Bringing Jesus, Paul, Hermetics, the Tao, Idealism, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness Together

I have come to see that what Jesus, Paul, and the writer of Hebrews are pointing toward is not a religion of belief layered on top of an otherwise material universe, but a radical reorientation of how reality itself is understood. Hebrews says it plainly—almost dangerously so—that what is seen was not made from things that are visible. That statement alone collapses the assumption that matter is primary. It suggests that the world we touch, measure, and name is not the source of itself, but the expression of something deeper, unseen, and already present. Paul intensifies this by insisting that the unseen is not only real, but more real than the seen—eternal rather than temporary, foundational rather than derivative.

When I read those words now, I no longer hear future-oriented theology about heaven versus earth; I hear ontology. I hear an ancient intuition that consciousness, meaning, and relational being are the ground of existence, and that matter is what consciousness looks like when it takes form. Jesus stands squarely in this same vision. His kingdom does not arrive with observation. It is not spatial, political, or architectural. It is hidden, like yeast in dough or a seed in the soil. It is within, among, already present, yet largely unperceived.

This is not because the kingdom is unreal, but because our way of seeing has been trained to privilege surfaces over depth, appearances over source. Jesus calls people to awaken—to see with a different eye, to hear with a different ear, to trust that the invisible currents shaping reality are more reliable than the fear-driven narratives produced by the visible world. In this sense, faith is not belief in the improbable, but alignment with the deeper layer of what is.

Paul lives entirely from this alignment. He can speak of dying while alive, of weakness as strength, of losing in order to gain, because he has relocated his sense of reality away from appearances and into the unseen field from which appearances arise. The seen is not denied, but it is dethroned. It no longer gets the final word.

When this Pauline and Hebraic vision is placed alongside modern quantum insight, something remarkable happens. Physics tells us that particles arise from invisible fields, that reality at its most fundamental level is probabilistic, relational, and observer-involved. Matter is no longer the solid bedrock it once seemed, but a pattern of activity emerging from something we cannot see. This does not prove theology, but it does rehabilitate ancient wisdom that materialism dismissed too quickly.

Idealism names what scripture intuited: consciousness is not a byproduct of matter; matter is an expression within consciousness. Hermetic wisdom says the same thing symbolically—what is above is reflected below, what is within gives rise to what appears without. Taoism speaks of the Tao as nameless, formless, unseen, yet endlessly generative, flowing into ten thousand things without ever being exhausted. None of these traditions are saying identical things, but they are circling the same truth from different angles, using different languages to gesture toward what cannot be directly grasped.

The unseen, in this vision, is not empty space. It is fullness. It is potential. It is the womb of form. When Jesus heals, forgives, or restores, he is not interrupting nature; he is revealing it. He is showing what reality looks like when fear loosens its grip and consciousness re-enters coherence with its source.

This is why love sits at the center of everything for him. Love is not a moral add-on; it is the natural expression of a reality that is fundamentally relational rather than competitive, participatory rather than mechanical. The cross, seen through this lens, is not a transaction to appease an offended deity, but an exposure of what happens when awakened consciousness collides with egoic power structures rooted in fear and control.

Resurrection, then, is not merely a miracle within history, but a declaration about the nature of reality itself—that life, meaning, and unity are more fundamental than death, fragmentation, and violence. Paul’s insistence on setting the mind on things unseen is not escapism; it is realism of the deepest kind.

To live oriented toward the unseen is to live from the source rather than the surface, from eternity rather than immediacy, from trust rather than anxiety. The world does not disappear when one lives this way, but it loses its tyranny. Appearances no longer dictate identity. Circumstances no longer define worth. Fear no longer masquerades as wisdom.

What emerges instead is a quiet stability, a grounded compassion, a freedom that does not depend on outcomes. This is why the gospel, for me, is no longer about getting out of this world, but about finally seeing it for what it is—a participatory expression of an unseen, conscious, loving reality in which we already live and move and have our being. When the unseen becomes primary, the seen falls into its proper place, and life itself begins to make sense not as a test to pass or a belief to defend, but as an invitation to awaken, remember, and align with what has always been true beneath the surface of things.

 

A short note on how I use A.I. in my writing

I post this because I want to maintain integrity in my writing and thought process. In case anyone notices a change of style in this blog. The ideas and musings are mine. 

My writings have emerged through a long process of study, contemplation, lived experience, and dialogue. Over the years, I have engaged scripture, philosophy, theology, and consciousness studies not as fixed systems to be defended, but as living conversations to be entered. Reflection—both inward and outward—has always been central to how I think and write.

In recent years, I have also made intentional use of an AI language model as a dialogical and editorial instrument. Its function has been neither to originate ideas nor to determine conclusions, but to serve as a reflective conversational field—a mirror through which language could be clarified, coherence tested, and insights already forming within me more precisely expressed. This process did not replace authorship; it supported articulation.

The ideas, interpretations, and perspectives presented in these writings arise from my own worldview and spiritual journey. They reflect a vision shaped over time through questioning, integration, and the willingness to move beyond inherited dogma toward a more expansive understanding of faith, consciousness, and the divine. Responsibility for the content, meaning, and implications of these writings rests entirely with me.

Clarity deepens through dialogue. As with any honest intellectual or spiritual journey, expression evolves as understanding matures. The refinement of language in these writings reflects that natural progression, not a departure from voice or intent. I acknowledge the dialogical tools involved in this process in the interest of transparency, while affirming that what is expressed here is authentically my own.

Dark Energy and the Sacred Depth of Reality

For most of human history, we assumed that what we could see was what existed. Stars, planets, bodies, rocks—matter felt solid, real, and sufficient. But modern cosmology has quietly dismantled that assumption. Today we know that everything visible—every atom in every galaxy, including our own bodies—accounts for less than five percent of the universe. The remaining ninety-five percent is composed of what we call dark matter and dark energy: unseen, unmeasured directly, inferred only by their effects. And it is precisely here, in what we cannot see, that the most profound questions arise.

Dark matter behaves like mass, shaping galaxies and holding them together through gravity, yet it does not interact with light. Dark energy, on the other hand, behaves like a pressure inherent to space itself, accelerating the expansion of the universe. Neither fits comfortably within our classical understanding of matter or energy. We do not know what they are. We only know what they do. And that distinction matters.

This is where the conversation becomes philosophical rather than merely scientific. In every domain of inquiry, when something is known only by its effects and not by its substance, we are already operating in metaphysical territory. Gravity itself was once such a mystery. Consciousness still is. We know consciousness exists because of its effects—experience, awareness, intention—but we cannot locate it as an object among objects. We infer it, not because we see it, but because nothing makes sense without it.

It is at least reasonable, then, to ask whether dark matter and dark energy are not “things” in the way atoms are things, but expressions of a deeper substrate of reality—one that is closer in nature to consciousness than to inert substance. In fact, this may be the most parsimonious explanation available. If consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent, then it would not be surprising that the universe is mostly composed of something that behaves nonlocally, invisibly, relationally, and structurally—just as consciousness does.

Matter clumps. Consciousness contextualizes. Dark matter provides structure without visibility. Consciousness provides coherence without mass. Dark energy expands space itself. Consciousness expands experience itself. These are not proofs, but they are resonances—and resonance matters when exploring ultimate questions.

What many call “God” has historically been treated as a being within the universe, albeit a powerful one. But this framing collapses under both theology and physics. A god who is merely another object is not ultimate. The more ancient, mystical, and philosophically coherent understanding of God is not as an entity among entities, but as Being itself, or more accurately, as the ground of being. In modern terms, we might say: the field from which all phenomena arise.

If consciousness is that field—and if dark energy and dark matter are manifestations of it at the cosmological scale—then God is not something added to the universe. God is what the universe is doing at its deepest level. Creation is not an event in the past; it is an ongoing expression of consciousness unfolding into form, structure, relationship, and experience.

This aligns remarkably well with the mystical strands of Christianity that were largely sidelined by orthodoxy. The Logos is not merely a historical figure but the organizing principle of reality itself. Christ is not just savior from sin but the revelation of what has always been true: that the divine is not separate from creation, but hidden within it, waiting to be recognized. Sin, in this framework, is not moral failure but forgetfulness. Salvation is not rescue from punishment but awakening to participation.

Dark energy may be the cosmological analog of grace: an unearned, omnipresent force that carries everything forward without resistance or demand. Dark matter may be the unseen scaffolding that allows form to arise at all. Together they suggest that reality is not built from dead particles alone, but from a living, intelligent depth that precedes and sustains matter.

None of this requires abandoning science. In fact, it may require taking science more seriously than materialism allows. Materialism assumes that matter is fundamental, despite overwhelming evidence that matter is derivative, relational, and dependent on observation and information. Consciousness, on the other hand, refuses to be reduced. It remains irreducible, omnipresent in experience, and indispensable to any account of reality.

To say that dark energy and dark matter are consciousness is not to anthropomorphize the universe. It is to acknowledge that the universe behaves more like a mind than a machine. Dynamic, relational, self-organizing, creative. And if that consciousness is what people across cultures have intuited and named as God, then perhaps theology has always been trying—imperfectly—to describe what physics is only now beginning to glimpse.

In that sense, God is not hiding from us. God is hiding as us, as space, as energy, as the unseen majority of reality itself. And awakening is not about believing the right things, but about remembering what has always been true: we are not strangers in the universe. We are the universe becoming aware of itself.

 

Beyond Defense: Reframing Apologetics Through a Non-Nicene Christology

I have never been particularly enamored with Christian apologetics, at least not in its dominant forms. Much of what passes for apologetics today feels less like an honest exploration of truth and more like a carefully constructed legal defense—one that only works if the jury agrees in advance to a specific set of presuppositions. The classic examples, such as the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” trilemma, reveal the problem clearly. They assume not only that the Gospel texts preserve Jesus’ words verbatim, but that those words were framed in a modern, literal, metaphysical register. That assumption is rarely argued for; it is simply smuggled in as a starting point. Once that foundation is questioned, the entire structure wobbles.

My difficulty with traditional apologetics is not that it affirms too much about Christ, but that it affirms too little—at least at the wrong level. Nicene Christology, as defended by apologetics, often reduces Jesus to a metaphysical exception rather than a revelatory disclosure. Jesus becomes the singular divine anomaly, ontologically distant from humanity, rather than the one in whom the true nature of humanity and divinity is unveiled. Apologetics then exists to protect that exception, to fence it off from scrutiny, rather than to invite reflection on what Jesus reveals about God, consciousness, and ourselves.

My Christology is high, but not juridical. It is high in the sense that Christ reveals the Logos—the divine consciousness, the creative and indwelling presence that has always been at work in the world. Jesus is not Lord because a set of propositions about him passed historical verification; he is Lord because his life discloses what reality itself is like. He reveals a God who is not primarily a judge requiring satisfaction, but a Father whose nature is love, presence, and participation. This kind of Christology does not need to be defended by manuscript counts or harmonized resurrection timelines. It stands or falls by whether it illuminates reality and awakens recognition.

In this light, apologetics must be reimagined. Instead of asking, “Can we prove Christianity is true?” the better question is, “Does the Christ-event disclose what is already true?” Apologetics becomes less about winning arguments and more about clarifying vision. Scripture is not a divinely dictated transcript to be defended at all costs; it is a witness—layered, interpretive, and profoundly human—pointing toward encounters with the divine. The Gospels do not function as courtroom evidence so much as iconography: they invite contemplation, not cross-examination.

A reimagined apologetics begins with lived experience rather than abstract certainty. It acknowledges that transformation, not intellectual assent, is the real test of truth. Jesus’ authority is not established because he fulfilled predictive checklists or left an empty tomb that defies alternative explanations, but because his way dissolves fear, exposes false gods, and calls humanity out of its forgetfulness. In this sense, Christ is Victor—not over divine wrath, but over death, alienation, and the illusion of separation.

Such an apologetic does not collapse into relativism, nor does it retreat into mysticism detached from history. It simply refuses to confuse modern categories with ancient meanings. Jesus need not be reduced to “liar, lunatic, or Lord,” because those are not the only options available to a first-century Jewish mystic operating within a symbolic, participatory worldview. Prophet, revealer, wisdom-teacher, embodied Logos—these categories are not evasions; they are historically and theologically richer.

Ultimately, the apologetics I can affirm is not one that defends Christianity against all challengers, but one that invites honest seekers into deeper coherence. It does not demand belief before understanding, nor does it threaten disbelief with cosmic consequences. It trusts that truth does not need coercion. If Christ is truly the Logos—the light that enlightens everyone—then apologetics is not about guarding the light, but about removing the veils that prevent us from seeing it.

 

Imago Dei and Imputed Righteousness 2: Return to Eden

When I ask how Paul’s first-century audience would have understood ideas like righteousness, law, and grace, I’m not trying to dismiss the language Paul used. I’m trying to understand how that language would have landed before centuries of theological scaffolding were built around it. Paul did use accounting language. Genesis does say that Abraham’s faith was “accounted” or “reckoned” as righteousness. That isn’t a later invention or a mistranslation—it’s there in Genesis 15, and Paul deliberately echoes it.

But words don’t exist in a vacuum. They live inside worldviews.

When Abraham’s faith is “accounted as righteousness,” the text isn’t describing a moral substance being transferred into him, as though righteousness were a commodity moved from one account to another. The Hebrew and Greek terms both point more toward recognition, regard, and acknowledgment. God sees Abraham’s trust and names it for what it is: covenantal alignment. Abraham is not made righteous by an external transaction; he is recognized as faithful within relationship.

Paul’s first-century audience—both Jewish and Gentile—would not have heard this as a legal fiction. They lived in a relational, participatory worldview. Righteousness meant being rightly aligned, rightly situated, rightly oriented within God’s purposes. It was about belonging and faithfulness, not about pretending someone was something they were not.

This is why Paul insists that Abraham was reckoned righteous before the law, before circumcision, before Israel even existed as a nation. He’s not constructing a loophole in a moral system. He’s pointing back to something older and deeper: righteousness precedes law because righteousness is not created by law. Law can guide, expose, and restrain, but it cannot generate being. It cannot create a new kind of human. That was never its role.

Grace, in Paul’s world, would not have been heard as “undeserved favor toward the guilty” in the later, moralized sense. Grace was gift. It was generosity. It was benefaction that created a new relational reality. Grace did not excuse people from transformation—it enabled it. It drew people into a new way of life by changing their sense of identity and belonging.

This is where repentance takes on its original meaning. Metanoia is not self-loathing or fear-driven remorse. It is a change of mind, a shift in perception. Paul says it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance because kindness reveals truth. When fear loosens its grip, the mind can finally see clearly. Repentance is awakening, not appeasement.

All of this begins to make sense when we return to the creation story. Humanity is blessed before it does anything. God declares creation “very good” before there is any moral drama to resolve. To be created in the image of God is not to be stamped with a superficial likeness, but to be imbued with divine consciousness—to participate in God’s way of knowing, creating, and relating. Humanity is the place where divine awareness becomes localized within creation.

The problem that emerges later is not the loss of that image, but forgetfulness of it. Consciousness narrows. Fear replaces trust. Separation replaces participation. Sin is not an ontological corruption so much as a misidentification. We forget who we are and begin living from that forgetfulness.

Seen this way, righteousness does not need to be imputed because nothing essential was ever missing. What needs to happen is remembrance. When God “accounts” righteousness, God is not overlooking reality; God is naming it. Faith is not mental assent to propositions. Faith is trust—trust in God’s character, trust in God’s kindness, trust that God is love and not transactional.

Looking back, I can see that this insight was already present in my own life long before I had language for it. Twenty-five years ago, when my wife and I were far more evangelical and fundamental than we are today, we believed we heard from the Spirit that “faith is obedience.” At the time, we probably understood that in moral terms. But the phrase itself says something deeper. It does not say obedience produces faith. It says faith is obedience.

If faith is trust, then obedience is simply alignment with what one trusts. And if what one trusts is that God is love—unconditional, non-transactional love—then obedience is not rule-keeping. It is living congruently with love. It is allowing love to shape perception, desire, and action.

This reframes everything. God is not negotiating with humanity. God is not managing a ledger of moral debts and credits. God is love, and love does not operate transactionally. Grace is not God overlooking our humanity; it is God affirming it. Repentance is not changing behavior to gain acceptance; it is changing perception because acceptance has already been given.

When faith is understood this way, behavior follows naturally. Not perfectly, not mechanically, but organically. We live differently when we believe differently about who we are and who God is. Ethics emerge from awareness. Transformation flows from recognition. Righteousness is not imposed from outside but expressed from within.

Paul, read in his own context, is not announcing a legal workaround for human failure. He is announcing the unveiling of a new way of being human—one rooted in trust, participation, and indwelling divine life. What later theology turned into courtroom language was, at its heart, a relational and ontological awakening.

And perhaps that is what the story has been pointing toward all along: not a God who fixes us from the outside, but a God who invites us to remember who we have always been—very good, indwelt, and loved.

 

Imago Dei and Imputed Righteousness

I have come to believe that many of the doctrines that later theology tried to explain—especially concepts like imputed righteousness—were never meant to be abstract legal mechanisms. They arose, I suspect, from an early intuition embedded in the creation story itself. Genesis opens not with deficiency, but with blessing. Humanity is spoken into being, commissioned, and entrusted before doing anything at all. There is no probationary period, no moral test to pass before approval is granted. Humanity is blessed, given purpose, and then declared “very good.” That declaration matters. It tells us something fundamental about the nature of being human.

Creation does not begin with lack. It begins with goodness.

When God declares creation “very good,” this is not mere poetic flourish. It is an ontological statement. Humanity is not introduced as morally broken, spiritually empty, or existentially flawed. We are introduced as complete, capable, and already participating in divine intention. From this vantage point, righteousness does not need to be added later as though something essential were missing. What later theology calls “imputed righteousness” may be better understood as a way of trying to recover what was already true but had been forgotten.

This becomes clearer when we consider what it means to be created in the image of God. I no longer see this image as a superficial resemblance or a functional role alone. To be created in the image of God is to be imbued with divine consciousness. In the ancient world, an image was not a likeness in the modern sense; it was a manifestation of presence. An image carried the essence and authority of what it represented. Humanity, as the image of God, is the locus where divine awareness becomes localized within creation.

Consciousness, then, is not incidental. It is central. Our capacity to know, to imagine, to create, to reflect, and to love is not accidental biology—it is participatory divinity. The Logos is not merely a theological concept or an external savior who appears later to correct a failure. The Logos is the animating intelligence already present within creation and within humanity itself. Divine consciousness is not imposed upon us from without; it is the depth of who we are.

Seen this way, the so-called fall is not a collapse of being but a narrowing of awareness. Humanity does not lose the image of God; it forgets it. Consciousness contracts into fear, separation, and survival. The divine presence does not depart, but it becomes obscured beneath misidentification. We begin to see ourselves as isolated selves rather than participants in a larger divine life. The problem is not corruption of essence but distortion of perception.

This reframes repentance entirely. When Paul writes that it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance, he is not describing moral pressure or divine threat. He is describing awakening. The Greek word metanoia does not mean remorse or self-condemnation. It means a change of mind—a shift in how reality is perceived. Repentance is not about convincing God to forgive us; it is about allowing our perception to realign with what has always been true.

Kindness leads to repentance because kindness disarms fear. When fear loosens its grip, the mind becomes capable of seeing clearly again. And when we see clearly, we recognize ourselves not as abandoned creatures scrambling for approval, but as indwelt beings already participating in divine life. Repentance is the return to a wider field of awareness, a remembering of identity rather than a rejection of humanity.

From this perspective, righteousness is not something transferred to us because we are lacking. It is something that emerges when belief aligns with reality. When we believe that we are indwelt by the Logos—when we truly trust that divine consciousness animates our being—our actions begin to reflect that belief. This is not moral striving; it is congruence. We act according to what we understand ourselves to be.

Ethics, then, are not enforced from the outside. They arise naturally from awareness. Love does not need to be commanded when one knows oneself as participating in Love. Compassion does not require threat when one recognizes shared being. Transformation does not come from discipline imposed by fear, but from insight born of grace.

This is why grace is so often misunderstood. Grace is not God overlooking our humanity; it is God affirming it. Grace is not a legal exception; it is a revelation. It tells us that we are not starting from zero, that we are not spiritual failures in need of divine tolerance. Grace reminds us of our original goodness and invites us to live from it.

In this light, salvation is not rescue from worthlessness. It is awakening from forgetfulness. Sin is not the presence of evil substance within us, but the misidentification of who we are. Salvation is not escape from being human; it is the fulfillment of humanity. It is the re-integration of awareness—the remembering that divine life has always been closer than breath.

What later theology often framed as moral repair, I now see as ontological remembrance. What was treated as legal standing, I see as relational and conscious alignment. The gospel, at its deepest level, is not about appeasing a distant God but about unveiling the indwelling presence that has always been there.

When this understanding takes root, life begins to change—not because it must, but because it cannot help but do so. The mind shifts, the heart opens, and behavior follows. Not out of obligation, but out of recognition. What was true in the beginning begins to express itself again, and the declaration “very good” is no longer something we read—it becomes something we live.

Reframing the Jesus message for late Gen X, Millennials, And Gen Z

Father God is far bigger than the theological boxes we have built to contain Him, and faith begins to fracture when those boxes are mistaken for God Himself. For many who are deconstructing, the crisis is not a loss of belief but a refusal to keep worshiping a limited picture of the divine. One hopeful path forward is the humble recognition that orthodoxy, while meaningful, may not have captured the fullness of truth—and that God remains larger, kinder, and more mysterious than any system designed to explain Him.

Here is clear bullet points designed to resonate with late Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z—people shaped by authenticity, justice concerns, trauma awareness, and distrust of coercive systems. The tone assumes curiosity, not rebellion, and invites reflection rather than argument. Most of all this could lead to a more authentic faith.

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A Kinder, Gentler Jesus

• Jesus consistently reveals God as compassionate, relational, and restorative, not violent or transactional
• He forgives before repentance (e.g., Zacchaeus, the woman caught in adultery), signaling grace as the starting point, not the reward
• His harshest words are directed not at sinners, but at religious systems that burden people with fear and control
• Love of neighbor, enemy-love, and mercy are presented as the core of spiritual maturity
• This Jesus feels less like a gatekeeper—and more like a healer, awakener, and guide

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Questioning Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA)

• Penal Substitution teaches that God required violence to forgive, raising moral and psychological questions
• This model emerges clearly much later in Christian history, not in the earliest centuries
• The Gospels emphasize healing, liberation, reconciliation, and victory over death, not divine appeasement
• The cross can be understood as:
• God entering human suffering
• Exposure of violent systems
• Solidarity with humanity
• Love refusing retaliation
• A loving God who must punish in order to forgive feels in tension with Jesus’ own teaching

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Rethinking Hell & First-Century Views of Gehenna

• Jesus spoke of Gehenna, not “hell” as later imagined
• Gehenna referred to:
• A real valley outside Jerusalem
• A symbol of destruction, corruption, and consequence—not eternal torture
• First-century Jewish listeners did not hear Jesus describing an endless afterlife punishment
• Eternal conscious torment develops centuries later, shaped by Greek philosophy and imperial theology
• Jesus’ warnings function more like:
• “This path leads to ruin”
• “Untransformed lives carry real consequences”
• Justice is portrayed as restorative, not vindictive

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The Late Adoption of the Orthodox Canon

• The New Testament canon was not finalized until the 4th century
• Early Christians read many texts—letters, gospels, teachings, and hymns
• Canon decisions were influenced by:
• Theology
• Geography
• Politics
• Imperial unity after Constantine
• The Bible is a library, not a dropped-from-heaven manual
• Acknowledging this history does not weaken faith—it invites maturity and humility

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The Diversity of Early Christianity

• The early Jesus movement was not monolithic
• There were multiple streams of Christian thought:
• Jewish-Christian
• Mystical
• Pauline
• Johannine
• Wisdom-oriented communities
• Different groups emphasized:
• Transformation vs. legalism
• Inner awakening vs. external conformity
• Union with God vs. rule-based religion
• What later became “orthodoxy” was one voice among many
• Unity was eventually enforced diversity was not originally a problem

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Why This Matters for Gen X, Millennials & Gen Z

• Many are deconstructing not Jesus—but harmful versions of God
• Trauma-informed spirituality matters:
• Fear-based religion wounds people
• Love-based transformation heals people
• Younger generations value:
• Authenticity over certainty
• Meaning over dogma
• Compassion over control
• A Jesus who restores dignity, invites growth, and awakens love is deeply compelling
• Faith becomes a journey of becoming whole, not passing a test

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A Reframing That Resonates

• Jesus didn’t come to rescue us from God
• He came to reveal God
• Not to threaten us into obedience
• But to awaken us into love
• Not to build an empire of fear
• But to form a humanity healed, free, and fully alive

 

Prayer Reimagined

I continue moving in the same direction I have been walking for some time now, and I no longer feel the need to justify that direction to myself or to anyone else. Deconstructing evangelical Christianity has not been an act of rebellion, loss of faith, or spiritual drift. It has been an act of honesty. What has fallen away are certain theological constructs that no longer ring true—particularly penal substitutionary atonement and fear-based frameworks that portray God as requiring violence before love can flow. What has remained, however, is trust. What has remained is relationship. What has remained is prayer.

One of the great misconceptions surrounding deconstruction is the idea that questioning doctrine somehow empties spiritual practices of their power. In my experience, the opposite has been true. As dogma loosens its grip, prayer has not weakened—it has deepened. I know, without hesitation, that I have experienced answered prayer throughout my life. Not in simplistic or transactional ways, but in subtle, relational, and often transformative ways. These experiences did not hinge on theological correctness, denominational alignment, or belief in a particular atonement theory. They hinged on trust, intention, openness, and communion.

Prayer still works because it was never dependent on institutional theology to begin with. Prayer works because reality itself is relational. The universe is not a cold machine governed only by impersonal laws; it is participatory, conscious, and responsive. My understanding of this has grown clearer as I have stepped outside rigid evangelical frameworks. I no longer view God as distant, reactive, or selectively present. Instead, I see existence as layered with consciousness—an interconnected reality in which divine life is already woven into everything that is.

This is where my understanding of the Trinity has shifted—not abandoned, but reimagined. Rather than a distant metaphysical formula to be defended, the Trinity becomes experiential and lived. I understand Father as the overarching Source—what could be called foundational or universal consciousness. This is not a being “out there” watching from afar, but the ground of being itself. The Logos, then, is the creative, expressive, and indwelling consciousness—the divine intelligence that animates, speaks, creates, and awakens. Humanity is not separate from this reality, but the embodied vessel through which it is experienced. We are not outside the divine flow; we are participants within it.

Seen this way, prayer is not pleading with a reluctant deity to intervene in a broken world. Prayer is alignment. It is resonance. It is conscious participation within a triune reality that already includes us. When I pray, I am not trying to convince God to care. I am trusting that care is already present and allowing myself to move into coherence with it. Prayer becomes less about words and more about posture—openness, trust, expectancy, and surrender.

Deconstructing evangelicalism has not removed Jesus from my faith; it has clarified him. Stripped of fear-based theology and sacrificial violence narratives, Jesus emerges not as a cosmic appeasement figure, but as the one who embodied complete trust in the Father and full union with the Logos. His life demonstrates what it looks like to live awake within divine consciousness, rooted in love rather than fear. Prayer, in this light, becomes less about asking Jesus to do something for us and more about learning to live from the same relational trust he lived from.

This does not make prayer symbolic or merely psychological. It makes it real in a deeper sense. Consciousness matters. Intention matters. Love matters. Trust matters. The universe responds not because it is coerced, but because it is relational. When prayer flows from fear, guilt, or obligation, it often feels hollow. When prayer flows from trust and connection, it carries a different weight. It is not magic, but it is effective—because it aligns us with the grain of reality itself.

One of the quiet gifts of deconstruction is freedom from performance. Prayer no longer needs to sound a certain way, follow a formula, or meet an expectation. It becomes honest. Sometimes prayer is words. Sometimes it is silence. Sometimes it is grief, frustration, or even doubt offered without disguise. None of that diminishes its efficacy. In fact, authenticity seems to be the doorway through which prayer becomes most alive.

I no longer believe that prayer works because God is pleased with correct beliefs. I believe prayer works because love is the foundational reality of existence. When we pray, we are not initiating something foreign; we are participating in what already is. The divine presence is not summoned—it is recognized. The Logos is not invited—it is awakened within us. Trust is not earned—it is remembered.

Deconstruction, then, is not a movement away from prayer, but a purification of it. As fear-based theology dissolves, prayer becomes lighter, freer, and more intimate. It is no longer burdened with anxiety about getting it right. It becomes a natural expression of relationship within a universe that is already infused with divine life.

I remain convinced that prayer is efficacious—not because it manipulates outcomes, but because it transforms alignment. It reshapes how we inhabit the world. It opens us to wisdom, peace, and unexpected pathways. And sometimes—often more than we realize—it participates in outcomes that cannot be reduced to coincidence.

If there is one thing I am certain of, it is this: moving beyond evangelical dogma has not led me away from God. It has led me deeper into trust. And prayer, far from being left behind, has become one of the clearest signs that the divine has never been absent—not from the universe, not from humanity, and certainly not from us.

 

Reimagining Christianity: A Return to the Forgotten Center

My reimagining of Christianity is not a novelty, not a rebellion, and certainly not a whimsical spiritual remix pulled from thin air. It is, rather, a serious return—an excavation of a Christianity older than councils, older than creeds, older than orthodoxy’s carefully guarded walls. It begins with the simple yet radical claim that consciousness is foundational. Before there were words about God, before theology, before catechisms and punishments, there was awareness. What John calls the Logos and what Jesus calls Father is not a deity perched in the heavens managing sin accounts, but the very Source of existence itself—the ground of Being, the consciousness through which all things live and move and have their being. If God is anything, God is the field in which all awareness exists, and that consciousness, Scripture dares to say, is Love. Not judgment wrapped in love, not conditional acceptance disguised as grace, but Love as the very essence of reality.

If this is true, then the fruit of the Spirit is not moral effort, nor proof of allegiance to a religious system, but the natural outflow of awakening to the Divine consciousness within. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control are not badges earned through discipline but the inevitable expression of union with the indwelling Spirit. Jesus stands in human history precisely as one who understood this with full clarity. What made Him unique was not that He alone carried divinity while the rest of us remained damaged, distant, and damned. His uniqueness lay in His consciousness—His knowing. He knew the Logos dwelled in Him, and, by extension, in all. His invitation was not to worship a solitary Son but to awaken to the shared Sonship of humanity. To be “born from above” is not to meet the membership requirements of a sect; it is to remember who we are at the deepest level of being: offspring of the Divine, participants in the same Spirit, expressions of the same cosmic Love.

This is why the Gnostics, despite the smear campaigns of later orthodox authorities, remain legitimate followers of Christ. They did not distort Christianity; they preserved its mystical core. Their writings, alongside the canonical texts, reveal a view of salvation as awakening rather than appeasement, illumination rather than doctrine, liberation from ignorance rather than ransom from wrath. They understood sin not as legal debt but as forgetfulness—a falling asleep to our divine origin. Their Jesus frees not by blood payment but by revelation: He comes to restore sight, not settle accounts. If we dare to approach the New Testament and the Gnostic texts as parallel witnesses rather than competitors, a coherent picture emerges: Scripture was never meant to be reduced to literal forensic logic. It is symbolic, psychological, mythic, cosmic. Mythic is not synonymous with untrue. Mythic means truth conveyed through symbol, story, and spiritual experience.

This reading is not foreign to the earliest voices of the faith. Paul was not a systematizer of penal transactions but a mystic of union. His language is not courtroom but interiority: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” John, too, is no legal narrator of guilt and payment; he is the poet of abiding, of oneness, of divine indwelling. “I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Both apostles speak the language of consciousness, union, and transformation, not empire, law, and punishment.

The tragic shift came not through Christ, not through the apostles, but through Rome. When Christianity became the religion of power, it had to become a religion of control. Orthodoxy, in its imperial stage, was not born to guard truth but to regulate it. Creeds and councils did not arise from mystical contemplation but from political necessity. The empire needed a unified theological system, not a diverse mystical movement. Thus the living, breathing, experiential faith of Jesus and the earliest followers hardened into rules, boundaries, penalties, and eternal threats. Love became fear dressed in ecclesial robes.

In that climate, penal substitution grew—not from Jesus' lips nor Paul’s pen, but from Augustine’s anxiety and Anselm’s feudal logic. For the first three centuries, no Christian theologian preached divine wrath satisfied by blood payment. The cross was victory, healing, illumination, liberation from the forces of ignorance and death. Christ conquered the fear of separation, not the Father’s temper. Only later did salvation become courtrooms and cosmic accounting.

It is in this same shift that hell transformed. Jesus spoke of Gehenna—a known garbage valley outside Jerusalem where fires smoldered and decay was visible. He used it as symbol, as prophetic image of wasted life, ego ruin, and inner breakdown—not eternal torture. The early Christians understood this. It was the imperial church that needed eternal punishment to fuel conformity and obedience. Fear is the easiest tool by which to direct populations.

So when I speak of reimagining Christianity, I am not inventing a new faith. I am remembering an old one. I am recovering the mystical Jesus who reveals our divine origin, the Pauline Christ who lives within rather than above, the Johannine Logos who binds all consciousness in love, and the Gnostic insight that salvation is awakening from forgetfulness, not rescue from divine violence. This Christianity is coherent, reasonable, historical, and spiritually alive. It returns to the vision of a God who is not a monarch in the sky but the living consciousness in whom all things share their existence. It sees humanity not as depraved wretches awaiting rescue but as luminous beings capable of remembering their origin in Love.

To reimagine Christianity is simply to remove the imperial armor that has covered its heart. It is to remember that Jesus did not come to found a system but to reveal a state of being: the Kingdom within. It is to reclaim a faith defined not by threat but by transformation, not by fear but by awakening, not by debt but by love. In this sense, reimagining Christianity is not an invention. It is a return.

When Love Confronted Fear: Reclaiming the Preaching of the Cross

I’ve come to see the Cross not as the center of a divine transaction but as the center of a divine revelation—one that has far more to do with awakening than appeasement. The Jesus I know is not the Jesus of punishment, wrath, or cosmic bookkeeping. The Jesus I know is the Jesus of the Gospel of Truth, the one who steps into the world of forgetfulness to remind us of who we truly are. And because of that, the Cross becomes something far larger, far deeper, and far more beautiful than the narrative I was raised on. It becomes the moment when the fog begins to lift and the human soul is invited to remember itself again.

For most of my early life, the Cross was presented as a payment, as if God needed blood to change His mind about us. But that view never resonated with the God I knew within the quiet spaces of consciousness. It didn’t match the Father I encountered when fear dissolved and presence took over. It didn’t sound like the voice of unconditional love. And it certainly didn’t fit the Jesus who walked among us showing compassion, union, and divine identity. Over time—through reflection, mystical insight, study of early Christian diversity, and my own lived experience—I realized that the penal model was a later construction, shaped by empire and fear, not by the original heartbeat of the early Christian message. The earliest believers, especially in the mystical streams, saw the Cross not as an act of divine anger but as a victory over fear, ignorance, and the forgetfulness that had taken root in human consciousness.

The more I’ve grown, the clearer it has become that Jesus did not die instead of us—He died with us, as one of us, moving through the deepest layers of human vulnerability to show that none of it can separate us from the Source. The real enemy He faced was not His Father’s wrath; it was the fear that had ruled humanity since the dawn of consciousness—the fear of death, the fear of separation, the fear that convinces us we are unworthy, broken, and cut off from the divine. Hebrews 2:14 says that by dying He destroyed the one who held the power of death, which is the fear of death—not death itself, but the illusion around it. That illusion is what blinds us to the truth of our divine origin. That illusion is what keeps us trapped in egoic patterns. That illusion is what religions, empires, and systems have used to control people for centuries. And that illusion is exactly what shattered on the Cross.

When I look at the Cross now, I see Jesus stepping directly into the center of human suffering—not to pay a debt, but to expose a lie. He went all the way into the darkness we fear most, the place we assume God cannot be, and revealed that God had been there all along. He took on the full weight of human violence, human misunderstanding, human rejection, and even the machinery of religion itself, not to condemn humanity, but to unveil the truth that death does not define us and separation does not exist. His forgiveness from the Cross—“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—is not a statement of divine pity. It’s a revelation that humanity acts out of ignorance, out of forgetfulness, out of the sleep that the Gnostic texts describe so vividly. We wound because we have forgotten who we are. We fear because we have forgotten where we come from. We cling to dogma because we have forgotten the living God within us. And Jesus addresses that forgetfulness not with punishment, but with awakening.

In that sense, the Cross becomes the moment where the “demon of religion”—the egregore of fear, control, and literalism—is finally exposed. Religion in its lowest form thrives on fear: fear of hell, fear of judgment, fear of not measuring up. It tells you you are separated from God unless you perform, believe, or conform. But the Cross undermines that entire structure. Jesus did not come to reinforce the fears of the religious ego. He came to break them. And so the Cross becomes the moment where religion meets its limit. It cannot intimidate Jesus. It cannot manipulate Him. It cannot bind Him through shame or guilt. He passes through the machinery of religion and reveals the emptiness of its fear-based system. The Resurrection then becomes the divine “No” to every authority that ever tried to enslave the human spirit through fear.

When I see the Cross now, I see the Hermetic pattern of descent and ascent written into cosmic history. As above, so below—Jesus descends into human form, enters the polarity of this world, and lifts it up by showing that consciousness is never extinguished. He embodies the eternal cycle: birth, death, rebirth—not as punishment, but as the structure of reality itself. In that way, the Cross is not an interruption of the divine order; it is the unveiling of it. Reincarnation, resurrection, awakening—these are all different languages pointing toward the same truth: consciousness cannot be imprisoned by matter or by fear. The Cross sits right at the center of that revelation.

And then there is grace—Romans 5, the heartbeat of everything I’ve come to believe. Grace is not something God gives reluctantly after a payment is made. Grace is the eternal flow of divine love that has always been present, always been unconditional, always been transformative. The Cross does not create grace; it reveals it. It demonstrates that God is not drawn to us because of our performance but because of His own nature. God is love, and love is not a transaction. Love is a revelation. Love awakens. Love transforms. Motivation by fear may reform a person temporarily, but it cannot transform the soul. Only grace can do that. Only unconditional, radiant, unearned love can awaken the divine spark within us. That is why the Cross is not about the law being satisfied—it is about the heart being awakened.

And this awakening is not merely individual. The Cross reveals the cosmic truth that all of creation is on a journey of remembering itself. The world of forms, the material density we inhabit, the experiences of joy and sorrow, love and loss—these are the classrooms of consciousness. We incarnate not to escape but to experience, to learn, to awaken. Jesus enters this cycle not as a distant God peering in, but as the highest expression of what we are meant to become: awakened humanity, divine consciousness embodied. He shows us that death is not a wall but a veil, and that the human journey—across lifetimes, dimensions, and layers of awareness—is held in a field of unimaginable love.

So yes, the Cross matters to me deeply—but not because God needed it. It matters because we needed it. We needed to see that fear has no final word. We needed to see that the divine is not separate from our suffering. We needed to see that consciousness cannot be killed. And most of all, we needed to see who we truly are: children of the Divine, bearers of the Christ within, destined not for fear, but for awakening. The Cross is the moment the world was invited to remember itself. It is the revelation that the Divine has always been for us, with us, and within us—even when we forget.

 

Reflecting on the film: The Age of Disclosure

After watching The Age of Disclosure, I found myself sitting in a quiet space, letting the weight of its implications settle over me. The film didn’t just revisit familiar stories of UFOs or resurfaced government programs—it stirred something deeper, something I’ve spent years sensing beneath the surface of this entire subject. What I realized, as the credits rolled, is that the phenomenon we are all trying to name is far larger, older, and more intricate than the modern conversation allows. This piece is my attempt to gather those reflections—shaped by the books I’ve read, the spiritual path I’ve walked, and the worldview I’ve come to embrace—and lay them out in a coherent way. Watching the film didn’t simply inform me; it activated a synthesis of everything I’ve studied about consciousness, spirituality, history, and human experience.

The more I explore the phenomenon—whether we call it UFOs, UAPs, USOs, non-human intelligences, visitors, angels, or something older and stranger—the more I realize that the topic has never been about hardware in the sky. It is, and always has been, about the nature of reality itself. Watching The Age of Disclosure only amplified what years of reading, reflection, and personal intuition have already shown me: the phenomenon is not merely a question of craft and occupants—it is a mirror held up to consciousness, history, spirituality, and the metaphysical fabric of the universe.

I’ve read Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, Super Natural, American Cosmic, Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, and countless others, and what emerges is not a tidy narrative but a mosaic—one that refuses reduction. These books, like puzzle pieces from different centuries and traditions, reveal a multifaceted reality that cannot be understood through any one dogma, institution, or worldview. And perhaps that is why so many systems—military, scientific, religious—have fought so hard against disclosure. It isn’t simply secrecy. It’s existential protection. Because true disclosure does not disrupt only national security—it destabilizes metaphysical security.

As I look at the phenomenon through my own spiritual lens—one shaped by Christian mysticism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, reincarnation, consciousness studies, and a lifelong awareness that our world is far richer than materialism allows—I see the same pattern repeating across the centuries. Humanity has always brushed up against the veil: shamans stepping into spirit realms; prophets having visions “in the heavens”; medieval encounters with shining beings; ancient stories of gods descending; angels, watchers, sons of God; and yes, biblical “chariots” that look suspiciously like technological metaphors for transcendent contact.

Jacques Vallee understood this decades ago. In Passport to Magonia, he reframed the phenomenon not as extraterrestrial hardware but as a control system interacting with human consciousness across eras—shapeshifting, adapting, evolving. When shamans in Siberia speak of portals and beings of light, when the Navajo describe skinwalkers and reality-bending trickster entities, when medieval Christians wrote of luminous messengers, and when modern pilots see structured craft violating the known laws of physics—we are meeting something that plays at the edges of our perception. Something that may not be literally “from space” but instead from the deeper structure of the cosmic psyche.

This resonates deeply with my understanding of consciousness: that we are fragments of a divine Source, experiencing polarity and incarnation across time, learning, awakening. If reality itself is participatory—if consciousness is not produced by the brain but filters through it—then the phenomenon may be an interface, a crossing point between states of consciousness. A reminder that the universe is layered: physical, subtle, psychic, and transcendental.

The military, for all its intelligence and reach, sees only one layer. Their instinct is control, classification, threat assessment. They can capture radar returns and track anomalous objects, but they cannot penetrate the metaphysics. Vallee himself said the phenomenon will not fit in a Pentagon box. The problem is ontological, not technological.

Evangelical Christianity resists disclosure for similar but doctrinal reasons. Their worldview demands a closed universe with one God, one history, one plan, and one set of spiritual beings—angels and demons. Anything outside that controlled taxonomy threatens the fragile scaffolding they’ve built. To admit that the universe is populated by intelligences with their own histories, cultures, and evolutionary trajectories would blow apart centuries of theological gatekeeping. The irony is that the Bible itself is filled with encounters that modern evangelicals would call “aliens” if they appeared today—fiery craft, beings descending in clouds, voices from the sky, wheels within wheels. But when orthodoxy ossifies, it can no longer see the mystical truths within its own scriptures.

Scientific materialists resist disclosure for the opposite reason. Their dogma isn’t theological—it’s metaphysical. The belief that consciousness is accidental, that life is meaningless, that reality is only matter and energy, is a comfort disguised as skepticism. If the phenomenon forces them to admit that intelligence may precede biology, that space and time may be porous, that consciousness might be fundamental, their entire worldview collapses. Materialism is a religion that masquerades as neutral observation. The phenomenon exposes that illusion.

And so disclosure is resisted not because of national security, but because of the security of worldviews.

But the phenomenon itself refuses to be constrained. It appears to shamans in power spots. It interacts with meditators, mystics, abductees, whistleblowers, and scientists. It adapts to the observer. It plays with our perception of time. It manifests in dreams, visions, and waking encounters. It blurs the line between physical craft and psychic experience. It dissolves the rigid boundary between the inner and outer world.

It is as if the phenomenon is telling us:

“You will not understand me until you understand yourself.”

This is what Super Natural hinted at. This is what American Cosmic explored—how the phenomenon intersects with belief, faith, destiny, and consciousness. This is what Skinwalker Ranch continues to reveal: a trickster intelligence that can mimic, misdirect, or enlighten depending on the observer. Something that knows when you are watching it.

To me, the phenomenon is not alien in the simplistic Hollywood sense. It is cosmic. Interdimensional. Trans-conscious. Perhaps even ancestral. It is part of the same spectrum of reality that produces near-death experiences, mystical visions, poltergeist activity, psychic phenomena, and spiritual awakenings. Not identical, but related—expressions of a deeper field underlying the physical world.

This field is consciousness. The unified divine Source from which all beings emerge.

Humanity is standing at the threshold of a metaphysical awakening. The Age of Disclosure is not about revealing spacecraft—it is about revealing ourselves. Our nature. Our destiny. Our place in a universe alive with intelligence and meaning.

The phenomenon is not telling us that we are small. It is telling us that we are not alone—and never have been.

And if we listen with humility, courage, and openness, we may finally discover what the mystics, shamans, prophets, and experiencers have always known:

Reality is larger, stranger, more conscious, and more divine than we ever imagined.

Reimagining Isaiah 53 Jesus as the Suffering Servant

Isaiah 53 has always been read by many as a courtroom drama, as if God were a judge demanding punishment and Jesus were a victim absorbing wrath. But in the deeper, more mystical vision of this passage, it is not a legal story at all. It is a revelation of what divine love looks like when it enters a world that has forgotten itself. It is the poetry of incarnation, the song of consciousness choosing to step into pain, not to satisfy anger, but to dissolve fear. This passage speaks of a Servant who is not crushed by God, but who willingly enters the density of human life to awaken it from within.

The “man of sorrows” is not a cursed object; he is the embodiment of divine empathy. He does not suffer so that God can be appeased, but so that humanity can finally see itself clearly. He becomes familiar with grief because grief is the language of the world he enters. Rather than standing apart from human suffering, he walks directly into it, carrying it not as a burden placed on him from above, but as a love he chooses to bear from within. This is not substitutionary suffering, but participatory suffering — not someone suffering instead of us, but someone suffering with us, from the inside of our own condition.

When the text says he was “wounded for our transgressions,” this is not the language of divine violence, but of divine solidarity. Transgression, in this vision, is not moral failure demanding punishment, but spiritual dislocation — the forgetting of our origin, the illusion of separation. The wounds of the servant are not inflicted by God, but by a fractured world that strikes whatever reveals its own illusion. Yet it is precisely through these wounds that healing flows, not because pain has magical power, but because love that refuses to withdraw in the face of pain awakens the truth buried in the heart of humanity.

The idea that “the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all” is not about God transferring guilt, but about God entering the full weight of human distortion. The servant absorbs, experiences, and transforms the collective suffering of humanity by walking through it without hatred, without retaliation, and without fear. He becomes the place where darkness is allowed to exhaust itself in the presence of light. The iniquity of the world is not paid for; it is exposed, embraced, and dissolved by compassion that will not abandon creation.

The silence of the servant before his accusers is not weakness; it is spiritual authority. It is the silence of one who knows the truth beyond illusion and therefore does not need to defend himself within the illusion. He stands like a lamb not because he is passive, but because he is surrendered — not to violence, but to love. His life is not taken from him; it is given freely, as an act of radical trust in the Source from which he came and to which he knows he will return.

Most traditional readings stumble over the phrase “it pleased the Lord to crush him.” In a mystical reading, this is not sadistic pleasure, but divine consent to the journey of love going all the way into human brokenness. The “pleasure” is not found in pain, but in purpose. It is the joy of the divine heart watching love prove itself stronger than death, stronger than violence, stronger than fear. The crushing is not an act of divine rage, but the inevitable resistance experienced by truth when it confronts illusion.

What emerges from this suffering is not satisfaction of wrath, but the birth of a new humanity. “He shall see his offspring” is not about biological children, but awakened souls — those who, seeing such love, begin to remember who they are. The servant does not die to change God’s attitude toward humanity; he dies to change humanity’s awareness of God. The resurrection implied in this passage is not merely the reanimation of a body, but the unveiling of reality: that love cannot be extinguished, consciousness cannot be destroyed, and light cannot be suffocated by darkness.

In the end, Isaiah 53 is not about God demanding blood. It is about God giving God’s own self in the form of vulnerability. It is a story of descent, not punishment; of awakening, not appeasement; of union, not separation. The servant “justifies many” not by balancing cosmic accounts, but by revealing the truth that has always been there — that we were never abandoned, never rejected, and never truly separate from the Source of love. This chapter becomes a mirror rather than a doctrine, a vision rather than a law, calling us not into fear of God, but into remembrance of our divine origin and our shared destiny of wholeness.

Reimagining 2 Corinthians 5:17-21: God Reconciling the World to Himself

 

God was never at war with the world, never standing at a cosmic distance with anger in His heart or judgment in His hands. The story of reconciliation is not the story of an offended deity finally deciding to be merciful, but of divine Love stepping into the very fabric of human consciousness to heal what had become fractured in our perception of reality. When the sacred text says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, it is not describing a transaction in the courtroom of heaven, but a revelation unfolding in the human soul — the awakening of humanity to what has always been true. God did not need to be convinced to love us. We needed to be awakened to the truth that we never lost that love.

In Christ Jesus, God does not stand outside of human experience trying to fix it from afar. He enters it fully. He walks in it. He breathes in it. He feels its fear, confusion, isolation, violence, and despair. The Christ does not come as a sacrifice to satisfy divine rage, but as a manifestation of divine union — a living reminder that the divine and the human have never truly been separate. In Him, God is not counting sins or recording failures. God is dissolving the illusion that we have ever been separate from the Source. The trespasses are not entries in a ledger; they are the symptoms of spiritual amnesia, the evidence of a forgotten origin.

Reconciliation, then, is not God changing His attitude toward the world, but the world being invited to change its awareness of God. It is not heaven moving, but humanity remembering. It is consciousness being healed, perception being purified, and the fragmented self discovering unity again. The ministry of reconciliation entrusted to humanity is not a ministry of fear, but of remembrance. We are not ambassadors of threat; we are ambassadors of awakening. We do not stand before the world with clenched fists and warnings of destruction. We stand with open hearts, bearing witness to the truth that the divine has always been near, always been within, always been moving through us.

When the text speaks of Christ being made “sin,” it is not saying that God turned His Son into a cosmic criminal or poured out wrath upon innocence. It is saying that the Christ entered the deepest layer of human distortion without losing divine awareness. He stepped into the density of fear without becoming fear. He walked into the illusion of abandonment without being abandoned. He carried the weight of human misperception, and in doing so, He revealed that even in the darkest corners of human consciousness, the light of the Source could not be extinguished. He did not become sinful; He entered the realm where sin seemed real and exposed it as a shadow with no substance of its own.

And in that divine act, we do not become righteous because a divine penalty was paid, but because our true identity is restored. We become the righteousness of God not by fiction, not by legal decree, but by awakening. By remembering. By returning. Reconciliation is not God tolerating humanity. It is humanity rediscovering that it has always lived inside the heartbeat of God, and that every step of apparent separation was only the long road home.

Father as Pantheism, Son as Panentheism: A Mystical Resolution

For many years, I felt tension between pantheism and panentheism as if I were being forced to choose between two visions of God: one that dissolved God into everything, and another that preserved God as something beyond everything. Over time, I came to realize that this is not a contradiction at all, but a living paradox that finds its harmony in a more mystical understanding of the Trinity — not as a rigid doctrinal structure, but as a metaphysical reality.

In the way I have come to see it, the Father is pantheistic in nature. The Father is not a distant deity standing outside of creation, issuing decrees from afar. The Father is Being itself. The ground of existence. The divine substance from which stars are formed, consciousness awakens, and matter takes shape. There is nothing that exists that is not, in some way, God. Not as a simplistic claim that everything is “God” in a naïve sense, but in the deeper mystical sense that all things participate in the divine essence.

This aligns deeply with Christian mysticism as I understand it — not the fear-driven frameworks of dogma, but the experiential mysticism of Meister Eckhart, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and the hidden thread within John’s Gospel itself. “In Him we live and move and have our being” was never poetry to me. It is metaphysical truth. The Father is not separate from existence; the Father is existence’s very substance.

Yet the Son — the Logos — represents something different. Not a different God, but a different mode of God. The Son is panentheistic. The Son reveals that while everything exists in God, God is more than what appears. The Son stands as the bridge between the infinite ocean of divine being and the differentiated expressions within it. This is not about blood appeasement or transactional salvation. It is about revelation. Awakening. Remembering.

This is where Gnostic insight resonates so deeply with me. The problem of humanity was never that we were “too sinful” for God. The problem was forgetfulness. We fell asleep inside our own divine origin. The Gnostics understood this — especially the Valentinian stream that saw Christ not as a legal substitute but as a revealer of divine memory. To awaken was to be saved. To remember who and what we are was to be redeemed.

Hermetic thought amplifies this beautifully. “As above, so below” is not a metaphor to me; it is a spiritual law. The Cosmos is not broken. It is patterned. It is intelligent. It reflects itself at every level. The Father, as pantheistic Being, saturates all planes of existence. The Son, as panentheistic Logos, gives pattern, meaning, and relational structure to that Being. The divine mind does not stand apart from matter — it breathes through it.

This is why I reject the common Gnostic idea of the demiurge as a villain. I do not see creation as a tragic mistake by a lesser, ignorant god. I see creation as intentional expression — the Father experiencing form. The Source exploring itself through limitation. The divine tasting contrast, texture, polarity, beauty, and even pain — not as punishment, but as participation in reality on every level. Without form, there is no experience. Without incarnation, there is no story. Without polarity, there is no movement toward love.

Here is where Taoism quietly speaks the same truth in a different language. The Tao is not a being you worship. It is the Way that cannot be named, the flow behind all things. When I read Taoist wisdom, I hear echoes of both Father and Son. The Tao is the Father — the nameless Source that precedes form. The manifested harmony of yin and yang is the Son — the dynamic balance that makes relationship and experience possible.

Taoism never demonizes the material world. It doesn’t call it fallen. It calls it fluid. It understands that light and dark, empty and full, movement and stillness are not enemies but dance partners. This resonates more deeply with me than doctrines of corruption and total depravity ever could.

In this framework, the Father is the ocean. The Son is the wave that reveals the ocean’s nature. The Spirit — if I were to complete this vision — is the breath that moves the water, the energy that animates the entire field of existence.

Christian mysticism affirms this through divine union. Hermeticism affirms it through cosmic law. Gnosticism affirms it through awakening. Taoism affirms it through harmony. They are not in opposition; they are speaking different dialects of the same truth.

What orthodoxy calls heresy, I experience as coherence.

The Father as pantheism means I cannot despise the world. I cannot see matter as evil or spirit as imprisoned. The soil is holy. The stars are sacred. The human body is not a prison — it is a temple of experience.

The Son as panentheism means I am never confined to appearances. There is always more than what is seen. I am within God, yet God is larger than my limited perception. Christ is not a gatekeeper to heaven; Christ is the divine whisper inside my consciousness reminding me that I was never separate from Source.

This is not rebellion against Christianity. It feels like its fulfillment. It feels like returning to the deeper current that existed before councils, creeds, and control systems tried to flatten mystery into manageable doctrine. The Trinity was always mystical — it was never meant to be reduced to logical diagrams.

Pantheism and panentheism are not opposites in my view. They are Father and Son in eternal conversation

. One is the vast, infinite field of being. The other is the relational awareness blooming within that field.

And in that sacred paradox, I feel closer to God than I ever did in certainty.

Reimagining the tongues of men and angels

I did not grow up in a church environment that welcomed speaking in tongues. In fact, the denomination I was raised in rejected it outright. Tongues were seen as emotionalism, foolishness, or something that belonged to other fringe expressions of Christianity that we were warned to avoid. Glossolalia had no place in my theology, my church, or my religious vocabulary. And yet, something was happening in me long before I had words to describe it.

Beginning around the age of eleven, I started to experience something that felt completely natural and completely uncontrollable at the same time. I would chant. Not sing. Not speak English. But chant — rhythmic, repetitive vocal expressions that felt ancient, familiar, and strangely comforting. I couldn’t stop myself when it began. It would rise up from somewhere deeper than thought. Not emotional hysteria, not imagination, not play-acting. It felt like something older than me moving through me.

What always puzzled me is that the sounds felt structured, intentional, and deeply meaningful, even though I did not consciously “know” what I was  . It wasn’t random noise. It had rhythm. It had cadence. It felt like language, but not a language of the mind. It was something of the body and the breath and the soul.

Years later, I learned that my father’s mother was half Chippewa. That detail landed in my spirit with far more weight than it probably should have according to the modern rational mind. I don’t claim that genetics carry spiritual memory in a simplistic way, but I also do not believe consciousness is as shallow or as mechanical as modern materialism insists. Something in me recognized that rhythm. Something in me felt at home in that sound. Whether ancestral, archetypal, or spiritual, I can’t reduce it to a neat explanation.

What is striking to me now is how closely that childhood experience aligns with what scholars later described as glossolalia. When I finally encountered Paul’s words in Corinthians — “my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful” — I felt seen by a text written two thousand years before I was born. I recognized myself in that sentence. I recognized the experience.

At the time, I could not have told you what glossolalia was. I wasn’t taught about it. I wasn’t encouraged toward it. In fact, I was shaped in a world suspicious of exactly that kind of thing. And yet, the experience found me anyway.

I now understand that what I was doing might not fit neatly into the category of biblical tongues as many churches define it. It may align more with what anthropology calls “ecstatic utterance,” what indigenous cultures have used as sacred chant for millennia, and what modern spirituality sometimes calls light language. I don’t feel the need to force it into one box. Spirit does not move in boxes. The divine does not respect our categories.

Indigenous chanting, especially, feels like a meaningful framework for understanding what was happening. In many native traditions, chant is not about aesthetics or performance. It is about connection. It is about entering a different layer of reality. It is about calling the unseen into presence and remembering who we are in the web of life. That feels much closer to what I experienced than the ideas I was taught in church.

I was not trying to summon anything. I was not trying to perform for God. I was not trying to impress anyone. There was no audience. It often happened alone. It was raw. It was intimate. It was unfiltered.

If there is any theology I can honestly assign to it now, it is this: it felt like my soul remembered how to breathe before my mind learned how to doubt.

There is something deeply important about pre-rational spirituality. Before doctrines, before creeds, before church splits, before religious gatekeeping — there was breath. There was rhythm. There was sound. There was vibration. The first humans did not write theology; they danced, chanted, and looked at the stars. Something about indigenous chant feels closer to that original human posture before the Mystery.

I don’t claim that what I experienced was a “native language” in a technical sense. I wasn’t speaking fluent Chippewa vocabulary. I wasn’t channeling a tribal dialect. But I do believe I was moving in a sacred pattern of sound that predates Christian and modern religious frameworks. Something older than religion and closer to Spirit.

And perhaps that is where glossolalia, indigenous chant, and what is now called light language meet — not as competing traditions, but as expressions of the same human-spiritual capacity. The ability to let sound become prayer. To let breath become bridge. To let vibration become communion.

Looking back, I see that my childhood chanting was not rebellion against my religious upbringing. It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t confusion. It was my soul’s way of speaking when the church offered me silence.

It was my spirit refusing to be flattened by doctrine.

It was the Logos finding a way to hum through flesh and breath.

I don’t feel the need to label it anymore. I don’t need to prove it was this or that. I only know that it was real. It was sacred. It was mine. And it was a gift that arrived before I had language to explain it.

Maybe that is the deepest truth of all: some forms of prayer cannot be taught, cannot be controlled, and cannot be explained. They can only be surrendered to.

And sometimes, they come to us before we even know we were searching.