On birthing the divine human - being disturbed by Andrew Harvey

Last weekend I was more than disturbed by Andrew Harvey - "birthing the divine human" and "sacred activism".
I only stayed for the first half day of two, but will listen to the rest as I digest. Everything he said brought me back to the metanarrative at the heart of christianity. Fallen creation renewed and restored by Christ. Now what I face into is the absolute recognition of Christ as the Word, and God's constant pushing for me to break beyond the bounds of enclosed belief and enclosed christianity. The Word of God is universal and is translated into every language.

Two major approaches to spirituality:
- Escape from the world – advaita, Buddhism, forms of Christianity that look to salvation and escape
- Engage with the world from a spiritual perspective – evolutionary spiritualities, magical and esoteric forms, social Christianity and “heaven on earth” forms of religion, process theology
The latter approach also has two major approaches:
- God as separate from creation (the Genesis approach)
- Pantheism
- Panenthesim
Panenthesim in turn can have subtle distinctions:
- The eastern orthodox approach that holds God and Creation as ontologically different but not separate as it is God who sustains creation and by whom and within whom it exists
- Other approaches that blur towards pantheism
God is creator and sustainer, his creation exists in hierarchical relation to him. Christ is the Word of God in whom and through whom everything was created and by whom creation is sustained.
This opens the question of the role of humanity. Fallen and separate from God, spiritually dead – resurrected and transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ. Is it possible to experience resurrection (new birth) without conscious contact with Christ? If not, then all the other religions are delusions of life and in actuality remain in death. Or is it more likely that the resurrection of Christ was a universal event that opened the possibility of life for everyone – no matter what the route. “No man comes to the Father but by me” – Jesus isn’t insisting that we all know his name, but that he has opened the Way. In the end all will bow before Christ – because Christ is the Word of God.
So whether you regard humans as animal or divine is less important than whether you regard spiritual rebirth (resurrection) as something reserved for the few who accept a particular intellectual formulation (the Christian creeds). Can rebirth be by human effort – it seems so – people make effort to contact God/awake and it happens – is that human effort or divine effort? Impossible to tell. Even the Christian who “accepts” or “receives” Jesus – is making effort, the effort of surrender.
Do we then become co-creators with God? Do we birth the divine human? What else are we going to do? We are reborn into eternity – if that is to have any meaning it means growing into a new spiritual form. The endless creativity of God united with the creativity inherent in being both human and a spiritual being.

Andrew Harvey himself seems to recognize that the stultifying mush of the new age needs to be transcended. Just as christianity needs to get over being the exclusive bearer of truth and recognize it's just the bearer of one translation of God's Word, the new age needs to grow a brain and use some rationality to distinguish between the bullshit and truth (with a small t). Less so than Andrew H, it was the response of the audience - intensely personal and small - that was most disturbing. His call was to transcend (and include) the personal, their response was to personalize.

The structure of spiritual revolutions

My abiding preoccupation with the creation of spiritual structures. Most are human creations, attempts to reach God. But in Christ, God definitively reached towards creation and created the structure that will lead us to him.

Jer 6.16 - stand at the crossroads and ask which is the good way.