Sapiential Christianity: A Conversation

I am often amazed by how alien the understanding of wisdom as the fruit of enlightenment is to Christians in the West. And it isn’t just the concept of enlightenment that seems foreign. Translating enlightenment into terms such as “an awakened heart” or “transformed consciousness” does little to change the confused looks on people’s faces when they talk with me about what we do or teach at Cascadia Living Wisdom.  

Today I want to reflect on the place of wisdom within Christianity, and the reason we in the West have largely lost touch with the richness of our sapiential tradition. I have invited Gina Denholm, a member of the Cascadia core community, to join me in pondering these questions since the best way to unpack things like this is often through dialogue. 

David: To get us started, I wonder how your experience fits with my sense that the Christian wisdom tradition has been, for the most part, a forgotten part of the Christian story.

Gina: From my experience within the Catholic, Pentecostal, and Anglican strands of Christianity in Australia, I’ve not had contact with anything approximating a wisdom approach to Christian teaching and living. Those who seek “enlightenment” assume there is nothing to be found in the church and go looking elsewhere.

David: Two exceptions to this pattern are the Eastern Orthodox Church and Celtic Christianity, both retaining their wisdom roots. But there is no question that those seeking personal transformation have, in large, lost hope of finding it in the church and have turned to the East. 

Gina: I do think there’s some focus on transformation in our Western churches, but the emphasis is usually on transformation of beliefs, followed by transformation of behaviors. Transformed consciousness or having an awakened heart are not hopes held out for this lifetime! I’ve wondered whether it’s because of our attachment to the doctrine of original sin. In the West, we’ve clung to the idea that we’re so fundamentally estranged from God by our own sinfulness that we can only await (by faith) a true transformation after death. David, you speak of turning to the East. I was both scandalized and blown open when I came across the Eastern tradition’s doctrine of theosis and started to inquire whether deification – partaking in the Divine nature – was an invitation to embody something in the present, not just an ideal future state. That’s what started my journey into wisdom Christianity.

David: The “East” I was referring to was the non-Christian East – primarily  Buddhism but also other Asian religions that offer a path for personal transformation. While the  Eastern Orthodox Church holds rich wisdom resources, it has an air of ethnic exclusivity that has kept it off the radar of most Western Christians seeking an alternative to the focus on sin and salvation. And, while the Orthodox vision of theosis/deification is important for personal transformation, the associated roadmap to awakening isn’t, in my view, sufficiently practical to be accessible to most Western Christians. 

In contrast, Buddhism offers a practical path to awakening and transformation that transcends ethnic boundaries and is based on praxis rather than beliefs. It’s no wonder it has captured the Western market and left Christianity to those who are content with a religion of beliefs and a vision of transformation that is tied to this. But perhaps we should identify the essential features of the wisdom tradition. Hopefully this will help us understand why Sapiential Christianity has been a forgotten part of our heritage – perhaps even resisted. 

Gina: You name my experience exactly: although theosis intrigued me, it remained simply an idea as there was no practical path offered in my church experience. I found myself drawn to the clarity and experiential nature of the Buddhist path and took on some practices, yet I was still so devoted to Christ. That was around when I found your books, David – I was looking for something about Christian forms of awakening!
One of the core features of Sapiential Christianity, in my view, is how it sees our human trajectory as a movement from immaturity to maturity, not one from perfection to brokenness to (restored) perfection. In this view, we came into the world “very good,” in the image of God, but unformed – not yet in God’s likeness, perhaps.

Our destiny is to be conformed to the image of Christ: to become fully human by embracing our oneness with the divine nature. Through the fall, we fell into a dualistic worldview and are all burdened with this sense of being separate from God. Sin arises from this and further obscures our connection to divine reality. The way I see it, Jesus came to show us the path out of that suffering of separation and home to our own indwelling God imprint (the Imago Dei). And his path is kenosis – self-emptying. Does this fit with your own understanding?

David: I think that’s a good overview of some of the major features of the Christian wisdom tradition – although I’d add three additional things. First, the emphasis on knowing, not simply believing, moving us beyond theology into lived spirituality. Second, the central role of the heart in this knowing. And third, the fact that the knowing of the truth of ourselves in Christ and Christ in us involves a transformation of identity and consciousness. Taking on the mind of Christ is acquiring the consciousness of Christ. This means seeing and knowing as Christ saw and knew, something quite different from merely believing things about Christ. 

Gina: I appreciate your emphases here as they reground our conversation in practice, which is central to the wisdom way. How easy it is to turn even this wisdom path into a matter of belief statements! Knowing from the heart, and the way this connects us to Christ consciousness, seems central to wisdom. I must say though, it really took me some time to accept “heart knowing”  as a legitimate part of a Christian path, as I’d been so thoroughly conditioned to be distrustful of the human heart in the sin-salvation paradigm. Can you say more about heart knowing as central to wisdom?  

David: Before getting to heart knowing I think we should first note the overarching emphasis placed on knowing as opposed to believing within Sapiential Christianity. Beliefs are fundamental in the salvation tradition of Christianity. In fact, faith becomes synonymous with belief, this being a serious truncation of the older understanding of faith as trust. When faith is reduced to beliefs, the focus of trust easily becomes beliefs. And knowing is limited to objective, not personal, knowing.

While personal knowing does receive emphasis in Charismatic and Pentecostal traditions, this knowing is strongly associated with ecstatic states. The wisdom tradition of heart knowing might suggest a similar emphasis on emotions, but the heart of the wisdom tradition is the fullness of the mind – adding to reason such subtle, generally underdeveloped faculties as intuition, imagination, and more. And, equally important, the route to such knowing is not experience but contemplation. Contemplation, or meditation, is not merely a practice. It involves its own unique form of knowing. That knowing is called heart knowing. 

Gina: And I wonder if, before getting to heart knowing, we need to speak about unknowing! The path to heart knowing does seem to require some unlearning: the release of habits of mind, the willingness to “become like a child” again (what the Buddhists call “beginner’s mind” perhaps).

I find the distinction you make here between personal knowing through experience (ecstatic states) and personal knowing through contemplation very helpful. Waking up seems to happen as much through becoming present to ordinary life, which sometimes feels like nothing, as it does through experiencing something extraordinary. And as we unlearn our habitual ways of seeing and judging the world, the subtle faculties of the heart can emerge more and more.

David: I think you are absolutely right about the unlearning that must precede genuine knowing. Anthony of the Desert, the third-century founder  of Christian monasticism, taught that the way to ascend to God is to descend into our present realities. Seeking the extraordinary misses this entirely when we start anywhere other than the mundane realities of our life. It is these things we try to escape from when we seek ecstatic states.

The truly extraordinary is hidden in the ordinary. But in order to see this, we must become like a child. This is integral to the awakening of the hearts and the Christian wisdom tradition. This is why Jesus, like other wisdom teachers before and after him, taught that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must become like little children.

Gina: On this wisdom path, I’ve come to understand Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom of Heaven as being about a state of consciousness rather than a place. How does becoming like a little child and entering the Kingdom of Heaven relate to taking on the consciousness of Christ in your view, David? 

David: This is a wonderful question because it brings us to the essence of wisdom. Wisdom is not knowledge. It is knowing, and living what we know. And what we know and live, we know through the heart and mind of Christ that has become our own. This is Christ consciousness. It involves a transformation of both consciousness and identity. It is being born again, something that involves a profound reorganization of our being. Rather than being aligned around what we believe, everything is realigned around what and how we know. And our living flows from this profound realignment of our being.

Becoming like a little child and entering the Kingdom of Heaven is returning to our hearts, not our minds, as our true centre. Through the eyes of our awakened hearts, we realize that the Spirit of Wisdom who inhabits all of creation is our truest and deepest self. We know we are home. 

Gina: I find myself so moved by your description of coming home to our hearts. I am struck again by the purity and simplicity of the wisdom path. This is not to say that being born again in this way is easy, but it is certainly humble – and humbling. For those who worry that seeking wisdom is grasping for power or that the idea of deification is somehow grandiose, may this invitation to become like a little child offer a different picture. This is the way of Christ Jesus himself, who is gentle and humble of heart. Yoked to him, we are realigned.

David: Wonderfully put! I can’t think of a better way to end this rich conversation. Thanks for joining me in it!

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2021 © Dr. David G. Benner

• What in my current spiritual practices cultivates knowing from the heart?

• What features of the Christian wisdom tradition make me want to learn more about it?

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For more on the Christian wisdom tradition and what it means to be aligned around what we know, not simply what we believe, see Dr. Benner’s book Living Wisdom.

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