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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.
Arianism makes a lot more sense than Trinitarianism, though; it is the radical notion that God and Jesus share the exact same relationship that every other father and son do, instead of some not-even-wrong word salad about substances that is so incomprehensible even its adherents admit it's a mystery. If I was convinced that something like Christianity was true but was not really clear on the details, I would become an Arian, like Isaac Newton, or perhaps a Mormon.
The mystery is part of the point my friend. We cannot understand the nature of God, and we are not meant to.
Doesn't seem terribly important to the average Christian experience? I bet if you questioned normie churchgoers who had never seriously studied theology about the exact nature of the relationship between God and Jesus, most of them would spontaneously reinvent Arianism, and have no idea they were committing a heresy by doing so. Trinitarianism is something you can only come up with after reading too much Aristotle.
Arianism explicitly denies that Jesus was God, so I doubt it- no doubt that normie churchgoers would invent things like modalism and tritheism, but not Arianism, which has a specific definition that Evangelicals, Catholics, and most mainline protestants are immunized against.
How many normie churchgoers actually understand that orthodox Christianity requires them to believe that Jesus is literally God, as well as being the son of God? I honestly don't think it's that many.
From what I can tell, even Catholics do not, on average, understand that they are supposed to be asking saints to pray for them rather than praying to the saints, or that the church considers Genesis to be non-literal, or that divorced women are not supposed to be having sex with men other than their ex-husbands. The priests know, of course, but somehow it is never their most pressing concern to make these things clear in simple, straightforward language to their flocks; probably because they can intuit how well it would be received.
The prayers of the church help inform the people. In the liturgy, we are constantly praying to God in the name of "The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit". If you attend vespers, you will hear the hymn Gladsome Light: "having come upon the setting of the sun, having seen the light of the evening, / we praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: God."
This is one reason why it is important to have most worship in the vernacular language
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Everyone understands Jesus is God. The people who think the immaculate conception is the annunciation(this group includes lots of Protestants confused why they don’t celebrate it in addition to normie Catholics who are very confused as to why it is in December) understand Jesus is God. The median normie churchgoer would be more likely to deny the different natures- God the father as the Old Testament who became Jesus God the son who then became God the Holy Spirit after the ascension.
Arianism specifically thinks that Jesus was some sort of super-Angel; Jehovah’s Witnesses are the only notable group of arians around today(they believe that Jesus and the archangel Michael are the same thing).
You’d get all sorts of interesting answers from normie churchgoers on the question of the relationship between Jesus and the father. Few of them would describe Him, explicitly, as a created being- which is the definition of Arianism. Lots of tritheism, modalism, nestorianism, hindu-style avatars, etc.
This is actually common in old school Protestantism; if I recall correctly, both Luther and Calvin flirted with the idea. The concept is that “Who is like God” indicates that Michael is like God, I.e. consubstantial with God, I.e. Jesus. It’s also true that the “angel of the Lord” in the OT is often identified with Christ in most Christian traditions, so the idea of “Jesus is an angel and God” isn’t that far fetched.
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You would not believe the effort I'm putting in to bite my tongue here and not be mean about the Heinz 57 varieties of American Protestantism.
But I can't just laugh about the Protestants, the state of modern catechesis nearly everywhere for the past forty or more years has been abysmal. An awful lot of "Jesus wants us to be nice because being nice is nice", much much less "here are the Ten Commandments and this is what they mean".
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It's intricately woven into mystical Christianity. When we say "God is Love", the trinity shows us an icon of what love is - perfect union that paradoxically does not obliterate distinction. It is the perfect balance between dualism and monism that is the fundamental pattern of reality
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