Not since I read C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity have I encountered a work so comprehensive in its scope and vivid in its portrayal of the Christian religion. Whether he speaks of God's relationship with Man or even of God's nature, he seems to get far more than others of what Christ was talking about in the Gospels. In fact, I believe he managed to sum up the most important themes of Christianity in a single paragraph. Here it is:
"This is what Jesus does: he comes to integrate, to make whole, to take all the bits and pieces and disintegrated parts and bring them together, reconciling us to ourselves and to the God who never stops inviting us forward - the God who, reintegrating and reintegrated, finally is truly all in all."
In other words, Bell says that God brings the pieces of the world together into a transcendent, all-encompassing whole. This may not be what you have heard about the Christian or the Mormon religion. Growing up in the Church I had the impression that we placed an emphasis on separateness - between man and God, between man and man, and between the members of the Godhead. After all, don't we all have bodies? Doesn't that mean that "oneness" is out of the question? Actually, divine embodiment implies exactly the opposite, (more on that later) and we can find evidence for Bell's interpretation throughout scripture. For example, take this prayer by Jesus from the New Testament:
"[I pray] that they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me." -John 17:21-23
and this remark from the Doctrine and Covenants:
"For the fulness of times, in the which I will gather together in one all things, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth." -D&C 27:13
and finally, this rather humorous short story from the Gospel of Thomas:
"A man said to him, 'Tell my brothers to divide my father's possessions with me.'
He said to him, 'O man, who has made me a divider?'He turned to his disciples and said to them, 'I am not a divider, am I?'" -saying 72
God takes the various separate bits and pieces of the universe and glues them all together, and in the process transforms all conflict into harmony and unity. This is what Christ taught, and this is the essence of Christianity. After all, the phrase "at-one-ment", which all Mormons are no doubt familiar with, isn't just a trite play on words - it is the actual origin of the corresponding term. The glorious good news of the Gospel is that conflict and fear need not dominate our lives, for God puts us at one with Him, with one another, and with all other things.
This oneness goes deeper than you might expect. For we are now speaking of a God who unifies opposites, one who isn't found in, say, only "the beautiful" or "the inspiring", but the "ugly" and the "gut-wrenching", too. This God doesn't only stay on one line of the demarcation, but acts equally from both sides to bring them both together (good and evil are an exception, but I won't go into that at the moment). But God transcends one set of opposites which are particularly relevant, which I will treat next.
In mainstream Christianity, the second member of the Trinity has an odd characteristic - he is both fully Man and fully God. This seems a little odd, doesn't it? After all, mustn't it be an either/or situation? This is actually an excellent example of the tendency of which I speak, for God and Man in this conception are opposites, unified by Jesus Christ in a simultaneously paradoxical and glorious synthesis. In this conception, the finite and the infinite, the sacred and the pedestrian, the divine and the human become completely and entirely one. But Jesus Christ is of course only one individual, leaving the rest of us out in this glorious fusion of divinity and mortality. It make one wonder: why not have it apply to all of us? The doctrines of Mormonism describe precisely this, as in the Mormon conception of the universe Gods, men, and angels are all one and the same species. Anything you can say about one you could potentially say about the others, and so we too would be included in this union, this majestic dance between the limited and the limitless.
The real world is not divided, separated, or divvied up in any way, shape, or form. It is seamless, moving from one part to another without any barrier separating them. After all, "all spirit is matter", (D&C 131: 7) meaning that nothing separates the spiritual from the physical, or indeed any extreme from its supposed opposite. This does lead to contradictions; how can an infinite being dwell in a finite body, after all? But I believe that rejecting contradictions does entirely the wrong thing, for it builds up walls between the various parts of our experience. To quote Christ, one could say that by refusing to accept contradiction and paradox, one "serves two masters" - acknowledging the existence of two realities which completely deny each other. You see, it is only by embracing conflict and contradiction that we can ever hope to transcend it.
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