dulled, but may it be as new and fresh as the springtime dew upon the morning grass. It just makes me want to say, “See you in heaven” where faith becomes sight and the fulfillment of all things will have reached its completion. There could never have been a greater promise; there could never be a lovelier rainbow, resplendent as it scintillates, sparkles, and glistens glimmering, now shifting, now turning, now to this side, now that, ever changing, ever beauteous, ever beckoning, everlasting: bedazzling in the unceasing radiance of divine light, forever and ever amen and amen.
God bless,
Eric
“I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.’ And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.’”
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