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1
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- Diversity and Its Demands
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2
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- Puritanism had two sides:
- A cold, logic theological side, closely related to classical Reformed
Theology.
- A strong emphasis on conversion and the experience of the Holy Spirit.
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3
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- That a person be able to relate, either to the whole church or the
deacons, their own personal experience of grace.
- Women, who made up the bulk of Puritan churches (perhaps as much as
2/3s), often recounted experiences that are best understood as mystical
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4
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- After 1660, the American Colonies became the “center of Quakerism” in
the world.
- Rhode Island was the Quaker Haven in New England.
- Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina were the other major
centers. Quakers left North
Carolina after they received their revelation that slavery was wrong.
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5
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- Every colony where the Quakers had a strong numerical presence early
adopted freedom of religion with Rhode Island and Pennsylvania both
having both Jewish and Catholic religious bodies.
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6
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- Son of a wealthy Admiral
- Received extensive New World holdings as payment for a debt that the
English King owed his father.
- Recruited many diverse people,
including the followers of Caspar Schwenckfeld, to settle on his
lands. Believed that diversity
created and sustained freedom.
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7
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- William Penn wrote a devotional classic: “No Cross, No Crown.”
- For what is a heap of the most pathetical words to God Almighty; or the
dedication of any place or time to Him? He is a Spirit, to whom words,
places, and times, strictly considered, are improper or inadequate. And
though they be the instruments of public worship, they are but bodily
and visible, and cannot carry our requests any further, much less
recommend them to the invisible God; by no means; they are for the sake
of the congregation: it is the language of the soul God hears, nor can
that speak but by the Spirit, or groan aright to Almighty God without
the assistance of it.
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8
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- Penn believed strongly in Native Americans and saw many values in their
religions.
- In some ways, he and Roger Williams, who died as a Seeker, were the
colonist most interested in understanding the Native American
perspective on God.
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9
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- We must be very careful. Native
Americans were not one culture, one language, or one religion.
- Some practices, such as Vision Quests, were practiced by some groups and
not by others. Many times the
ritual was different in different tribes.
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10
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- http://www.elexion.com/lakota/rites/hanble2.html Good site, follows tribe’s ethical
guideline on sharing its faith.
- Like classical mysticism, the quest has a guide or director, a period of
purification, and a period of waiting.
- The sweat lodge was at the heart of the ceremony.
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11
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- Wrote a Journal that became one of the classics of colonial
autobiography.
- Tormented as a child by his act of killing a robin tending her young
when he was 12: “I then went on my errand, and for some hours could
think of little else but the cruelties I had committed, and was much
troubled. Thus He whose tender mercies are over all His works hath
placed a principle in the human mind, which incites to exercise goodness
towards every living creature; and this being singly attended to, people
become tender-hearted and sympathizing; but when frequently and totally
rejected, the mind becomes shut up in a contrary disposition.”
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12
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- My employer, having a negro woman, sold her, and desired me to write a
bill of sale, the man being waiting who bought her. The thing was
sudden; and though I felt uneasy at the thoughts of writing an
instrument of slavery for one of my fellow-creatures, yet I remembered
that I was hired by the year, that it was my master who directed me to
do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of our Society, who
bought her; so through weakness I gave way, and wrote it; but at the
executing of it I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before my
master and the Friend that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice
inconsistent with the Christian religion. This in some degree abated my
uneasiness; yet, as often as I reflected seriously upon it, I thought I
should have been clearer if I had desired to be excused from it, as a
thing against my conscience; for such it was.
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13
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- From 1730 to 1760 people in the American colonies experienced a series
of religious revivals that profoundly changed the shape of American
life.
- These revivals were marked by
many signs of what the century called “enthusiasm:”
- uncontrollable crying
- Being struck in the Spirit
- Intense experience of religious call
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14
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- Massachusetts Congregational Pastor
- Lead one of the first revivals in the 1730s along the Connecticut River
Valley
- Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of
Many Souls.
- The book that inspired Wesley
- Beginning of a search for what was real and what was not real in the
religious experiences of his times.
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15
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- His Private Notebooks.
- “Images and Shadows of Divine Things”
- The world as a tapestry of symbols that point to God.
- Part of a long tradition of nature mysticism in the United States that
sees the outdoors as the real “theater of grace.”
- Influence of the Cambridge Platonists, seventeenth century philosophers
and, at least in the case of Henry More, mystics.
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16
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- And as I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there
came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of
God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a
sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a sweet,
and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful
sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.
PN
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17
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- An inward, sweet sense of these things, at times, came into my heart;
and my soul was led away in pleasant views and contemplations of them. .
. .. Those words Cant. 2:1, used to be abundantly with me, I am the Rose
of Sharon, and the Lilly of the valleys. The words seemed to me, sweetly
to represent the loveliness and beauty of Jesus Christ. The whole book
of Canticles used to be pleasant to me, and I used to be much in reading
it, about that time; and found, from time to time, an inward sweetness,
that would carry me away, in my contemplations. This I know not how to
express otherwise, than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all
the concerns of this world; and sometimes a kind of vision, or fixed
ideas and imaginations, of being alone in the mountains, or some
solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with
Christ, and wrapt and swallowed up in God. PN
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18
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- The appearance of every thing was altered; there seemed to be, as it
were, calm sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every
thing. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to
appear in every thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and
blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature;
which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon
for continuance; and in the day, spent much time in viewing the clouds
and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the mean
time, singing forth, with a low voice my contemplations of the Creator
and Redeemer
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19
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- How does one judge whether an experience of grace is authentic or not?
- Edwards noted that much that people thought was essential—such as
visions, scriptures coming suddenly to mind (illumination), or
ecstasy—might or might n not be marks of real experience.
- A real experience did not add truth to what was already but changed the
way in which truth was apprehended.
One saw the beauty and excellence of divine things.
- One saw truth with a new sense of the heart analogous to the other
senses.
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20
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- Edwards did not believe that new information could be gathered from
religious experience because of two fundamental beliefs:
- That God was truly known through nature and reason. New information about God would
violate God’s presence to humankind.
- Edwards believed that human religious knowledge had been decisively
completed in Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures.
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21
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- Perhaps the most characteristic American philosopher and poet.
- Deeply influenced by Platonism, German Idealism, and, however poorly he
understood them, eastern religions.
- A Unitarian pastor, he came to reject emphatically the Christian
elements in that church.
- The problem for Emerson was not Christ, but the fact that he believed
that we were all called to be religious originals who through our own
experience of God set forth the truth as it came to us.
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22
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- Emerson was, in many ways, the first American to market spirituality.
- Immensely popular as a speaker and essayist, he used all the new media
of the 19th century—the popular magazine, the railroad, the
lecture hall, and the collection of essays—to popularize his
understanding of humankind and nature.
- Interestingly enough, Emerson was very popular with a number of
evangelical and other Americans who were able to separate his religious
consciousness from his religious views.
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23
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- The Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
"Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?__
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept:__
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24
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- Up rose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave:
She stood Monadnoc's head.
- Through a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame
"Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am."
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25
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- Not a classically religious person, even in Emerson’s sense.
- R.M. Burke coined the phrase, “Cosmic Consciousness,” to describe the
mystical elements in Whitman’s poetry.
- Later commentators on mystical religion, such as Joseph Campbell, have
also found this phrase useful.
- (much of this material is from Rufus Jones)
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26
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- What do you suppose Creation is? What do you suppose will satisfy the
Soul, except to walk free, and own no superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hun-
dred ways,
but that man or woman is as good as
God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Your-
self?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths
finally
mean?
And that you or any one must approach Creations
through
such laws?
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27
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- A noiseless, patient spider,
- I marked, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
- Marked how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
- It lauched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
- Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them
- And you, O my Sopul, where you stand,
- Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
- Careless musing, venturing, throwing—seeking the spheres, to connect
them.
- Till the bridge you will need, be formed—till the ductile anchor hold;
- Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch something
- O my soul.
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28
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- “Yet, George Fox stands for something too—a thought—the thought that
wakes in silent hours—perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought latent
in the human soul. This is the
thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and identity.”
- Essay on Shakespeare and George Fox
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29
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- “Bibles may convey, and priest expound, but it is exclusively for he
noiseless operation of the one’s isolated Self to enter the pure ether
of veneration, reach divine levels and commune with the unutterable.”
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30
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- And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
- And I know that the Spirit of God is the brother of my own;
- And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my
sisters and lovers;
- And a kelson of the creation is love.
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31
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- Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
- I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person,
- My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe,”
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32
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- Sail forth! Steer for the deep waters only!
- Reckless, O Soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me;
- For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
- And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
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33
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- The Great Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1892
- The decision to ask representatives of all the world’s religions speak
to a World’s Parliament of Religions.
- Although the Parliament was overwhelmingly Protestant, Americans got
their first taste of Hinduism and Buddhism from the presentations at
this conference.
- Representatives of both religions were invited to come to the United
States subsequently to lecture and teach.
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34
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- In the age of Anxiety, Zen became popular as an American mysticism.
- The Beat Poets, such as Alan Ginsberg, made Zen almost the same as
rebellion.
- American Zen began to develop on its own course.
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35
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- The Dawning of the New Age
- Potent combination of disillusion with religion and desire for religious
experience
- The Jesus People and Calvary Chapel.
- The new Jew Buddhist
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36
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- One way to think about Jewish Influence in the development of Buddhism
in the United States is in terms of a tendency to define Buddha-hood as
a menschlichkeit kind of thing.
Instead of monkhood being the most exemplary form of Buddhism, as
it is in Asia, human decency, compassion, and self-understanding in more
ordinary human terms have come to represent what many American Buddhist
think of as exemplary expression of Buddhist life.
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Notes