Accepting Jesus as your
Personal Lord and Savior
A Process Appreciation
Recently I watched videos of two younger friends of mine, both teenagers, who had chosen to be baptized into a new life: a life in Christ. They had accepted Jesus as their personal lord and savior and thus as the guiding light of their lives.
I don't think they accepted Jesus out of a fear of hell. I think they invited him into their lives out of hope for love, out of a sense that he could be a companion to their journey through life, and out of the desire for a moral compass in their lives. I get this. I am for Christ, too. In another essay in Open Horizons I have shared my own understanding of Christ an eternal companion, a radiant energy, and a spirit of creative transformation in the world. See The Universal Christ. I, too, want to live from Christ's love.
But I'm not sure they would would appreciate my essay. They'd miss Jesus: the one who died on the cross to save us from the consequences of sin. The fact of the matter is that I, too, believe in this Jesus and love him very much. I may not have emphasized that in the essay, but I feel it. I think that when people say "thank you, Jesus" from the depths of their heart, someone is listening. Many people around the world meet the universal Christ through a personal relationship with Jesus.
Witness my younger friends. What I so appreciated about their presentation in the videos was their sincerity and humility. Their choice to be baptized included a recognition that there is something more than sports and grades and parties and personal achievement, something more than them, and that this something is a someone: Jesus. Their choice included an honest recognition of their own sinfulness. They wanted to be saved from the consequences of their sin through an openness to Christ's love. I could identify, because I, too, am a sinner in need of forgiveness. Along with my teenage friends, I fall short of God's call to love, again and again, every day, in thought and word and deed. The word "sin" means missing the mark of responding to God's call to love. I sin all the time. I'm a mark-misser.
*
I have many Christian friends, young and old, who cannot quite connect with my younger friends experience of being baptized into Christ's love for one or another reason. Some of my Christian friends can't connect with the emphasis on sin, which they think has been overemphasized in too much Christian history, inducing too much unnecessary guilt about often harmless matters. And some worry about so much emphasis on personal spirituality at the expense of wider social concerns: like global warming and environmental degradation, or economic inequities and corporate greed.
I myself worry a bit about these things, too. I am, after all, a Pope Francis Christian and a United Methodist. I believe that the authentic Christian life recognizes, not just that we humans are sinners but also that we are beautiful icons of God, made in God's image, and that our task in life is to grow into a likeness of the image in which we are made. And I believe, along with Pope Francis, that a life in Christ is as much a matter of helping heal a broken world, with particular service to the poor and powerless, as it is to find a depth of spiritual aliveness through a personal relationship with Jesus. Our calling, as Christians, is to recognize the Earth as our home and walk in love as Christ walked in love.
Truth be told, I suspect that my younger friends may believe the same. They didn't emphasize these matters in the videos, but I'm quite sure that they read the Bible. I know that they, too, sense the image of God in each person, and perhaps also within themselves and that they want to live lives of service to the world. They want to be disciples of the young rabbi, Jesus, who said that whenever we serve the hungry and the poor and the imprisoned, we are serving him.
In any case, I can connect with the experience of my younger friends on being baptized, because I, too, have had a baptism experience of this sort. I know what it can mean to make a decision for Christ. I have made it and am grateful to have been able to do so. I think the invitation to make this decision came from God. And even though my perspective has changed over the years, I certainly see wisdom in their experience and I admire their idealism: that is, their sense of hope that, if they walk with Christ in their daily lives, life can truly be different and they can help make the world a better place: more peaceful, more loving, more forgiving, and more just and sustainable for all.
In their ways they glimpsed the possibility of what the Bible calls a peace that surpasses understanding "And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7)
Yes, when I watched the videos of my younger friends, it was this peace that called out to me. I thought of my own experiences of peace and, in truth, I thought of the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead,
*
I would never expect my younger friends to read Whitehead. Still, I thought of Whitehead's sense that, when people are young, they can glimpse a possibility of peace that is real and genuine, and they are able to give themselves to a hope, an ideal, that is relevant to us all, but too often forgotten as we age. Conventional wisdom often says that wisdom comes with age; and I know that sometimes it does. But Whitehead believed, and I do as well, that sometimes wisdom comes with youth, and we "older" people can best grow wise, not by relying on our age, but by remembering when we were young, and reclaiming forgotten wisdom.
In his book Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead suggests that the highest intuition a person can have, the very consummation of the soul, is a sense of Peace. Peace for him is not simply the absence of violence or conflict; it is alive with creativity, beauty, and love. It is a positive force, a positive energy. The sense of peace is an intuitively felt recognition that, above the compulsions and narrowness of personal concern, and above the desire for personal happiness, there is something higher and deeper and wider that includes each and all. In Adventures of Ideas, he calls it a Harmony of Harmonies. I can't help but wonder if, when my young friends were baptized, they had a sense of this Harmony of Harmonies as mirrored through the Jesus to whom they gave their lives.
For Whitehead this Harmony is not simply a psychological feeling; it is also a cosmological reality, as real as gravity and electromagnetism. It is what, in Process and Reality, he calls the consequent nature of God. The consequent nature of God is the universe itself as enfolded within an ongoing and loving consciousness, a single ongoing life, both divine and worldly. My young friends might call it the Logos, that is, the universal Christ, described in the Gospel of John: a universal love that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but that also preceded Jesus' birth and was the light of all people. Interestingly and importantly, in the New Testament Christ isn't just a name for Jesus, it's also a name for the Logos, the universal Christ that is everywhere throughout the world and the universe.
In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead adds that a primary characteristic of this harmony, this Logos, is Beauty with an upper-case B. Indeed Beauty is, for Whitehead, the very aim of the universe. And what is the relation between Peace and Beauty? Whitehead suggests the experience of Peace comes with a transcendence of personality: a realization that individual personality is not the defining feature of life's deeper purpose. Peace comes with an inner recognition of ideals beyond the limits of the private self.
And what are the circumstances in which we might experience such Peace? In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead notes two circumstances in which this experience of Peace may emerge: tragedy and youth. In my young born-anew friends, I saw a glimpse of this Peace in their sense of peace, their capacity, upon being baptized, to relax into what they thought, and rightly hoped, would be a new life in Christ. There are many other versions of this peace, this relaxing into a new life beyond egotism, not necessarily Christian or religious, and I celebrate this. What is important spiritually is to recognize and appreciate peace wherever we find it, trusting that it is of God and from God, however named. It is indeed a peace beyond understanding and well worth living from. As I see things, one way of awakening to this peace is a letting go, a relinquishment of self-centered concern, a baptism into Christ's love. My young friends might say it is the only way. I suspect they would. But that doesn't matter to me. We in the Christian world can live with these differences of opinion. What counts is how we live. Let the love of God, extending to each and all, be the measure. It is this love that's worth being baptized into, not just once in our life, but every day.
- Jay McDaniel, September 14, 2021
I don't think they accepted Jesus out of a fear of hell. I think they invited him into their lives out of hope for love, out of a sense that he could be a companion to their journey through life, and out of the desire for a moral compass in their lives. I get this. I am for Christ, too. In another essay in Open Horizons I have shared my own understanding of Christ an eternal companion, a radiant energy, and a spirit of creative transformation in the world. See The Universal Christ. I, too, want to live from Christ's love.
But I'm not sure they would would appreciate my essay. They'd miss Jesus: the one who died on the cross to save us from the consequences of sin. The fact of the matter is that I, too, believe in this Jesus and love him very much. I may not have emphasized that in the essay, but I feel it. I think that when people say "thank you, Jesus" from the depths of their heart, someone is listening. Many people around the world meet the universal Christ through a personal relationship with Jesus.
Witness my younger friends. What I so appreciated about their presentation in the videos was their sincerity and humility. Their choice to be baptized included a recognition that there is something more than sports and grades and parties and personal achievement, something more than them, and that this something is a someone: Jesus. Their choice included an honest recognition of their own sinfulness. They wanted to be saved from the consequences of their sin through an openness to Christ's love. I could identify, because I, too, am a sinner in need of forgiveness. Along with my teenage friends, I fall short of God's call to love, again and again, every day, in thought and word and deed. The word "sin" means missing the mark of responding to God's call to love. I sin all the time. I'm a mark-misser.
*
I have many Christian friends, young and old, who cannot quite connect with my younger friends experience of being baptized into Christ's love for one or another reason. Some of my Christian friends can't connect with the emphasis on sin, which they think has been overemphasized in too much Christian history, inducing too much unnecessary guilt about often harmless matters. And some worry about so much emphasis on personal spirituality at the expense of wider social concerns: like global warming and environmental degradation, or economic inequities and corporate greed.
I myself worry a bit about these things, too. I am, after all, a Pope Francis Christian and a United Methodist. I believe that the authentic Christian life recognizes, not just that we humans are sinners but also that we are beautiful icons of God, made in God's image, and that our task in life is to grow into a likeness of the image in which we are made. And I believe, along with Pope Francis, that a life in Christ is as much a matter of helping heal a broken world, with particular service to the poor and powerless, as it is to find a depth of spiritual aliveness through a personal relationship with Jesus. Our calling, as Christians, is to recognize the Earth as our home and walk in love as Christ walked in love.
Truth be told, I suspect that my younger friends may believe the same. They didn't emphasize these matters in the videos, but I'm quite sure that they read the Bible. I know that they, too, sense the image of God in each person, and perhaps also within themselves and that they want to live lives of service to the world. They want to be disciples of the young rabbi, Jesus, who said that whenever we serve the hungry and the poor and the imprisoned, we are serving him.
In any case, I can connect with the experience of my younger friends on being baptized, because I, too, have had a baptism experience of this sort. I know what it can mean to make a decision for Christ. I have made it and am grateful to have been able to do so. I think the invitation to make this decision came from God. And even though my perspective has changed over the years, I certainly see wisdom in their experience and I admire their idealism: that is, their sense of hope that, if they walk with Christ in their daily lives, life can truly be different and they can help make the world a better place: more peaceful, more loving, more forgiving, and more just and sustainable for all.
In their ways they glimpsed the possibility of what the Bible calls a peace that surpasses understanding "And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7)
Yes, when I watched the videos of my younger friends, it was this peace that called out to me. I thought of my own experiences of peace and, in truth, I thought of the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead,
*
I would never expect my younger friends to read Whitehead. Still, I thought of Whitehead's sense that, when people are young, they can glimpse a possibility of peace that is real and genuine, and they are able to give themselves to a hope, an ideal, that is relevant to us all, but too often forgotten as we age. Conventional wisdom often says that wisdom comes with age; and I know that sometimes it does. But Whitehead believed, and I do as well, that sometimes wisdom comes with youth, and we "older" people can best grow wise, not by relying on our age, but by remembering when we were young, and reclaiming forgotten wisdom.
In his book Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead suggests that the highest intuition a person can have, the very consummation of the soul, is a sense of Peace. Peace for him is not simply the absence of violence or conflict; it is alive with creativity, beauty, and love. It is a positive force, a positive energy. The sense of peace is an intuitively felt recognition that, above the compulsions and narrowness of personal concern, and above the desire for personal happiness, there is something higher and deeper and wider that includes each and all. In Adventures of Ideas, he calls it a Harmony of Harmonies. I can't help but wonder if, when my young friends were baptized, they had a sense of this Harmony of Harmonies as mirrored through the Jesus to whom they gave their lives.
For Whitehead this Harmony is not simply a psychological feeling; it is also a cosmological reality, as real as gravity and electromagnetism. It is what, in Process and Reality, he calls the consequent nature of God. The consequent nature of God is the universe itself as enfolded within an ongoing and loving consciousness, a single ongoing life, both divine and worldly. My young friends might call it the Logos, that is, the universal Christ, described in the Gospel of John: a universal love that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but that also preceded Jesus' birth and was the light of all people. Interestingly and importantly, in the New Testament Christ isn't just a name for Jesus, it's also a name for the Logos, the universal Christ that is everywhere throughout the world and the universe.
In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead adds that a primary characteristic of this harmony, this Logos, is Beauty with an upper-case B. Indeed Beauty is, for Whitehead, the very aim of the universe. And what is the relation between Peace and Beauty? Whitehead suggests the experience of Peace comes with a transcendence of personality: a realization that individual personality is not the defining feature of life's deeper purpose. Peace comes with an inner recognition of ideals beyond the limits of the private self.
And what are the circumstances in which we might experience such Peace? In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead notes two circumstances in which this experience of Peace may emerge: tragedy and youth. In my young born-anew friends, I saw a glimpse of this Peace in their sense of peace, their capacity, upon being baptized, to relax into what they thought, and rightly hoped, would be a new life in Christ. There are many other versions of this peace, this relaxing into a new life beyond egotism, not necessarily Christian or religious, and I celebrate this. What is important spiritually is to recognize and appreciate peace wherever we find it, trusting that it is of God and from God, however named. It is indeed a peace beyond understanding and well worth living from. As I see things, one way of awakening to this peace is a letting go, a relinquishment of self-centered concern, a baptism into Christ's love. My young friends might say it is the only way. I suspect they would. But that doesn't matter to me. We in the Christian world can live with these differences of opinion. What counts is how we live. Let the love of God, extending to each and all, be the measure. It is this love that's worth being baptized into, not just once in our life, but every day.
- Jay McDaniel, September 14, 2021
Whitehead on Youth and Peace
Section V. The deepest definition of Youth is, Life as yet untouched by tragedy. And the finest flower of youth is to know the lesson in advance of the experience, undimmed. The question here for discussion is how the intuition of Peace asserts itself apart from its disclosure in tragedy. Evidently observation of the earlier stages of personal life will afford the clearest evidence.
Youth is distinguished for its whole-hearted absorption in personal enjoyments and personal discomforts. Quick pleasure and quick pain, quick laughter and quick tears, quick absence of care, and quick diffidence, quick courage and quick fear, are conjointly characters of youth. In other words, immediate absorption in its own occupations. On this side, Youth is too chequered to be termed a happy period. It is vivid rather than happy. The memories of youth are better to live through, than is youth itself. For except in extreme cases, memory is apt to count the sunny hours. Youth is not peaceful in any ordinary sense of that term. In youth despair is overwhelming. There is then no tomorrow, no memory of disasters survived.
The short-sightedness of youth matches the scantiness of its experience. The issues of its action are beyond its ken, perhaps with literature supplying a delusory sense of knowledge. Thus generosity and cruelty are equally natural, by reason of the fact that their full effects lie beyond conscious anticipation.
All this is the veriest commonplace in the characterization of Youth. Nor does the modern wealth of social literature in any fundamental way alter the case. The reason for its statement here is to note that these features of character belong to all animals at all ages, including human beings at every stage of their lives. The differences only lie in relative proportions. Also the success of language in conveying information is vastly over-rated, especially in learned circles. Not only is language highly elliptical, but also nothing can supply the defect of first-hand experience of types cognate to the things explicitly mentioned. The general truth of Hume’s doctrine as to the necessity of first-hand impressions is inexorable.
There is another side. Youth is peculiarly susceptible to appeals for beauty of conduct. It understands motives which presuppose the irrelevance of its own person. Such motives are understood as contributing to the magnification of its own interests. Its very search for personal experience thus elicits impersonality, self-forgetfulness. Youth forgets itself in its own ardour. Of course, not always. For it can fall in love. But the test of the better nature, so happily plentiful, is that love passes from selfishness to devotion. The higher forms of love break down the narrow self-regarding motives.
When youth has once grasped where Beauty dwells—with a real knowledge and not as a mere matter of literary phraseology in some poetic, scriptural, or psychological version—when youth has once grasped, its self-surrender is absolute. The vision may pass. It may traverse consciousness in a flash. Some natures may never permit it to emerge into attention. But Youth is peculiarly liable to the vision of that Peace, which is the harmony of the soul’s activities with ideal aims that lie beyond any personal satisfaction.
Youthful Idealism at its Best
Brian G. Henning on Beauty in Whitehead
In his brief preface to Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead provides a rare window into how he conceived of his own work. “The three books—Science and The Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas—are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things…. Each book can be read separately; but they supplement each other’s omissions or compressions” (AI vii). If I am correct, one of the most important concepts in process thought is virtually absent from Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality. I suggest that the single most important “omission” remedied by Adventures of Ideas is the claim that beauty is the one self-justifying aim of the universe, that “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). Creativity is in this sense “kalogenic”; it is inherently beauty generating. Though there are notable exceptions, surprisingly few process scholars have recognized and embraced the significance of this claim. Indeed, beauty is notable in its absence from most of the major works on process metaphysics, which tend to focus on Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. Perhaps fearing charges of aestheticism, those who do note the centrality of beauty have mistakenly sought either to minimize its significance or to explain it away as metaphorical embellishment.5 The goal of this brief essay is to defend the view that process thought, particularly process ethics, will be more adequate and applicable if it is “re-centered” around the concept of beauty.
For rest of essay click here.
- - Brian G. Henning in RE-CENTERING PROCESS THOUGHT: RECOVERING BEAUTY IN A. N. WHITEHEAD’S LATE WORK