What I mean by crossinity is two things, first I mean the cross-in-thee. Paul made it very clear that he was not presenting a particular creed or dogmatic system of thought but made it clear that he was preaching nothing but his Messiah crucified, that is planted, and the Messiah psyche sprouting to then “seed” humans like a seed into a pot of soil. His mythos was one of vegetative transformation.
So by crossinity, I mean dying to your old self among selves, and become a new self on the continuum of selves. Peterson past Jordan Peterson rights in Maps of Meaning:
Christian morality can therefore be reasonably regarded as the “plan of action”whose aim is re-establishment, or establishment, or attainment (sometimes in the “hereafter”) of the “kingdom of God,”the ideal future. The idea that man needs redemption –and that re-establishment of a long-lost Paradise might constitute such redemption –appear as common themes of mythology, among members of exceedingly diverse and long-separated human cultures. 24
(Location 689-694).
Hence, the cross as the symbol of death to Form (i.e. to identity, to clinging to ideology and selfing as Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it) and with the cross-in-you, taking up your cross, facing death of Ego, of limiting self-concept, and courageously conquering your inner dragon of chaos and outward obstacles, to “die” to a self-defeating self-concept and rise up into a new creation of selfhood.
This mythology is acting out in practical terms when we see the weakling becoming strong, the cowardly becoming courageous, the extremely unpopular becoming more popular, those who are in poverty rising to the middle class in America, the shy learning to socialize, the jerk become kinder, the bully humbling himself and overcoming his shame, the criminal undergoing redemption of character, etc.
Thus, I mean the cross in you as the ability to reform yourself, to get knocked down and get back up again. Like the process of the caterpillar into a butterfly called chrysalis. Crossing into adversity and crossing over to triumph.
According to the scholarship of Paul Middleton, Paul led a cult of psychological transfiguration that sought denying the human body and earthly life itself in rebellion of one’s inner innate tendency toward vices and he was also in rebellion of Roman religion and dominance; and Mark’s gospel was basically akin to a religious tract generating a kind of kamikaze pilots against Rome, with disciples acting in opposition of Rome that is run by evil spirits (pagan gods); thus it was a war-strategy, conquer Rome by defying Caesar which will inaugurate the return of Emperor Jesus to destroy Emperor Caesar; so that to defy Rome was to defy the-satan (The Adversary).
Well, obviously there is no more Rome to fight against and the apocalyptic expectations of Paul and Mark never happened as promised. But is there a way to reinterpret Paul and Mark for today and thus allow them to provide practical value from a psychological perspective despite most of what they wrote applied only to the first century under Roman subjugation with the expectation of the Messiah returning in their lifetime?
The first solution is to see the Bible as an evolution in thought, which I will discuss later. For now, scholars have pointed out that while Paul and Mark were apocalyptic expecting the Kingdom would come soon, the Gospel of John reverses this theme and instead argues that the Kingdom, the Realm of God, was here already. It was not coming later, but here now. So as John Shelby Spong advocates, the Gospel of John is perhaps the way forward in theology for rational biblical-scholarship minded Christians.
The second way to interpret Paul and Mark in the 21st century is by seeing the transformation themes of “Christ in you” and “taking up your cross” in psychological terms.
In fact, most Christians already do this. When they talk about taking up your cross they do not mean what the gospel of Mark literally meant; which was seeking to enter a Roman Court and reject Caesar as Emperor and rejecting Roman religion; knowing you would be sentenced to death for doing so but that by doing so you were demonstrating faithful allegiance to Emperor Messiah and that would inaugurate the end times and you we're destroying the adversary and guaranteeing your high seat and position in Jesus's future reign on earth as the new emperor.
Obviously that first century historical context is no longer applicable in modern American society. Instead, most Christians when they talk about taking up your cross they talk about living a noble life of virtue sentinus and receiving persecution for doing so. So modern Christians already reinterpret the original meaning of the text.
In his book 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson talks about Pinocchio becoming a real boy through a transformation, and in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, on page 15, Joseph Campbell writes:
The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival —a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.
Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the Christ figure as an archetype of our own recurring palingenesia, our dying to an old self and giving birth to a new self through each successive tragedy and triumph, etc. For example here is is Jordan Peterson describing a dream of his in his book, 12 Rules for Life:
I knew that cathedrals were constructed in the shape of a cross, and that the point under the dome was the centre of the cross. I knew that the cross was simultaneously, the point of greatest suffering, the point of death and transformation, and the symbolic centre of the world. That was not somewhere I wanted to be. I managed to get down, out of the heights—out of the symbolic sky—back to safe, familiar, anonymous ground. I don’t know how. Then, still in my dream, I returned to my bedroom and my bed and tried to return to sleep and the peace of unconsciousness. As I relaxed, however, I could feel my body transported. A great wind was dissolving me, preparing to propel me back to the cathedral, to place me once again at that central point. There was no escape. It was a true nightmare. I forced myself awake. The curtains behind me were blowing in over my pillows. Half asleep, I looked at the foot of the bed. I saw the great cathedral doors. I shook myself completely awake and they disappeared.
My dream placed me at the centre of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me months to understand what this meant. During this time, I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual. The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted. It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
(Loc. 377-388)
In his prior book Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson writes:
Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero –the “savior”–who upholds his association with the creative “Word”in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.
(Loc. 315-317)
So while Paul and Mark’s context is largely obsolete, as in we no longer think pagan gods are demons flying around causing earthquakes and disease, and the Roman government is no more; yet the psychology of facing the mythic Dragon, conquering Oppressors, both within us and without, is worth salvaging and recasting into pragmatic usefulness via Jungian psychology Joseph Campbell's monomyth.
So that the cross symbol becomes a reminder to face the call to adventure on Joseph Campbell’s Hero Journey, and undergo the belly of the whale and the wasteland, to re-emerge from chaos and dis-order into a new re-ordered self, a hero.
The second thing I mean by crossinity is seeing the symbol of the crossbeam as representative of a quadrant representing the four aspects of the Divine, as Carl Jung suggested. As Jordan Peterson writes in Maps of Meaning:
First is unexplored territory –the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory –the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory –the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory “Word”...
We are adapted to this “world of divine characters,” much as the “objective world.” The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in “reality” a forum for action, as well as a place of things.
(Loc 277-279)
So the divine characters of the godhead -- which originated from the human unconscious and has acted as adaptive schema as a means of orchestrating our world and psyche -- I find to be more psychologically integrative when we follow the Jungian model of the godhead: so that you do not have a post-Constantine dogma of the Trinity, of a single Dad, Bachelor Son, and a Pigeon (or Dove), but what I have coined a Crossinity: as a quadrant representing the characters of Divine Family, which can be interpreted from the Bible itself: as in a Fatherly “Breath of Force” (YHVH) and the spoken “Voice of Creation” (Jordan Peterson comments on), the Son as the Masculine Divine as The Word (Scripture as Order); and Motherly Wisdom (Sophia, see Luke 7:35) and the Feminine Divine as “Warmth of Presence” (The Shekinah). For example,
In first-century Judaism one can find the idea of God as manifested as the Word, the Logos. Judaism has the idea of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God descending to earth and dwelling among human beings. The prologue of the Gospel of John makes perfectly good sense in that context (Source: http://www.uscatholic.org/church/2012/09/jewish-take-jesus-amy-jill-levine-talks-gospels).
So what we have in the New Testament, is the combining of the divine masculine (The Logos) and the feminine presence (Shekinah) being merged into the Christ-figure; as he acts as the manifestation of fatherly YHVH and motherly Sophia into one archetypal hero figure: with the mother Mary (the “Mother of God”) giving birth to the son Jesus; and Jesus manifesting both feminine and masculine qualities in his character by being both strong yet compassionate, acting as a caring healer yet speaking with masculine authority, etc.
The motherly divine Wisdom of Luke 7:35 is also infused into the Jesus-figure. Jesus is mythologically part human with the human mother Mary, so that his humanity is given to him through the female human. So that by logic his human qualities would be of the female human while his masculine qualities would be from the divine fatherly energy, combined with the feminine Sophia imparting her divine nature to him as he represents her divine energy as well by being called the Logos or Word.
As John Crossan writes in his book How to Read the Bible and Still be Christian while quoting from the Book of Wisdom:
Proverbs 8 and Luke 7:35 both speak of the divine feminine. So that the Godhead is not described as a merely a paternal “all men’s club,” negating the maternal and feminine aspects of the divine; yet is based in the Bible and retains the original monotheism. For an example of this see The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. Or The IVP Women's Bible Commentary by Catherine Clark Kroeger and Mary J. Evans.
What all the great religions and philosophies and psychologies essentially advocate is what I call virtue-centeredness. In the Vice and Virtue Lists of the New Testament at http://bcresources.net, one learns that the New Testament (from now on NT) builds upon several schools of thought, including Greek philosophy and culture, such as the Stoics, to create virtue and vice dichotomies toward creating high character. The article states that “the vice and virtues lists [in the NT] are discussed in the context of passages addressing love; the virtue lists often either begin with or progress to love--sometimes beyond it to focus on perseverance in the midst of persecution.” Thus, the NT naturally produces synergy via constant advocacy of the virtue of love (i.e. compassion, other-focused, charity, friendship). The love virtue features very strongly throughout the 27 documents of the NT.
The articles states that one of the other possible sources of the NT vice and virtues lists is The Wisdom of Solomon (the work of a Hellenistic Jew), the article quotes Wisdom 8:7 (NRSV):
And if anyone loves righteousness,
her labors are virtues;
for she teaches self-control and prudence,
justice and courage;
nothing in life is more profitable for mortals than these.
In the article Sophia: The Christian Mystic’s Path To Wisdom by Antonia Blumberg, we learn from Elaine Pagels that Sophia is significant as personified Wisdom. She says:
“In the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is a feminine being….She is God’s partner, or darling, his delight. The idea is that wisdom is a personified feminine being who is with God and helps him out.”
In this scripture Wisdom is personified as a being that can possess us, as with Wisdom 7:7 which reads, "I called upon God, and Sophia, the Spirit of Wisdom, came unto me.” As Barrie Wilson, of York University, Toronto, writes in his 2014 article A New New Testament?, that amongst the early Christian communities pre-Constantine, “...there were other ways of understanding redemption, not just as a sacrifice on the cross, an atonement for human sin - Paul’s view. Some conceived of salvation as the result of a life--giving union between Jesus and the Heavenly Wisdom, Sophia.” So when Paul speaks of being possessed by Messiah, a scholarly and psychological reading can see this as possessing virtue-centeredness through possession of Wisdom leading to high character.
As the article Vice and Virtue Lists of the New Testament explains, “the vice and virtue lists [of the NT] served critical rhetorical function in the Christian world of exhortation: as preconversion calls to escape an old way of life and begin to a new way … as postconversion advice and instruction for continuing a way of life.” In other words, that aimed at a cross-in you, Wisdom in you, causing you to cross over from vice to virtue, from Ego to Love, from despair to faith, etc.
Thus, the article continues, the lists were not merely informative but “definitive of Christian growth, highlighting the virtue of love” and “to promote the honorable over the dishonorable, the noble over the ignoble. … to organize … the basic disciplines necessary for an ordered community; to impart these disciplines to the church (cf. The Didache) … to encourage conformity to contemporary moral values ...” This obviously impacts the psyche of the NT reader and it's why even anti-religious skeptics will acknowledge that those who convert to Christianity often go through a major shift in character: the alcoholic becomes sober, the criminal reforms, the abusive husband manages his anger, the depressed become hopeful, etc.
So the crossinty is a psychological meditation on what it means to die to your selfish ways of vice and harm to others, and be born anew from above: that is to embody heavenly ideals after a sincere change of heart and committing to a lifeward virtue-centeredness and doing good unto others just as you would want done unto yourself.