I received a free review copy of this ebook because the author read a review I wrote of Jesus, Interrupted : Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don’t Know about Them by Bart D. Ehrman. Ehrman is a respected Biblical scholar and one need not be a believer in order to find his book interesting. In fact Ehrman was no longer a believer when he wrote it. Leroy Grey’s book, on the other hand, exists very much within the born again Christian paradigm. I am not a Christian and never have been. My life philosophy has been heavily influenced by concepts expressed by Jesus as recorded in the gospels, but I don’t believe in the supernatural and see those words, and many of the stories which have come to surround the figure of Jesus, as a poetic expression of existential psychological principles.
I see three distinct problems with the title of this book :
1. The link to a political slogan cheapens the subject matter. (The link to Donald Trump is conscious, as is indicated by the book’s description on Amazon : “…just as President Trump has called all loyal, patriotic Americans to Make America Great Again…” Political slogans are propaganda, regardless of which party or candidate they are used to drum up support for. They are an attempt to bypass critical assessment by a crude appeal to emotions. If the aim of this book is to encourage critical assessment of the mainstream churches’ interpretation of the Christian message, then it hardly seems appropriate to associate it with a form of discourse aimed at bypassing such thought.
2. When was Christianity great? If, as Grey claims, the mainstream churches are not founded on a true assessment of Christ’s teachings, then clearly he is not claiming the power and popularity of those churches as Christianity’s greatness. Was Christianity great in the very beginning when it had only a small number of followers? Maybe, but smallness and lack of immediate influence is not what we usually define as greatness. Wouldn’t a more appropriate title be something like Restoring Truth to Christianity?
3. The title is liable to leave mainstream Christians feeling like they have been the victim of a bait-and-switch. Since the popular conception of Christianity is associated with the mainstream churches, believers in those churches are liable to assume that this is a book about making what they believe in “great again”. But then when they read the book, they may feel that it is about trying to destroy Christianity as they know it.
In placing an emphasis on personal experience of God through meditation, Grey takes a position similar to that of the gnostics. He presents this as an alternative to the fragmentation of Christendom into thousands of seperate denominations. Maybe. There are others who recommend personal experience of God through the ingestion of psychedelics as a way to bring us together. (Leroy isn’t advocating the use of such substances, but he did use them before becoming a born-again Christian.) Such dreams of social divisions healed are yet to prove themselves, but I’m always curious to see what comes of them. If something works for people, more power to them.
Grey places a lot of emphasis on a religious experience he had in which he was “taken to Heaven alive”, saw a bank of angels and received a mission to foster community and help others to experience such communion with God. Such experiences are not so uncommon apparently. There seems to be a potential for them built into the human brain. Once again, the use of psychedelics has been known to facility this phenomena, though this was apparently not the case with Grey at that time. Of course, the fact that someone experiences something like this does not mean that what appears to be happening conforms to any external reality. I don’t know how we could prove that it doesn’t, but it is perfectly reasonable to interpret it as the equivalent of a very vivid dream. That life-changing insights might arise from such an experience makes sense when we consider the fear-based conservatism characteristic of much of our thinking. We tend to settle into habits of thought and belief which protect us from uncertainty. Genuinely original, out-of-the-box, thinking might confront us with some horrific truth about ourselves which we find unbearable. We might discover that everything we ever “knew” about ourselves was wrong. But a spiritual experience like that described by Grey can temporarily eliminate that box we have such trouble thinking outside of. For some people, the catalyst is a near-death experience. If you fall off a cliff and you know you are going to die, then there isn’t much point keeping up the habits of mental self-protection. By the time you miraculously land safely in a soft bush, you’ve already seen the bright light of a reality unfiltered by conceptual thought, and the ordinary has revealed itself as magical by comparison to that deadening day-to-day dogmatism. And the answers to the big questions of our life may be quite obvious with those barriers removed.
What response are readers likely to have to this account? We don’t have any evidence that it actually happened, certainly none that some celestial being is the true source of the message expressed in Grey’s book. This could be seen as an unfounded claim to authority. It’s like when Neale Donald Walsch wrote Conversations with God. Conversations with My Deeper Self just doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it can be so much easier for writers to claim to be taking the Archangel Gabriel’s dictation than to stand or fail on the quality of the ideas they are expressing. The only real authority is truth. If I tell you that 2 + 2 = 4, my voice carries authority because I can demonstrate the truth of what I say with four bottle caps. Spiritual insight is not quite as clear cut as that, but the general principal still applies. Spiritual wisdom, like a valid scientific theory, turns mystery into something comprehensible. Our ability to see some important aspect of reality of which we were previously blind is the evidence which gives the wisdom its authority. Don’t tell me about the day God spoke to you. Don’t tell me about how many years you’ve meditated. That’s important to you, but it carries no weight with me. Tell me something that causes the scales to fall from my eyes and nothing else matters.
Grey believes that the doctrine of the Trinity is a lie. His argument seems to rest on the idea that the oneness between God and Jesus expressed in the Trinity concept is exclusive and thus a denial of our ability to be one with God too. Maybe it is my ignorance of traditional church doctrine on the Trinity, but I can’t see why the idea that God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are different manifestations of a single entity precludes our ability to also achieve oneness with them. “Our oneness with God and Jesus Christ is a oneness with their Perspective, their Purposes and their personality, infusing us with more love, more peace, more forgiveness, more patience, more of all the fruits of the Spirit. And all this leads to greater unity between brothers and sisters in Christ.” This seems very reasonable, and I do realise that fighting over interpretations of the Trinity is one of the things which has divided the church, but I can’t see any reason why the two ideas are necessarily in conflict. Let’s say God is love. Jesus was a man who lived love to the full, thus he was a manifestation of love in human form. The holy spirit is love in us, which brings us together just as Grey describes. The three are different, but the same in that they are all love. Is this not how the concept of the Trinity is supposed to work? Again, maybe I’m just ignorant of doctrine, but it all just seems like arguing over semantics.
Grey claims that God wants Christians to seperate from the world and form specifically Christian communities. This is how he interprets II Corinthians 6:17 : “Come out from among them and be seperate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.” But then he says that this was the example set by Jesus when he and his followers went on the road rather than being fixtures in society, but surely what they did was the opposite of Paul’s advice. They went out and mixed with the unbelievers and they touched the unclean. How else could they bring salvation to those who most needed it?
I have nothing personally against born again Christians forming their own communities. I often tend to find such people a little bit creepy, so if they want to keep to themselves, that’s fine. But I think it is important to recognise the risks of it turning into something unhealthy as we have seen in many self-isolating religious cults. Ideology has a way of interfering with honest communication, and honest communication, i.e. love, is the soul of community. We can see this problem arising from “politically correct” political philosophies which motivate the repression of all that is not accepted by them. Is this not also a danger with religious ideology? What if Grey has a fixed idea of what God wants and others feel differently but keep their feelings to themselves for fear of disrupting the harmony of the group? Without ideology all that is needed is for people to express themselves honestly, because there is no right belief or right way to feel.
If one is insecure in self and particularly insecure in one’s own belief system, then it makes sense one might feel more comfortable with the reinforcement of being surrounded by like-minded people. For me the goal is individuation - bringing all aspects of my self together into a harmonious and secure integrated whole. Mixing with people who think and behave differently from myself is important toward that goal, because the friction that arises as a result is how I become more aware of those aspects of myself I have yet to own and make peace with.
Grey claims the churches have rejected Christ’s command to “not be called teachers” (Matthew 23:10). I think the point he is trying to make here is that the Holy Spirit is the teacher and it is not the role of ministers or priests to teach so much as to help the individual to open up to instruction from their own inner manifestation of the Holy Spirit. This is a little bit like what I have said above about authority. That which illuminates has its own authority and it is important for us to avoid getting an inflated sense of our own importance while serving the interests of that authority and those who can benefit from knowledge of it.
Grey’s advocacy of meditation makes sense. It plays an important role in many religions. The benefits of stilling the mind and opening up to inner guidance are well established. I never had the discipline for it myself. I just get bored and give up. But clearly it works for others.
However, as with Grey’s story about going to heaven, he can’t expect his personal experience of God’s voice during meditation to carry any weight with others unless what he claims God told him makes sense to them. An account of an experience others did not share does not carry intrinsic authority. But, if God really does have a message for us which we can hear when we meditate, then perhaps it is possible for others to test it out and experience it for themselves. What I like about this approach is that it undercuts human authority structures. If one believes in the kind of God Grey believes in, then the authority comes in there, but it cuts out the middle man. It should be the role of a teacher to make themselves unnecessary. If Grey’s meditation method gives people a hot line to the big man, then they will no longer have any need for him, his books or his webinars. This should be the deepest wish of any teacher, that their students will grow up and leave them behind.
Grey argues a lot against the interpretation that Jesus was God. I’m sympathetic to this, because, to me, Jesus was just a very wise and psychologically healthy man. I don’t believe there was anything supernatural about him at all. But it seems as if Grey downplays the scriptural “evidence” for the argument that Jesus was God. He doesn’t mention two key passages in the Gospel of John : “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1 and “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.” John 1:14. Is it not understandable that if Word = God and Word Made Flesh = Jesus, then Jesus = God Made Flesh? Personally, I don’t take it literally but see it as a way of acknowledging the archetypal connections between Jesus the man and God the theological concept. I’m not a Christian though. If Grey is going to persuade dyed-in-the wool believers in the Trinity, it seems like it would be a good idea to tackle this early passage in John head on.
There seems to be a weird disconnect in Grey’s approach. He is claiming that the Christian church betrayed Jesus’ true message, and yet he often quotes from Paul’s letters as if they were an authentic account of how Christianity should be, even while pointing out that Paul was someone who was distorting Jesus’ message. This is particularly weird in a passage in which he claims that one of the foundations of Jesus’ message was “All Priests Equal Before God”. “There are to be no cultural or ethnic walls, no slavery, and no greater distinction given to male or female members of ‘Christ’s body, which is the Church.’ (Colossians 1:24) For ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28). Again, compare this to Paul’s and most of Christianity’s position, in which women are not allowed to preach.” Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians and the letter to the Galatians, but Grey doesn’t acknowledge here that he is quoting Paul against Paul. (Later he tries to reconcile this inconsistency by saying that he views some of Paul’s statements as authentic expressions from God and others as Anti-Christian errors.) Surely the consistent position, if Paul corrupted Jesus’ message, would be to disqualify Paul as a source for true Christianity. Why does Grey not confine himself only to words actually attributed to Jesus himself? Perhaps because he needs to quote Paul to back up his own “God given?” prejudices in favour of Christian community which might not be sufficiently supported by quotes from Jesus.
Grey quotes 2 Chronicles 7:14 : “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” He interprets “and seek my face” as a call to direct contact with God through meditation. This seems reasonable, but, from my own pantheistic perspective, I see “God” as an integrative, in the social realm - loving, principle within the natural processes of the universe, so I think to “seek the face of God” can be a call to look outward and perceive the integrative principals through which all creation comes into existence, just as much as it may be a call to look inward to find and be motivated by that principle within ourselves. Surely this is a necessary insurance against solipsistic wishful thinking. Haven’t we all seen too many out-of-control self-proclaimed “prophets” who looked only within themselves for guidance?
In defending his idea that we should seek God’s direct word through meditation, Grey says : “First, I must point out that Jesus says we must hear God’s Word. Not once does Jesus say we are to read the word of God - always we are to hear it.” Of course. He was speaking to people who were illiterate. And the word of God he was communicating was the new edition, most of it not having been communicated in the books of the Old Testament.
There is a key passage from which Grey quotes which is worth examining in its full context. Jesus has been accused of driving out demons by the power of Beelzebul : “Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every kind of sin or slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognised by its fruit.’” Grey places great emphasis on the line “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters”, taking it out of context as support for his belief that Christians should gather together in separate communities. But Jesus is talking against that which divides. My own interpretation of this passage is that it is that “the Holy Spirit” is a way of referring to truth. That which is factually true is the essence, or spirit, of any whole (the words “holy” and “whole” come from the same root, so “holy” refers to wholeness or integrity). It is that which gives it its integrity. Lies divide us, because everyone can have their own lie, but the truth is the objective ground on which we can all come together. It is that on which we may agree, and, in agreeing, be one. So I think the bit about gathering is not a reference to geographical proximity, but a call to serve the cause of truthfulness, such that we can find common ground. No sin can fracture society and blight people’s lives like a lie can. Even when something as horrific as child sexual abuse occurs, the largest part of the psychological damage which results comes from the fact that the child’s experience is generally isolated within a network of lies which prevent the healing process.
For me, “God” is a mythological way of referring to integrity. All of life comes about because of the meaningful integration of matter. And our “soul” is our integrity, the coherence of all aspects of our being into a functional whole. What is described as being “born again” seems to me a sham - the adoption of an artificial state of discipline in which the new self is split off from the old “sinful” self. This seems to me to be the loss of the soul. There may be “spiritual” feelings, but they are dissociated, not the natural fleshy experiences of the healthy child. The more neurotic we are, the less emotionally healthy we are, the more alienated we are from integrity and thus the more likely it is to seem like something otherworldly and magical. A newborn is not disciplined, split off from - or at war with - its biological urges (“that sinful flesh”). If Jesus’ advice that we must be “born again” can mean anything to me it is that we can return to the playful and loving naturalness of the child by practicing unconditional self-acceptance. Idealism is the root of all evil, and the source of religion’s dark side. To look at ourselves and the world from an idealistic perspective - one which feels it should be looking at something of “God-like purity” - is to poison our relationship to ourselves and the world. The worst evils we humans commit - such as the deliberate infliction of suffering on the innocent and defenceless - is something we are driven to by the oppression of idealistic expectations which undermine our self-acceptance and kill our ability to feel love. What is most important is not high morals or “spirituality”, but honesty.
I’ve been very critical here, but I have to say that there is much in this book which I can sympathise with. Christianity as a religion is a travesty of the teachings we find in the gospels. The mainstream church’s brutal persecution of those who didn’t accept their dogma has been horrendous. The meditative approach to Jesus’s words which Grey proposes, and which was practiced in the past by many individuals as well as gnostic sects, is the only sensible approach for anyone who wants to use Jesus’ words as a pathway to some kind of enlightenment.
I would recommend this book to Christians who want to have their worldview challenged. (As a non-Christian, I’m not really in the target audience. I found it interesting and stimulating because I have a fascination with the psychology of religion as well as my own eccentric interpretation of the gospel message.) But I would suggest that they keep their critical faculties sharp. Just because someone is accurate in their criticism of others, doesn’t mean that they may not also be profoundly mistaken in their own cherished beliefs. And a lot of people who claimed God spoke to them have proven untrustworthy, sometimes dangerously so.
