Q: Are these statements right: 1) Christianity expresses that God is not within His creation. He is out of His creation (materiality). 2) Contrary to the idea of Upanishads, in the Western there has been a tendency to assume that the phenomenal or transactional world possesses a reality of its own. Upanishads say that the world has no absolute reality; the world is relatively real. It is created by Brahman. So, its reality is dependent on Brahman.
These statements are correct in relation to contemporary exoteric dogmatic Christianity which developed after it became a state religion in the fourth century.
But…
Before that the followers of Jesus (Ishanath) believed exactly what the Indian rishis knew to be true, for he taught them what he had learned in India.
Even though official, political Christianity held these materialistic views as you describe them, whenever a Christian developed as a mystic, they saw things in the original manner of the Indian sages.
For example, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the eleventh century described seeing that the entire universe was a single beam of light, and that light was God. The author of Theologica Germanica in the fourteenth century wrote that the world around us is illusion if we believe it as we see it through the senses, but that it is the presence of God, one with God.
In the fourth century Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, Egypt, wrote that the world is an illusion, that only God is real. (He also wrote that evil did not exist, but was a twisting, a corruption, of good.)
The Infinite Light
Even until the Middle Ages, the only mystical experience considered legitimate in Europe was threefold:
- the vision of infinite Light;
- the knowing that the Light was God; and
- the experience of being one with that Light-God.
So awakened Christians (who were persecuted and even murdered by Churchianity) saw just what the rishis saw, which is why our website was created: to show that original Christianity was the teachings of Sanatana Dharma which Jesus brought back from India.
Further Reading:
- The Infinite Light of the Self—from a commentary on the Upanishads
- Seek out the Way—from a commentary on Light on the Path
- Saint Ambrose of Optina’a experinece of the Infinite Light, from a commentary on The Gospel of Thomas