Category Archives: Bible Interpretation

Spirit Parables

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2018

Reading the New Testament is a challenge not only because it was written almost 2000 years ago using a pre-modern metaphorical language, but also because the first four books of the New Testament (and others) use a devise I will call “Spirit Parables.” For example, “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that grows into a large tree.” This style of communication is also present in the stories of healing. Following is an example from the Gospel of Mark (Mark 2: 1-12).

This selection is taken from my commentary on the Gospel of Mark. This entire book is now published on the Realistic Living blog site for $10.

https://realisticliving.org/blog/mark-commentary/

When he [Jesus] re-entered Capernaum some days later, a rumor spread that he was in somebody’s house. Such a large crowd collected that while he was giving them his message it was impossible even to get near the doorway. Meanwhile, a group of people arrived to see him, bringing with them a paralytic whom four of them were carrying. And when they found it was impossible to get near him because of the crowd, they removed the tiles from the roof over Jesus’ head and let down the paralytic’s bed through the opening. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man on the bed, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”

But some of the scribes were sitting there silently asking themselves, “Why does this man talk such blasphemy? Who can possibly forgive sins but God?”

Jesus realized instantly what they were thinking, and said to them, “why must you argue like this in your minds? Which do you suppose is easier—to say to a paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, or ‘Get up, pick up your bed and walk’? But to prove to you that the Son of Man has full authority to forgive sins on earth, I say to you,”—and here he spoke to the paralytic—“Get up, pick up your bed and go home.”

At once the man sprang to his feet, picked up his bed and walked off in full view of them all. Everyone was amazed, praised God, and said, “We have never seen anything like this before.”

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Deep River Washing

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Realistic Pointers 2018

This month’s Realistic Living Pointers contains excerpts from my commentary on the Gospel of Mark. It is about my understanding of the meaning to Mark of John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus.

In these verses of Mark’s narrative about a Jewish peasant from Nazareth named “Jesus” rising from John’s washing from the corruptions of that era of history is prelude to the disciples of Jesus rising from their own deep-water dying experienced when their mentor was crucified. Mark is going lead us from this resurrection in the life of Jesus to the resurrection of Jesus’ life in the lives of the disciples.

If you want the read this whole commentary on the Gospel of Mark, it is published on the Realistic Living blog site for a mere $10 plus your name, your address, and your e-mail address. Just put those four things in the mail to Gene Marshall, 3578 N. State Highway 78, Bonham, TX 7418, and I will e-mail you the password that allows you to download as many copies of this commentary as you want to use for yourself or in your local ministries.

To see more clearly what this commentary contains, you can go to:

https://realisticliving.org/blog/mark-commentary/

Following is an early part of that commentary:

Continue reading Deep River Washing →

Spirit Sickness

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2018

For my Realistic Living Pointers this month I am sharing a portion of my recently published book: Radical Gifts: Living the Full Christian Life in Troubled Times.

I now have copies in my house that I can mail to you or to your friends and relatives as Christmas gifts. Each book is $20, postage free in the US. I only have 17 copies left.

Or you can order this book from the Canadian publisher www.woodlakebooks.com. The price for one print copy is $19.95 plus $17 shipping to the US. For 7 or more books, shipping from Canada is free. If you live in Canada your best deal is to order your books directly from Wood Lake. If you want an e-book or kindle, you can order it from Wood Lake for $9.96.

Contact me, ( jgmarshall@cableone.net ), and I will put a $20 book on its way to the person whose address you send me. You can mail your check to Gene Marshall; 3578 N. State Highway; Bonham TX, 75418 You can also order this book on Amazon.com

Most important, please read the following and share it with others.

Chapter 2
What Is Spirit Sickness and How Is It Healed?

Spirit sickness is not the same as the dread we identified in the previous chapter. Dread in the midst of an oblivion experience is normal, healthy, spirit life. So is the dread we experience in resurgence periods – the dread in our struggles to build a new and unfamiliar life. Dread, fascination, and the courage to embrace these intensities are all factors of healthy spirit life.

“Despair” is the key concept for understanding the sickness of the spirit. For example, leaving childhood is an oblivion experience for an adolescent. Being in despair over leaving childhood, however, is something else. Despair would be the result of refusing to grow up. Despair is spirit sickness. The opposite of despair is trust in the goodness of one’s real situation – in this example, it means trusting in the goodness of leaving childhood. The adolescent might also despair over taking up the roles of adulthood. In this case, he or she would be despairing over a resurgence experience. Here, the opposite of despair would be trust in the goodness of growing up.

As adults, we might be in despair over having to leave the familiar patterns of declining aspects of our society. Or we might be in despair over having to learn new styles of social life. The opposite of despair would be a trust in the goodness of living in the midst of this awesome social change.

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Interpreting Scripture

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2018

For my Realistic Living Pointers this month, I am sharing with you the last half of the introduction to a new book that I am publishing on our Realistic Living blog site.

The Creator of Christianity
a commentary on the Gospel of Mark
by Gene W. Marshall

The entire book can be purchased for $10 on this site:

https://realisticliving.org/blog/

While you are there, look around. We are also publishing the 8 spirit talks that Gene gave at the June 2018 Realistic Living Summer Program, plus a Study Outline for the above book, and Study Outlines for The Unbelievable Happiness of What Is by Jon Bernie, and Dangerous Years by David W. Orr. All this is in addition to the monthly Realistic Living Pointers.

Following is the second half of the Introduction to the Mark Commentary.

Interpreting Scripture Today

Today, Christian theologians, who want to go to the roots of the first century Christian “revelation,” face the reality that people in the first century used the now obsolete two-tier, story-telling metaphor. That old manner of talking about ultimate matters had been the way of talking about ultimate matters for as long as anyone could remember.
In spite of the fact that their way of talking is no longer adequate for us today, we cannot claim to be Christians if we fail to interpret our scriptures. Therefore, to do scriptural interpretation adequately, we must translate for our era of culture what those early writers meant in their own lives when they used that old form of metaphorical talk that is now basically meaningless to us. Throughout this commentary, I will be illustrating what such metaphorical translation looks like.

Christian theologians today also face a second challenge. Within our current culture we tend to overlook metaphorical meanings altogether. We tend to view all statements literally. We learned to be literal from the current prominence of the scientific mode of truth. In the scientific style of thinking, words mean something only if words point to something in the realm of facts, observable by the human senses. Influenced by this overemphasis on facts, both religious agnostics and religious literalists fail to see the poetic or contemplative type of truth that is contained in the wild stories of the Bible. The agnostics are right to see that many stories of the Bible are preposterous when viewed literally. And religious literalists, who think they are defending Biblical truth with their literalism, are actually ignoring the profound truth that is hidden in these wildly creative stories.

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The Creator of Christianity

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2018, ,

For my Realistic Living Pointers this month, I am using part of the introduction to a new book that I am publishing on our Realistic Living blog site.

The Creator of Christianity
a commentary on the Gospel of Mark
by Gene W. Marshall

The entire book can be purchased for $10 on this site:

https://realisticliving.org/blog/

While you are there, look around. We are also publishing the 8 spirit talks that Gene gave at the June 2018 Realistic Living Summer Program, plus Study Outlines for the above book, The Unbelievable Happiness of What Is by Jon Bernie, and Dangerous Years by David W. Orr. All this is in addition to the recent Realistic Living Pointers posts.

So here is the first part of the

Introduction

to the Mark Commentary.

Living in Aramaic-speaking Galilee twenty-one centuries ago, Jesus and his first companions constituted the event of revelation that birthed the Christian faith. But without Paul’s interpretation of the meaning of cross and resurrection for the Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jewish culture, we might never have heard of Christian faith.

Mark, whoever he was, lived during the lifetime of Paul and was deeply influenced by Paul. In about 70 CE, Mark, like Paul, was a major turning point in the development of the Christian religion. Mark invented the literary form we know as “the Gospel.” This remarkable literary form was then copied and elaborated by the authors Matthew and Luke, and then revolutionized by John. These four writings, not Paul’s letters, are the opening books of the New Testament that Christians count as their Bible (along with the Old Testament). “Gospel” (Good News) has become a name for the whole Christian revelation.

We might say that Mark was the theologian who gave us the Christianity that has survived in history. The Markian shift in Christian imagination was important enough that we might even claim that Mark, rather than Paul or Jesus, was the founder of Christianity. However that may be, Mark’s gospel is a very important piece of writing. And this writing is more profound and wondrous than is commonly appreciated.

Of first importance for understanding my viewpoint in the following commentary is this: I see the figure of “Jesus” in Mark’s narrative as a fictitious character—based, I firmly believe, on a real historical figure. I do not want to confuse Mark’s “Jesus” with what we can know through our best recent scientific research about the historical Jesus of Nazareth. For our best understanding of Mark, we need to view Mark’s “Jesus” with the same fun and sensibility we have toward Harry Potter when we read J. K. Rowling’s novels about this unusual character.

Continue reading The Creator of Christianity →

Being Buddha

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Realistic Pointers 2018,

A number of Buddhist teachers insist that everyone is already a Buddha (The Awake One.) Underneath, we might say, all the falsifications about who we think we are, there exits our Buddha-hood. I believe that something similar can be said about being “in Christ Jesus.” If Jesus, as the Christ (Messiah), is understood as a revelation of our profound humanness, then all of us are already “in Christ.” Our profound humanness has never been missing, and it is still there. We simply have to get our alien self-images out of the way. That is a serious business, for we are sociologically conditioned to a human build world that is a far approximation of what is really real.

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When Total Obedience is Perfect Freedom

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2018, ,

Realism means obedience to reality. Such obedience entails giving up building mind-castles of false realities to take the place of Reality with a capital “R.” This capitalization assumes that there IS a really real Reality that is not made up by human beings. However the capitalized word “Reality” is capable of misunderstandings. For some it can mean a second realm that stands over-against the ordinary realm of existence. If we are inclined to a more down-to-Earth view of Reality, it can mean those parts of our experience that are pleasant, excluding those parts that are unpleasant, horrific, challenging, grim, or perhaps boring.

But the “total obedience” I want to describe is a devotion to the mysterious all-powerful encounter that includes everything that happens to us in every event we face. Such realism means taking in what is actually happening to each of us and to us as societies. This includes possibilities as well as limitations. It includes the consequences of human choices as well as the processes of nature over which humans have no control. It includes the horrific as well as the glorious. In addition to our everyday content, the Reality we actually face includes the Abyss of No-thing-ness from which each thing, including our own lives, have come and to which each thing, including our own lives,will return. Reality also includes the Every-thing-ness of that Expansive Sea of Mystery within which each identifiable thing exists for now. Reality includes the Awesome Otherness that we encounter as well as the Awe that the Awesome occasions in our inner being.

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The Good Shepherd Lives

Bible Interpretation, Existential Ethics, Realistic Pointers 2018, , ,

Here is a much mistreated passage from the Fourth Gospel about shepherds and sheep.

I have come that human beings may have life and may have it is all its fullness. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hireling, when he sees the wolf coming, abandons the sheep and runs away, because he is no shepherd and the sheep are not his. John 10 :10-12

Those who give sermons on the good shepherd often assume that this ancient image applies to a contemporary pastor who tells his flock what they should believe and how they should act. Such a view also assumes that most people are sheep in the sense of being gullible, go-along, authority-addicted dumbbells.

I do not believe this was the meaning intended by the original author of these verses. The original shepherd image was grounded in the experience of noticing highly dedicated persons working on a hillside with a flock of sheep, providing them grass and water and protecting them from wolves. Being a follower of Jesus means being such a leader.

So where can we actually experience this Good Shepherd in our lives today? Let me answer this with a fictitious story—a story made out of my own experiences. In my story, Sally McGillicutty teaches an adult class in the Sunflower room of the Umpity Ump Christian Church. Sally trusts the Ultimate Message that the Infinite Silence we meet in every event of our lives loves Sally and every other person (and creature) on this planet or any other planet. Because of her trust in that Eternal Wholeness that is faced by Sally and by us, Sally is thereby an embodiment of the Ultimate Message from Eternity.

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The Flight From Freedom

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Existential Ethics, Realistic Pointers 2018, , ,

Freedom is a component of our essential nature along with trust of Realty and care for self and neighbor. Yet we flee from this freedom, just as we distrust Reality and neglect care for ourselves and others. Flight from freedom is an estrangement from realism.

The Primal Merging with Freedom

When we have been blessed to see beyond our self images, personality structures, and social conditioning, we discover our intentionality, our initiative, our freedom to act beyond those self-inflicted boundaries. Too easily, we tell ourselves that we can’t do what we can do. The truth is we don’t know what we can do. We think we are determined where we are not. For example, if I am by habit a shy person, I can still discover my freedom to risk myself in gregarious contact with others. If I am by habit a boisterous person, I can still discover my freedom to calm down into being sensitive to others. Personality impulses exist, but so does freedom, unless we have squelched it.

Our essential freedom does not control the future—almost always he future comes to us as a surprise. Our freedom is not absolute control, but a participant in options. And this freedom is a gift—a gift that must to be received and enacted by us. Freedom is our profound initiative to make a difference in what the future turns out to be. Our free initiatives mingle with massive forces beyond our control to form a future that is both a surprise to us and a result of our initiatives.

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The Revelation of Moses

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2018, ,

What happened to those slaves that Moses led out of Egypt?  Why do we remember an event that is centuries more than 3000 years old.  Furthermore, this event is now covered with layers of story, myth, and interpretations to the extent that any scientifically historical accuracy about what factually happened is obscured in all the fuss that has been made about this event.  Let us suppose that the following bare-bones approximation of the outward historical facts, gives us an impression of what we need to guess in order to begin understandings why this event was revelatory—yes, revelatory of the nature of every event that has ever happened or ever will happen.

Here is my guess:  An unusually aware, sensitive, and perhaps educated member of the Hebraic slave community was moved to lead a significant number of his Hebraic companions out of a severely hierarchical Egyptian society into the wilderness where a new vision of law-writing was established that was based on a vision that the Mysterious Realty allows free action to change the course of history.  This was a huge shift in life interpretation for these Egyptian enculturated slaves—so huge that it took Moses and others 40 years, so the story goes, to wash Egypt out of this people and prepare them to fight for a more promising place on Earth for their revelation and their emerging peoplehood.

A more personally rooted story-time rendering of this transformative event begins with how a man named Moses got so angry over a member of his people being mistreated by an Egyptian soldier that he killed that solder, and then had to flee to the out-back into a life in hiding.  Then one day, so the story goes, Moses came upon a bush that was blazing with a strange type of fire.  Temporal bushes burn up, but this bush was not being consumed.  It remained the same old bush in spite of this strange conflagration. This was surely a bit of Moses’ poetry for a very real inner happening to Moses himself.   His own “who-he-thought-he-was” was being burned up, yet he was not consumed.

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