What I Think

I want to say clearly what I actually think — not what I was taught, not what I half-believe because it is more comfortable, but what I have arrived at after a long time of reading, thinking, and refusing to settle for answers that don't hold up.

If you are reading this because you have been through some version of deconstruction — because the faith you grew up with stopped fitting your actual experience of reality, because you found you could not believe the things you were told you had to believe, because you miss the depth but cannot go back to the version you left — then some of this may be useful to you. But I am not writing it to comfort anyone, including myself. I am writing it to be accurate. There is a third option between "go back" and "give it all up," and I am going to state it as precisely as I can, including the places where it is heterodox, the places where I am making a bet, and the places where I genuinely do not know.

Here is what I think.

Start with the metaphysics, because everything else rests on it and because I am no longer willing to leave it implied.

I hold that consciousness is fundamental — not a late product of matter, not an accident that complex brains happen to generate, but the ground that everything else appears within. This is not a spiritual mood. It is the position that survives the hardest pressure from the philosophy of mind. The hard problem of consciousness — why there is something it is like to be you, rather than just information processing happening in the dark — has no answer from the materialist side, and the gap does not close the more carefully you look; it deepens. The honest move is not to keep trying to squeeze mind out of matter. It is to flip the priority: consciousness is the given, and the physical world is the structured appearance within it. Non-dual idealism, in the vocabulary I use: there is one field of consciousness, and individual minds are localized, bounded perspectives within it — what I call souls — a word that carries real baggage, and I mean it precisely (see that post). Kastrup's vocabulary is "dissociated alters" — bounded perspectives within mind at large, like how a system with multiple personalities works but as the basic architecture of every individuated consciousness. The physical world is real in its structure and its consequences. It is not a hallucination and we do not make it up. It is a lawful render, and science is the rigorous study of that render's structure. What it is not is the bottom layer. The bottom layer is awareness.

Now the Logos. The Logos is not first of all a title for Jesus. It is a claim about the structure of that render. When the Gospel of John opens with en arche en ho logos — "in the beginning was the Logos" — the author is not giving Jesus a promotion. He is making a cosmological claim: the rational principle that Greek philosophy had been reaching for — Heraclitus's logos, the order that makes the flux coherent; the Stoics' rational fire pervading all things; Philo's divine Reason that is the pattern of creation — that is what is at the origin of everything, and it is the principle through which all things come to be. "All things came into being through the Logos, and apart from it not one thing came into being" (John 1:3). That is the structural claim, and it is the one that converges, strikingly, with what physics has independently arrived at: a reality that is, at bottom, not stuff but lawful field — one ordering principle through which everything physical arises. The Logos is the rationality of the render. It is the reason mathematics works, the reason nature has structure, the reason any of it is intelligible at all.

Here is the half I left out for too long, and it is the half that matters most.

A Logos that only structures reality is a magnificent thing and a cold one. It can be described, mapped, admired. It cannot be prayed to or lived from. Heraclitus had the Logos. The Stoics systematized it. Philo gave it a theological face and pointed it at the God of Abraham. But all of them left it transcendent — an ordering principle that pervades the cosmos as law, structuring from a distance. That is, at most, a very sophisticated deism. It is not yet anything you could come home to.

What the Christian tradition adds is not a new concept of the Logos. It is a claim about what the Logos does: it comes in. "The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). And then — this is the part the Greek tradition never produced — it does not leave again. By the Farewell Discourse the indwelling has become a permanent condition: "I in you and you in me" (John 14:20); "Abide in me, and I in you" (15:4). Paul, writing earlier than any Gospel, is already there: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20); "we have the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16); "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27).

On the metaphysics I just laid out, this is not devotional decoration. It is a structural claim: God (Level 0) is present within the localized perspective (the soul, Level 2) — as the soul's own deepest life, available to be recognized as what it already is and has always been within. The indwelling is the participation half of the structure that the bare ordering principle cannot give. It is the reason the framework is warm rather than cold, prayable rather than merely accurate, a home rather than a diagram.

The figure who held both of these together most completely was Maximus the Confessor, with the doctrine of the logoi: every created thing has its own logos, its own reason-for-being, and all the logoi are contained in and unified by the one Logos. Creation is the procession of the many from the one; salvation is the return — each thing recognizing its source. That is the cosmological axis and the participatory axis stated as a single motion. I take that structure. I diverge from his metaphysics — he holds a real Creator/creature distinction; I hold consciousness-first non-dualism, souls as God's own self-differentiation rather than as artifacts a maker stands apart from. That re-seating is my move, not his. But the shape is his, and it is older and more orthodox than people assume.

If the Logos is the ground of all things, then every particular thing is a local expression of it — the stone, the tree, the galaxy, the person. The difference between them is not whether the Logos is present. It always is. The difference is how fully and transparently the Logos is recognized and expressed.

But I want to be exact about which part I hold hard and which part I hold open, because they are different. The structure — degree not kind, the Logos universally present, Jesus as the fullest expression rather than the sole instance — that I own. What I hold genuinely open is the terminus: whether the incarnation at that intensity has happened only once in human history, or whether something analogous has happened elsewhere, in other lives, in other traditions. The Christian tradition has real reasons to affirm the extraordinary, perhaps singular, character of what happened with Jesus. I do not think it follows that nothing comparable occurred elsewhere. I hold that with humility, as a real unknown, not as a settled universalism and not as a settled exclusivism. The structure is owned; the once-or-several question is open. That seam is deliberate.

There is a tradition running from Heraclitus through the Stoics through Philo into the early church — Justin Martyr's logos spermatikos, the seminal Logos present in every person and every tradition; Clement of Alexandria's salvation as gnosis, recognition rather than legal transaction; Origen's apokatastasis, the restoration of all things, coherent with a Logos in which all things subsist and to which all things return. It is the richest intellectual current in early Christianity, and the standard story is that it got suppressed.

That story is half right, and the half it misses matters. Two things happened, not one.

That is a stronger claim than "they buried the good stuff." What the Latin West lost, the Greek East largely kept.

What was lost, where it was lost: the universalism, the philosophical openness, the understanding of salvation as recognition rather than transaction, the comfort with apophatic theology. What replaced it in the West: a highly administered system with sharp edges and sharp penalties, a God who is primarily judge and lawgiver, a salvation that is primarily legal. The forensic, substitutionary apparatus that Anselm formalized and the Reformation amplified is a late development, not the original deposit. I am not against the creeds because they are old. I am wary of them where they are narrower than the tradition they claim to summarize.

I will answer this directly, because it is the live question and because owning the heterodoxy means not dodging it.

By the standard of Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy — and by the Reformed standard I was formed in — no, this position does not clear the bar. I deny the unique-in-kind incarnation, I hold degree-not-kind, I treat the resurrection's mechanism as open, I put a ground prior to and apophatically beyond the persons of the Trinity, and I hold a metaphysics the creeds do not contemplate. If "Christian" means "affirms the creed as written," I am outside it, and I will not fuzz that to make anyone, including me, more comfortable.

By the standard of the broader tradition as it actually existed before the councils narrowed it — the standard where "Christian" named a real range that included the Logos theologians, the subordinationists, the Origenists, the people who held much of what I hold — there is a serious case that I am recovering a Christianity rather than leaving Christianity. Heterodox by 451; not obviously outside the thing as it stood in 200.

Here is the part I have actually decided. "Christian" has a contested boundary, and I am standing on the contested part of it on purpose. My whole position is that the creedal boundary was, in part, a later political narrowing of something wider and more alive. If I now let that same boundary be the thing that tells me whether I belong, I have handed the councils the authority my entire account says they overreached. So I am not going to let the ruler I have spent years arguing is too narrow be the ruler that measures me. I am not a Stoic with a Jesus accessory. I am a Logos Christian in the pre-conciliar and cosmic-Christ sense, standing in a real and ancient stream, diverging from the councils knowingly. And I accept that keeping the name means explaining, every single time, exactly which Christianity I mean.

Whether that "counts" depends entirely on who is holding the ruler. That is not evasion. That is the actual structure of the situation, and I would rather state it accurately than win the word by lowering what I mean by it.

With conviction: that the Logos is real, as the rational ground of a reality that is not brute matter. That the indwelling is real — the ground present within the localized perspective, available to be recognized — and that this, not the cosmological claim alone, is the heart of it. That something happened with Jesus that was a genuine encounter with the ground of things, and that the testimony of the people who experienced it is not simply hallucination or wish-fulfillment. That the mystical and participatory core of the tradition is a real path toward something real.

With open hands, and I mean genuinely open, not rhetorically:

The resurrection. The testimony is stubborn and early — Paul's account in 1 Corinthians 15 is within a couple of decades of the events, not legend grown over centuries. Something happened that the witnesses experienced as Jesus alive after death. But the trajectory of the texts, from Paul's "spiritual body" through Mark's empty tomb with no appearances to the increasingly physical, touchable accounts of the later Gospels, tells me the telling developed, and the mechanism — bodily resuscitation, transformed embodiment, an appearance of the Logos in a new mode, something we have no category for — is not something the texts let me read off cleanly. I hold the that with more confidence than the what. In a consciousness-first frame the question even inverts: if consciousness is the ground, what would it mean for it to be simply extinguished? But I am not going to cash that into a certainty I don't have.

The uniqueness of Jesus. As above: degree-not-kind I own; once-or-several I do not know.

The creedal machinery is not nothing. The 2,000-year project of trying to articulate what happened with Jesus is not nothing. But it is not the Logos. It is a tradition's attempt to name the Logos — some of it brilliant, some of it political, some of it driven by genuine encounter and some by the need to hold institutional power. The work is to read with enough historical depth to tell those apart, and to hold what is actually there.