The Divine Universe

It is time to come clean regarding the philosophical and religious background of my thinking. Although I have a wide interest in religion generally and in what is popularly called spirituality, I identify myself as Christian. I subscribe to the basic doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
I don’t accept this formula as absolute truth (I don’t think humans are ever in possession of that) I embrace it in the same way that scientists embrace relativity and quantum theory: because it works. It fits what we know of the reality we are part of, and continues to do so with each increment of our knowledge. The doctrine of the Trinity has been developed since by some of the best intellects in history, and Christian theologians and philosophers regard it as being as fundamental to their thinking as modern quantum theory and relativity are to scientists.

Much of my reflection is focussed particularly on the Second person of the Trinity: God incarnate, the Cosmic Christ, Jesus the Messiah.
Christianity begins with Jesus. Saint Paul, the ground breaking religious philosopher who took the Christian gospel to the Greco-Roman gentile world, saw Jesus as the human manifestation of something infinitely greater. Never having met him face to face, Paul saw him as a cosmic being. To the Colossians he wrote, “(Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Saint John, writing some thirty years later, distils Paul’s thinking: “In the beginning was the Word (Christ), and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being.”
After three hundred years of philosophical debate and the birth of a systematic theology, there was a meeting of about three hundred bishops and scholars to define clearly, in classical philosophical terms, what Paul and John were really saying. The doctrine of the Trinity was formulated at the Council of Nicea in AD 325.
The Nicene Creed was the product of that Council. In it we find, distinctly identified, the Father, the ultimate essence and source of the whole of existence, the Son, Jesus, the human manifestation of God, and Christ – God incarnate in the whole of physical nature, and the Spirit, referred to by one theologian as “the Go-Between God”, uniting all the innumerable interrelated and interdependent entities of the universe – the Spirit of creation, life, knowledge and wisdom.
The Nicene Creed is the first unanimous statement of basic Christian dogma. It is a theological construct. Theology is really the invention of early Christian intellectuals, mostly gentiles, and it is the first and only religion to possess a systematic theory of God. Modern science has, during most of its history, developed within a European, Christian environment. But both Christianity and modern science have evolved from the seeds of Classical philosophy, and both have been motivated by humankind’s insatiable curiosity about the nature, meaning and purpose of existence.

I said that Christianity begins with Jesus. Jesus was a religious Jew. Jews do not have a systematic theology. God is undefined, but has inspired his chosen people with a moral sense from which they have composed an elaborate ethical code called the Torah. The Jewish God is never named, but is referred to in literature by four consonants (YHWH) that are, of course, unpronounceable. Jews maintain an enduring hope, however, that YHWH will send a supremely powerful and wise human ‘vice-regent’ whom they call Messiah, The Anointed One.
Messiah had other titles, and in some apocalyptic writings we find the favoured Christian title, Son of God. This evolved into the fully-fledged concept of the Second Person of the Trinity. Christianity is founded upon the conviction of the first disciples that Jesus was the true Messiah, not that he was, in a theological sense, divine. That was not fully accepted until the Council of Nicea. Jews remain unconvinced, but the hope of a human manifestation of divine power and wisdom, the Messianic hope, lives on.
Today most people are aware of several major Eastern religious traditions that first emerged in the Indus region of India. I refer to Hinduism in all its branches and its only-begotten son, Buddhism. Hindus, like Christians, believe that the divine is immanent in all things. A similar consciousness is evident in many even older traditions, such as that of Australian aborigines. So, when I write about the divine universe, I am not only referring to my own, native Christian inheritance, but also to a more universal numinous experience and cosmic vision.