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Notes -
In my circles on twitter, the Mystical Christianity conversation is cropping up again. It tends to come around every few months, at least for the past year I've been on the site.
Tyler Alterman writes a long post on it that is mostly summed up here:
Now to broaden this outside of just Christianity, I'm curious what the Motte thinks of symbolism as a whole? I will admit my own path back to religion came via a symbolic pathway, although I believe it goes far deeper than this.
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview. Again, might have a mistaken impression.
I know this is a rationalist offshoot forum so not sure I expect a ton of mystical/symbolic discussion, but I'm kind of surprised by how little there is given how many professed religious folks there are here. And I do think from a Culture War angle, that materialism is definitely losing steam (especially amongst the right) as we see more and more cracks form in the edifice of Expert Scientific Opinion(tm).
On a deeper note, the symbolic worldview is all about seeing the world through the language of God (or meaning if you prefer), in a way that helps people bind together and understand events in the same way. Right now we are in "darkness" symbolically because, well, nobody can interpret events the same way! I personally think a return to the symbolic is inevitable given how confused everything is at the moment, although the transition may not be smooth or easy.
As a somewhat reformed Angry Internet Atheist, this is certainly the most interesting and palatable form of Christianity I've encountered.
Which is probably why most of the Christians here don’t like it. It’s pretty heretical! Mostly the Jesus parts. When you downgrade Jesus from “God incarnate” to “guy who did the best at being good” then it’s going to be more palatable to atheists (since it keeps God in the mysterious “ground if all being” box where he’s not likely to do anything to offend*) and less palatable to Christian’s (the guys whose hope is salvation through the intercession of Christ).
*Lewis wrote on this in his autobiography (emphasis mine):
"The Absolute Mind—better still, the Absolute—was impersonal, or it knew itself (but not us?) only in us, and it was so absolute that it wasn’t really much more like a mind than anything else. And anyway, the more muddled one got about it and the more contradictions one committed, the more this proved that our discursive thought moved only on the level of 'Appearance', and 'Reality' must be somewhere else. And where else but, of course, in the Absolute? There, not here, was 'the fuller splendour' behind the 'sensuous curtain'. The emotion that went with all this was certainly religious. But this was a religion that cost nothing. We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us. It was “there”; safely and immovably “there”. It would never come “here”, never (to be blunt) make a nuisance of Itself. This quasi-religion was all a one-way street; all eros (as Dr. Nygren would say) steaming up, but no agape darting down. There was nothing to fear; better still, nothing to obey."
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