Category Archives: Contemporary Religion

Wilderness Abel and Canaanite Cain

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

The Genesis story about Cain and Abel has often been interpreted as a story about sibling jealousy and questionable parenting, but the actual biblical text is about the conflict of two modes of relating to Reality—Reality with a capital “R”—that absolutely Mysterious All-Powerfulness that meets us in every event of our lives.

Every Abel and every Cain is closer to this Mysterious Reality than to his or her own breathing. The truth that Reality is infinitely beyond us does not change the truth that Reality is also infinitely close to us. This is true for women as well men. Abel and Cain are two different relationships with Reality for any he or she.

Abel’s mode of worship is a symbol of that obedience to the Moses style of realism that was carved out in 40 years of wilderness practices. After this Moses-trained, One-Reality-loving community of people conquered a place for themselves in that more fertile land of promise, a deep religions conflict took place between the Moses monotheism and the Canaanite diversity of devotions that celebrated the many different powers of being human.

In this story, Cain’s mode of worship was a devotion to these many aspects of human life. His many gods and goddesses represent different aspects of our humanity. These were and still are real powers in our lives, worthy of some access and care, but no one of these devotions, nor all of them together, is a devotion to that One Reality that creates and destroys all aspects of our humanity. So the Canaanite relationship with that One Reality was a flight from that One Reality into a devotion to the various aspects of being human. This put Canaanite humanism in severe conflict with a devotion to that One Truth of that One Awesome Reality of Moses.

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Freedom

Contemporary Religion, Political, Realistic Pointers 2019

How Does the Essential Freedom of the Human Spirit
Differ from Political Freedom?

Political freedom is something granted by a human government to its citizens. Essential freedom is something granted by an “Eternal Government” to its human beings. This is a big difference.

Political freedom is created by human beings. It is the gift of a human creation—the governments that we humans create. But our essential freedom is provided by the Profound Reality that we confront in every event of our lives. We typically flee from this freedom and get stuck to the places to which we have fled. Nevertheless, the miracle of being restored to our essential freedom remains a possibility. We don’t have to create or achieve this essential freedom. We don’t have to do anything to have it. We only have to surrender to the essential freedom as given to us in the events of our lives.

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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:

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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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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.

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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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Power

Contemporary Religion, Political, Realistic Pointers 2018,

Many authors today have often contrasted the power-to do things for people with power-over other people. Indeed, there is deep contrast between the use of our power in service of others and the use of our power to gain status for our selves or as a means of oppressing others for our own benefit and sense of worth.

Nevertheless, power-over is not in itself evil. Parents have power-over their children. This benefits the children, if such power is well used. Our political leaders (however they are selected) are granted power-over a wide scope of citizen life. Such political power can also be used in service of the citizenry, and such power can be misused very badly.

Power is an important factor in all social actions. As Paul Tillich spelled out in one of his most creative books, there is no Justice without Power and there is no Justice building Power or empowered Justice without Love (Tillich, Paul; Love, Power, and Justice).

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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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Perpetual Revolution

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2017, ,

in our use of the word “God”

My mentor for 20 years Joe Mathews was a graduate student and long-term friend of H. Richard Niebuhr. “Perpetual revolution” is a phrase and an emphasis that Mathews took from Niebuhr and passed on to me. This phrase was applied to all social structures, but especially to the perpetual revolution in religious forms.

One of Mathews’ favorite spins was about how Spirit cries out, “Give me form,” and how the form that we give to Spirit can never contain the Spirit that cried out for form.  In this same way, what Niebuhr called “radical monotheism” is a perpetual revolution. Such monotheism is “radical” all the way back to Moses and all the way forward to any radical new edition of Christianity.

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