This week, I offer the first of four issues [today’s column discusses pp 1-30] on John Philip Newell’s 2008 book “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation”, in preparation for our after-church book study on Sunday April 7^th, which itself is preparation for Newell’s visit to St John’s on May 10^th through 12^th. You are encouraged to purchase this fine book and read along with me over the next four weeks. Copies of many of Newell’s books will be for sale (and signing!) when he is with us.

One of the ways I measure the value of a book is by how many notes I scribble in its margins. I like to engage the text, talk back to it, annotate it with ideas and references that arise as I read. According to the scribbles I’ve made thus far, “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation” by John Philip Newell is a gem. I chose this book to read and discuss with you at the last session of our Lenten speaker series—a series which regards how people of faith can make lifestyle and behavioral changes that better help us care for our planet. The more I read Newell’s book, however, the more it seems to regard the healing of our own selves.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Newell opens by reminding us that in the Celtic tradition, Eden is not a geographical place from which sinful humanity is separated. Rather, Eden is located in the deepest part of our own being. We live in exile from it, because we live in exile from our truest selves. This calls to mind the Gospel of Luke (17:21) where Jesus tells the Pharisees, “The kingdom of heaven is within you”, or as some translations say, “among you” or “in your midst”. Heaven, Eden, Paradise—they are not distant but rather lie within us. We forget, suggests Newell, that when Adam and Eve were driven from Eden, the garden itself was not destroyed. They simply lost access to it, lost access to the truest and most divine part of themselves.

Newell also reminds us that even though Adam and Eve were compelled to leave the garden, they were still made in the image and likeness of God. The image of God, he writes, is “the essence of our being” and “the core of the human soul… We are sacred [simply]because we have been born.” Therefore, our wisdom, creativity, sense of right and wrong, and love are larger and deeper than our ignorance, barrenness, apathy, fear, or hatred. In a second-century manuscript, an encounter between Christ and John is recorded, and in it Christ tells John that humanity has fallen asleep and forgotten who it is, forgotten its divine beginnings. Christ calls himself “the memory of the fullness”—our true nature and our relationship to all things. Christ has come, writes Newell, to wake humanity up.

How do we return to a state of being or state of mind where we truly recall our divine origins? French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said we get there via grace. de Chardin calls grace “the seed of resurrection” sown in us, that assists us in reconnecting with “the wisdom that was born with us in our mother’s womb.” Grace permits us to be whole and secure in who we are so that we are then able to lose ourselves in love. Sin, says Newell, desensitizes us to the divinity deep within us and leads us to treat ourselves and others “as if we were not made in the image of God.”

Christianity has unfortunately tended to define human beings as sinful, totally missing the fact that at the core of our being is the image of God. Newell stresses that this is not to downplay the depth, breadth, pervasiveness, or seriousness of sin. But it is to say that as deep as sin may be rooted in us, “deeper still is the Light from which we come.” We find healing from sin not by looking away from it, he says, but by looking intently into it, and through it, to the deeper Light that is the source, center, and life of all things. If when we encounter the other we look at them expecting to find that Light, we will treat them much differently than if we encounter them expecting to find sin and brokenness.

Newell acknowledges that sin is so widespread it lurks “inside the door of the womb”, but he and Celtic Christian theology reject the doctrine of original sin—the teaching (since the 4^th century) that human beings are born sinful because we are descended from Adam. The doctrine of original sin disempowers us, says Newell, teaching that “what is deepest in us is opposed to God rather than of God”. An early Welsh Christian named Pelagius became a noted teacher in Palestine and Rome until he tangled with Augustine and the institutional church over original sin (and other teachings as well). Newell says that the doctrine of original sin served the institutional church (Rome) because it permitted them to be the guardians of truth and purity, and to subdue people and compel their obedience in exchange for forgiveness and favor. It created, says Newell, “a religion of dependency”.

Contrast this with Celtic Christianity whose adherents taught that wisdom, dignity, authority, and truth are owned by the individual and are not the exclusive property of a religious institution. Newell says that Pelagius taught “when we look into the face of a newborn child, we are looking into the face of God freshly born among us.” This doesn’t discount our propensity to sin or our need for Christ’s saving grace. It means instead that we are at our core, holy. Newell says that Pelagius’ teachings got twisted and perverted by the church in Rome, he was branded a heretic, and sadly his holistic perspective on the intrinsic goodness of humanity was all but lost to mainstream Christianity for centuries.

Newell notes that the doctrine of original sin has been so long tolerated by Christians and is so woven into the fabric of our liturgy and beliefs that it haunts both our worship spaces and our lives. And so, believing ourselves to be intrinsically bad, we hang our hopes on a savior who will offer us personal salvation. The peril of the model of a personal savior, says Newell, is that we allow him to lead “us into a salvation that forsakes the earth and the rest of humanity.” I touched upon this peril in my 2018 Easter sermon, when I spoke of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s perspective on resurrection—namely, that Christ came to save all humanity and not to be our personal escort into heaven.

And Newell points out that “Western Christianity’s understanding of salvation is that we are adopted by God rather than being originally and essentially children of God.” This understanding sadly sets us up to “become something other than ourselves rather than to become truly ourselves.” We are, says Newell, “most deeply divine precisely when we are most deeply human.” Newell dives into the Greek of St Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and finds that the verse which gave rise to the adoption doctrine (4:5) means less “to be adopted” and more “to claim our inheritance”. This has bearing on how we view ourselves: not as apart from God but as of God.

You are holy, because the Lord your God who made you in the divine likeness and image is holy.