The Unspeakable Way (Sense of God)

How Organizational Christianity Co-opted Theological Doctrine & the Imposition of Normative Principles

Some thoughts that were sparked at the last Christ outside of Christianity meeting.

When our nervous system relaxes, we have a sense of God—a felt sense of God. This is faith. It is more somatic than cognitive, though the two can be—and ideally are—complementary. Pistis leads to gnosis.

We know God because we feel God. As Presence. Parousia.

God is in a relaxed nervous system. God is here. God is in the house. God is available to all of us in any moment, in every moment.

Christianity as an organized social structure for taking refuge in, for finding shelter, a peaceful station, can help to relax the nervous system. The ritual can help to relax people, the prayers, the liturgies. Whatever works, works. It doesn’t work for me, or hasn’t much so far.

The closest I got was a Benedictine monastery in my twenties; I didn’t get any sense of it on Mount Athos. I get antsy in a church. I even get antsy if there are too many Christians at my meetings. I think they’re going to gang up on me and call me a heretic.

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Enlightenment (to me) means a nervous system that became so relaxed that the body came fully online (the soul came home), and now God is fully in the house, 24-7. So there’s nowhere to go from there. There are still daily struggles, but essentially, for the personality, for the person that I am, there’s no longer anything to strive for. That’s how I understand enlightenment, anyway, without having a direct or full experience of it.

In Eastern Orthodox language, a purification (or catharsis) lays the groundwork for illumination, which ends in theosis, the God awakening in the cells, if we’re going to be non-orthodox about it.

There definitely are lots of sins we can place at the doors of the churches, and even of the scripture itself. I’m currently finishing up my latest book, Crucial Fictions, and finding all kinds of evidence in the New Testament (thanks to other scholars who are pointing the way) for political agendas at the very start. But nonetheless, the Bible can relax your nervous system, just as William Blake works for some, the Tao Te Ching for others, and so on.

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Rudolf Steiner said that we can’t think of Jesus Christ as a person. It was an act. The meaning of Christ was an act. God is an act, and Christ is the act of God, and the Word of God is an act, and so on. We can compare all these terms and see that they are in some sense synonymous. But nonetheless, that was helpful to me, just as Steiner’s idea of Christ-as-impulse has been helpful.

We’re here to experience an act of God. Not like a tornado or a tsunami, not the kind that we get insured against. The kind that nobody around us will notice, maybe even we won’t notice it. When God moves us, we don’t need to know it. We don’t need to notice. Noticing it may even get in the way. Yet there’s something accumulative to the movement of God, where we find that our lives are becoming easier and easier and there are less and less thorns (2 Corinthians 12).

Actually, in my case, literally speaking, it is more and more thorns. But figuratively speaking, it is less and less. I am undergoing aversion therapy and I’m kicking against the pricks less and less (Acts 26:14). The more pricks there are, the more we need not to kick, but also the less we have to kick. We’re going to get them in us, even if we don’t kick. But if there aren’t enough thorns, then we need to kick.

Whatever thorns you can find, kick against them, like poor old Saul. He wouldn’t have become Paul if he hadn’t been kicking against the pricks, so hard that Jesus showed up. The greatest sinner became the greatest apostle. He was goaded into it.¹

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The Christ impulse is not a doctrine. It is an imperative. We are supposed to be in the image of Christ. We’re supposed to be living that way, not just talking about it.

Kierkegaard’s point was that it is too easy to be Christian once the culture has been Christianized. The more difficult it is to be a Christian, in other words, the easier it will be to become Christ-ian. If following the Way isn’t something you can be socially ostracized for, then it doesn’t really have the meaning it’s supposed to have.

The Way is giving up everything to God. It is self-sacrifice, which is literally the hardest thing to do. It’s really an impossible thing to do, as impossible as being as the lilies of the field. But since it’s what God is asking of us, we can be grateful that God is asking for it, because that means that somehow it’s possible. Because God wouldn’t ask it of us if it wasn’t possible.

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Christ is our very individuality. Christ is the image of the individual. We are living in a culture that is very Christian, even now that it is secular, and what is strange is that, in some ways, the secular culture is more Christian than the churches are.

The churches, with their normative principles, are hierarchical, whereas our culture is egalitarian and democratic. A free-for-all that reifies the individual. It makes an unholy mess of it, of course. But ironically it may be closer to the spirit of Christ than the churches are. It is closer to the Pauline spirit of “to each his own.”

It is also the proof that Christ is who he said he was, because today he’s everywhere! The whole culture has been transformed by Christ. But because it looks so shitty, Christianity looks like the answer, the way back to something. But it’s not, not really. It’s the means to the Way, or at least, it’s a reminder that the Way exists. But it is not the Way (the Way that can be spoken is not the Way).

Even at the most superficial level, you are an individual. Nobody is made exactly the way that you are made. Nobody’s configured exactly as you are configured. It’s the internal man, the inner man, that has been homogenized, installed as a cultural implant, a homunculus, a Jewish golem. Churchianity can tweak the inner golem, but it can’t remove it, because it helped to create it.

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Is Jesus a teacher? Was he a teacher? It became quite popular in the last two hundred years or so to rebrand Jesus as a great teacher and a wise man, to humanize and demythologize him. It’s easy to see why, and to see the efforts of liberal theology and the quest for the historical Jesus as fruitful in certain ways.

Then there is this Petersonian idea that somehow Christianity, and the very idea of God, is a means to create or maintain an ethical system, a moral way of life. It’s possible that we do need the idea of God in order to have some sort of ethical basis in society, as Dostoyevsky wrote, and certainly, it was true once upon time. I am not sure if it is still true today, but even if it is, this doesn’t mean that this is what (the idea of) God is for.

The same goes with Christ. The meaning of Christ isn’t found in a teaching or an ethic or a set of principles or theological prepositions. Insofar as it is found there—in the essential sayings such as “Consider the lilies of the field” and “Resist not evil”—these things are impracticable at a physical level, that of sheer survival, which means they can’t be turned into an ethical system for social organization.

This is the big lie of Christianity, that Christ (or Paul) ever intended the Way to be a social, ethical system for organizational purposes. That was what Judaism was, and all Christianity today is simply two thousand years downstream from a successful Jewish sect that fell back onto Judaism once the world didn’t end, and with the financial aid of the Roman Empire.

That’s it. The idea of apostolic succession is a myth with next to no historical basis. In the first century, organizational principles were inserted into the New Testament (via the Pastorals and other late additions) disguised as theological ones.

Paul’s charismatics were converted into the first bishops, the old Judaic priest class was reintroduced, along with new rituals. Paul and Christ—as examples for how to live—were de-gnosticized and reduxxed and redacted as Judeo-Greco-Roman icons, brands.

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Now we have internet orthobros like Jay Dyer or Andrew Wilson (a Christian Nationalist) selling the One True Church that holds the keys, that is in possession of “the whole truth,” but from what I can understand, is a higher level of sociocultural Christianity: it’s a political, this-world system, and so it is anti-Christ-ian, as evidenced by the arrogance of the claim to hold the whole truth.

In fact, the New Testament scriptures hold many canons, including gnostic and adoptionist, which means there is no “one true way” that can be defined by any normative principle: that is just social engineering. This doesn’t mean a given church, with its hegemonic impositions on the scripture, can’t still lead to a felt sense of God and Christ by relaxing people’s nervous systems. The shadow does lead to the light, if we use it to orientate ourselves.

But as a general principle, if we are looking at the shadow, then the light is in the opposite direction.

Get thee behind me, Andrew Wilson! ;)²

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What we can perhaps all agree on, in the mélange of Judaic-Hellenist-Christian-Gnostic-Anthroposophic confessions, is that the meaning of Christ is found in an act. It is the most radical act a human can commit, of which there is no greater love than this.

The meaning of the gospel is a salvation history. It records a moment in time in which eternity entered into time. The cross, the intersection between the vertical and the horizontal, between time and eternity. That’s why it’s our point of reference now. And it’s always happening now.

The Christ event is happening now. And it’s only happening for anyone if it’s happening right now, as impulse, within them. You can’t find it in the book, much less a church. The scripture (for which we owe a debt of gratitude to the Church and Empire for preserving) is a compass that’s pointing to the place where it’s happening.

The place of the skull, Golgotha, where ego goes to die.

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1. The Greek word kentra = prick or goad. Apparently (I just read this online, and haven’t checked it thoroughly), “it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” is a direct quotation from a play by Euripides (d. 406 BCE), the Bacchae, with Jesus speaking instead of the Greek god Dionysus (source).

2. Full disclosure: my wife introduced me to Wilson via her interest in blood sport debating and I have listened to and watched a number of his debates. Though he’s a chain smoker and seemingly lacking much paranoid awareness, I’ve enjoyed his charisma and debating skills. Last night, I listened to an interview with Gerald Morgan and got triggered by Wilson’s comment that Eastern Orthodoxy has “the whole truth.” My wife tells me Wilson is currently under attack from many sides; my aim isn’t to add to any sort of scapegoating that might be occurring. He seems like a good enough guy to me. Maybe I should debate him! Jay Dyer, on the other hand, is now part of Alex Jones’ team, so one can’t avoid the possibility of some sort of cultural engineering op to promote EO. I’m not mapping this stuff, however, only juxtaposing it with scripture and as an example of why I continue to seek to deepen my sense of Christ in a Pauline fashion, i.e., outside of any church organization (besides my Substack and Zoom admin).