The Great Mystery Was Always There
#indigenous theology #apophatic christianity #mystical synthesis #religious studies #decolonize metaphysics
Funny how no one talks about the fact that Native American spiritualists probably had more in common with Christian mystics than with modern evangelical Christians.
While missionaries were busy trying to replace Wakan Tanka with a white-bearded sky-God named Jehovah, they completely missed that the Lakota were already doing negative theology — seeing the Divine as an ineffable force beyond name, gender, or form.
Wakan Tanka doesn’t mean “Great Spirit” in the European sense. It means “Great Mystery.” Not personal. Not impersonal. Beyond both. Not a guy. Not a ghost. But the Ground of Being itself.
Sounds a lot like Pseudo-Dionysius or Meister Eckhart if you ask me. But instead of reverence, Western colonialists reduced Indigenous beliefs to “primitive animism.”
No academic thought to say: “Hey, maybe this isn’t myth. Maybe it’s metaphysics.”
This is why I’m convinced that Indigenous cosmologies were more “Platonic” than the literalist theologies that colonized them.
And yet, no one in religious studies seems to be talking about this. Why? Because we’re still trapped in a Eurocentric idea of what “real theology” looks like.
But the Great Mystery doesn’t care for your credentials.
It was here long before Plato. It will be here long after systematic theology folds in on itself.