Most religions, especially those considered major or “world religions,” seem to have a love-hate relationship with the idea of unity. They all reflect the philosophical and psychological tension between “the one and the many,”
Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism all promote the idea of ultimate unity–with God or Divinity (however named and understood) and even with other humans. Confucianism, although included in World Religions textbooks, is really a philosophy rather than a transcendental religion. Yet Confucius also aims toward unity, to be attained by “li”– a word meaning proper conduct, propriety or ritual. Beyond that Confucianism is really a human-centered rather than a God-centered philosophy.
Yet, despite commitments to ultimate unity, most religions carve out their own spaces in the spiritual firmament with practices and beliefs that tend to separate rather than unify.
The western religions–Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all claim to worship the same (one and only) God, but do so in ways that pit them against each other like angry siblings. And there is nothing more difficult to resolve than a fight among angry siblings.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes them appear polytheistic to Jews and Muslims, while Christians cannot forgive Jews and Muslims for questioning the divinity of Jesus and, in the first case, for killing him. And then, of course, the rituals, languages, and historically developed beliefs of each of these are different enough to promote mutual estrangement.
South Asian world religions, Hinduism and Buddhism (the latter sometimes seen as a philosophy or psychology that evolved into a religion) see a kind of ultimate unity or absorption into the universe as the goal. This can be attained, some argue, only by many lifetimes of work that result in entry to Nirvana or some other form of Enlightenment.
My favorite definition of this is an image taken from Tibetan Buddhism which describes our ultimate goal as similar to a bubble of fresh water dropped into the ocean. Eventually the bubble dissolves and becomes part of the ocean—this is what happens to our individual “soul”. This is how we achieve “salvation.”
Notice how different this is from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of salvation in an afterlife in Heaven. And, more important, consider that the definition of what salvation is and how it is best achieved differs among the siblings, the Abrahamic faiths, with each requiring different paths, prayers, and programs of worship.
None of this is new or startling to anyone who has studied religions. Most religions are exclusive rather than inclusive, despite what they say about ultimate unity among all members of the human family. Indeed, this exclusivity itself helps explain their popularity. Each major religion mentioned above helps define the culture of a group of people and explain to its adherents why that group is different–and better–than other groups. Religions help define differences among ethnic and nations and thus can be a nation-building or nation-destroying force.
Given this tension between unity and separation in almost all religions, it is nice to encounter the “metaphysical religions” that emerged in the United States in the 19th and early 20th century. Among them are Unity and Centers for Spiritual Living (originally called Religious Science). These spiritual groups can be traced in part to the transcendental philosophy associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as to the great interest in spiritual healing in the nineteenth century. They did not think of themselves as churches or religions but were similar in some ways to what we call the “spiritual but not religious” folks of today. They called their movement “New Thought.”
Among other things, these people believe that thought creates things; they were positive thinkers long before Norman Vincent Peale popularized and simplified that idea in his book “The Power of Positive Thinking” in 1952. The notion that by focusing on positive instead of negative thoughts you can change your life is also, of course, found in Christianity. In an earlier blog post entitled “Imagining a New Way to be Christian,” I described what has been called “Progressive Christianity” and what I thought should be called “Incarnational Christianity”–the domain name of this site. See that essay for a fuller critique of traditional Christianity.
In the “Guide for Spiritual Living” published by the Centers for Spiritual Living (CSL), one finds in each issue of this monthly magazine a list of “What We Believe,” a creed of sort, written by the “Science of Mind” founder, Ernest Holmes (1887-1960). One of the statements in this list is as follows: We believe that the Universal Spirit, which is God, operates through a Universal Mind, which is the Law of God; and that we are surrounded by this Creative Mind which receives the direct impress of our thought and acts upon it.”
That statement was written nearly a century ago. All the capital letters found in early publications by Religious Science authors such as Holmes were designed, I believe, to make this theology sound more Scientific (and slightly Germanic), as was the way early New Thought authors used the word “Law” frequently–as in Law of Mind, Law of Good. All this is a product of the idolization of science as a kind of secular faith a century ago.
Nevertheless, there are a number of things attractive, to me at least, about these metaphysical positive thinkers. Among them are the stress on the value of meditation, the idea of visualizing or “imaging” what you want, and the notion that we all share in the Mind of God, and that we are therefore good and not evil. There is no “original sin” in Incarnational Christianity or among these “New Thought” proponents. There is no Hell to which we can be committed for our sins but only love and forgiveness. The list of commandments and judgments found in much of traditional Christianity (especially in the evangelical version popular in my part of the world) are absent among these people. They believe that we share the divinity found in Jesus.
And that divinity is perhaps the only thing that can ease and, God and us willing, even end our separation and create the unity was have always said we desire.