In this morning’s post (The Holy Spirit = God = All You Need to Know), I referred to the question of what, if any, extent the spirit of God can or does dwell within the hearts of non-Christians. A devotee of New Age beliefs responded to that question by asking for further clarification; she asked whether or not I believed that a person must know Jesus Christ before they can know God.
It’s a question I’ve had to consider before. I once wrote something for a book to the effect that God is present in the hearts of all men. The theology vetters for the Christian publisher for whom I was writing the book asked me to excise that thought from it, since it suggested that people who didn’t believe in Jesus Christ could still experience or access God. They didn’t assert that people who don’t accept Christ can’t know God; they were simply unsure about the whole thing, and wanted the safety that came with dropping the question altogether.
And now here’s that question again! Namely, can someone who has rejected Christ and Christianity still know God?
Before giving my own answer, I thought I’d let my Christian readers share with our New Age friend their thoughts and ideas on the matter. Whatcha’ think, fellow Christians? When the New Age practitioner is deep in meditation, and feels what he experiences as nothing less than the full and absolute presence of God, is he simply and absolutely deluded about that?
[Update: the follow-up to this post---being my own answer to this question, doncha know---is here.]
Related post o’ mine: Jesus the Decider: Who Gets Into Heaven?
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First, I’d like to follow up on something Sarah said a few days ago:
“Everyone is born into the world as perfectly innocent babies.” – No, there is this thing we all were born with called Original Sin. If Charles Manson was baptized (I’m not an expert on his biography), then this was wiped away, but the efffects of sin remained. Of course, God is still present in him, as God is present in everyone and everything. (Or, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, instead of saying that God is in us, it would be more accurate to say that we are in God – and this is more accurate according to the Upanisads and the Bhagavad Gita as well.)
Secondly, my own answer to the question posed:
Yes, whenever we come to know God it is always through Jesus, consciously or unconsciously. Many of the non-Christian mystics had a sense that their knowledge of God was through some sort of cosmic man/God, though they didn’t know how. Hence, in al-Arabi and a number of the other Sufi saints you will see discussion of the “al-insan al-kamil” or Perfect Man through whom one must go to be divinized; they thought of this Perfect Man usually in terms of Platonic archetypes, but the point is it was a Man (with a capital M) who is identified with God.
The Taoists had the same concept, though I cannot recall the Chinese term for it off the top of my head. Toshihiko Izutsu argued this thesis in his book “Sufism and Taoism”, which is what I’ll have to resort to giving as a reference.
The Hindu equivalent is, of course, Purusa. If your emphasis in Hinduism is more Vedantine than Samkhya, as it is with most Westerners, then instead of Purusa you will probably speak instead of the immediate presence of divine grace in the soul – Atman, which is both God (atman is Brahman) and intimitely commensurate with human nature, so much so that Svetaketu was told “tat tvam asi” – “that thou art”.
But atman is NOT the individual self. There are two words which have been translated “self” in Sanskrit. “Hamsa” means the individual “you” – what is meant by “self” in every European language. There is no real word for “atman” in English. It most closely corresponds to Meister Eckhart’s “grund” or ground of being of the soul, or St. Augustine’s recognition that “Thou art closer to me than I am myself” (I may be conflating the exact words of St. Augustine with the saying in the Koran [or a hadith? Dunno] “Thou art closer to man than his jugular vein”.) The Atman is called the “Self” because it is the very being, ground, and life of the soul (there is no clear distinction between the natural soul and the divinized soul as there is in Christianity), but is clearly distinct from it. The Munduk-Upanisad speaks of the hamsa and atman as “two birds in one tree”, the tree being the body.
My argument is as follows: Atman is both God and Man, since it is more Man (the human Self) than man himself. (Atman is our true Self, much more so than ourselves [our hamsa] – and it is the truest answer to the question “Who am I” and the truest subject of the pronoun “aham” ["I"].) It is also universal – there is only one Atman. We are saved then by coming into union with a divine, universal Man who is the life of our souls.
That man was Jesus Christ, and He created His Church – the Catholic Church – to be His mystical body through which grace flows.
Peregrinu: Okay, who ARE you? I saw how quickly you banged out this astoundingly informed little dissertation. So … well, who are you? Cuz man, you're good.
no–I didn't know Christ before God–the other way around.
Okay, y'all. Ieft a lenglhy reply over on John's answer post. See y'all there….
"'….but because of God’s personal revelation to them, they knew Him!'
Exactly. Not because they knew Jesus first. "
Of course, it could be argued, that when God made his personal appearances to these Old Testament people, that it was in the form/character of Jesus and they just didn't use that name.
Not that I'm actually arguing this, of course. I'm just saying….
Oops…sorry *Julia*–I hate misspelling someone's name. I've been reading this without my glasses!
@Jeanine
That was me who made the comment on FB about the OT folks.
I threw out a few popular names of the OT when I made that comment. We know there are many others in the OT who were reported to know God, have a relationship with God or be considered Godly men without Jesus being involved. Prophets were not the only ones in the OT that knew God.
"….but because of God’s personal revalation to them, they knew Him!"
Exactly. Not because they knew Jesus first.
How do we know who God has revealed himself to? We don't. We only know of our own personal experiences or what others have shared about their experience.
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