Christianity: first a question of allegiance, not worldview!

It seems that I’ve -more or less by accident- outlined most of my worldview in my recent few posts. I’m a ‘small o orthodox’ Christian’ as I said in my last post. Which means that I’m certainly and strongly a monotheist. And yet I am epistemologically an Animist too, for biblical and traditional reasons, and possibly even a polytheist.  And oh, I’m probably a Christian Neoplatonist and in some details even Aristotelean, anything but a philosophical nominalist… And I’ve noted earlier my postmodernism is probably more in line with theoretical chaos magick when it comes to paradigm shifting than with contemporary academic postmodernism.

But actually any of these doesn’t mean much apart from the theoretical level. Christianity isn’t a worldview but it is in the first place an allegiance. One can be a modernist liberal Christian and have a solid relationship with Christ (as Bonhoeffer did for example), or a tribal animist (like some of my African pentecostal brethren are in practice), or a medieval European premodernist (get a book on church history and have your pick), or an existential postmodernist (ah, Kierkegaard anyone?), or even a messianic Jew. Surely, worldview IS important, but it’s nothing without relationship.

What I mean is that what we believe in terms of ‘accepting information’ does not at all equal our actual religion. I tend use the example of the letter of James, who says that the demons believe that ‘God is one’ too, and tremble. Yes they probably have very accurate worldview technically, much more accurate than any Christian worldview that has ever existed (though probably inverted when it comes to certain things like good and evil, in some kind of non-human Luciderian fashion) but this example should make it quite clear that even if ticking all the boxes of orthodoxy makes one technically a ‘believer’ of sorts, it doesn’t make one a follower of Christ.

Believing in spirits without ever engaging with them doesn’t make anyone a convincing spiritist. Saying ‘I believe in the historical Buddha’ or even in the more abstract Amida Buddha and the pure land, or the precepts of Zen philosophy, or even believing in the reality of the dharma itself does not make one a Buddhist unless one commits to following the dharma as a way of life. Or to take an example that’s a bit more extreme and closer to home: believing in the existence of Satan does not make one a Satanist. Well, actually Anton Szandor LaVey -probably because needed to make sure that his occult system got enough attention – naming his cult  ‘Satanism’ without even having Satan and God in the worldview is the reason that most modern ‘Satanists’ don’t even believe in Satan, while a lot of Christians and other Abrahamic monotheists do as they have always done. So here goes the whole ‘X-ism is believing that X exists’ completely out of the windows. It’s useless anyway…

So it’s quite clear that merely believing in an entity or even in the creeds of a religion  doesn’t make one an adherent of said religion. That is a modernist reduction that is actually quite meaningless. The first Christians were called the followers of the Way (just as a lot of people in other religions and spiritualities speak of their ‘path’. Even the word ‘Tao’ can be translated as such btw.) The ‘Way’ in that expression can be seen as the way of Christ, or as Christ Himself, who is called the Way, the Truth and the light in Johns gospel.

So Christianity is following Christ as the Way to the Father, leading a life that is in accordance with His teachings, and having a faith in God who will save us. Evidently this faith means to trust God, not accept information about God. It’s a life oriented towards God, where we orient ourselves on the Person of Christ and the body of Christian believers. Getting saved by believing in the right information about how we get saved is a weird mistranslation of the protestant idea of ‘sola fide’ and a very strange variety of the old gnostic idea that it is the right knowledge that saves us. It is God that we believe in (relationally and that we trust.

And this actually can happen in a different lot of differing worldviews and paradigms. Modern Christianity, Premodern Christianity, Postmodern Christianity, Jewish Christianity, inculturated tribal Christianity, etc can all be environments in which this Way can be followed… Actually we shouldn’t be naive to think that one of our man-made worldviews could ever be a one to one representation of the world. It’s always coloured by cultural tendencies and the Zeitgeist and what more. There is no pure ‘Christian worldview’, no matter what some people say (and those who claim to have one are often thoroughly modernist in a lot of regards.)

Sure there are problems where your worldview makes it impossible to see certain truths. The number of paradigms in which Christianity can be incarnated is transfinite, and not infine. And there will be a degree of incompatibility in which your Christianity might be hindered in certain aspects that comes with certain worldviews. If you do away with the whole supernatural dimension as a lot of moderns do you’re not likely to experience much to that aspect of the Kingdom of God. If you give it too much place (especially evil spirits controlling everything with no space for natural causality) you’ll fall in opposite traps… And getting to know God through a walk with Christ will expand our worldview. None of our categories is safe if we let Christ be Christ and try to learn from Him, if we let the Spirit be the spirit and learn from it, if we let God be God and learn from Him. Actually, if we get acquainted enough with the natural world we will already see our precious held worldviews splinter in certain areas from time to time…

We should stick to Christ even if our worldview falls apart. And lay our confidence in God and Reality rather than in any paradigm, be it a modern or a postmodern one… Christ should be more real to us than all of our man-made worldviews, which are just on ‘social construct’ layer, an interpretation of reality, but never reality itself.We have to remember that Reality is always more real than our interpretations of it. That Jesus is more than Christians can put into words, and more real than our dogmas and theology…

Even if we’d not only lose our worldview but end up in another world, Christ will be there. Be it an alien planet or shamanist spirit world, if we’d ever come in such a situation (yeah, I am aware chances are slim for us mere mortals with our boring earthly lives, but still) it can come in handy to realise that Jesus transcends worlds and worldviews… So do Truth and Love by the way.

(But as you can see from the possible Christian neoplatonist undertones in my last paragraph, we should not expect to ever be fully free from our woldview while in this world. Or maybe the old professor was right and it can all be found in Plato (what do they teach kids in school these days…)
One day we’ll see face to Face though…)

What do you think?

Shalom

Bram