Christian Nonduality, Panentheism & Anarchism

entheism via our realizations of inter-subjective intimacy (relational unitive strivings). What it also suggests is that we can (maybe even better) realize these values by relaxing with our vague conceptions and questions, holding (exploiting even) these creative tensions while abiding with mystery and paradox, rather than anxiously rushing forward with specific root metaphors and answers, imagining that every paradox is ours to resolve dialectically, dissolve paradigmatically or evade practically. This is to say, for instance, that it doesn’t ambition a theodicy. In fact, the theodicy “problem” doesn’t arise precisely because it hasn’t tried to say more than we could possibly know by “proving” too much regarding God’s essential nature or divine attributes.

It seems clear to me that our panentheisms begin within the faith as theologies of nature, as poetic reflections of our affective attunements and participatory imaginations, as anagogical expressions of our hope in a God Who deeply cares for us and desires to be with us. They cannot credibly proceed from a natural theology or metaphysics, which at best could only raise the plausibility of a deism, which could have no inkling of whether or not primal reality is ultimately friendly or not (nature being so red in tooth and claw).

I have come across some beautiful neo-pagan reflections which did seem to link their panentheist intuitions and anarchist inclinations via what I would call a divine spark anthropology. (Now, when it comes to theological anthropology, even Rahner’s transcendental thomism was too optimistic, so, we must take care with any “divine spark” anthropology to avoid getting too dualistic, too Kantian. Human knowledge is way more problematical and a gnostic rationalism is no cure for other epistemic vices.) I have elaborated my own “norms for intervention” based on my reflections on nature as it dances with both freedom and coercion (from an emergentist perspective). I’ll simply say this – that, notwithstanding the initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos and the constrictions we experience, we are generally free enough to love and the normative takeaway is that our default bias must be on freedom. The rub has always been whether or not freedom can be absolutized, for all practical purposes, and this speaks to anarchist and pacifist stances. And this comes full circle back to just what type of Kingdom the Good News aspires.

Ted wrote: “I think there is corollary here to what I consider one of the key dynamics of Christian anarchism: that the Christian anarchist’s allegiance is to Christ as king who is primarily present by dint of having his spirit poured out on all people (that’s a theologically sloppy gloss but I’m trying to keep it succinct). It seems to me the relationship some are articulating between panentheism (and similar constructions) and anarchism would be at least tangentially related to this.”

Ted is spot on here. Let me extrapolate to suggest that, only articulating my view, panentheism is such a corollary in the sense that it would follow as a direct inference from this or that pneumatology (stance re: the Spirit) which, for Christians, would follow from this or that Christology (view of Christ). What I am implying is that, as with the Transcendentalists, any compelling intuitions of God in nature will be articulated from insights gathered from within some faith perspective rather than derived merely philosophically, much less metaphysically.

To what values, then, does the Good News really aspire? temporally vs eternally? How 6