This is an excellent essay by Philip Goff, a Professor of Philosophy, that a dear friend recently shared with me. Many of its points resonate with my own thinking on the amipotent, open, relational, panentheistic, consciousness-based, contextually nominal, and cosmotheandric God and how Jesus fits into it.
The moral problem of evil and suffering cannot be simply brushed aside with the persistent reiteration of God’s “mysterious” omnipotent sovereignty. That strikes me as human excuse-making for a God of dogmatic religion that makes no sense.
Even Goff’s concept of Jesus’ resurrection body bears deep salience and similarity to the rainbow body of Dzogchen (Great Perfection) rooted in Tantric Buddhist cosmology. My own thinking about God has gone beyond dominant paradigms and received dogmas of institutional religion that to me fail to persuade, let alone convince, for the weakness of their theodicies.
One word about so-called “heresy.” This problematic term has been frequently invoked by the religious establishment to beat up alternative visions and understandings of the sacred that challenge ossified dogmas. What we need to ask are basic questions like “what exactly do we mean by heresy?”; who decides what is or is not heresy?”; “what criteria do we use to decide?”; “who sets these criteria?”; “what are the power dynamics involved?”; “whose interests does proclamation of orthodoxy versus heresy benefit?”; “what are these interests?”; “how much of attachment, hostility, and delusions play into our clinging to orthodoxy and aversion to heresy?”; “are we sure of our judgements?”; and many more.
For me, the divisive judgmentalism often associated with religious authority and strident condemnation of non-dominant ideas strikes me as equally if not more problematic than the pronounced and caricatured “heresy” itself.
Read the essay: https://aeon.co/essays/i-now-think-a-heretical-form-of-christianity-might-be-true