Theological Snapshot

This is my first blog which I am doing as part of an assignment for a Metaphysical Theology class being taken at Unity Institute in Unity Village, MO. as I work on completing a Master of Divinity degree.  The assignment is to write a brief description of my beliefs as of today.

My most basic theological belief is Oneness--- One Presence, One Power, One Spirit, One Mind, and One Life.  Although simple, it has grown in depth and richness over the sixty some years of my life.  Raised in a Pentecostal church, I was taught and believed in one triune God.  While this God was transcendent, it was also immanent and fully present.  Within Pentecostalism there is a special emphasis placed on having a direct personal experience of God through the baptism of the Holy Spirit.   This emphasis is one in common with mysticism, which I eventually gravitated to after parting from the Pentecostal church and its insistence on a literal translation of an inerrant Bible and the belief that Jesus was the only way to salvation.

While the departure from the church of my youth was abrupt, the process itself was one of “deliberative theology” where during my preteen and teenage years, I carefully reflected upon my embedded theological convictions and found them wanting.  My early belief of a “God out there” was slowly transformed by my readings of theologian Paul Tillich and his teachings of God “as the ground of being” and “the eternal now”.  When I left home for college I read voraciously about other spiritual paths and especially mysticism which I saw as a common thread running through all religions. In mysticism there is a sense of unity, totality, timelessness and sacredness which can be experienced but not adequately put into words.

This intuitive sense of connectedness, of being part of something larger, of not being isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it was further strengthened and confirmed by my studies in quantum physics---a quantum world where seemingly solid matter is nothing more than energy waves of potential existence, observer and the observed are really interdependent and the world of local interactions within space and time is not real; we are really in a realm where all things are non-locally united in an indivisible whole. As quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner Neils Bohr stated, “we are in a living universe of consciousness and intelligence, evolving, ongoing, connected, eternal………. (our) purpose is to learn how to live in eternity.”

With this foundation I discovered Unity, feeling an affinity with Charles Fillmore, one of the founders of the Unity movement who was also considered a mystic. Speaking of Divine Mind in The Revealing Word, Fillmore says, “There is but one Mind, and that Mind cannot be separated or divided, because, like the principle of mathematics, it is indivisible.  All that we can say of the one Mind is that it is absolute and that all its manifestations are in essence like itself…….The connecting link between God and humankind.  God Mind embraces all knowledge, wisdom and understanding and is the source of every manifestation of true knowledge and intelligence.……The individual mind is a state of consciousness in the one Mind.”

I live and move and have my being in this one Power in the universe and in my life…..this Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Alpha and Omega.  Ironically, I find that there are parts of the Bible that I do take literally such as Jesus’s words, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40 and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”, Mark 12:31.  This is a theology that moves me beyond my own self interests. Connectedness implies certain responsibilities.  If we really are connected and one, then any injustice we do to others we do to ourselves.  Any lack of compassion to others is a lack of compassion to us.  Any failure to feed the poor is failure to feed ourselves. My awareness of these responsibilities creates my value system.  May I live up to it.