Do you think Jesus might have been misunderstood when he said that he and the Father were one?
Recently in my studies of world religion I came across something that gave me an interesting idea. Some quick background: There is an Islamic philosophy known as Sufism. Many Sufi mystics during the Islamic Golden Age wrote that while meditating, they felt as though they became one with God. This was not to suggest that they believed they "were" God in the sense of having his intellect and abilities. They believed that, through meditation and by God's will, the psychic barriers between themselves and God had been broken down and their minds had become one with him, the source of all thought.
Later, a Muslim named Mansur al-Hallaj would be imprisoned and brutally executed for blasphemy: he had cried out in a state of ecstasy "I am the Truth!" (or "al-Haqq", an alternate name for Allah). Like other Sufi mystics he believed in a unification of man and God, and at the time of his death he apparently believed that he and God were one and the same. Al-Hallaj gladly accepted his fate, praying for his executioners to be forgiven and believing his death to have redemptive significance. The parallels between Jesus and al-Hallaj are quite blatant--indeed, al-Hallaj admired Jesus and held the unorthodox (for Muslims) belief that Christ was God incarnated, and no doubt this had a lot to do with why he was executed.
This got me thinking. We already know Jesus was well ahead of his time. Could it be that when he claimed to be God, he meant it in the same sense as al-Hallaj would mean it centuries later? A sense that he had achieved oneness with God through introspective practices such as meditation, rather than a literal belief that he was God in human form? This would fit with how he clearly makes a distinction between himself and God, and would explain troublesome passages of the Gospels that otherwise depict Jesus praying to himself, or claiming not to have knowledge of certain things when he should be omniscient. This obviously puts Christian theology in a whole new light. Interestingly, it solves Lewis's "lunatic, liar, or lord" trilemma neatly by showing how a perfectly sane and honest Jesus could have claimed to be one with God, without actually being one with God. Perhaps this can allow those who don't accept the divinity of Jesus to develop a greater appreciation for one of the most significant moral teachers of human history.
I don't know why I'm bothering with an honest philosophical question when the usual fare of this section is trolling and bashing each other's beliefs, but I guess I mostly want to see if anyone will reply. Like all of my questions, it is intended as a consciousness-raising exercise, but this time it's directed to Christians and non-Christians alike.
A couple notes before I choose the best answer:
@Shinigami: I'm not sure how the rest of the passage discredits my interpretation? If anything it supports it: Jesus says the Father is in him and he is in the Father, which is actually even less direct that al-Hallaj's "I am the Truth (Allah)!"
@Messenger of God: That's cool, but I'm not a Muslim. I was raised a Christian, and am now a pantheist studying various world religions. Also, your message comes off a bit hostile. No animosity towards Christians was intended, I simply offered a new perspective on the Gospels.
@Kim W: True enough. Here is where I will diverge with Biblical fundamentalists, but the Gospel according to John is heavily theological rather than a cut-and-dry summary of Jesus's life and times, and I feel that it is possible that early Christians such as John misunderstood Jesus.