getting with the times??

As this lazy approach continues, the church's audience will continue to dwindle. John Shelby Spong states: ‘Institutional Christianity seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge—indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda, which has its origins in a world that none of us any longer inhabits’.

No wonder we had to invent the term ‘blind faith’! Using scare tactics to ‘save souls’ is just plane underhanded and gaining heaven or nirvana or whatever you choose to call it, doesn’t have anything to do with reward or punishment, if this were our motivation, humanity then has yet to escape its self-centeredness and has a long way still to evolve!
Now this hard line approach was necessary in the pre-modern word to be sure, but we no longer inhabit that world. We now live in a post-modern age and simply can no longer blindly accept crude black and white answers to complex questions.

In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.  -  J.H. Newman

summing up

So biblical literalism arises out of a blindness created both by an ignorance of and a prejudice against the Jewish origins of our Christian faith—literalism therefore, is a direct result of the gentile attitude of society toward the Bible, and the regretful path which theologians (read: the ecclesiastical church) have taken when being entrusted to teach the ‘word of God’ to their members.

This narrow-mindedness is not showing any signs of slowing either. Just recently, before he was replaced by an even more conservative patriarch, Pope John Paul II said that “Christ is absolutely original and absolutely unique. He is the one mediator between God and humanity”. This attitude excludes dialogue and fosters religious intolerance. IT DOES NOT HELP. And here’s the kicker, I’m totally convinced that Jesus would agree with me on this one!

A great man shows his greatness by the way that he treats the little men.  -  K. Sri Dhammanda

putting it back together

The last entry's example is but one illustration of the Midrashic style of writing which is echoed time and time again throughout the old and new testaments. But luckily, since these stories were interpreted incorrectly well into Christian history, they can certainly be rectified in our modern age without destroying the core of the story. It has taken until the twenty first century to begin to go back and pick up on the symbols of the Jewish faith—and not before time I tells ya!

So we can now finally open our eyes to a whole new dimension of the gospel material.. the dimension were were meant to see!

One of the scribes who had listened to them debating, appreciated that Jesus had given a good answer and so gave a further question to him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “This is the first: You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself”. There is no commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12:28–31

Midrash

So for a taste of how the Jewish writers operated, I would like to tell of their ‘Midrashic’ style (and I’m paraphrasing John Shelby Spong here). Midrash is the Jewish way of saying that everything to be venerated in the present must somehow be connected with a sacred moment in the past. It is recognition that the truth of God is not bound within the limits of time but that its eternal echoes can be and are heard anew in every generation. For example, the power of God working through Moses was seen in the parting of the waters to allow the Hebrew people to walk into God’s promised future beyond the Red Sea. But Moses died, and God’s people needed to validate God’s continuing presence in Moses’ successor, Joshua. That validation was established by retelling the parting of the waters story in the saga of Joshua. This time it was the waters of the Jordan River rather than the Red Sea, but the affirmation of the parting of the waters was equally real—God was still at work among God’s people in the time of Joshua, still calling them into God’s promised future. The Midrash tradition continued when Elijah was also said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River when he exercised his authority as the leader of God’s people. When Elijah died, the story was repeated in the cycle of stories about Elisha. The ability to part the waters told the Jewish people that Israel’s history was one continuous story.

This same Midrash tradition sought to tell the story of Jesus, who was believed by his followers to have both fulfilled and expanded the symbols of the Jewish tradition. The Gospel writers had Jesus begin his career by not only parting, but walking into the waters of the Jordan River and subsequently parting, not the waters, but the heavens themselves! so that the spirit of God, which was linked with heaven and water in both Jewish mythology and in the Gospel tradition, could visibly descend, rest on, and validate Jesus as the new expression of God in the ongoing story of God’s people.

The question then to ask of this Midrash tradition is not, did it really happen? That is a Western question tied to a Western mind-set that sets up a yes-or-no answer, for it either happened or it did not; it was either real or it was not.  A better approach would be to ask: what was the experience that led, or even compelled the compilers of sacred tradition to include this moment, this life, or this event inside the interpretative framework of their sacred past? And what was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through these Jewish stories of antiquity?

Our battle is not between good and evil.. but between ignorance and enlightenment - MiesterX

the root of anti-Semitism

Now the gospels were written at a time when the Romans were persecuting the Jewish people—in fact Jerusalem had just been destroyed by the Roman army! This meant that the Christians had to distance themselves from the Jewish people or they themselves would have been subject to the might of Rome. So their gospels which contain a combination of both oral tradition passed down through at least three generations (talk about Chinese whispers) and when you add to that the above-mentioned need to separate themselves from the Jews; a large amount of propaganda naturally crept in. So what have we done? We've taken those gospels out of context to become ‘the word of God’ and placed them flat bang into our day and age and then we wonder why it’s followers become anti-Semitic!

The first Christians of course, were converted Jews, thus the gospels were in fact written through Jewish eyes and by people who had detailed knowledge of the Old Testament and believed Jesus to be the fulfilment of these scriptures. But unfortunately, we Christians became gentiles just after the first century of this common era, and we began to read the scriptures as if they were gentile objective history books. We were so anti-semitic that we didn’t even raise the question of how these ex-Jews wrote their sacred stories. How can this, in essence Jewish work be understood if one ignores the Jewish context, the Jewish mind-set, the Jewish frame of reference, the Jewish vocabulary, and even the Jewish history that shaped and formed the writer? But this has been the reality of the Christian west for most of our history!

your wanting an example?? stay tuned..

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.  -  Jonathan Swift

broad brushstrokes

The disciples I mentioned in the last blog went on to establish the Christian religion we know of today. One which I will argue later on, has refused to renew itself since its humble beginnings in the first century. As Paul Davies observed ‘The trivial God we meet in church is no longer big enough to be able to be the God of this world anymore’. ‘After religion, try Jesus’ is now the cry as the church continues to refuse to budge on fundamental dogma. In messing with the simple and central theme of ‘There's nothing you can do and nothing you can be that would place you outside the boundaries of the love of God’, the church only succeeds in muddying the waters by adding unnecessary layers.

The church needs to realise that the Bible cannot be taken literally or assumed inerrant anymore as its words and images are limited by the age that produced them. Our 20th century vision of this God of antiquity has been culturally conditioned, socially moulded as well as linguistically restrained. We need to journey beyond these restrictions and into the experience that shaped the bible and put it into a context that we can understand in our day and age.

A summary of Jesus by the early Christians:

The coming of Christ has fulfilled the ancient prophecies. He was born of David's family, died according to the Scriptures in order to deliver us from the present evil age. He was buried, rose again on the 3rd day as Scripture foretold, and is now exalted at God's right hand as the Son of God and Lord of the living and the dead. He has given His Holy Spirit to His followers as an assurance of His Lordship and as a foretaste of his return to be the Judge and Saviour of men at the Last Day.

real or not?

So let's begin with the New Testament: I have problems with the accuracy of the bulk of the latter part of this collection of books, however the earlier writings such as Paul's letters and to a lesser extent, the gospel of Mark, I believe are sincere. This is because they (Paul in particular) were writing about Jesus the person. The latter books tend to use Jesus as justification for the early church’s doings by stretching and in fact inventing many of His stories to suit their needs.

But while I'm here, to dispel the argument that Jesus was not an historical person, I tell you; if they were to create a myth, the early writers of the Gospels would not have had Jesus come from Nazareth, a place they despised—with doctrine stating ‘nothing good could ever come out of Nazareth’. And further, their message surely spells history as there is no other explanation for the writers to create a story so unheard of in their time, a story they would need to bend and twist to fit into the framework of their pre-modern ways for decades. If you were looking for something that isn’t historical, start at the stories invented later to try and rectify what didn’t sit well with early Christian prejudices—Jesus was born in Bethlehem, during a census and in a stable—now that may be a lot of things, but it’s certainly not history.

And the resurrection story—which is the crux of the Christian message. What gives it merit is not whether Jesus was crucified or raised from the dead, it is in the transformation that occurred within the disciples shortly afterwards—they had forsaken Jesus in fear and abandoned him in cowardice but suddenly became fearless, heroic people ready to die for the truth which now possessed them, becoming the most influential movement the world has ever known—no vision or hallucination I believe is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.

Perhaps they saw the love of God incarnate within him… he was betrayed, denied, persecuted, forsaken, tortured and killed yet he still loved the perpetrators. That’s why I believe God is in Christ—I don’t see it possible in any human to have this much capacity to love. I find in this Jesus a life fully lived and a love wastefully given.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg––or else he would be the Devil. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  - C. S. Lewis