We saw last week, that through our Christian history, there have been many ways we have understood the words “Jesus died for our sins.”

As is true of all reality when we encroach on the territory of God, the Divine, the Transcendent, we have trouble talking about things clearly. The doctrine of the ineffability of God tells us that God is a reality beyond our ability to formulate in thought or word, so when we do talk about God (essential to the human experience), we are always talking about that that can’t be talked about. Consequently, it makes sense that the people who experienced the Jesus-event, the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and the category-blowing experiences after his death had trouble talking about it, had trouble assigning meaning to it. They tried their best to suggest several ways to give meaning to their experience of life overcoming death, of sin being defeated by love and truth, but over the years, the many ways were reduced to one. Especially since 1895, the most common way conservative Christians have tried to make meaning out of this moment in history has been called the substitutionary theory of the atonement.

James Hall Brooks: Niagara Bible Conference

At a bible conference in Niagara, NY in the years approaching the new century, a group of Christians articulated 14 points of belief. As often happens when a fundamental shift is occurring in a society, the rise of science and biblical criticism was causing many Christians to feel they were losing their roots. Responding to what they saw as an attack on the basics of their faith, the Niagara Bible Conference posited 14 core points; “fundamentals,” they called them. The first 5 of these core doctrines have been called the Magna Carta of fundamentalism.

One of those five core fundamentals reduced the many historical ways Christians have talking about Jesus saving us from our sins to just one, Christ’s vicarious, blood-atoning death as fulfillment of the Old Testament offering system for the forgiveness of sin.

We saw last week, that this “substitutionary theory of the atonement” is problematic. It has some often unconsidered implications that merit some rethinking. Last week, I said we’d begin that rethinking by considering what sin is. Hopefully, if we can deepen our understanding of “sin,” we can deepen our understanding of the words “Jesus died for our sins.”

We began this section looking at the core motivation behind all religion:  how to deal with the reality that we humans carry two natures, nobility, virtue, goodness, the very image of God nature on the one hand, and ignobility, wickedness, badness, the very image of a depraved nature. The latter, we said, is not the deepest reality about ourselves, but it is a very real part of us, a part we must deal with every day. Our religion demands we address this dilemma which we have come to call “sin.”

Over the years, we’ve come to make a distinction between lower case “s,” “sins,” and upper case “S,” Sin Nature. Sin Nature, we’ve said, is what truly separates us from God.  That phrase “separation from God,” has become a mantra of sorts for us; one, I suggest, we should keep. Of course we have to think clearly about what “separation from God” means, but in the end, I believe we’ll want to keep it.

As we consider the two meanings of “sin,” it is obvious that lower case “sins” were not deal-breakers for Jesus. People who did sex and drugs and rock and roll; liars, cheaters, thieves; these were the people he associated with. Frailty, failure, adultery, betrayal, these were just not big things to Jesus or even to Paul. To be sure, the writings of Paul discourage us from doing bad acts. Almost every letter, he’s encouraging virtue, discouraging vice. However, he couldn’t have been clearer, that God is full of grace for all kinds of sins, all kinds of failures, all kinds, all the time.

No, the truly problematic Sin, we’ve been taught, is the “Sin Nature;” something inside us that separates us from God, something inside us that separates us from God-Love, from GoWd-Life, from God-Thoughts, and from God-Instincts.

Here’s how we’ve told the story. God made you with the capacity to sin, and the knowledge that you would sin, and then when you did sin, he turned his back on you, requiring a stiff punishment for you, or for an innocent man in your place. A severe penalty had to be exacted in order to make you acceptable; death. This severe penalty had to be meted out, because God requires death when sin happens.  And this was not just death to our bodies, but spiritual death, eternal death, death we call separation from God. You’ve done bad, and the law of the universe is that bad must be punished. The wages of sin, after all, is death, and so you’re in for it. Because you have sinned, you must be punished by separation from God.

God is pure and perfect and cannot abide to be in the presence of sin, therefore God cannot abide you, for you are sinful. Your sin has earned for you, the rejection, the alienation, and the eternal separation from God. You made our bed, and now you have no choice but to lie in it. All have sinned, and all must pay the piper.

And that’s the sequence of events that comes to our mind when we think about our story of sin. The human race did a bad thing and must suffer separation from God for doing it.

This way of thinking about sin demands we somehow become different from our fundamental nature before we can be acceptable to God. As long as we hold this view of sin, however we tell the story of Jesus saving us, it must include doing something to change our essential state of being. We must be morphed from our unacceptable state, to an acceptable state; a change in our fundamental essence.

It is this demand that necessitates the magic embodied in the substitutionary atonement. God, by punishing Jesus, changes our fundamental nature. And with this way of giving Jesus’ death meaning, comes the unspoken implications of God’s heartlessness, and the depiction of a God who treats people like we wouldn’t treat a dog.

So maybe there’s an assumption about sin that triggers this line of thinking in our story, that if changed, would allow us to come at the story differently. What if Sin (capital “S”) is not an extension of sins (lower case “s”)?  Even though we say they’re different, we have an unspoken assumption that they’re intimately related. They’re bad acts, bad thoughts, bad motives. The lower case version is when we act them out, the upper case version is an infection of that badness inside us that can’t help but leak out.

But what if lower case sin and upper case Sin Nature are not simply extensions of one another? What if they are fundamentally different in nature, not even apples and oranges, but apples and rocket-ships? What if upper case Sin, is any illusory belief that separates us from God, like the belief that I am not loved by God, or the belief that because I’ve sinned, God cannot accept me, or the belief that I am not love-worthy?  What if Sin Nature is the shame that lies at the core of these mis-beliefs?  What if Sin Nature is a collection of compensatory strategies we employ to make ourselves OK in the face of this debilitating, existential shame? Like the strategy to maintain control of people, things, and circumstances to fool myself into thinking I’m OK? Or the strategy of making everyone pleased with me, to prove to myself that I’m OK? Or the strategy of creating security for myself by gathering enough money, enough insulation, enough of anything, so I feel safe?

What if Sin nature, is in fact, illusion and not the innate proclivity to do bad?  Even more specifically, what if Sin Nature is the compilation of illusions that separate me from the energizing power of Divine Life, separates me from the wisdom of the Indwelling Spirit of God, separates me from the indwelling presence of Divine peace and joy and  goodness and virtue? What if this is the Sin from which I need to be saved?

Instead of seeing badness causing God to separate himself from me, we could see illusion and false belief about The Way Things Are as the thing that separates us from God.

This is not the most common way Christian people see things, but consider this. Our tendency not to see things this way, can be directly traced to our visceral sense that ours is an anthropomorphic God, a God created in the image of humanity.

As we’ve discussed in earlier sections, this is not our religion’s story, but it creeps into our instincts, even our scriptures, at every turn. God is like us, God is made in man’s image, so of course, we imagine God rejecting us for sinfulness. It is, after all, how we treat one another. It is how we feel when somebody sins against us. So, if God is a projection of ourselves, of course that’s what God will do.

But again and again, our saints and prophets and sages and saints have all said it is not so. Our God cannot be contained in the metaphor of being a human. Sure, we use the metaphor of king, ruler, father, mother, and lover, but these cannot contain the vastness and different-ness of God.

So when the scriptures teach us, not that God loves us, but that God is, by God’s very nature, made up of Love, and when our scriptures teach us, not that God parses out mercy, but that God is by God’s very nature made of mercy… and forgiveness, and grace, and goodness, and kindness, if we drop our human images of God, a very different story begins to unfold.

In this telling of the Story, we are not separated from God because God has just had it up to here with our sin.  We are not separated from God as punishment for being bad.  Instead, separation from God is a function of us being sold a bill of goods, deceptions that tell us up is down, black is white, in is out. We’ve been deceived into thinking we are not made in God’s image, we’ve been deceived into believing that we must earn our love, that we are not intrinsically love-worthy. We believe it is not true that we, simply because we exist, are the apple of the eye of God, the apple of the eye of All That Is, the eye of The Ground of All Being. We believe that the very universe does not sing forth our love-worthiness, that the very atoms do not pulsate with our worth and preciousness before God. And behind this mask of deception, this mask of illusion, this mask of erroneous belief that separates us from God, this Sin Nature, we learn to cope with reality Not As It Truly Is. And of course, that just doesn’t work.

We live our lives trying to make up down, in out, and white black, so of course we are frustrated, of course we become afraid, of course we feel shame, of course we have to compensate, of course we create strategies to make life work, and of course those strategies don’t work. In our frustration, our fear, our shame, we hurt others, we have hurtful thoughts toward others, we do hurtful acts toward others, and we do sins.

Out of the illusion of Sin Nature, emanates the bad words, thoughts, and acts that we call “sins.” But, it is the illusion itself that is the culprit, it is the illusion itself that separates us from God, and it is the illusion itself that is the Sin. It is the illusion itself that Jesus dies to save us from.

Now, next week we’ll talk about some other historical ways Christians have told the story of Jesus saving us; ways that do not require God to have been repulsed by the sin he created us with the capacity to commit; ways that never required an innocent man to suffer so that God’s honor could be salvaged, or the penalty of death be paid.

Jesus’ humanity.   Jesus’ divinity.

Historically these two themes have defined the Christian discussion about Jesus, the central figure of our religion. How we think about these two seemingly mutually dimensions of Jesus is powerfully determinative in the religion we live.

Last week we laid some groundwork for rethinking the habited ways we Christians have come to think about Jesus, imagining a way of thinking about our own humanity that has bearing on how we think about Jesus. We pictured a model with three concentric circles, three layers of human consciousness; body consciousness, ego consciousness, and Spirit consciousness. We focused on that third, elusive, spirit level of consciousness asking, “what is it?”  ”Is it?”  ”Does it exist at all?”  and if so, “What makes us think so?”If you missed this lesson, it is critical prerequisite for what we’ll say today, so go back and have a listen.

Let’s pause for a moment to remember something we said during the “Rethinking God” section of our year-long project. When we speak of “the divine” we are speaking about that, about which we cannot speak. Our minds and hearts are not expansive enough to contain the mystery and the depths of the divine, rather, it is an encounter we have out on the edge of human experience. We see majestic mountains, or we contemplate the expanse of the universe, or we hold a newborn baby and consider the mystery of being-ness vs. not-being-ness. Out here on the edge of human experience, we get glimpses of the transcendent, the beyond-us-ness of reality, and we want to talk about it. But here we face a problem. Our minds and hearts are unable to contain the immensity of this Reality. Consequently, we are reduced to developing code words to talk about the experience:  we call it “God,” “the Divine,” or “the transcendent.”

But human beings being what we are, our next inclination is to try and pin down this un-pin-down-able reality to precise, controllable terms. We try, but we can’t do it. Our minds and our hearts are simply unable to fully embrace that which is by definition, beyond us.

So we use pointers, simile, symbols, allegories, images, and figures of speech to talk about this part of human experience. We say “God is like this, or like that.” We say that God can be experienced similarly to a child experiencing a Father, a bride experiencing a bridegroom. We create these analogies, and then we savor them deeply.  However, we must always remember that they are merely ways of talking about that which cannot be talked about.

It’s important to remember this when we speak of “the divinity of Jesus,” or “Spirit consciousness.” In this arena, we’re talking about reality beyond ourselves. We’re treading in areas of our religious tradition that we are told we can never contain, never fully grasp.

That being said, let me offer this conclusion to last week’s preamble;
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.

(Remember, we don’t know what we’re talking about here.  We’re using shaky metaphors at best.)

Human beings were vested with the image of God vested at Creation. That’s what the Story in Genesis tells us. Human beings have capacity for oneness with the Father the way Jesus had oneness with the Father. That’s how Jesus prayed for us in John 17. We humans can be “in Christ” and experience “Christ in us.” It’s a mystery, but that’s how Paul spoke of his own life.

I’m suggesting that these ways of speaking of the union between Divine-ness and human-ness crop up throughout our scriptures, because the Divine is an essential element of being human.
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.

A way of talking about this mystery of human existence is to say that we are of God, we are in God, and that we are made of the same mysterious, inaccessible, transcendent, ineffable stuff that God is made of.

The implication of this is quite challenging to the way we’ve so often thought of the divinity of Christ.

In this way of framing our story, what distinguishes Jesus from normal everyday people like us, is not that Jesus was divine. No, this way of thinking suggests that we are all divine the way Jesus was divine. This way of thinking suggests that what distinguishes Jesus from normal, everyday people like you and me, was not his divine-ness, but how purely he expressed that divine-ness. This way of thinking suggests that Jesus set a standard of pure expression of what it looks like when we humans live from our  Divine centers. It suggests that rather than being a non-human deity like Zeus, Jesus was a pure expression of what it means to be truly human.

Let’s go back for a moment, to our concentric circles of human consciousness. Imagine sprinkled throughout the outer two layers of body and ego-consciousness dark nodules of illusory belief, undigested hurt, unhealed wounds, and truths we believe that are not true. Imagine these dark shapes littered throughout our ego and body consciousness and generating their own thoughts and feelings. Imagine these falsehoods, these wounds, these illusions creating everyday actions, feelings, instincts, drives, and impulses;  beliefs like this:

• You are not worthy of love, or…
• You have been so bad, you must now earn God’s love, or…
• The only way you can ever redeem yourself is to straighten up and fly right for the rest of your life.

On the basis of  beliefs like these, people  think thoughts and feel feelings about Reality. They develop strategies for living, they interpret other peoples actions, they build belief systems, they build coping strategies. They develop a whole version of self, on the basis of these dark nodules of false belief and illusion, and this amalgamation of belief, instinct, coping strategy, feeling and action becomes the version of self with which we interface with the world. It is a version of self that is based on falsehood, a false self, but it is the self we live nevertheless. It is a version of self that betrays us at every turn, it fractures relational peace and creates wars among nations. It creates a pecking order in the office, and a pecking order of nations, the haves and have-nots. It deeply infects the human race and is the root behind our misery and our tendency for self-destruction.

But imagine Jesus somehow magically, or by divine appointment coming to live on earth in his true humanity. Imagine Jesus through some means, perhaps through special birth, perhaps through divine appointment, perhaps by genetic anomaly or an attained enlightenment; imagine Jesus living on the earth as a true human.

Absent the amalgam of false belief and instinct that infects humanity, imagine Jesus living a true self, as a true human, as a pure expression of the divine-human that is all of us.  Imagine Jesus free of the false self, free of the wounded self, free of the betraying-instinct self. Imagine Jesus, a true human, an unadulterated human, a pure expression of humanity; fully human, fully divine.

Instead of thoughts, feelings, and actions emanating from the hurts and mis-beliefs that characterize the human experience, Jesus lived as all humans are created to live, from his divine center. Jesus radiated the essence of God that indwells us all, unblocked, unpolluted, unadulterated by the coping strategies that so ensnare and divide us from our own Spirit consciousness.

In this way of rethinking our story, what distinguishes Jesus from the rest of us is not his divine nature, but his freedom from the nature of sin that would block the divine nature. Jesus expressed the Divine purely, naturally.

And when he did, we stood in awe, and said “He must be a god!”

But that’s not what Jesus said. What Jesus said is that we will do the same things he did, that you and I will do even greater things than he did.

That’s not what Paul said either. Paul said that Jesus was the firstborn of many who will live this unadulterated life, the firstborn of many who will follow Jesus into their own experience of unpolluted ego and body consciousness, the firstborn of many who will purely express the divine.

Now again, this is just a model for thinking about things that cannot be thought about, a metaphor to help us explain what cannot be explained, a metaphor like the Trinity that tries to explain three aspects of divine experience or a metaphor like “Father” or “King” that tries to talk about other aspects of divine experience.

But since metaphors are all we have, consider the implications of this way of thinking about Jesus divinity and humanity.

We began this section talking about how our religion’s thoughts about Jesus as a deity separate us from him. “He is a god, for goodness sake, and I am a mere mortal.” “He is in a different category than me, a completely different kind of being than I am, how can I possibly aspire to the selflessness, the sacrifice, the nobility, the truthfulness, the divine power expressed in Jesus.” “He’s a god…  I’m a mere mortal.”

But in this way of thinking, we’re not disconnected from Jesus at all. In this way of thinking, we’re divine the same way Jesus is divine. The difference is that unlike Jesus, our divinity is masked, hidden, and covered over by dark splotches of false beliefs, false instincts, and unhealed wounds. We need to be healed, we need to be delivered, we need to be saved from the encrustation of falseness that obscures the divine.  However, the divine is in us, just as the divine is in Jesus.

Jesus, having walked this earth as a visible expression of the invisible God (as Paul called him) showed us what was possible. He showed us what is embedded in us, at the core of our truest identity. He calls us to a new life, an abundant life, a holy life because he awakens us to the Divine present in us all. He calls us to a life lived beyond the illusory, beyond the sin nature, beyond the false self.

If our religion is based on a view of Jesus that is distinct from ourselves, we have no recourse but to helplessly await a magical rescue from our selves. But if our religion is based on a view of Jesus that reveals the deepest reality about ourselves, then he is calling us back to our truest state, back from the state we fell into that alienated us from our own divine identity, back to a true self, a self made in the divine image; a self that is one with God the way Jesus was one with God.

And the difference between the Christianities founded on these two different views of Jesus divinity couldn’t be more striking. In the latter, the spiritual life isn’t about gaining legal access to God; we could never lost it.  It is our true identity. In the latter, religion is not about earning God’s forgiveness so we can have restored relationship. The divine is as close to us as close can be, even in us. Forgiveness is simply the way things are, the nature of the Divine.

In this second view of Jesus’ divinity, the spiritual life is a life of discovering and returning to our true, Jesus-like selves. The spiritual life is about awakening to the indwelling Spirit of God the way Jesus did. It is about accessing our own the Divine centers and living responsively to the Inner Voice, the Divine Voice within us…   the way Jesus did.

And it is on that note, that we break for the summer.

But note this: the next section in our year long project is titled “Rethinking What Happened.”  In that section we’ll be considering what has happened to humanity to get us stuck in this false-self condition. We’ll reconsider what theologians call “The Fall” and “The Atonement,” asking how we got in the pickle we’re in, and what has Jesus done to help get us out.

When we do, the way we’ve rethought our own human nature and the way we’ve rethought Jesus’ humanity and divinity will have tremendous implications for what we mean when we say the words “Jesus saves us from our sins.”

See you in September!

NOTE:
See the comment below for scripture references about it being part of our humanity to share the divine nature.

Again this week, we’re following the path laid out by the historical conversation by looking at Jesus humanity and what we Christians mean when we say “Jesus is divine.”

We spent several weeks thinking about Jesus’ humanity, his historically determined self-perception as a warrior-messiah (a well-rehearsed genre of leadership in Israel), but we also saw how he subverted the violent, militaristic core of that genre. We said that this understanding of Jesus’ humanity profoundly shapes how we live out our religion, how we follow Jesus.

Last week, as we began looking at what it means when we Christians say that Jesus is divine, we saw that if we don’t think clearly about this, it has troubling implications for living our faith.

Jupiter: God of the Romans

We saw that throughout the ages, people have held a personified, humanized, anthropomorphized, vision of God. We’ve tended to see God as a man; a super, special, majestic, celestial kind of man, but a man nonetheless. The Romans, Greeks, Aztecs, and Norse all saw their gods this way. It is almost a knee-jerk human instinct to do so. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, our saints, sages, and writers of scripture have disallowed us this instinct. We are to hold the tension of allowing our God to exist and function beyond human construct, beyond our ability to contain, understand, or pin down.

But even though our ancient traditions teach us this, we usually try our best to pin God down to the understandable. Even our scriptures tell the stories of God interacting with people as though he himself was a person. In the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, God talks as a person, acts, and wills as a person. But again and again in our tradition, we’re told not to limit God to any image we can construct in our minds.

God the Father

But because we do it anyway, because we work so hard to envision God as a “him,” a Father, a King, or a Bridegroom, when we say “Jesus is divine,” our mental images tend toward the special, toward the “big-man-in-the-sky.” Our instincts tend to equate him with the way the Greeks talked about Zeus, a full god;  or Heracles, a demi-god. We tend to interpret our doctrine that Jesus is divine in a way that corrupts any meaningful way of thinking of Jesus as truly human, at least not the way I am human, or the way you are.

In the section we did on rethinking our humanity, I said we’d discuss another way of thinking about ourselves when we got to the section on Jesus. Now’s that time.

Let’s imagine a way of thinking about our own human nature that takes into account the things we know about ourselves from experience, but also the things we’ve come to believe about ourselves by faith; beliefs we gain from our historical, religious, and scriptural traditions.

Human Nature in Three Parts

Imagine with me, three concentric circles. These three circles represent three layers of human consciousness. The outer layer is the easiest to see, the inner the most difficult.

Let the outer layer represent our body-consciousness. This is the part of us that is aware of existing in three dimensions, aware of existing in time and space. This part of us is aware of up and down because we feel gravity; it is aware of physical limits, because our body provides a nice package to contain us. In other words, we don’t exist beyond our skin the same way we exist inside our skin.

Body-consciousness represents a primal part of us that is rooted in our biology, and relies on our senses. It distinguishes the experience of awake-ness or asleep-ness, it knows if we’re energized or fatigued, it has muscle memory, it is conscious of hot, muggy days like we’ve had recently, or cold, frigid days like we have in winter.

Freud

We assume the capacity to observe our body-consciousness resides in our brains, the second of our concentric circles. Our brains both energize and direct our senses, and interpret the data we gather. Together, the gray matter, the chemicals, the neurons, the transmitters, create another layer of consciousness we can call ego-consciousness (for those familiar with Freud, we’d include superego in this layer). It is the amalgamation of thoughts we think and feelings we feel. It is the way of being ourselves that expresses temperament, habit, instinct, morality, and conscience. Though this layer of consciousness is also rooted in our bodies, the human brain is so vast in its capacity that this way of being self is distinguished from the animals, and is less primal than body-consciousness.

It is in this part of self that we contemplate truth, beauty, and the good life. It is here we become self-aware, and discover that we’re extroverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, thinkers or feelers. It is here we discern if we’re strong or weak in compassion and resolve to do better. It is in this layer of being that we find ourselves more an impulsive person, or more a methodical planner.

At first glance, one could say that these two layers, understood deeply enough, would suffice to define our humanity. In fact, a whole philosophical school called “material reductionism” insists that this two-layer model must suffice. But saints and sages from all the religious, and from many philosophical, and metaphysical traditions have made another observation as well.

We are able to observe ourselves existing in ego-consciousness. I can observe myself thinking thoughts and feeling feelings. I can observe myself being moral or immoral. I can stand outside myself and watch myself being introverted or extroverted, impulsive or methodical. With training, I can put such a gap between this form of “me” and my impulses that begin to think of self having a third layer of consciousness, an “observer” layer.

Which raises the question, what is the nature of this observing layer of the self?

The problem is that when we set out to observe this observing part of ourselves, we become it. When I observe the observer, I become the observer. When I look at the looker, I become the looker.

So by definition, I cannot pin down with precision, what the nature of this observing self is. I know it is deeper than the thoughts I think or the feelings I feel because it can observe myself doing them. It is deeper than the temperament I possess, or the instincts I experience for the same reason. So what is this mysterious inner layer, this mysterious inner part of me?

As our society increasingly gravitates to the material reductionist view of “The Way Things Are,” the view of many has become that for something to matter, it must fit into what can be sensed, measured, or reasoned by human beings. Consequently, many come to believe that any layer to our humanity that is beyond the senses or reason.

But what if it’s not that way?

To say that reality only exists inasmuch as we humans can observe, measure, or reason is a statement of faith. Certainly we Christians (as well as Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus) believe that reality is much less limited than that. Our faith statements would be at odds to the that of the material reductionist.

We would agree with the reductionist view that the human brain, and ego-consciousness is extraordinarly powerful, but would disagree that chemicals and electrons are all there is to reality. We would agree with the neuroscientist’s observation that part of the brain lights up when nuns meditate or when Pentecostals speak in tongues, but would disagree that these spiritual experiences are nothing more than the electrons and chemicals that are being observed.

Because neuroscience can show us where spiritual functions happen, it does not follow, to us, that that’s all there is to reality.

I read a neuroscientists who said this, “Just because I can look at your brain and tell that you’re seeing an apple, does not mean I can say definitively that the apple is there, or that it is real, only that you are having a brain experience of an apple. The same is true of the experience of God. Because I can tell you that your brain is lighting up the God-section, this says nothing about the realness or un-realness of God. (REFERENCE)

Consider an analogy from my mp3 player.

To say that an experience in the brain is God, is like saying that playing an mp3 on an iPod, is Chopin. A Chopin nocturne plays by ones and zeros on my digital player, and if I was an engineer, I could fully understand the process. But if my player breaks, Chopin still exists beyond the player. Chopin exists as sheet music in some other part of the world. Chopin exists in the memories of many skilled pianists. Chopin exists in mp3 files on my computer. So if my iPod breaks, I can access Chopin elsewhere. I can get it back.

An mp3 player is not Chopin.

Drawing on this analogy, we could suggest that another layer of consciousness exists beyond the grey matter in our heads, that a layer of consciousness exists beyond the electrons, beyond the neurons, beyond the transmitters of our brains. We could suggest that our brains, like mp3 players, may die, but that a layer of consciousness could exist beyond our brain’s life or death. In fact, in the last many years, a great deal of research into near death experiences seems to indicate this is so, that a layer of human consciousness exists beyond an active, living, brain. (REFERENCE)

Even though many today are deeply committed to the idea of material reductionism, many philosophies (not just Christian philosophies) chafe under the rigidity of these restrictions. George Berkley (the guy the city and the university were named after) made this point. When I see and touch an apple, I don’t see and touch an apple. I only see and touch the image that goes in my eyes, the sensations I take into my hands. Then I take these sensations into my brain and construct an image. My experience of the apple is the experience of this image. What I don’t know is if that mental image corresponds to reality. Is there a real apple out there that I’m experiencing? Of course I assume so, but I cannot prove it. (REFERENCE)

Schopenhauer

Building on this, another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer said something like this. Our sense perceptions are not reality, they are only sense perceptions. This means there are two worlds, the “phenomenological” world that we experience through our senses and the “numinous” world we must be willing to admit may exist beyond our senses. (REFERENCE)

The world of phenomenon that we access through our five senses may not be the sum total of reality, existence, or human nature. Our spiritual faith has suggested for thousands of years that this is so, and that the third part of human consciousness, the undefinable part of us, the part of us that is able to observe and think about the things that happen in the layer of ego-consciousness, is spiritual in origin.

The different religious and philosophical traditions talk about this layer of human consciousness differently, but in Christian thinking, we teach our children that this part of us is the part where Jesus lives in our hearts, the part of us is where the Holy Spirit of God indwells us. This is the part of us Genesis says is made in the very image of God, and it is where we experience what Jesus prayed for us, that we would be one with God as he experienced being one with God.

At NRCC, we’ve been talking about this part of our faith story for a while, and have said it this way; this is the part of us that is made out of the same stuff God is made out of.

We’ll finish next week by talking about the implications of this way of seeing humanity, and we’ll see that it helps us think about the words “Jesus is divine” in a way that doesn’t discount him being a real-live human being like you and me.

Following a path laid out by the historical conversation about Jesus, in our year-long project, we’ve looked first at Jesus’ humanity, and now turn to look at his divinity. What does it mean when Christian people say Jesus is divine? Does it mean, as seems to be implied in many of the conversations we Christians have on the topic, that Jesus is a “deity?” If so, we need to take a look at that word and ask ourselves about the unspoken meaning it causes when we unconsciously frame our understanding of Jesus in these terms.

The word “deity” informs thinking other than our Judeo Christian thoughts about the divine. Romans, Greeks, the Norse, and Aztecs all framed their understanding of their gods in a way that gives meaning to the word “deity.” Consequently, the dictionary has several meanings for the word. One thing it means is attaining to the estate or rank of a god or a goddess. This evokes the understanding the Greeks had of their deities, Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus, Apollo, and Aphrodite. They were beings very much like humans, but bigger and more powerful. Is that what we mean when we Christians say Jesus is “divine?” Most wouldn’t say so if asked directly, but often these themes inform our unspoken assumptions about the word, and about Jesus.

But we Christians also think of Jesus as human, sometimes, causing the Greco-Roman notion of the demi-god seems to unconsciously apply. Some frame Jesus in their minds as half god, half human, like Herecles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, half god, half human.

The dictionary also uses the word in another sense, as a person or thing that is revered as a god. In this meaning, when a person or thing becomes highly valued to people, it is elevated in revered status equal to the gods (In this society, money is the only deity).

Is that what we mean when we say Jesus is divine? Are we saying that because of his ability to perform miracles, and the profound wisdom of his teachings, or because of the drama surrounding his death and resurrection, that we have come to revere him so deeply, that we have elevated him to the status of a god? Again, if asked directly, I don’t think many of us would say this is what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.”

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Yes, there is a danger to our Christian spirituality when we don’t think carefully about what we mean by the words “Jesus is divine.” However, because this has been such a controversial topic in our ancient past, we Christians tend not to discuss it very openly. Feeling the pressure to acquiesce to the party line, we don’t do our best thinking on this subject.

On the one hand, we’re afraid we’ll be out of the club if we tinker with something as sacrosanct as the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity. When we Christians determine who is in the orthodox club, and who is out, who is part of a cult, our primary litmus test is this question; Do you hold that Jesus “was god,” or was he merely “a god.” If you say Jesus “was God,” you’re in; “a god,” you’re out.

Preparing for this mini-lesson, I was speaking to a devout Christian on this topic a while ago. As soon as I brought up the topic fireworks went off. “Go ahead and do this “rethinking Christianity” project if you must,” she said, “But you just can’t be rethinking this topic. Some things are just too sacred to mess with.”

However, on the other hand, if we don’t reconsider some of our instincts about Jesus’ divinity, our spirituality will suffer. If we unconsciously put Jesus in the same camp as Zeus or Apollo, or if we frame him in our minds as a half god, like Herecles or Perseus (Zeus fathered Perseus, another demi-god, this time with Danae.  The guy got around!), or if we frame the divinity of Jesus in these ancient, familiar mental constructs people have always had for their gods, we reduce Jesus, and we reduce the concept of divinity.

Also, if we unconsciously invite these constructs about divinity from other religions to inform our thinking about Jesus, we ignore much of the teaching of Jesus himself. We certainly ignore the teaching of the ancients who insisted we hold Jesus’ divinity in tension with his humanity. If we think of Jesus as an improved version of Zeus, in a very visceral way, it lets us off the hook.

Many times in the Christian scriptures Jesus told us to live the way he lived, to do the things he did. He told us to to heal those who are sick, to confront injustice the way he did, to express the divine nature the way he did, and to live virtuously the way he did. But if Jesus is a Greek deity, that makes no sense. Yes, Jesus lived and died selflessly. But, we say to ourselves, of course he lived nobly.  He was a god, for goodness sake. True, it would be better if I lived selflessly and virtuously myself. It would be better if I healed people’s wounds or confronted social injustice, but what hope do I have to live at this elevated level?  I’m a mere mortal. We see Jesus discern the heart of the Divine and living accordingly, and we say to ourselves, “I can’t do that, I’m just a man, just a woman. He was a god.”

Thor: God of Thunder

But, I suggest, these ancient Roman and Greek and Aztec and Norse constructs of “the gods” don’t apply to Jesus. I’m suggesting that the divinity of Jesus can’t be reduced to the term “deity” as our social and historical instincts would dictate. Jesus was something much more, an expression of the mysterious, uncontainable divine (More on that next week).

The dictionary suggests yet another usage of the words “divine” and “deity” which I believe serves as a better mental framework. It says this of the word “deity:”  of divine character or nature; holding the very nature of God; proceeding from God.

If we frame the words “Jesus is divine” this way, it does not let us off the hook. There’s no room for “well Jesus was a god, for goodness sake” kinds of thoughts. Jesus and the book of Genesis both teach us that we ourselves, are made of the divine, that we holding the very nature of God within our beings, and that we proceed from God. Yes, we’ve been corrupted, as we saw in the section we did on rethinking our humanity, but those essential characteristics were never erased.

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Council of Chalcedon

In AD 451, a group of bishops got together in a town in Turkey called Chalcedon. There hadn’t been much trouble on the topic of Jesus’ divinity in the early years of Christianity being as influenced as they were by the Jewish mind. They had been so rooted in the one-ness of the Hebrew God, that they understood Jesus as an expression of that divine oneness. They did not see Jesus’ divinity as a separate Zeus-like deity. But when Christianity spread into Rome where the Greco-Roman mind did have the Zeus-like images of God, they needed clarification. So they got together, talked it over, and issued a proclamation.

“Jesus is a oneness,” they said, “a fully human and a fully divine oneness.” Mostly what they said was negative, “Jesus is not what those other guys are saying he is.” They were defending against separatist doctrines that said Jesus was two entities, a spiritual one and a physical one.

But what this Council at Chalcedon did not do, was try to explain the mystery. They just left it in its unexplainable ambiguity. This Jesus figure, so important in our history, in our religion, we’re not going to try and pin down exactly what he is, or how this whole human-divine thing works.

And now, this many years later, mainstream Christianity hasn’t made any formal statement about Jesus that goes much beyond the one we made at Chalcedon. The divinity of Jesus remains a mystery we’re just content to live with. We’re ok with defying explanation, and in a way, this makes sense.

To say Jesus is divine, is to say that somehow he expresses God, and, as we saw in the earlier sections of our project, we cannot in any way, ever get our minds around the nature of God. “Ineffable,” “transcendent,” “incomprehensible,” these are the words we apply to the doctrine of God. Even though popular Christianity reduces God to being a guy in the sky, it is not our faith. We hold that one cannot contain the vastness of the divine in the human mind. Experience tells us there is something there, but wisdom is content to leave the immensity of the Divine in the realm of mystery.

So, long ago when people experienced Jesus as something beyond themselves, a reality bigger than their reality, it made sense that they would use the word “divine.” Jesus is beyond our capacity to contain, bigger than we can control or hold on to. So for centuries, we’ve said this; “Jesus is a man, a human being like you and me, having the same kind of body, the same emotional upheaval, the same hurt and disappointment and ecstasy that go with the reality of being human.” “Jesus is also an expression of the invisible God, a way of putting flesh to a reality that can’t be contained in flesh, an imperfect expression of the inexpressible, but a visible, tangible expression nonetheless, a way of putting into three dimensions, a reality that can’t be contained in three dimensions.”

We’ll hold these two truths in tension, we Christians say…

• Jesus a human being like you and me, and…
• Jesus an expression of the Divine that cannot be expressed

And we’ll live with the mystery that imposes on our brains. We’ll live with the tension that creates, because we believe there is a reality that is bigger than our brains and hearts can contain, and we believe the person of Jesus somehow expressed that bigger reality.

However, we humans (and we Christians are no exception to the rule), we don’t like mystery. We don’t like tension and we don’t like our truth to come to us in the form of paradox.

Even though the church has never said more than we said at Chalcedon in any kind of formal statement about Jesus, popular Christianity certainly has. And when we have, we’ve tended to swing to one or the other poles of this paradox. We give lip service to Jesus being human and divine, but we live, speak, and worship as though he is one or the other. Some generations, some denominations, give rich focus to Jesus’ humanity, others to his divinity.

In conservative American Christianity in our generation, we’ve tended to focus on the divinity of Jesus, Jesus exclusively as the Son of God.

When I was a middle-schooler, I participated in an irreverent discussion that took place in a Sunday school class. The topic of our discussion was the degree to which Jesus experienced every-day bodily functions. A kind, older, church-lady who happened to be in the class that day was appalled at the suggestion that Jesus would ever pass gas. It was inconceivable to her, that Jesus, the visible expression of the invisible God, as Paul calls him, could ever be reduced to a world of blood, semen, and gastric juices. “How could such inexhaustible Truth and Beauty as is contained in divinity ever coexist in such proximity to bowels and foot odor?”

Next week, I’ll suggest a way we can think that can help us live with the paradoxical tension, the mystery of humanity and divinity. As I said in the section on rethinking human nature, what I say will have implications for how we think of our own humanity. We’ll see that Jesus himself, suggests that the same kind of oneness with the Divine that he experienced is ours to experience as well.

Next week.

We’re  rethinking how we tell the Story of Jesus, following the ancient framework for our discussion, the humanity and the divinity of Jesus. To understand Jesus the human being, to understand his message, we must understand his times. We must understand the social, political, and economic pressures he, and all of his country lived under. This means we must understand how the Roman occupation and the Jewish aspiration for freedom and sovereignty informs Jesus’ life and message.

So thus far in this section, we’ve looked we looked at how the writings of the Qumran community shed light on both the pattern John the Baptist followed, and the path Jesus followed. Both were following a genre of leadership that in their time was shaped by a national resistance to Rome. John walked the path of the Qumran wandering prophet and Jesus followed the path of the God-sent, warrior-messiah. As we said, these were well-worn paths in Jesus’ society, and they came with clear expectations, vocabulary, and actions. It was clear to everyone, that Jesus was playing the part of warrior messiah.

the Justice League

But, we also saw, he used the role, to subvert the role. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus as a provocateur, firmly rooted in the tradition of resistance to injustice and oppression. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus working on the side of the downtrodden, demoralized and the broken. The nature of the role demands we see Jesus the champion of the exploited, and an opponent of the exploiters. (Which of course, demands we, Jesus’ followers, see ourselves in that same light.)

The role of the warrior-messiah role came loaded with another expectation as well, an expectation of military might and retributive violence. This, we saw, Jesus both transcended and subverted.

Indeed, Jesus called his followers to resist injustice, but to resist taking up the tools of violence and hatred to do so. “It just doesn’t work,” we can hear Jesus intimate. “You can live by the sword if you like, but you will die by the sword. You’ll cut some Roman throats, but they’ll hate you for doing so, and inevitably, they’ll be back around to cut your throat in turn.”

No, we need another form of resistance, another way to fight injustice, another way to struggle, another way to oppose. And his subversive strategy was to gain the heart of one’s adversary.

In one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, he was talking about Bull Conner, a particularly obstinate and violent man, and an aggressive and cruel opponent of the civil rights movement. We cannot, King said, simply defeat Bull Conner. If we do, we’ll just reverse the same power dynamic that he perpetuates on us, now. And while that seems attractive to us when we’re on the bottom of the heap, in the long run it is not what we want. We need to win the heart of Bull Conner. We need Bull Conner to be our friend. We need him to be fighting for what is just, just like we’re fighting for what is just. We’ll continue moving forward whether he comes or not. While our actions will anger him by upsetting the status quo, let us never do anything that will wound him, or his loved ones, or his people.

What makes this all the more remarkable, is that while King was preaching these themes, his own children were being threatened,  civil rights workers were being murdered, and innocent children were bombed in churches.

As followers of Jesus, it is not our way to stoop to the tools that will only perpetuate the system of retribution and alienation. This is true for social injustice, it is true among friends who are at odds, it is true during marital strife, it is true in all the contexts of our lives.

Ours are to be strategies that draw people into a new vision of reality, not to drag them back to the old one. Consequently, we show grace and love. Our confrontation will highlight evil, but not harm people. We will create a context of healing, restoration, forgiveness as the backdrop for our work toward freedom, life and light. Yes, we will highlight injustice, but we will never return evil for evil. We’ll completely change the dynamic by returning good for evil.  And, yes, it’ll take longer, but it’ll also last longer.

People who think such a strategy is naïve in the face of the darkness of the human heart don’t understand history very well. Oppressors perpetrate injustice, sure they do. They even do so very effectively for a very long time. But the hurt they render will always get its revenge in the end. And when it does, the cycle of alienation, division, hatred, and even violence just won’t stop.

I’ve seen it in my marriage; we see in the struggle of nations.

So yes, Jesus role was one of resistance and provoking change. But he was unwilling to do so using the same worn out tools that had created the oppression in the first place.

"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind."

Gandhi was a fervent follower of Jesus. He wasn’t a Christian man, primarily because his experiences of Christians were so awful, so bigoted, so hurtful. But Gandhi followed Jesus. He immediately recognized the similarity between the position of the Jews under Roman occupation and the Indians under British occupation. While there was tremendous pressure to throw of the colonial, imperial exploitation with violence and hatred, Gandhi challenged these instincts, inspired by teachings of Jesus. Resist, challenge, overturn, overcome, but do so without creating more oppression and more hatred tomorrow. Yes, it’ll take longer, but it’ll last longer.

This brings us to the primary framework for understanding the life and teaching of Jesus the human being; the term he used so often: The Kingdom of God, or The Kingdom of Heaven. The sheer number of times Jesus used the terms, and the centrality they played in his messages make them a primary interpretive lens through which we understand his teaching.

Despite current instincts, very little of what Jesus referenced when he used these terms had to do with the afterlife. Some did, but not much. American Christianity’s fixation on getting people saved so they can get to heaven was decidedly not Jesus’ emphasis.

Jesus’ focus was on salvation, but it was salvation from Rome, it was salvation from oppression and foreign domination, salvation from injustice, and salvation from exploitation. At a deeper dimension, it was a focus on being saved from the internal ravages of evil, it was Divine salvation from hatred, dishonesty,  fear,  mean-spirited, and small-heartedness. It was about being saved from life without connection to the indwelling Divine, and being saved from the forces in our souls that fracture our relationships, fracture our personalities, and fracture our destinies.

In a manner typical to the Jewish framework of his day, Jesus’ focus was on this life, this world. Jesus was about bringing Divine rule, Heaven’s rule, God’s rule to bear upon the kingdoms of this earth. Jesus was about bringing the law of love, the law of grace, and the law of forgiveness to bear on the kingdoms of this world.

In all his interactions with people; with the sick and diseased of body, with the sick and diseased of soul, with tax collectors, with smug, self-satisfied Pharisees, with seekers, with obstinate Romans, with collaborating Jews, his interactions all worked toward a singular objective, to make things on earth, as they are in heaven. To bring to bear on the earth, Divine goodness, Divine justice, Divine Truth, and a Divine value system that breeds Divine Beauty.

To tax collectors who labored under the shame of their collaboration, but who were also desperate to guard the rewards their collaboration bought them, Jesus worked toward a healed soul, a mind that could see Divine Truth, and a life that was lived in the freedom of that Truth.

To adulterers bearing the shame of failure and exposure, Jesus healed the shame, and advocateed a life that wouldn’t perpetuate the harm. To Roman soldiers, Jesus ministered the Truth that set them free. To Pharisees with blinded eyes, Jesus ministered rebuke so they would see. To Pharisees who had authentic questions Jesus sat through the night answering. And to the crowds, Jesus taught forgiveness, grace, and goodness. He taught them to connect to the Divine Spirit, the Divine will, and he taught them how this strange new Kingdom works.

I have my children read a book every year. When they were early in high school, I had them read a compilation of stories about people who were setting right what is wrong in the world, fighting injustice, resisting poverty, and undercutting child labor and human trafficking.

When they were finished, I asked them to my office to talk it over. “Why do you think I had you read that book this summer?” I asked. They stumbled trying to get the right answer so they could get on with their summer. I particularly remember my son answering with a series of canned Sunday school responses, one after another. To each of his responses, I’d reply, “Nope, that’s not why I had you read the book.” Finally, semi-joking, he laid out the limits of his childhood religion. “I don’t know exactly how this is going to work out, but I’m pretty sure the answer has to be is either, “God loves me,” “Jesus saves me,” “the Bible tells me,” or “we should pray about it.”

I laughed, and let him off the hook. “Daniel, I wanted you to read this book about people serving the earth, healing what is wounded, fixing what is broken, because this is your religion.” If you’re a follower of Jesus, this is your religion.

“Jesus’ message was only a little bit about what happens after we die,” I continued. “That was almost an afterthought. Sure, Jesus acknowledged what we believe inside ourselves, that some part of us continues when we die.  He assured us that the hunger we have for the Divine will be satisfied. But it’s almost like he was saying there will be time to think about that at a later date, when we die. For now he told us think about this stuff; Be salt, spread across the earth to bring out the God flavors. Be light, spread across the earth to show forth the God colors. Heal what is wounded. Restore what is lost. Challenge what is evil. Enlighten what is blinded. Repair what is broken.”

“This, Daniel…  This is your religion.”

And this, friends, this is our religion. If we are followers of Jesus the human being, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the sage, Jesus the warrior-messiah, the opponent of injustice, the provocateur, the maker of right over wrong, then ours is to take up the mantle and become better-ers of the earth.

This is our religion.
This is the implications of following Jesus, a human being.

Next time we’ll begin to talk about what it has meant throughout the centuries when Christians have said that Jesus is not just human, but that he is also divine.

This being  the last post in this section on Rethinking God, let me take a moment to recap…

This year, we’re rethinking how we tell the Christian story.  We’re doing it in seven sections. We began our look at God by looking at the ancient doctrine of the “Ineffability of God” (also known as the “Incomprehensibility” or “Transcendence of God”).

Transcendent, Incomprehensible, Ineffable God

In essence this doctrine says that the Ultimate Reality from which we come is not something we can fully capture with our mental or emotional faculties.  As human beings, we are not expansive enough to capture the Source from which all things come, the God from whom all is made. Ultimate Reality is beyond our ability to define with any precision or understand with any certainty.

Consequently, all we have are metaphors to talk about God, metaphors that say to us; “That which cannot be talked about… well, let’s talk about it kind of like this…”

But metaphors, being what they are, when pushed too far inevitably break down.  I was once talking about this to a 12 year old girl.  I told her, “Sweetie, you are a precious flower.”  Then I asked her, “is that true?”She said “Yes. I’m lovely, I’m beautiful, I’m wonderful, just like a precious flower.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m so glad you see yourself that way.”  ”But now,” I continued, “If you get sick and your mom takes you to the doctor and says, ‘Doctor, help my precious flower,’ and if the doctor says to the nurse, “Nurse, get me the fertilizer and the bug spray. We have a precious flower here that is quite ill…’   Well now, is it true that you’re a precious flower?”

All metaphors, even the most cherished and ancient God-metaphors in our tradition,eventually break down.

Last week, we talked about re-imagining one of our most ancient metaphors about God. We quoted a term used as far back as the Council of Nicea (AD 325). By writing out their agreed-upon orthodoxy, they reinforced the image of God as a Person and set it in stone for those coming later.  “God is Three Persons, one substance,” that’s the way they said it.

In the Bible, the idea of the “person-ness” of God is one of the most common and primal images of the Divine. But even that metaphor, we said last week, breaks down if we press it too far. And when it does it has very troubling consequences, particularly when we try to talk about the painful, evil parts of the human experience. When our image of God is “The-Guy-Up-There-Running-Things,” we have to question how a good God could allow such evil and pain as exists on the earth.

So here’s our predicament…
God can’t be understood, or talked about with any certainty at all, but the deepest yearning of the human soul is for the Divine.  The deep within us calls to the deep we call “God,” and consequently, we are compelled to talk about God — that which cannot be talked about.

So…  What to do?  What to do?

www.ContemplativeOutreach.org

There is one stream of spirituality within our tradition that has grappled with this predicament very well. It is the contemplative tradition.  In my spiritual community, we’ve familiarized ourselves with an uncommon word that describes this form of spirituality; “apophatic.” It means “beyond words”  or by implication, “beyond mental constructs.”

The spiritual practices of this tradition, have for centuries focused on experiencing the Divine, but not pinning It down with precise understanding. Contemplative practices focus on being present to the Divine without limiting our presence by trying to understand or articulate it.

And so meditation is a practice beyond thoughts, beyond words. The ancient contemplative practices we studied last year (click HERE for a list of readings), the Jesus prayer, hesychastic prayer, welcoming prayer, Centering Prayer, contemplation, and lectio divina, all these practices are not predicated on saying “God is like this,” or “God will do that.”

No, these practices encourage our ceaseless yearning for the Ultimate, for the deep from which we come, but they invite us to that pursuit in a way that is beyond study, comprehension, or analysis.  The contemplative tradition invites us to experience the Inner Quiet without ultimately trying to direct or maneuver the Divine.

contemplative spirituality

When we focus on simply being present to the Ultimate Divine Reality, something happens to us. Those of us in this tradition find our thoughts, feelings, and assumptions about God morphing over time.  People of steadfast contemplative practice begin to frame God less as the Person-God, and more as a context of Love.

Whatever God is, its nature, her nature, his nature (we struggle for language, don’t we?) God’s essence embodies Love.  Throughout the scriptures, that theme is repeated, throughout the writings of the contemplatives, this theme is repeated.  God is love, God is love, God is love.

And this ultimate reality extends wherever we are, wherever we go.  The nature of Ultimate Reality is shot through with Love, for me, for you, for trees and rocks, for sinners and saints alike, for Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, Americans and Iraqis.

The sense of overarching Love that awaits those on the contemplative path exists for everything, for everyone.  It is the testimony of those of contemplative practice, that the Nature of Ultimate Reality, the Nature of the Divine, is Love.

And when this experience of Divine Love seeps into us,we begin to change. As we quiet ourselves to be present in the Incomprehensible God, when the expansiveness of Divine Love captures us, we do not remain in the narrow focus of “me-and-mine,” “how-I-feel,” or “what-I-want.” Contemplatives in the Judeo-Christian tradition inevitably become focused on social justice, invariably begin to care for the earth and its inhabitants.

One of Martin Luther King’s favorite passages to speak from was Amos 5.  He read it in the poetic King James language, but listen to it in the gritty language of the street (paraphrased from The Message).

Personifying God, Amos speaks on behalf of the Divine…
Quit with the burnt offerings already.  Quit with the grain offerings. Quit with all the things you do to satisfy religious requirements.  You bring all the right stuff to me, you meet all the right requirements…
But go away!
Stop bringing me these things.
I have no regard for them

Don’t’ sing me any more of your noisy songs.  Don’t play me any more of your pretty tunes.
Instead, go out and let justice run down like waters.
Go out, and let righteousness flow like a mighty stream

This is what Love does.  This is what happens to those whose perspective becomes enveloped in Love.

At times in our tradition, we’ve really gotten this.  Ours is a heritage rich with people who have gone out and pursued justice and rightness and goodness.  Ours is a heritage rich with people who have sensed the Divine impulse to care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned.

But ours is also a tradition at times singularly focused upon self, and what I can do to get God working for me. Our focus has often been on keeping the world’s hatred and evil from threatening me, making God an ally to keep me safe, and getting God to keep my world sane.  Our focus has often been to learn how to direct the Divine through my prayers, through my good behaviors, and to get the Person-God working on my side.

Also at times, ours has also been a tradition of immobilizing fear.  We worry that we may have earned the wrath or rejection of the Mighty Person-God.  We fear we will be severely punished for our failures.  We fear being rejected for our sinful tendencies, cringing in the face of the Divine Person’s negative perception of us.

In this section on “Rethinking God,” I’ve been suggesting that the most inspiring and uplifting dimensions of our faith tradition, and the most toxic and ignoble dimensions of our faith tradition, begin with the images we use to frame God. The metaphors we use to talk about that which is Ultimate, can motivate us to the highest heights, or lead us to cringe in the darkest corners.

So, we conclude this section, having suggested some different metaphors for God that may serve us better than the ones we inherited.  You’ve been invited to explore the contemplative tradition as a way of pursuing God beyond understanding and feeling.  But primarily, I’ve suggested that in our tradition, we have permission to tinker with our understanding of the Ultimate that is God.

Jesus gave us a simple litmus test for measuring the worth of any construct we embrace. What kind of fruit does it bear?  If your image of God is bearing bad fruit, in our tradition, you have permission to trade that image in for a better one.

As we are working toward a better telling of the Christian Story, let’s start at the beginning, and rethink our understanding of God.  In this section, we’ll ask ourselves what comes to our minds when we use the word “God.”

Before we begin, however, some background thinking…

When I was in seminary, I bought a Systematic Theology book at a garage sale (just in case).  Part I of the book is called The Doctrine of God.  Under that section, there is a sub-section titled “God is Immutable” (meaning God never changes).  ”God is perfect,” the book says, “and since change is always change for the better or for the worse, God has no need of change.”

Now, as doctrines go, this seems a fine one to me.  Whatever the Divine is, it says, it embodies all that is Good, all that is True, all that is Life, all that is Love.  Since the Divine is doing just fine at being the essence of all these virtues, it doesn’t need to get any better at them, and it’s not getting any worse at them.  So, OK, I buy the doctrine.  God doesn’t need to change.  We can think of God as Immutable, Unchanging.

However, I’ve seen this doctrine go bad when it bleeds over into how we think about our concept of God. We can easily begin to believe that what we believe about God needs never change.

It is one thing to say that whatever the Divine is, it has no need to change.  It is something altogether different to be so convinced of our own concept of God — what we learned in our doctrine books, what we learned in Bible class, what we learned about God at our parent’s knee — that we believe that view of God need never change.

The fact is that in our tradition, our view of God has been in continuous flux.  The human idea of God has meant many, very different things over the 4000 years since Abraham.  There has been such dramatic difference in the concept of God from generation to generation, that one would be meaningless to the other.  There is no unchanging, objective, meaning for the word “God.”  It is fluid throughout history, always shifting, always changing, some of these competing concepts being very much at odds with one another.

Those who compiled the Hebrew scriptures drew from four main sources in their work.  These sources were called J, E, D, and P, for Jehovah, Elohim, Deuteronomic, and Priestly.  Each of these sources had a very different understanding of God.  Sometimes, as in the Creation account, these sources aren’t integrated at all, but simply loaded in side-by-side.  Genesis 1 tells the creation story as a poem from the P view of God, while Genesis 2-3 tells the same story from the J perspective.

Our Judeo-Christian tradition has been very pragmatic about these different views of God through the years.  It has been more important that our view of God be helpful than that it be consistent.  Whenever our spiritual ancestors found a particular concept of God to be unhelpful, they simply abandoned it and replaced with another, more helpful one.  This has made the concept of God quite flexible over the years. If it had not been, it would never have survived.  This flexibility in our tradition has helped the concept of God not only survive over the years, but thrive as one of humanity’s best ideas.

Like us, throughout history, men and women have experienced that which is beyond themselves. When they did, they used the word “God” to describe their experience, and they formulated specific images to help them think about God.

Our ancestors were at their best through the years, when they acknowledged that their current concept of God was provisional at best.

In the Hebrew tradition, we were not even allowed to speak the word for God.  It was stripped of vowels so it could not be pronounced.  ”Don’t be deceived,” our ancestors were telling us, “into believing we know what the ‘God’ concept is all about.”  ”Don’t think we can contain the concept of God.  No, it is simply too big for us.”

With a few Renaissance exceptions, our Christian tradition has generally heeded the Hebrew injunction not to create pictures or statues of God (graven images).  In the wisdom of the ages, we were again being warned not to hold the concept of God with too much certainty, but to leave it in the realm of the Unknowable Unknown.

So…
When you and I formulate an idea in our heads that says “God is kind of like this,” there is one thing we know about our formulation.  It is wrong.

Even those images of God we cherish…  are wrong.

God is our Father.  Inadequate.
God is our Bridegroom/Lover.  Incomplete.
God is the feminine wisdom Sophia, as articulated in Proverbs. Again, insufficient.

These can be helpful formulations from time to time, but they do not depict the Divine with any kind of comprehensiveness or accuracy.

And from time to time, our views of God stop fitting.  Like a constrictive or scratchy old coat, they begin to bother us.  The patriarchal overtones of a masculine God becomes ill-fitting.  The overtones of condemnation of the Judge-God image doesn’t make sense any more.

We have a strong tradition, when this happens, of discarding our old and scratchy views of God, and formulating new ones.  We cannot be too married to our concepts of God.  Again, they are provisional and temporary, helpful for a season, even life-altering and transformative at times.  However, as their usefulness fades, we need to formulate new understandings of the Infinite Divine.

In our tradition, we’ve always had permission to speculate and create new, more helpful images of God, but somehow in conservative Christian circles, we’ve lost that permission.

I believe our society is in a time of upheaval not seen since the Enlightenment.  If ever there was a time we needed permission to reframe our images of God, this is one.

In the weeks ahead, as we’re “Rethinking God,” we’ll work to get back that permission, and suggest some new ways of framing God in our minds.

Next time.

Council of Nicea AD 325

When I was in seminary, I was taught the orthodox, party-line view of scripture.  The Bible is, one of the ancient Church councils told us, both “the word of God,” and “the words of man.”  The ancients had the insight that allowed for such a paradoxical view of this hodgepodge of documents from which we synthesize our Story of seeking for God.

But because we human beings so love a tidy world, we tend to dislike paradox.  Consequently, we vacillate between the two poles of this continuum.  In some traditions, some times in history, we have tended to think of the Bible primarily as God’s word, at other times, the words of men.  The former gives us a view of the Bible as a magic book, the timeless answer book we discussed last week.  The latter view tends to devalue the Divine gift the Bible can be, the ancient wisdom, insight, and profound spiritual guidance available in its pages.

To draw the spiritual benefit available to us in the pages of this special book, we need some interpretive guidelines (called our “hermeneutic”) that allows us to be both skeptical and receptive; skeptical of the historical, scientific, and ethical problems in the book, receptive to this book’s proven capacity to elevate our vision, stir and arouse us, rebuke, correct, and train us, and equip us to walk the journey awakened to the Divine life in each of us.

In addition to a hermeneutic of both skepticism and receptivity, let me suggest four principles that can guide our quest to draw spiritual benefit from the Bible.

Principle #1:  Come to the Bible listening for the Inner Voice

As we’ve said, it is problematic to think of the Bible as The Word of God (genocide, slavery, chauvinism, etc.).  However, that is not to say that we cannot find the Word of God in the Bible.  If we come to the scriptures with a listening heart, the Inner Divine Voice often awakens us to love, to kindness, to goodness and selflessness.  In the Story of our ancient ancestors seeking the Divine, the testimony of generations who have gone before us, is that if we listen to the Spirit of God within us while engaged with this book, it is common to sense an inner awakening to ancient Truth, a nudge to walk in virtue, a prompting to embrace Divine Life.  If we come to this book in a posture of listening for the Inner Divine Voice, our souls are strengthened for the spiritual life.

Principle #2:  Listen for the Story that unfolds in the Bible

Instead of studying the Bible to get our doctrines right, to make sure we assent to the proper creed, read the Bible as a Story of those who have gone before us; a Story of which we are very much a part.

In this Story, people rise above the base parts of themselves.  They rise above the dreary sameness of the lesser truths, lesser values and beliefs imposed on them by the culture they lived in.  In this Story, while we cannot define God with precision, like the wind that blows, we can sense Divine movement, and be carried by it.

A good goal for us if we would have our theology unfold in narrative, is to be able to tell the Story of the bible in 10-15 minutes.  Be able to recount what happened to the descendants of Abraham for the last 4000 years.  It is a Story of an ever changing experience of the Divine.  In the beginning, people’s understanding of God was as angry and punitive as the gods of the peoples around them.  But over time, the prophets, the sages, and Jesus kept pointing toward a deeper understanding of God.  God is Love (1 Jn. 4:8).

At another level, it is a universal Story of people overcoming the duality of their lives.  Stuck on a path that is beneath them, humanity finds in Divine resource, the capacity to rise above the false self, rise above the numbingly dead self, and begin the experience of being their truest, Divine selves.

And once we can tell the Story, we begin to see ourselves in it.  We see our own morphing, transforming experience of God.  We see our own lives overcoming and triumphing over the base parts of us.  We see our own lives moving from the punitive to the loving.

Principle #3:  Seek out your Mission on the earth

At the very beginning of the Story of the Bible, Abraham had a seminal experience.  He experienced the Word of God, telling him that the blessings he received, were for the express purpose of blessing all the nations of the earth (Gen. 12:3).  Sadly, we often overlook that defining and formative episode in our faith.

When we come to the Bible, the question that should always be in the back of our minds is this; “What is my Mission on the earth?” What is the contribution of kindness or goodness I am to make?  Where and when shall I give my gift of wisdom, or compassion, or service?  What is mine to do on this earth?  Where shall I contribute my life and gifts?

As we listen to the ancient stories, as we read the ancient letters and histories, we must be listening for the specifics of the Divine call upon our lives; the call to make things on earth, as they are in heaven; the call to contribute to the earth.

Principle #4:  To use the Bible well, we must be humble

Humble people always understand more than proud people.  Flexible people always discover more than rigid people.

In our community’s building, one of our members runs an Aikido dojo.  She always teaches her students to come to the martial art “with an empty cup.”  If we believe we know what we need to know, we cease being listeners and learners.

If we come to the bible only to confirm what we already know, we cease being listeners and learners.

Humility recognizes that the very foundation of the spiritual life is Mystery.  We would love to have our world be tidy and neat, with precise definitions and clear-cut truths.  However, the spiritual life is just not that way.  When we get to the weeks we talk about God, the very first thing we’ll learn is that God is ineffable, that is beyond our ability to grasp or understand.  We cannot know God, or even our own natures for that matter.

Consequently, we must come to the Bible with the humble understanding, that we will not understand it all.  In fact, we do well to question what we think we know already.  We may get some answers in the Bible, but we’ll surface even more questions.  Jesus often answered questions with questions.  On this un-pin-down-able spiritual journey we travel, a posture of humility is essential.

So there they are…
Four principles to complement a hermeneutic of skepticism and receptivity.

Gutenberg Bible

And if we come to the Bible with these four principles, history indicates generations have found it to be a source of Life and Light to our souls; a source of  Truth ad goodness, of Love and internal awakening.

It is a spiritual resource, less about getting right answers and more about helping us change as human beings; changing ourselves, changing the earth.

I enjoin you who have left the Bible to return to it.  Read it, mull it, ponder it, discuss it.  A better hermeneutic can avail us of this wonderful spiritual resource.

Framing the Bible as a text book, an answer book, or as a fix-it manual leads us to use it in a way that reduces the spiritual benefits we can gain in it.  The primary danger we saw last week, is that we stop going to the Bible as detectives, seeking to ferret out a Story of The Way Things Are, and then finding ourselves in that Story.

When we see the Bible as an answer book, we tend to take the texts quite literally, and get ourselves into trouble.  In their book Adventures in Missing the Point, Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren recount this humorous letter written to Dr. Laura, the daytime radio program host…

Dear Dr Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend homosexuality, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other laws in Leviticus, and how to follow them.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger

a)  When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 11:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

b)  I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21.7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c)  Leviticus 25.44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?d)  I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35.2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

e)  Leviticus 21.20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20 or is there some wiggle room here?

f)  I know from Leviticus 11.6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Yes, when we treat the Bible as an answer book, it can get us into trouble.

Leviticus

However, there are other ways to  frame the Bible in our minds.  We can see it as a collection of literary artifacts, written over 3000 years by people on a quest to experience the Divine.  We can acknowledge that it was written by people from many different cultures, many different worldviews.

And, we can see these literary artifacts (poems, letters, mini-histories, and some literary forms we don’t even use any more), as source material to ferret out a wonderful Story.  It is a Story of how men and women perceived God from the days of Abraham until about 1900 years ago.  It is the Story of people on a quest to more deeply resonate with the transcendent Reality that is in and around us.  Over the centuries, these people’s imagination of God shifted profoundly.  What Abraham thought of God was very different from what Moses thought, and both of them though of God differently from Jesus.

However, if we want to retain the spiritual benefits of the Bible to our souls, we cannot ignore the problems it presents.  Scientific, historical, and ethical difficulties abound in the Bible.  How could it be any different in a document compiled over 3000 years, coming from many different societies and worldviews?  So, if we wish to use the Bible effectively, and to avoid the troubles of the “answer-book” Bible, we must develop a hermeneutic of skepticism. We cannot ignore the difficulties the Bible has.

Viewing the Bible as source material for a Story allows us this latitude.  The Bible as authoritative answer-book does not.

However, skepticism is not a broad enough hermeneutic.  We also need to be come to the Bible with receptivity.  Some Truth, some wisdom, some inspiration, is bigger than culture, bigger than worldview, bigger than science, bigger than history.  Some Truth is transcendent.  The history of those who have used this book as part of their spiritual lives, is that it is full of these transcendent Truths.

To draw spiritual benefit from the Bible, we are well-served to have a hermeneutic of both skepticism and receptivity.

African American slaves refused to accept the authority of those teachings in the Bible that justified and condoned slavery, prejudice, or oppression.  They had a very receptive hermeneutic.  The Story of God was unequivocally their Story.  They were devoted to Jesus, devoted to God, devoted to the spiritual life.  However, they were also skeptical about those passages of scripture trumped by the Inner Light of Truth.

In the book, Re-Enchanting Christianity, Dave Tomlinson recounts the story of Howard Thurman, one-time dean of Howard University:

My regular chore was to do all of the reading for my grandmother – she could neither read nor write … With a feeling of great temerity I asked her one day why it was that she would not let me read any of the Pauline letters. What she told me I shall never forget. ‘During the days of slavery’, she said, ‘the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves … Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used as a text: “Slaves be obedient to your masters … as unto Christ.” Then he would go on to show how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible.

The wisdom of this woman’s hermeneutic was in both her skepticism and her receptivity. Her internal sense of Divine Grace, was more authoritative than Paul’s historically-conditioned letter, or the preacher’s culturally-conditioned interpretations.

Next week, we’ll talk about how to use scripture with a hermeneutic of both receptivity and skepticism.

We Christians have a high view of the Bible.

We call it “The Word of God.”

Gutenberg Bible

Some of us call it “inerrant,” others “infallible,” still others think of it as an inspired spiritual book. We have divergent views of what it is and how we should use it, but we all agree that it is somehow special.

However, if we don’t define carefully what we mean by “special,” we can get ourselves into trouble. Without a clear definition of what the Bible is and how we should use it, we begin to tell ourselves a distorted Story of The Way Things Are (see last week).

In the last several generations, we haven’t thought very clearly about the specialness of the Bible. Consequently, many of us have become arrogant. In our certitude that the Bible says this, or means that.  Many of us have sidestepped the humility so necessary for a healthy spiritual life.

I’ve heard Christian folk say some very hateful things with the certainty that they were speaking on behalf of God. Believing the Bible is special, and certain that they understood it, they were convinced that their hatefulness carried the authority of the Word of God. Several years ago an abortion-clinic bomber was interviewed who felt he had done a good thing, a holy thing, and pointed with certainty to the Bible as his justification.

Arrogance has no place on the spiritual journey, and we do well to be suspect of the certitude we carry in our hearts, especially about the Bible.

The second kind of trouble we get into when we don’t think clearly about the specialness of this book is the tendency to make this book into something it never claimed to be. Since the Enlightenment, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation, Western society has had a love-affair with certainty. We love understanding, knowledge, and the assurance that we have a firm grip on truth.

But in our rush to assurance, many have lumped the Bible in with other Enlightenment resources. Many have associated the Bible with other things we think are special. We love information, so we have tended to project onto the Bible the image of a text book or encyclopedia; a place to gather answers to life’s persistent questions.

Also, we value fix-it manuals. They help us fix our computer, cook a delicious meal, or assemble a desk. Consequently, it wasn’t much of a stretch for us to see the Bible this way. In my childhood I heard the Bible called Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” or “A Guidebook for Living Well.”

However, if we think the Bible is these things, and we interact with it as if it is… and if it turns out that it is not these things… well, that’s a problem.

But that is exactly what many Christians have done. We have associated the Bible with something we would like it to be, and we marketed it to one another as though it was.

That is not to say that the Bible does not answer questions, that it does not help us fix things in our lives, or that it does not help us understand “The Way Things Are.” If you have a long history with this book, you probably share my experience of the Bible as each of these.

However, there is a difference between experiencing the Bible in these ways, and defining it as these. It turns out, that it is much harder to pin down an accurate working definition of the Bible. Listen to a quote from Frederick Buechner, a man who loves, honors and teaches the Bible…

Frederick Buechner

The Bible is a disorderly collection of sixty-odd books written over a period of 3000 years or more. The text is often tedious, barbaric and obscure. It is full of contradictions and inconsistencies. It is a swarming compost of a book, an Irish stew of poetry and propaganda, law and legalism, myth and murk, history and hysteria. Over the centuries it has become hopelessly associated with tub-thumping evangelism and dreary piety, with superannuated (old-folk) superstition and blue-nosed moralizing, with ecclesiastical authoritarianism and crippling literalism. (Beyond Words:  Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith)

And this scholarly teacher of the Bible, loves this book!  But even so, sometimes the Bible bothers him deeply…

…the barbarities, the often fanatical nationalism, the passages where God is interested in other nations only to the degree that he can use them to whip Israel into line, the self-righteousness and self-pity of many of the Psalms, God hardening Pharaoh’s heart only to turn around clobber him for his hard-heartedness. (Footnote)

But Buechner reads the Bible, and is very receptive to its message. However, he is very careful in how he defines its “specialness.”

In the next few weeks, I’ll suggest that when we make the Bible something that it is not, we reduce it and diminish it, and in so doing, we reduce and diminish our spiritual lives. If we make the Bible into a fix-it manual, book, we reduce our lives to being problems that need to be solved. If we make the Bible a text book, or an encyclopedia, the spiritual life is reduced to a quest for knowledge and understanding. Again, I believe these are reductions of spirituality that harm us deeply.

Spirituality has to be more than solving problems in our lives, getting our dogma right, or defining the right belief system. Finding our place in the Story of The Way Things Are must inspire us to a higher life, a deeper life, a life that dances with the rhythm of the Divine that is in and all around us.

And critical to that experience, is a better understanding of what the Bible is, and how we can properly use it.

Next time.