When Religion Calls Spirituality Demonic

There is an irony in contemporary evangelical fundamentalism that I find both fascinating and troubling. Some of the most outspoken defenders of Christianity are also among the quickest to label spiritual experiences and understandings outside their accepted doctrinal framework as demonic. Whether the subject is mystical experience, expanded consciousness, spiritual awakening, reincarnation, or the possibility that humanity participates in the divine nature, the response is frequently the same. If it does not conform to their understanding of Scripture and their established theological doctrines, it must be deception, and quite possibly demonic deception.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the religious authorities of Jesus' day made essentially the same accusation against him.

According to the Gospels, Jesus was accused of having a demon. In John 8:48, his opponents asked, "Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?" In John 10:20, some declared, "He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?" In Mark 3:22, scribes from Jerusalem accused Jesus of casting out demons through the power of Beelzebul, the ruler of demons. These were not accusations coming from people who rejected religion. They came from people deeply committed to their religious understanding of God, Scripture, and the proper boundaries of spiritual activity.

I find that parallel remarkable. Two thousand years later, we have religious people making essentially the same accusation against spiritual perspectives that challenge their theological assumptions. The language has changed very little. What was attributed to Beelzebul in the first century is attributed to Satan and demonic deception today.

To appreciate the significance of this, we need to understand something about the language of the first century. The Greek word commonly translated as demon is daimonion, related to the older Greek word daimōn. In the broader Greek-speaking world, a daimōn was not necessarily an evil being. The term could describe a spiritual presence, a divine intermediary, or a supernatural influence. Plato discussed such beings as intermediaries between the divine and humanity. Socrates spoke of his daimonion, an inner divine warning that guided him. These were not necessarily understood as malevolent influences.

Within Jewish religious thought, however, the terminology generally carried a more negative meaning. The Hebrew Scriptures referred to shedim, spiritual beings associated with improper worship and foreign gods. The related Aramaic term sheda also referred to a demon. Since Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic in everyday life, he probably used Aramaic expressions for demons or unclean spirits rather than the Greek terminology preserved in the Gospels. By the first century, Jewish traditions commonly understood these beings as harmful spiritual influences.

This distinction is important because I am not suggesting that Jesus and his contemporaries regarded demons as benevolent spiritual guides. They clearly did not. My point concerns something else entirely. It concerns the willingness of religious authorities to identify spiritual activity they did not understand, or could not reconcile with their theological expectations, as originating from an evil supernatural source.

The irony becomes even greater when we consider what Jesus actually taught.

Jesus spoke of a kingdom that was not established through the religious and political structures of his day. He spoke of the kingdom of God as already present among his listeners. He spoke of his unity with the Father and invited his followers into that same unity. In John 14:20, he declared, "I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you." In John 17:21, he prayed that his followers might be one, just as he and the Father were one, and that they might participate in that divine unity.

These are profoundly spiritual statements. They suggest a relationship between humanity and the divine that goes considerably beyond adherence to religious doctrine. From my perspective, they point toward an awakening to a reality that has always existed but has largely been forgotten. Humanity is not separate from the divine in the absolute sense imagined by much of traditional Christianity. We exist within the divine reality, participate in it, and express something of its nature. Jesus came to awaken humanity to that relationship, not simply to establish another religious institution.

Yet today, suggesting that humanity participates in the divine nature is often enough to provoke accusations of New Age deception, occultism, or demonic influence. The very idea that Jesus may have been revealing something about our own spiritual identity, rather than emphasizing an unbridgeable separation between God and humanity, is treated as dangerous.

I find it particularly revealing that the people making these accusations frequently believe they are defending Jesus. They are defending the very person whom religious authorities once accused of possessing a demon.

Of course, there are differences between first-century Judaism and contemporary evangelical Christianity. The Pharisees were not a uniform group, and not every religious authority opposed Jesus. Likewise, not every evangelical Christian rejects mystical spirituality. Christianity has a long contemplative tradition that recognizes the importance of direct spiritual experience. Nevertheless, the tendency to protect established doctrine by discrediting unfamiliar spiritual perspectives is difficult to overlook.

Perhaps the most revealing passage is found in Mark 3:28–30. After being accused of operating through demonic power, Jesus warned about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Mark specifically connects his warning to the accusation that Jesus had an unclean spirit. In other words, his opponents were attributing what Jesus understood as the activity of God's Spirit to an evil spiritual source.

Think about the implications of that for a moment.

What if the very people who are most confident in their ability to identify demonic deception are sometimes confusing unfamiliar expressions of spirituality with evil? What if their theological certainty prevents them from recognizing spiritual truth when it appears outside the boundaries of their religious tradition? And what if their determination to defend God actually becomes an obstacle to discovering more about the divine?

I am not suggesting that every spiritual claim is authentic or that discernment is unnecessary. Quite the opposite. Discernment is essential. But discernment and doctrinal conformity are not the same thing. An experience does not become demonic simply because it challenges a particular interpretation of Scripture. Neither does a spiritual understanding become false simply because it conflicts with doctrines developed centuries after Jesus lived.

Jesus himself offered a remarkably practical principle for evaluating spiritual activity. In Matthew 7:16, he said, "You will know them by their fruits." He did not say that people should evaluate everything according to its agreement with a future system of Christian theology. He directed attention toward what something produces.

Does a spiritual understanding produce love, compassion, humility, forgiveness, and a greater recognition of our shared humanity? Does it encourage people to care for one another, overcome fear, and live more consciously? Or does it produce hostility, condemnation, exclusion, and the conviction that everyone outside one's religious community is spiritually deceived?

Those seem like reasonable questions to ask.

I am especially troubled by the tendency to treat religious doctrine as though it were identical to divine truth. Doctrine is humanity's attempt to explain its understanding of God. It is not God. Scripture records humanity's encounters with and interpretations of the divine, but our interpretations of Scripture are still interpretations. When we elevate those interpretations to the level of unquestionable truth, we risk making our understanding of God more important than God.

That, to me, is one of the enduring lessons of the Gospel accounts.

Jesus repeatedly challenged religious assumptions that placed institutional authority, inherited interpretations, and religious observance above compassion, mercy, and spiritual understanding. His conflicts were not with Judaism as a whole, but with particular attitudes and practices that he believed obscured the deeper purposes of God.

I wonder how many contemporary Christians would recognize Jesus if he appeared today expressing the same kind of spiritual freedom that brought him into conflict with religious authorities in the first century. Would they recognize his message, or would they measure his words against their doctrinal statements and conclude that he was teaching something demonic?

It is a question worth considering.

For me, spirituality is not the enemy of Christianity. Spirituality is the reality that Christianity, at its best, attempts to illuminate. The tragedy occurs when the religious structures created to preserve spiritual insight become barriers to further spiritual discovery.

There is something profoundly contradictory about proclaiming that God is infinite while insisting that our understanding of God is complete. If the divine is truly infinite, then our theological explanations must necessarily remain incomplete. There will always be more to discover, more to understand, and more to experience.

Perhaps the greatest danger to spiritual understanding is not the possibility that we might encounter something unfamiliar. Perhaps it is the certainty that anything unfamiliar must be evil.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable irony of all is that some of those who are quickest to call spirituality demonic are repeating the very accusation once directed against the person they claim to follow.

The question is not whether we should abandon discernment. The question is whether we have confused discernment with defending our beloved doctrines.

Because if our doctrines become the final measure of what God can or cannot reveal, we have effectively placed our theology above the divine reality it was intended to describe.

 

The Living Cosmos: Tao, Logos, Hermeticism, and Animism

A synthesis of four spiritual perspectives

The foundation of my understanding of reality begins with a simple conviction: God is ineffable. Whatever ultimate reality is, it cannot be adequately described, defined, contained, or confined within the theological boundaries of any religion. God is not simply another being within the universe, however powerful. God is the infinite ground of being itself, the inexhaustible potential from which all existence emerges and within which everything participates.

This is where the ancient Chinese understanding of the Tao becomes particularly meaningful.

The Tao Te Ching begins by reminding us that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Ultimate reality transcends the names and descriptions we assign to it. Yet the Tao is not absent from creation. It is the underlying way through which existence unfolds, the mysterious source of the ten thousand things.

The Tao is beyond differentiation, yet differentiation emerges within its expression. Yin and yang are not competing forces of good and evil but complementary polarities through which the universe manifests itself. Light and darkness, activity and rest, expansion and contraction, individuality and unity are all dimensions of a dynamic existence.

Here I find a meaningful connection with the Hermetic philosophy expressed in The Kybalion.

The Kybalion, a modern work published in 1908 that draws upon selected Hermetic ideas, proposes that reality is fundamentally mental and that the universe operates through principles such as polarity, vibration, rhythm, and correspondence.

Its principle of polarity suggests that apparent opposites are frequently different degrees or expressions of an underlying reality. Hot and cold, for example, are not independent substances but variations along a continuum.

Where Taoism emphasizes the complementary movement of yin and yang, Hermeticism emphasizes the relationships, rhythms, and transformations occurring within manifested existence.

I would not necessarily accept every claim of the Kybalion as a literal scientific description of the universe. Nevertheless, I find its philosophical insights useful in understanding a cosmos that is dynamic, relational, and continually unfolding.

But this raises a profound question: How does the ineffable become knowable?

This is where the Christian Logos becomes central to my understanding.

The prologue of John's Gospel declares that in the beginning was the Logos, that the Logos was with God, and that the Logos was divine. Everything came into being through the Logos, and the true light enlightens everyone.

I do not begin by assuming that the Logos in John 1:1 is simply another name for the historical Jesus. Rather, I understand the Logos as the eternal self-expression of the ineffable God—the divine intelligence, wisdom, and consciousness through which the unknowable becomes knowable.

John 1:14 declares that the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. I understand this not merely as a statement about one isolated supernatural intervention, but as the supreme disclosure, through Jesus, of a divine reality that is already intimately involved in humanity.

Jesus uniquely and perfectly manifested this divine consciousness. Yet the Logos is not confined to Jesus. The light enlightens everyone, and the divine presence is available within all humanity.

This also resonates with the remarkable statement in the Gospel of Truth that the name of the Father is the Son.

I understand the Son here as divine self-disclosure. The ineffable Father is made known through the Son, just as the invisible source becomes recognizable through its expression.

And this leads naturally to the fourth perspective: animism.

Animism, found in many Indigenous and ancient spiritual traditions, understands the world as alive, relational, and permeated by spiritual presence. Mountains, rivers, forests, animals, and the earth itself are not merely collections of inert matter existing for human exploitation. They participate in a living cosmos.

I do not believe this requires imagining that every rock possesses a humanlike personality or that every tree thinks as we do. Rather, I see animism as pointing toward a profound truth: consciousness and spiritual significance may be far more deeply woven into reality than our materialistic assumptions allow us to recognize.

Within my evolutionary panentheism, everything exists within God, while God remains infinitely more than everything that exists.

The material universe is therefore not separated from the divine. It is one dimension of divine manifestation.

A tree is not God in God's totality. Neither is a mountain, a river, a human being, or a galaxy. Yet none of these exists outside the divine ground of being.

The cosmos is not a dead machine occasionally visited by supernatural interventions. It is a living, evolving expression of an inexhaustible foundational consciousness.

And here these four perspectives come together.

THE TAO

The Ineffable Source

The ultimate mystery beyond all names, forms, and distinctions

THE CHRISTIAN LOGOS

Divine Self-Disclosure

The intelligible expression of the ineffable, illuminating and indwelling humanity

THE KYBALION

Principles of Manifestation

Polarity, rhythm, correspondence, and transformation

ANIMISM

The Living Creation

A relational cosmos permeated by sacred presence

EVOLUTIONARY PANENTHEISM

Infinite potential continually expressing itself through finite, evolving experience, without exhausting its infinite source

This is a conceptual synthesis, not a claim that these traditions teach precisely the same metaphysics.

What makes this synthesis especially meaningful to me is that it does not require the elimination of individuality.

I do not believe our spiritual purpose is simply to dissolve into an undifferentiated divine consciousness, abandoning everything that makes individual experience meaningful.

Rather, individuality may be one of the very purposes of manifestation.

The infinite experiences itself through the finite. The universal finds expression through the particular. Consciousness participates in countless perspectives, relationships, discoveries, and experiences.

The ego, properly understood, is not necessarily an enemy to be destroyed. It is a functional aspect of individualized experience. The problem arises when we mistake that temporary individual perspective for the entirety of who we are.

In this understanding, spiritual awakening is the recognition that we are simultaneously individual expressions of consciousness and participants in a universal divine reality.

This is also how I understand the ministry of Jesus.

Jesus did not come merely to establish another religious institution or to provide an exclusive escape from an eternally divided creation. He came to reveal the Father, overcome humanity's fear and alienation, and demonstrate what a life fully conscious of divine union looks like.

His resurrection, for me, points toward the continuity of life beyond physical death. His teaching reveals a kingdom that is not simply somewhere else, but a spiritual reality already present within and among us.

And his life demonstrates that love is the natural expression of awakened divine consciousness.

The implications are extraordinary.

If all existence participates in the divine, then compassion is not merely a moral commandment imposed from outside. It is the recognition of our underlying unity.

If creation is spiritually meaningful, then our treatment of animals, forests, oceans, and the earth itself becomes an expression of our understanding of God.

If the Logos enlightens everyone, then divine revelation cannot be the exclusive possession of one religion, culture, historical period, or institution.

And if the ineffable ground of being is infinite, then no finite expression of religion, philosophy, or spirituality can exhaust its mystery.

The Tao points toward the ineffable source. The Logos reveals its self-expression. Hermeticism offers a symbolic understanding of the dynamics of manifestation. Animism reminds us that the manifested world is alive with sacred significance.

Together, they suggest a cosmos in which consciousness, matter, spirit, individuality, and unity are not ultimately disconnected realities, but interrelated dimensions of one unfolding existence.

I would summarize my understanding this way:

Foundational consciousness is infinite potential continually creating infinite experience. The ineffable remains inexhaustible, while its manifestations evolve. We are not separate from that reality. We are conscious participants within it.

And perhaps the greatest spiritual realization is not that we must somehow find our way back to God, but that we have never existed outside God in the first place.

One distinction I would preserve in developing this further is that Taoism does not necessarily identify the Tao with a conscious personal God, the Kybalion is not identical to ancient Hermetic literature, and animist traditions differ considerably in their understandings of spiritual agency. The Christian Logos also has its own distinctive Jewish and Hellenistic background.

These differences matter historically. Yet they do not prevent us from drawing the traditions into a coherent contemporary philosophy.

In fact, I think the strongest aspect of this synthesis is the distinction between the ineffable ground that does not evolve and the manifest universe that does. That gives us a philosophical foundation for explaining how eternal divine reality and an evolving cosmos can coexist without contradiction.

 

Heaven and Earth Must Have Passed II: The New Heaven and Earth Brings Universal Reconciliation

Jesus made the following statement in Matthew chapter five:

Matthew 5:17–18: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.”

Jots and tittles are descriptive of the smallest pen strokes. Jesus is therefore making a very strong statement about the continuing authority of the Law. Until heaven and earth pass away and until all is fulfilled, not even the smallest part of the Law will disappear.

With this in mind, let us look at something that precedes the Mosaic Law but becomes incorporated into Israel’s covenant identity: circumcision.

God said to Abraham:

Genesis 17:7–14: “And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you.... This is My covenant which you shall keep, between Me and you and your descendants after you: Every male child among you shall be circumcised.... And the uncircumcised male child... shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant.”

This is extremely important. Circumcision was not some minor Jewish custom that could easily be discarded. According to Genesis, God himself established it as the sign of an everlasting covenant. The uncircumcised male was specifically excluded from the covenant community.

This requirement was subsequently incorporated into the Law of Moses. Exodus chapter twelve makes the connection unmistakable:

Exodus 12:48–49: “And when a stranger dwells with you and wants to keep the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as a native of the land. For no uncircumcised person shall eat it. One law shall be for the native-born and for the stranger who dwells among you.”

This passage gives specific instructions concerning how a Gentile could participate fully in Israel’s covenant life. He had to be circumcised before participating in the Passover. Verse forty-nine is particularly significant: “One law shall be for the native-born and for the stranger who dwells among you.”

So the requirement cannot simply be dismissed as an insignificant ceremonial detail. Genesis calls circumcision the sign of an everlasting covenant, and Exodus explicitly requires circumcision of the Gentile who wishes to participate in Israel’s Passover.

Now compare this with what happens in the first century.

A major controversy arose because certain Jewish believers were teaching Gentile believers that they had to be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses. Acts records their position very clearly:

Acts 15:5: “But some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed rose up, saying, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses.’”

This was precisely the issue addressed by the apostles at Jerusalem. Their resulting letter stated:

Acts 15:24–29: “Since we have heard that some who went out from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls, saying, ‘You must be circumcised and keep the law’—to whom we gave no such commandment—it seemed good to us... to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality.”

Something enormous has happened.

Genesis 17 says circumcision is the sign of an everlasting covenant. Exodus 12 says an uncircumcised Gentile cannot participate in Israel’s Passover and that one law applies to the native-born and the stranger. Yet Acts 15 specifically rejects the claim that Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses.

Paul goes even further:

Galatians 5:2: “Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.”

And again:

Galatians 6:15: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation.”

This creates a serious problem if Matthew 5:18 is interpreted to mean that the Mosaic covenant remains legally binding until the physical universe is destroyed.

Jesus said that not one jot or tittle would pass from the Law until heaven and earth pass away and until all is fulfilled. Yet within the New Testament itself, one of the clearest covenant requirements—circumcision—is no longer required of Gentiles entering the people of God. What Genesis describes as an everlasting covenant sign and Exodus requires of the stranger is explicitly rejected as a requirement in Acts 15.

The jots and tittles have disappeared.

In fact, much more than individual pen strokes disappeared. The covenantal structure itself changed. Circumcision ceased to determine membership in the covenant people. The distinction between Jew and Gentile was transformed. Participation in the people of God was no longer established through circumcision and Torah observance.

Therefore, if Jesus’ statement in Matthew 5:18 is true—and I believe that it is—then we must seriously reconsider what Jesus meant by “heaven and earth passing away.”

Perhaps he was not talking about the destruction of the physical planet and cosmos at all.

Within the prophetic language of Scripture, heaven-and-earth imagery can describe covenantal worlds, peoples, kingdoms, and orders. If that is the framework Jesus was using, Matthew 5:18 takes on an entirely different significance. The old covenant world could not disappear until everything associated with that covenant had reached its fulfillment.

And that is exactly what the New Testament claims was happening in the first century.

The question therefore becomes unavoidable: If physical heaven and earth have not passed away, how could circumcision cease to be required?

Either Jesus was wrong when he said that not one jot or tittle would pass until heaven and earth passed and all was fulfilled, or heaven and earth in Matthew 5:18 means something different from the physical universe.

I choose the latter.

The disappearance of circumcision as a covenant requirement provides powerful internal New Testament evidence that the “heaven and earth” Jesus spoke about was the old covenant order that was passing away. The jots and tittles disappeared because the covenantal heaven and earth to which they belonged had fulfilled its purpose.

The issue is therefore larger than circumcision. Acts 15 provides a historical marker showing that the transition was already underway. What Genesis established, what Moses codified, and what Jesus said would remain until fulfillment had reached its appointed transformation.

Heaven and earth passed away—not the planet beneath our feet or the stars above our heads, but the covenantal world governed by the Mosaic order. And when that world passed, its jots and tittles passed with it.

 

Reimagining the Gospel

I was taught that the gospel began with a problem. Humanity had sinned against God, God's justice demanded satisfaction, and Jesus came to pay the penalty that humanity could not pay. The good news was essentially that because Jesus died in our place, those who believed the correct things about him could be forgiven and eventually go to heaven rather than hell. I understand that story. I lived within it for many years. But the longer I have studied Jesus, Paul, the Gospel of John, the early Christian writings, and the broader spiritual traditions of humanity, the more I have come to believe that the gospel is much larger than the story I inherited. Perhaps the gospel does not begin with how bad humanity is. Perhaps it begins with who we are, who God is, and what Jesus came to reveal.

Jesus proclaimed what he called the kingdom, or realm, of God. Yet when he spoke about this realm, he did not consistently describe a place to which people would someday travel after death. He spoke of something arriving, something present, something breaking into human experience. In Luke 17:21, the Greek expression can be translated as the kingdom of God being “within you” or “among you.” I am increasingly convinced that both ideas point toward the same profound reality. The realm of God is not simply somewhere else. It is present within and among humanity. Jesus was awakening people to a divine reality that was already closer to them than they realized. The problem was not that God was absent. The problem was that humanity did not recognize the divine presence already in its midst.

Paul approached the gospel from another direction, but I believe he ultimately arrived at much the same place. When Paul summarized the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, his emphasis was resurrection. Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared. That is striking because modern Christianity has often made the mechanism of Jesus' death the center of the gospel, while Paul places enormous emphasis on what happened afterward. “If Christ has not been raised,” he says, the proclamation is empty. Resurrection changes everything. The resurrection declares that death does not have the final word. Something within us transcends the temporary boundaries of biological existence. Jesus becomes the great demonstration that life is larger than death and that what we presently experience as physical existence is not the totality of who we are.

But Paul goes even further. In 2 Corinthians 5 he describes the gospel as a ministry of reconciliation. His language is extraordinary: God was in Christ reconciling the world to Godself, not counting people's trespasses against them. Notice the direction of movement. God is not standing at a distance demanding that somebody change God's mind about humanity. God is in Christ. God is the one doing the reconciling. The initiative originates in divine love. This is very different from the picture of an angry deity whose wrath must somehow be satisfied before forgiveness becomes possible. The cross can instead be understood within the larger drama of divine reconciliation: God entering fully into human existence, suffering, violence, rejection, and death and overcoming them through love and resurrection.

This also changes what reconciliation means. Reconciliation does not necessarily mean persuading God to accept us. Perhaps it means awakening humanity to the astonishing reality that God has never abandoned us. The alienation exists primarily in human consciousness. We experience ourselves as separated—from God, from one another, from nature, and even from our deepest selves. Religion itself can reinforce that separation when it tells us that God is somewhere above us, outside us, watching us and keeping score. Yet Paul speaks of something radically different. He speaks of Christ in us. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” That is not merely a theological doctrine to believe. It is a reality to awaken to.

This is where my understanding of the Logos becomes important. The opening of John's Gospel tells us that the Logos was with God and was God, that everything came into being through the Logos, and that the Logos was the true light enlightening everyone. Then the Logos becomes flesh. I no longer read this simply as a statement that a divine being named Jesus traveled from heaven and became human. I see Jesus as the extraordinary embodiment and revelation of something universally true: humanity participates in the divine Logos. Jesus uniquely and perfectly manifested what humanity carries within itself. He did not merely come to tell us how different he was from us. He came to reveal what humanity looks like when the divine life within us is fully awakened.

This brings me to one of the most fascinating early Christian texts, the Gospel of Truth. Whatever we may conclude about its historical relationship to emerging Christian orthodoxy, it preserves a beautiful alternative way of imagining salvation. The fundamental human problem is described in terms of ignorance, forgetfulness, and estrangement. Humanity has forgotten its source. Salvation therefore involves knowledge, awakening, and remembrance. We remember where we came from. We remember whose children we are. We remember our participation in divine life. In that sense, Jesus does not merely rescue humanity from something. He reminds humanity of something.

Perhaps this is why so many sayings attributed to Jesus have the quality of awakening rather than merely instruction. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen.” “The kingdom of God is among you.” “You are the light of the world.” Jesus continually invites people to see what they have not seen before. The transformation he announces begins with a changed consciousness. The Greek word metanoia, usually translated “repentance,” literally carries the sense of a changed mind or transformed way of seeing. What if the gospel invitation is not primarily “admit how terrible you are,” but “awaken, because you have forgotten who you are”?

This does not mean that human selfishness, cruelty, violence, and injustice are illusions or that morality does not matter. Quite the opposite. Forgetfulness has consequences. When I believe I am fundamentally separate from you, it becomes easier to exploit you. When nations believe themselves separate from other nations, violence becomes easier. When humanity believes itself separate from nature, the earth becomes merely something to consume. But if the same divine ground sustains all of us, then love is not merely a religious rule imposed from outside. Love becomes the natural ethical consequence of awakening. To love my neighbor is ultimately to recognize that my neighbor and I participate in the same divine reality.

I therefore find myself reimagining the gospel as awakening, resurrection, reconciliation, indwelling, and remembrance. Jesus announces that the realm of God is already present within and among us. His life demonstrates what humanity can look like when completely surrendered to divine love. His death reveals the violence produced by human fear and separation. His resurrection proclaims that death does not possess ultimate authority over life. Paul declares that God was in Christ reconciling the world and that the great mystery is Christ in us, the hope of glory. And the Gospel of Truth adds another beautiful possibility: salvation is remembrance. We awaken from forgetfulness and rediscover our origin in the Divine.

Perhaps, then, the gospel is much better news than many of us were taught. We are not abandoned creatures desperately trying to reach a distant God. We exist within God, while God infinitely transcends us. The realm of God is already here. The Logos is already enlightening humanity. Christ is within us as the hope of glory. Resurrection tells us that death is not the end. Reconciliation tells us that separation does not have the final word. Jesus shows us the way into conscious participation in the divine life that has been present all along.

The gospel, reimagined this way, becomes an invitation to remember.

Remember where you came from.

Remember what lives within you.

Remember that you belong to God.

Remember that your neighbor does too.

And then live as though you finally remember.

 

When the Word “Pseudoscience” Becomes a Weapon

I have become increasingly troubled by the way the word pseudoscience is used in discussions of consciousness, spirituality and psi phenomena. The word has a legitimate purpose. Fraudulent claims, fabricated evidence and practices deliberately designed to avoid examination deserve to be exposed. But too often, pseudoscience is not used as a careful description of faulty methodology. It is used pejoratively—as a rhetorical weapon intended to end a conversation before the evidence has even been considered.

I am not arguing that every paranormal claim is true. I do not believe every medium is genuine, every vision comes from another realm or every unusual experience proves the continuation of consciousness after death. Human beings can misunderstand experiences, exaggerate stories and sometimes deceive themselves and others. Researchers can also design weak experiments or interpret ambiguous results too enthusiastically. Nevertheless, none of this justifies dismissing an entire field of investigation because its implications conflict with the dominant physicalist understanding of reality.

Science is a method of investigation, not a list of subjects that respectable people are permitted to study. When researchers formulate hypotheses, establish controls, document testimony, analyze statistical results and expose their conclusions to criticism, they are doing science. Their conclusions may eventually prove mistaken, but being mistaken is not the same thing as practicing pseudoscience. Much of scientific history consists of intelligent people investigating possibilities that initially appeared improbable.

Near-death experiences offer an important example. Thousands of people across cultures have reported remarkably similar experiences during cardiac arrest or other life-threatening events. They describe leaving the body, encountering a light or loving presence, experiencing a panoramic review of their lives and entering a realm that feels more real than ordinary waking consciousness. Some report observing medical procedures or events occurring around them while they were apparently unconscious. Prospective hospital studies have confirmed that these experiences occur and can permanently transform people’s values, personalities and attitudes toward death.

None of this automatically proves that consciousness survives bodily death. Brain-based explanations must be considered. But explaining certain features of NDEs as hallucinations does not make every aspect of the phenomenon disappear. The proper scientific response is continued investigation—not ridicule.

The apparent past-life memories of small children may be even more challenging. Researchers associated with the University of Virginia have investigated thousands of children who spontaneously began talking about previous lives, usually between the ages of two and five. Some supplied names, locations, relationships, occupations and details surrounding a death that researchers later connected with an actual deceased person. In certain cases, birthmarks or physical abnormalities corresponded with injuries suffered by the person whose life the child appeared to remember.

These are not primarily adults producing romantic stories while under hypnosis. They are young children speaking spontaneously, sometimes becoming distressed by memories they do not understand. Normal explanations must always be explored, including coaching, coincidence, faulty reporting and information transferred between families. But when those possibilities have been carefully investigated and do not adequately account for every case, it is unreasonable to declare that there is nothing worthy of further study.

Remote viewing has likewise been subjected to controlled experiments. The United States government funded remote-viewing research for approximately two decades because some experiments appeared to produce information at rates exceeding chance. The Stargate program did not demonstrate that remote viewing could function as a consistently reliable intelligence tool. Much of the information produced was too vague or inaccurate for operational use. Yet the government’s eventual decision to end the program does not mean that every experimental result was worthless. Even the official evaluators disagreed about what the statistical evidence meant. That disagreement is part of science—not evidence that no science occurred.

Controlled research has also been conducted into telepathy, Ganzfeld communication, precognition, physiological presentiment and mediumship. Meta-analyses have sometimes found small but statistically significant effects across many experiments. Blinded and triple-blinded mediumship studies have attempted to prevent cold reading, sensory cues and information leakage. Some produced results that deserve serious consideration. Again, these studies do not compel one interpretation. An anomalous result attributed to communication with the deceased might conceivably involve telepathy, unconscious inference, an undiscovered informational process or a methodological problem. But uncertainty about the explanation does not justify pretending that the findings never occurred.

Other documented phenomena include deathbed visions, shared-death experiences, crisis apparitions, out-of-body experiences, meaningful after-death communications and terminal lucidity. Terminal lucidity is especially fascinating because people suffering from severe dementia or neurological impairment sometimes regain clarity, recognize relatives and communicate coherently shortly before death. This does not prove that the mind is separate from the brain, but it raises questions about any simplistic claim that the condition of the brain completely determines the possibilities of consciousness.

My own worldview is best described as evolutionary panentheism. I believe that everything exists within God, while God is more than everything that exists. Foundational consciousness contains unlimited potential, and creation is the experiential dimension through which those possibilities are expressed and explored. The ineffable divine ground does not need to evolve, but the manifested life within God continually becomes, develops and awakens through experience.

From this perspective, consciousness is not an accidental byproduct of matter. Matter is an expression occurring within consciousness. Individual consciousness may therefore participate in a deeper field of information and spiritual reality that is not limited to the ordinary senses or entirely imprisoned within the brain. Near-death experiences, childhood memories of previous lives, remote viewing and other psi phenomena may be glimpses of this larger order.

This interpretation cannot yet be demonstrated conclusively, and I do not pretend otherwise. But neither has physicalism proved that consciousness is created entirely by neural activity or that it cannot exist apart from the brain. Correlation between brain states and conscious experience is undeniable, but correlation alone does not establish that the brain manufactures consciousness. A radio and its music are closely correlated: damage the receiver and the music becomes distorted. That does not mean the radio created the broadcast. This analogy does not prove that the brain receives consciousness, but it shows that other interpretations remain logically possible.

Healthy skepticism asks questions, examines methods and follows the evidence wherever it leads. Dogmatism decides beforehand what reality is permitted to contain. When pseudoscience is applied automatically to every investigation that challenges materialism, it becomes a means of protecting a worldview rather than protecting science.

I am not asking anyone to believe every extraordinary claim. I am asking that credible evidence be evaluated on its merits. Fraud should be exposed, weak studies criticized and exaggerated conclusions corrected. But persistent anomalies deserve investigation. Something can be unproved, disputed and poorly understood without being pseudoscientific.

There is enough documented evidence to make continued investigation of psi and survival-related phenomena reasonable. We may ultimately discover that different phenomena require different explanations. Some may be psychological, some neurological, some informational and some genuinely spiritual. But we will never discover the truth by using contemptuous labels to close the door. Science advances by examining anomalies—not by declaring them impossible before the investigation begins.

 

When Scientific Method Became a Metaphysical Dogma

One of the things I have become increasingly interested in is how scientific materialism became so dominant in the twentieth century that many people eventually stopped distinguishing between science and materialism. Science is a method for investigating the natural world. Materialism, or what today is more commonly called physicalism, is a philosophical position claiming that physical reality is ultimately all there is. Those are not the same thing. Yet during much of the twentieth century they became so closely associated that questioning materialism could make someone appear to be questioning science itself. I think we need to understand the historical environment in which this happened.

Scientific materialism did not suddenly appear in the twentieth century. Its roots extend through the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, nineteenth-century positivism, Darwinian evolution, and the enormous success of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. But ideas do not develop in a cultural vacuum. European science arose within a civilization dominated for centuries by Christianity, while Judaism and Islam were also part of the broader Abrahamic intellectual world. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, science was increasingly challenging explanations of nature that had traditionally been grounded in scripture, ecclesiastical authority, miracles, divine intervention, and supernatural causation. It is therefore hardly surprising that some advocates of science defined their worldview partly in opposition to religion.

Consider Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche. Marx came from Jewish ancestry but was baptized into Lutheran Christianity as a child. Engels grew up in a strongly Protestant family. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor. All three eventually became powerful critics of traditional religion, although their philosophies differed enormously. Marx and Engels developed a materialist interpretation of history, while Nietzsche attacked Christianity from an entirely different direction. Their rejection of religion does not demonstrate that materialism was merely psychological rebellion. Nevertheless, it reminds us that modern European materialism developed in continual conversation and conflict with Christianity.

The pattern continued into the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell became one of the most influential critics of Christianity and defenders of a scientific outlook. A. J. Ayer helped popularize logical positivism, which treated many traditional metaphysical and theological statements as meaningless because they could not be empirically verified. B. F. Skinner's behaviorism attempted to explain human behavior without requiring an immaterial soul or even the traditional conception of an interior mind. Francis Crick eventually approached consciousness as something that should be explained through the physical brain. Daniel Dennett became one of the strongest philosophical defenders of a naturalistic understanding of consciousness, while Richard Dawkins later brought a similarly naturalistic interpretation of evolution into popular culture. Several of these thinkers had been exposed to Christianity as children and subsequently rejected it.

But there was another cultural force developing alongside this rejection of traditional religion that I think deserves more attention. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an extraordinary fascination with Spiritualism, séances, mediums, spirit communication, psychical phenomena, occult societies, Theosophy, and esoteric teachings. Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society became enormously influential. Spiritualist mediums claimed communication with the dead. Psychical researchers investigated telepathy and survival after death. Later figures such as Aleister Crowley became associated with ceremonial magic and occult experimentation. To a scientific establishment struggling to establish rigorous standards of evidence, this environment presented a serious problem.

Some scientists did investigate these phenomena. William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Oliver Lodge and others were willing to consider evidence that consciousness might not fit comfortably within a strictly materialistic framework. The Society for Psychical Research was created precisely because serious investigators believed extraordinary claims should be studied rather than automatically accepted or dismissed. Unfortunately, the world of mediumship also contained fraud, exaggerated claims, theatrical effects and sometimes outright deception. Scientists therefore had perfectly legitimate reasons to demand rigorous evidence.

My concern is that a reasonable skepticism sometimes hardened into something more philosophical. Instead of saying, “We have insufficient evidence for this particular claim,” the intellectual culture increasingly moved toward, “These things cannot happen because reality is physical.” That is a very different statement. The first is methodological skepticism. The second is metaphysics.

This distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical physicalism is extremely important. Methodological naturalism simply says that science should search for natural, testable, repeatable explanations. It has been spectacularly successful. We do not need to invoke spirits to explain lightning, infection, planetary motion or thousands of other phenomena once attributed to supernatural causes. But metaphysical physicalism goes considerably further. It says that because naturalistic scientific methods work so well, ultimately nothing exists except the physical. That conclusion is philosophical rather than something demonstrated by the scientific method itself.

I suspect that some of the hardcore physicalist dogmatism we still encounter today is partly an inheritance from this historical struggle. Science had to distinguish itself from ecclesiastical authority on one side and from séances, fraudulent mediums, occultism and extravagant metaphysical claims on the other. Drawing a hard boundary around physical explanation was enormously useful. But boundaries created for methodological reasons can eventually become unquestioned metaphysical assumptions.

We can also see the effects of this boundary policing in the treatment of respected scientists and scholars who ventured too far outside the accepted materialist framework. Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack provides a striking example. Mack was a Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School who became interested in people reporting extraordinary experiences commonly described as alien abductions. He did not simply declare that extraterrestrials were visiting Earth. He took the experiences and the people reporting them seriously and became willing to consider explanations that challenged conventional assumptions about consciousness and reality. Harvard investigated his work, an extraordinary development for a tenured professor, although ultimately his academic freedom was affirmed. Whatever we think about Mack's conclusions, his case demonstrates how professionally dangerous certain questions can become.

Rupert Sheldrake provides another example. Sheldrake was trained at Cambridge and worked as a biochemist and plant physiologist before proposing his controversial theory of morphic resonance and later investigating telepathy, animal behavior and other anomalous phenomena. His ideas have been heavily criticized by mainstream scientists, and criticism is certainly appropriate when extraordinary claims are made. But Sheldrake has also frequently been treated not simply as someone whose hypotheses may be wrong, but as someone whose questions themselves lie beyond respectable scientific inquiry. That distinction matters. Science advances by testing hypotheses, not by declaring beforehand which categories of phenomena reality is permitted to contain.

There are other examples. Nobel laureate Brian Josephson has endured considerable criticism for his interest in parapsychology and consciousness. Dean Radin, trained in electrical engineering and psychology, has spent decades conducting experimental research into psi phenomena while working largely outside mainstream academic science. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia devoted much of his career to investigating children who reported memories of previous lives. His successor, psychiatrist Jim Tucker, has continued that research. Even earlier figures such as Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, and physicist William Crookes risked scientific ridicule because they took Spiritualism and psychical phenomena seriously.

None of this means Mack was correct about anomalous experiences, Sheldrake has demonstrated morphic resonance, Stevenson proved reincarnation, or parapsychology has established the existence of psi. That would simply replace one dogmatism with another. My point is different. If physicalism becomes an assumption about what reality is allowed to be, evidence that does not fit the assumption can be dismissed before it receives serious consideration. There is a tremendous difference between saying, “The evidence for this phenomenon is inadequate,” and saying, “This phenomenon cannot exist because our worldview has already determined what reality consists of.”

This is where scientific skepticism can quietly become philosophical dogma. The appropriate scientific response to an extraordinary claim is neither belief nor ridicule. It is investigation. Some anomalous claims will undoubtedly collapse under careful examination, just as fraudulent mediums were exposed a century ago. Others may remain unexplained, and some may eventually require us to expand our understanding of consciousness and nature. We cannot know which is which if certain questions become professionally untouchable. The great irony would be if a scientific culture that liberated us from religious dogmatism eventually created metaphysical boundaries of its own.

This is why I find the present debate over consciousness so fascinating. We are no longer limited to choosing between biblical supernaturalism and nineteenth-century materialism. Idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, process philosophy and other approaches are again being seriously discussed. None of this proves Theosophy, validates Crowley, establishes mediumship, or demonstrates the existence of a spiritual dimension. Those questions must stand or fall according to their own evidence and philosophical coherence. But neither should the failures of fraudulent mediums or the inadequacies of traditional religious explanations be treated as evidence that consciousness must ultimately be reducible to matter.

Perhaps materialism performed an important historical service. It forced religion, metaphysics and claims of paranormal experience to confront evidence and intellectual accountability. But successful rebellion against one worldview does not automatically make the opposing worldview ultimately true. The pendulum may simply have swung too far. What began as the entirely reasonable scientific determination not to invoke invisible causes unnecessarily sometimes hardened into the philosophical conviction that invisible or nonphysical dimensions of reality cannot exist.

That is the distinction I believe we need to recover. Science should remain skeptical, rigorous and evidence-based. But genuine skepticism must work in both directions. We should be skeptical of unsupported spiritual claims, but we should also be skeptical of the unsupported metaphysical claim that physical reality is all that exists. Once we make that distinction, the question of consciousness becomes open again—not as a retreat into superstition, but as one of the most profound unanswered questions concerning the nature of reality.

 

What Did Christianity Look Like Before There Was an Orthodoxy?

Most of us were introduced to Christianity backward.

We learned what Christianity eventually became and then assumed that this was essentially what Christians had believed from the beginning. We read the New Testament through doctrines formulated centuries later, and we often imagine the earliest Christian movement as remarkably unified: Jesus taught the apostles, the apostles taught the churches, and the churches faithfully preserved a single body of Christian doctrine.

History is considerably more interesting than that.

During the first and second centuries, followers of Jesus were wrestling with enormous questions. Who exactly was Jesus? What happened in the resurrection? What did salvation mean? How should the Hebrew Scriptures be understood? What was the relationship between Jesus and the God of Israel? What did Paul mean by Christ living within the believer?

Different Christian communities did not always answer those questions in the same way.

Paul's letters reveal arguments taking place while Christianity was still in its infancy. The Gospel of John presents Jesus and the Logos in language quite different from what we encounter in the Synoptic Gospels. By the second century, figures such as Marcion, Valentinus, Justin Martyr, and others were offering dramatically different interpretations of Christ, scripture, creation, and salvation.

Eventually some interpretations became orthodox and others became heretical.

But those categories can obscure something important. Before there was an established orthodoxy capable of defining its boundaries, there was a remarkably diverse spiritual and intellectual movement attempting to understand what had happened through Jesus.

That realization does not require us to conclude that Christianity was invented or that Jesus was insignificant. I have increasingly come to the opposite conclusion.

Something extraordinary appears to have happened.

The resurrection proclamation emerged very early. People became convinced that death did not have the final word. Communities spread throughout the Mediterranean world. Paul described an experience of the risen Christ powerful enough to redirect his life. John's Gospel eventually expressed the meaning of Christ through the extraordinary concept of the Logos—the divine Word or Reason through which creation itself comes into being.

Perhaps the mistake is assuming that the significance of Jesus must be confined to the theological framework that eventually won the doctrinal debates.

What if the resurrection points toward something profound about humanity's eternal nature?

What if Jesus' revelation of God as Father points toward something equally profound about our identity as children of the Divine?

And what if the Logos is not merely something Christians must find outside themselves, but a divine reality in which humanity already participates?

These questions open Christianity in a very different direction.

The traditional Christian understanding of Jesus as Savior does not necessarily have to disappear. For millions of people, that language expresses something deeply meaningful about their relationship with Christ. But it may not exhaust what the Christ event means.

The Cosmic Christ can be larger than any single theory of salvation.

Someone does not necessarily have to begin by being told that they are a sinner separated from God before Jesus can have meaning for them. The story can also begin with divine participation, awakening, transformation, resurrection, and the discovery of our relationship with the Father.

That possibility becomes easier to see when we temporarily set aside later theological boundaries and enter the strange, creative, contested world of the first Christians.

That is the world I wanted to explore in Before Christianity Became Orthodoxy.

The book is not an attempt to replace one rigid orthodoxy with another. It is an invitation to look again at the evidence, encounter some of Christianity's forgotten possibilities, and ask a question that has fascinated me throughout this project:

What might Christianity have become if some of those early conversations had remained open?

If this exploration interests you, Before Christianity Became Orthodoxy is available on Gumroad.