Having read Huston Smith's The World's Religions 10 years ago in community college I was suprized to see his latest book,The Soul of Christianity featured last year at Borders. What I found even more shocking was that this highly respected world religions scholar identifies himself as a Christian. Though his worldview is far from the evangelical camp, his tenets of what is essential to the Christian Worldview are profound in that they are both expanding and exclusive:
1. The Christian world is Infinite
2. The Infinite includes the finite
3. The contents of the finite world are hierarchically ordered
4. Causation is from the top down, from the Infinite down through the descending degrees of reality
5. In descending to finitude, the singularity of the infinite splays into multiplicity
6. As the virtues expand and begin to overlap and merge
7. Absolute perfection reigns
8. Everything that is outside of us is also inside of us
9. We cannot know the infinite
10. Revelation is multiple in both scope and degree.
11. Reports have to be interpreted- hense the science of exegesis
12. Exegesis that stops with the literal meaning of the text cannot do that text full justice
13. There are two distinct and complementary ways of knowing, rational and intuitive
14. Religions likewise have outsides and insides: they have outer, exoteric forms that house inner, esoteric cores.
15. Outside of Revelation's beam we live in darkness.
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