Quotes from Quantum Spirituality (online at http://www.leonardsweet.com/Quantum/quantum-ebook.pdf):

 

"So far the church has refused to dip its toe into postmodern culture. A quantum spirituality challenges the church to bear its past and to dare its future by sticking its big TOE into the time and place of the present....  Then, and only then, will the church not appear to be in a timecapsule, sealed against new developments. Then, and only then, will a New Light movement of 'world-making' faith have helped to create the world that is to, and may yet, be. Then, and only then, will earthlings have uncovered the meaning of these words, some of the last words poet/activist/contemplative/bridge between East and West Thomas Merton uttered:

"We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity." (p. 10)

Note: The new focus is on unity -- a worldwide oneness reflected in the growing union between the East and West -- and between the physical planet, all of humanity, and our spiritual God. Apparently, Sweet has replaced the "offense of the cross" with a passion for interfaith peace, unity and  possibility thinking. That point is well illustrated by the above statement by Thomas Merton, the popular Catholic author who popularized mysticism and died in Asia searching -- and experiencing -- the depths of Tibetan Buddhism.

"Mysticism, once cast to the sidelines of the Christian tradition, is now situated in postmodernist culture near the center. In part, the physics of David Bohm and Fritjof Capra are ways of responding to culture's having pushed it there. In the words of one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, Jesuit philosopher of religion/dogmatist Karl Rahner,

"The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, one who has experienced something, or he will be nothing."

"...Mysticism (which Einstein called 'cosmic religiosity') is metaphysics arrived at through mindbody experiences. Mysticism begins in experience; it ends in theology....." (p. 76)

Note: Yes, mysticism leads to new belief systems -- but the spiritual guides behind those beliefs are the enemies of God and tormentors of humanity.

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"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to inform means 'to give form to, put into form and shape.' The purpose of the church is to give form to, to put into form and shape, the energy-matter known as Jesus Christ. New Light leaders, therefore, are in-formational connectors helping the body of Christ to become an in-formed church, an in-formational community." (p. 120)

"New Light leadership helps patches of information become cloaks of knowledge. Information brokering is central to creating community in postmodern culture, not to mention achieving synergic states of group consciousness. Association of Theological Schools president/divinity school dean Jim L. Waits, in his address at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, calls for clergy to move from their 'learned ministry' model to a '“knowledgeable ministry' model. 'Knowledge ministry' helps information become 'alive in the consciousness,' as Einstein put it...." (p. 121)

Note: But it's the Holy Spirit, not human philosophies or processes that makes God's Word come alive in a believer. It's certainly not by assessing the "energy flow" in a room, as Sweet suggests below. (See 1 Corinthians 2:8-13)

"Christbody communities must come to be seen as thermodynamic units in which the rules of the conservation and degradation of energy apply. Some preachers almost unwittingly do an energy analysis of a congregation, assessing the energy charge of a room, pinpointing the energy flow, and drawing strength from those hot spots from which energy emanates most powerfully....

"Reluctance to see communities of faith as information-processing systems and the refusal to assist people in exploring and critiquing the unexamined metaphors by which they live helps explain why oldline communities are in such a state of entropic decline and disarray. Yet entropies of information produce variety within a species as well as new species themselves. The second law of thermodynamics states that energymatter decomposes and, what is more, that the more entropy grows, the less the amount of usable energy. Since the total amount of energy and mass in the universe cannot change, the entropic consequence of the second law is known as evolution.

"A major New Light undertaking is the designing of newstream communities that can be 'in connection' and 'in-formation' with the spirit of Christ. Christ will be embodied for the postmodern church in information." (p. 121)

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"The following are five gross premises of embodiment... that build anew the body of Christ for the postmodern era -- being “in connection” and “in-formation” with: (1) other Christians, (2) all creation, (3) one’s ancestors and ancestral memories, (4) other faiths, (5) technology....

[1] "With Other Christians: The first of these five untheorized observations is that New Light embodiment means to be “in connection” and “in-formation” with other Christians.... The church is fundamentally one being, one person, a comm-union whose cells are connected to one another within the information network called the Christ consciousness. No congregation or denomination can go it alone in being the body of Christ.... To be “in connection” and “in-formation” is to be related to other Christians and the shared culture of all Christians and to grow a set of organic relationships and coalitions around a common love for God [Christ consciousness?] ...

"Communities have souls, not just individuals. The modern era downplayed a biblical doctrine of salvation that had this communal dimension. In contrast, the New Light movement is concerned about the salvation of ensouled communities as well as individual souls, and the salvation of community souls relating synergistically to one another. ... The power of community is the energy of between: The synergizing of synergies in which “one [shall] chase a thousand, and two [shall] put ten thousand to flight” (Deut. 32:30).... (p. 122)

[2] "With All of Nature: Priests of Creation:...New Light communities extend the sense of connectionalism to creation and see themselves as members of an ecological community encompassing the whole of creation. “This is my body” is not an anthropocentric metaphor. Theologian/feminist critic Sallie McFague has argued persuasively for seeing Earth, in a very real sense, as much as a part of the body of Christ as humans.... The world of nature has an identity and purpose apart from human benefit. But we constitute together a cosmic body of Christ.... Creation spirituality is of tremendous help here in weaning us from this homocentric warp....

"Quantum spirituality bonds us to all creation as well as to other members of the human family. New Light pastors are what Arthur Peacocke calls 'priests of creation' -- earth ministers who can relate the realm of nature to God, who can help nurture a brother-sister relationship with the living organism called Planet Earth. This entails a radical doctrine of embodiment of God in the very substance of creation. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (1974) identifies the difference between pantheism and panentheism:

"Pantheism is 'the belief or theory that God and the universe are identical' panentheism is 'the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but... that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the Universe.”

"New Light spirituality does more than settle for the created order, as many forms of New Age pantheism do. But a spirituality that is not in some way entheistic (whether pan- or trans-), that does not extend to the spirit-matter of the cosmos, is not Christian."  (p. 123-124)

[3] "With Ancestors in the Faith: "...Third, New Light embodiment means to be 'in connection' and 'information' with ancestors and ancestral memories. One of the most significant things that can be said about New Lights  is that they know their ancestors... for the sake of communal identity and integrity....

“'Memes,' a term first coined by Richard Dawkins, refers to culturally transmitted ideas and customs which have been implanted in the human brain by social interaction and historical development. One of the first things New Light leadership does is to learn the genetic/ memetic endowment and environment of a community." (p. 124-125)

[4] "With Other Religions... "Fourth, New Light embodiment means to be 'in connection' and 'information' with other faiths. To be in-formation means to know each other’s songs almost as well as one knows them oneself, and to enlarge the community to include those whose conceptions of God differ from ours in form. To be in connection means to be able to sing, not only selected stanzas, but all the verses...." (p. 129)

"One can be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ without denying the flickers of the sacred in followers of Yahweh, or Kali, or Krishna. A globalization of evangelism 'in connection' with others, and a globally 'in-formed' gospel, is capable of talking across the fence with Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim--people from other so called 'new' religious traditions ('new' only to us)--without assumption of superiority and power."129-130

"...It will take a decolonized theology for Christians to appreciate the genuineness of others’ faiths, and to see and celebrate what is good, beautiful, and true in their beliefs without any illusions that down deep we all are believers in the same thing."

"The American denomination boasting the most 'decolonized' official proposal for guidelines for effective interfaith witness is the Southern Baptist Convention. The recommended draft of these “guidelines” emphasized “not judging, not convincing, but witnessing.” “Witnessing” was defined as having to listen, “genuinely to run the risk of opening yourself to another person and to his beliefs.” ...'Recognize the ideal in all faiths, and the fact that most believers do not attain the ideals of their faith.' Sadly, the final document adopted by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention excised all the above statements.... The knowledge of the environments of other religions is a spiritual duty as well as an intellectual necessity for the formation of our own religious heritage. ...

"The tide of an exo ticized and orientalized theology is already at flood stage in New Age thinking partly because of modernist Christianity’s theological xenophobia.... An example of East-West integration that is less a subversion of the Christian tradition than an homage to it is the flourishing field of study known as transpersonal psychology, where the West’s emphasis on material processes of self-realization become mutually dependent on the East’s emphasis on consciousness journeys of self-annihilation.

"The interfaith embodiment of a quantum spirituality is based not on the Enlightenment search for what the world religions hold in common but on the multitudinousness and uniqueness of each particular vision of truth." (129-130)