Heretical Aussie priests lauds "avatars," Arians, and the "Cosmic Christ"

In an audio interview with LiveNews.com.au, Austrialian priest Fr. Peter Dresser expresses his apparent surprise—"dismay"—that his book, God is Big. Real Big., has some people upset. After all, he says, he is merely trying to "marry" theology and science in that book, and he says the quotes used in various media reports were taken out of context. Fair enough. Let's give the chap a fair shake. What does the book actually say?

Fortunately for us, the text of the book is available online. And the Preamble wastes no time in setting the stage for a collision between the open-minded seekers of truth and the narrow-minded guardians of dogma and doctrine:

It is well nigh that we begin to think and feel with the heart and mind of Pooh if we are going to find our way through the Forest with our God.  For far too long our Christian religion and Catholic tradition have been overburdened by the Owls and Rabbits among the doctors and theologians of the church.   The beautiful inspirational message of Jesus has been hidden and indeed in many cases destroyed by the learned and the clever. What should have been Good News has been anything but that, and the magnificent message of a freeing and liberating God with us has been lost in the muddle of doctrine and dogma.

Fr. Dresser insists that a central goal of his work is to make Catholic beliefs "relevant," which is almost always a code word for "reworking and changing doctrine and dogma to fit my personal likes and dislikes." He writes:

It is time to make our God more meaningful in our contemporary world, to allow the man Jesus to be more authentic, and to make our Catholic religion more relevant. We need to listen to the voice within us because that in essence is what God is – a presence that we discover in the very depths of our lives, in our capacity to live, in our ability to love and in the courage simply to be.  We need to listen to that voice that reasons beyond Cleverness and knows beyond Knowledge.  It is indeed a search for truth and the search for truth will always be an exciting and vigorous and rewarding exercise in this exciting scientific world we live in.  In many ways it will be an attempt to converge theology and science in an attempt to seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of our faith as St. Anselm attempted to do all those years ago – faith that seeks understanding.

This book is not a theological treatise, although matters of theology are naturally raised.  Neither is it a scientific document, although scientific details are presented. It is an invitation to readers to rethink some aspects of their Catholic faith in their lived experience in the modern world.  Hopefully this will raise their level of faith development and allow them to live meaningfully with their God and to be nourished meaningfully by the teachings and practices of the Catholic religion. Whilst some areas of Catholic belief are examined critically, the exercise is not meant to disparage beliefs but to allow these beliefs to speak with more relevance in the “Forest of Real Life”. And once this is done, we might be able to stand with even greater awe and reverence and wonder and appreciation of the deep and mysterious riches that our religion has acquired over the centuries.

Ah, yes: listen to the voice within us, rethink doctrine, be more relevant. This is certainly fresh and original (ha!), just like tie-die t-shirts, tuning in and dropping out, and burning draft cards. What about listening more carefully to the voice of our mother, the Church, thinking about specific doctrines more deeply in light of the whole of the Faith (using the analogy of faith and considering the hierarchy of truths), and seeing how the deposit of faith (which is protected by the Magisterium) can be properly expressed in ways that reach modern man without changing the meaning of what the Church has always believed and taught? Well, one reason that Fr. Dresser doesn't take the latter path is because he has been drinking too heavily from the Grateful Dead bottle marked "Spirit of Vatican II Kool-Aid," and therefore has a serious problem with the Magisterium, as he expresses in a September 2008 piece on the Catholica.com.au site:

As a bright eyed twenty year old I watched the unfolding of the Second Vatican Council. I was bouyed with hope when I shared the thoughts of Pope John 23rd for a fresh beginning for the Church, opening the windows, letting in the Holy Spirit...and so on. Even the man himself was an inspiration. I drank the teachings of Vatican 11 like one drinks a fine wine and saw a beautiful future for the Church where Jesus would once again be proclaimed as brother and friend for all people and his memory would be meaningfully celebrated in a new theological framework and enhanced liturgical experiences...and so on.

... The Institution continues to exist but the liberating, freeing and inclusive teachings of Jesus remain hidden behind a quagmire of bureaucratic nonsense and doctrine and dogma which remain quaintly irrelevant in the world we live in. We have to regain the plot. Urgently. And that, I believe will require a renewed aggiornamento...but that, unfortunately, will take some time.

I'd bet good money the man never did read the actual documents of the Council. Regardless, this brings us to the notable section of Fr. Dresser's book on the divinity of Jesus Christ, the fifth chapter, titled, "Jesus the Avatar." It opens with an explanation of what an avatar is and the claim that Jesus was one avatar among many:

Throughout the history of the world there have been many such figures, almost transcendent figures who are able to give an almost singular expression to the Spirit of God.  The Hindus refer to such people as Avatars – divine incarnations or divine manifestations. The word itself is derived from the Sanskrit Avatara and is translated as descent.  In Hinduism an avatar is the incarnation of a deity in human or animal form to counteract some particular evil in the world. The term usually refers to the ten appearances of Vishnu, and the number of Vishnu’s avatars is sometimes extended or their identities changed, according to local preferences.  Thus Krishna in some areas is elevated to the rank of a deity and his half-brother included as an avatar.  In the religious poem the Bhagavadgita Krishna tells Arjuna: Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness then I send forth Myself.  For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of righteousness, I come into being from age to age.  In these people the Logos or the Word of God or the cosmic purpose of the universe, or the principle of reason, or the outpouring of God’s goodness, power, light and love, makes present in a tangible human way the transcendent God.  God speaks to us and shows himself to us in a comprehensive way in the life and teachings of these unique persons, these avatars.   In them the transcendent God becomes immanent.  Early in John’s Gospel the words of the writer could easily be painting the man Jesus as an avatar: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

Put simply, he denies the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and he hints at what he makes more explicit shortly: that Jesus was not God in the sense that the Church and the vast majority of Christians think he is. I quote at length so that the context is absolutely clear:

Now comes an important issue.  If we worship Christ or Krishna or Buddha or Moses or Mohammed, are we worshipping God?  The answer is probably (and a rather tentative probably) and the rationale behind such a response is that we are not worshipping a man as God, we are not worshipping a person.  We actually are worshipping God himself, the impersonal-personal Existence, in and through the Incarnation.[i] We are not worshipping the man but worshipping God in and through the man. Maybe we could say that we are worshipping the divine component in the avatar - but then we would be guilty of dualistic thinking!  Jesus and the other avatars did not simply encase themselves in a human body; they actually used the human body to express the divine.  In a sense the human and the divine became one. This was one of the issues of the early Church Councils – whether or not Jesus was a divine person or a human person.  The conclusion arrived at was that Jesus was a divine person but having both a divine and a human nature.  So he was God in person according to the teaching of the Church. The conclusion of the learned and the clever! But one has to raise a disclaimer in all these matters. God is big.  Real big. No human being can ever be God. And Jesus was a human being.  It is as simple as that!  It would have been much better and certainly much healthier had the Arians had their way in the days of those early Church Councils.  They insisted that Jesus was a human person.  Certainly today among many theologians the conclusion has been arrived at which is fundamentally closer to an Arian way of thinking. Pooh would understand.

Barbara Thiering in an article “A God for our Times”[ii] claims that to worship Jesus is to worship an idol. That is to say, she cannot accept that this Jesus was the Son of God.  He is someone to be admired very much for what he did politically but Thiering and others refuse to worship a human being.  No human figure can represent a God who is far beyond the personal.

I think Jesus would undoubtedly agree.  I am quite sure that although he felt an extremely close intimacy with a God whom he called Abba, he himself would never have thought of himself as God or a god.  A prophet perhaps – but never a god. After all Jesus was a Jew and a good one at that.  It would have been the ultimate blasphemy to have seen himself as God. The problem is that Barbara Thiering and countless other theologians and millions of Christians take the Scriptures and perhaps Church Councils too literally.

The people who made Jesus into a God – or to be more theologically correct, the Incarnate Son of God – were a breakaway group of Jews, Christians, who claimed that this person Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed One of God, the Christos.  Subsequently there developed over the early church period some theological reflections regarding this man Jesus which ultimately lead to the Council of Nicaea which encoded the major beliefs of the mainstream Christian churches today, including the divinity of Jesus.  I want to return to this whole matter regarding Jesus being God a little later because it is a concept that not only does violence to my own intelligence but must be a sticking point for millions of people trying to make some kind of sense of the Christian religion. The concept of Jesus being an avatar makes considerable contemporary sense. It does not detract in any way from Jesus being a human person, it explains more easily his relationship with his God, and it helps us to read and respect the lives and teachings of other avatars - something very important for us living in the global village.  <snip>

It is unfortunate, I feel, that little thought has been given to this profound theological reflection by John’s community and it is urgent that we distinguish clearly between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.  In other words the person Jesus preached a liberating doctrine for his own particular time and for those people who aligned themselves with his teaching, the first Christians.  But that same Jesus apart from his historical personage also had a kind of cosmic significance for all people and for all of creation.  The Jesus in John’s Gospel is the Christos or the anointed one, the Jesus of faith.  According to most traditional Christians this Jesus of faith has no significance and makes no sense apart from the particular historical Jesus of Nazareth. It is at this point that Quantum Theology, espoused by Diarmuid O’Murchu and others, adds the cosmic dimension.

Quantum Theology tends to reflect more genuinely on the words of John’s Gospel.  It considers the Cosmic Christ, the God of universal life and love, whose revelation unfolds over more than 16 billion years of evolution, to be the originating mystery from which we devise all our divine images and personages.  All the god-figures of the different religions, including Christianity, emanate from this cosmic originating source.

O’Murchu states that “consequently all the events narrated in the Christian Gospels, particularly those that impact upon universal human and planetary yearnings –beginnings (e.g., the Infancy Narratives) and endings (e.g., Calvary, resurrection), miracles, parables – are particularisations of a more universal narrative of faith and meaning….They offer a universal symbolic significance as well as having an immediate, practical application.”[iii] To put it quite simply, the Cosmic Christ came before the historical Jesus.  Indeed all our prophets, deified or not, are expressions of the Word as expressed in John’s Gospel.

To put it another way, the events that happened to Jesus and the response that Jesus made to them and about them were of particular events of his time but they are particularisations of a higher global and universal impact.  So, for example, the Calvary experience of Jesus has a symbolic meaning of planetary and global proportions, “a dimension largely ignored by orthodox religion and theology.”[iv] Similarly it must be said that, although real experiences for Jesus, the flow of events that befell him must be seen in an evolutionary context. They have a gigantic symbolic meaning of planetary and global proportions.  The flow of good and evil, of life and death, of life giving and life destruction.

As opposed to the clear teachings of the Catechism:

The unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man.

During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.The first heresies denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God's Son "come in the flesh".  But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. The first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is "begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father", and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God "came to be from things that were not" and that he was "from another substance" than that of the Father. (pars 464-65)

And, finally, in what might be the most damning statement that I read (and I've not read the entire booklet yet):

I tell this little story because if someone were to ask me how many gods there were, I would reply rather uneasily that there is only one.  I suspect, however, that there are as many gods as there are people who believe in them.  Thus we have the God of the Christians, the God of the Jews (and in early Jewish history there were several gods), the God of Islam, the God of the Egyptians, and so on. It is extremely important that we respect each other’s God(s) and that we treat with great respect and tolerance and sensitivity the religious beliefs of all people – although I admit it is tediously difficult to remain patient with some fundamentalists, heartened as I am that such rampant fundamentalism is on the decline.  More about this later. Indeed in terms of the current communication and technological revolution which could, at least on paper, finish up with one world, one culture, various religions and their Gods will stand side by side.  Christianity will have to stand alongside Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and so on.  One cannot be said to be better than another. Each creed or religion has its own orthodoxy and its own experience and understanding of God.  One’s God cannot be said to be better than another’s.  For a Christian to state that the fullness of redemption and salvation is to be found in Jesus Christ is not an acceptable statement for other faiths or religious traditions.  And it is offensive to proclaim it as universal truth.

Hey, let's play "Count The Heresies!", the nifty board game with fancy words and orthodox rules: Polytheism, syncretism, indifferentism, relativism, etc., etc., etc.

And this man is a priest!

I don't know which is more amazing and bewildering: that Fr. Dresser thinks that adopting and promoting such overtly heretical notions should be part of an ongoing discussion among Catholics when the discussion has long since been settled, or that he can say, without any apparent sense of irony, "I'm dismayed that this has caused controversy." He is either a fool or thinks that others are fools. I'll let other people—hopefully his superiors—figure that out. But, for the moment, this will hopefully shed a bit more light on what's going down Down Under.

P.S.: Since I know some might read this and think, "It's so impolite, harsh, nasty, judgmental, and meanspirited to say that Fr. Dresser is a heretic," be assured that I am not using the term in some loose, polemical fashion, but am employing the definition of heresy used in the Catechism and the Code of Canon Law: "Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same..." (CCC 2089; CIC, can. 751). if the shoe fits...

• Australian priest: "No human being can ever be God..." (October 30, 2008)
• A Short Guide to Ancient Heresies | Kenneth D. Whitehead
• Selections from Jesus, The Apostles, and the Early Church | Pope Benedict XVI
• Jesus in the Gospel of Luke | Christoph Cardinal Schönborn
• A Shepherd Like No Other | Excerpt from Behold, God's Son! Encountering Christ in the Gospel of Mark | Christoph Cardinal Schönborn
• Encountering Christ in the Gospel | Excerpt from My Jesus | Christoph Cardinal Schönborn
• The Truth of the Resurrection | Excerpts from Introduction to Christianity | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Seeing Jesus in the Gospel of John | Excerpts from On The Way to Jesus Christ | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• A Jesus Worth Dying For | A Review of On The Way to Jesus Christ | Justin Nickelsen
• The Divinity of Christ | Peter Kreeft
• Jesus Is Catholic | Hans Urs von Balthasar
• The Religion of Jesus | Blessed Columba Marmion | From Christ, The Ideal of the Priest

Comments

[Nick Milne]

Throughout the history of the world there have been many such figures, almost transcendent figures who are able to give an almost singular expression to the Spirit of God.

Almost, but not quite.

I also find it telling that the good father asks his readers to emulate Winnie the Pooh in their approach to God. The bear in question, though a gentleman of eminent quality, is not well-known for being described in terms of his innocence or lack of guile, as one might describe the children our Lord commanded us to emulate, but rather as being one with "very little brain." This would seem to indicate that Fr. Dresser knows his readers well, and has descended (transcended?) from Other Realms to be their avatar.

[Victoria]

Welcome to my world - Catholicism Down Under - check out St Mary's Brisbane as well. *sigh*

[Ed Peters]

I tend to be one of those folks who, seeing bishops fail to excommunicate and/or expell from the clergy a given appalling priest, say to myself, "Well, there might a reason I don't know about here." In this case, however, I cannot remotely imagine what that would be.

[Salome]

Barbara Thiering? Oh, Jesus, save us!

[Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto]

It is a pity that the Bishop who was in charge of Father Dresser until his recent retirement, did not act promptly and efficiently; I do not think your thoughts on Father Dresser were strong enough. The man sustains a Heresy that was solved at the beginning of our Church's History. It is time that Bishops do their work more appropiately. When it comes to Heresy, someone in the Curia should have acted quickly. Where is Cardinal Levada on this ?

[Michael]

Unfortunately the original text of Fr. Dresser's work entitled, "God is Big, Real Big" seems no longer to be avalable. It has been withdrawn from the website. All that one would find at the address is Fr. Dresser's retraction, apology and 'explanation'.

[Loretta]

He needs either: excommunicated, or, Haldol.