The writer of the Gospel of John placed these startling words in the mouth of Jesus. In John’s stories, the statements of Jesus are about the essence of Christian faith within any human being. In the above verse, John is witnessing to the radical freedom of the Christian life in overcoming death in a way that is more radical than simply accepting death as part of our lives. The life of Christian faith includes intending our death for the causes that we alone choose to make “death ground” for the living of our lives.

So, if I am a person of faith, no ruling power of my society takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No power of nature takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No God or Goddess takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will.

This means that no oil company can take my life from me when I insist upon phasing out fossil fuels, because I am already laying down my life for the moderation of the climate catastrophe. No pharmaceutical or health insurance company can take my life from me when I insist upon a government administrated Medicare-for-All type of justice, because I am laying my life down of my own free will for an affordable healthcare provision for all persons in my society of responsibility, and also for the human species as a whole. If I make these causes my death ground, pubic health has taken on a meaning for me that no insurance company can intimidate.

The phrase “free will” as meant in the above scripture is about every human being’s essential freedom to act beyond biological impulses; beyond personality impulses; beyond sociological conditioning, beyond the norms & laws; beyond superego voices of restraint; beyond conscience ,if conscience is seen as internalized sociality.

If freedom is lost in my life, it is because I have employed my freedom in giving away my freedom. This can be a simple act of mimicry of my peers. However complicated be my loss of freedom, freedom is still my essential being, even if I cannot now recover it. Perhaps I am still free enough to pray to the Giver of freedom to restore my freedom.

When I am free to be free, I can make this free response in obedience to the Giver of my freedom and to the neighbors given to me by this All-encompassing Giver. I do this freedom alone, but I do freedom in active surrender to a cosmos of people and events.

Being my God-given freedom includes“freely giving back” to the Giver of my life all the gifts of my life, including my life itself. “No force whatsoever takes my life from me. I lay my life down of my own free will.” This is an expression of and also a definition of true Christian faith. Jesus is our exemplar. We follow him. As pictured by John in the above passage, Jesus defines our Christian faith. This is clearly the view of the writer of the Fourth Gospel. But our essential humanness is not so because John says it is so. John says it is so because this freedom is an aspect of the essence of our being human. Jesus is the Christ because he opens for us a return to our essential humanness—a human essence that includes the freedom to ”lay down our life of our own free will.”

Now of course, if I don’t lay down my life, I die anyhow. But not intending my death means that I “back into my grave” instead of “going forward” toward my grave “headfirst,” so to speak. Of course, death may grab me at any time, but death will happen to me as I am either expending my life of my own free will or as I am refusing to do so. Perhaps my whole life is about just trying not to die. Or perhaps I am dedicated to resentfully wasting away. But such passive relationships with my life and death are not necessary. Within whatever circumstances of life I am living, including my closing days, I can lay my life down of my own free will, or I can live otherwise. With whatever bits of awareness remains for me, I can intend my living with whatever powers I have left.

That is, I can lay my life down if I am experiencing my essential freedom. If I have sold my freedom into slavery, then I cannot be a person who freely lays down my life, I must serve whatever lesser values I have sold out my freedom to serve. So perhaps I cannot lay down my life of my own free will, because, at the present time, I have no free will with which to do that. Perhaps I am refusing to have my freedom because I deny the very existence of freedom, or at least my freedom. Perhaps I simply refuse the response-ability of being free. Perhaps I am so trapped in my serious addictions that my freedom would be an agony for me—an agony I do not choose to live through to the realization of my essential freedom, glory, and tranquil joy.

If I am being my freedom and indeed laying my life down of my own free will, what does this look like. It does not necessarily appear all that extraordinary. If I am president of the United States, laying down my life of my own free will basically mean doing what is expected of me—namely, using this office to serve the people rather than using this set of privileges and powers to serve myself and my narrow set of interests. Or to put this more carefully, do I let being president serve me in the context of my serving the people, or do I provide a scrap of service to the people in the context of the presidency serving me. For of course, this role of presidency does serve me, not just my support, comfort, and pleasure, but my felt need to make a contribution, to have a purpose, and other values. Are these services to myself done in the context of laying my life down for the people? Or is whatever good I grudging do for the people done in the context of my being served by this role?

Or take the more ordinary case of my having chosen to provide my own life support with a plumbing business. The same dynamics apply to plumbing as to being president. Do I do this plumbing in resentment about having to do this “dirty” work—seeing it only as “necessary” for my survival, or do I lay my life down of my own free will in the service of the plumbing needs of my community? In this latter case, I continue to learn and to improve what I do. I make an art of plumbing. I do not even call it “dirty work”—at least not any more dirty than what a politician has to put up with. It is simply my work. No one is taking my life from me: I am laying my life down of my own free will.

The Truth of Response-Ability

A core truth in both of the above illustrations is that our lives are not being freely given unless we are actually giving our lives in the exercise of freedom within the actual particulars that are being given to us by the Almighty Giver. If I view my life as an already determined drama that is destined to work out the only way it can, then there is no laying down of my life of my own free will. I am viewing myself as a complicated piece of rock, water, and air for which all my processes are being determined by a fixed fate.

Of course there are many forces impacting me—forces over which I have no control or even knowledge. But I am also an aware being, and that awareness includes not just watching, but also being response-able to a significant degree. Being a recipient of this gift of the ability for free response, I am thereby responsible for all my response-able responses.

Nikos Kazantzakis in his book-length poem entitled “The Saviors of God” provided us with words that might be viewed as the voice of Jesus on this topic of freedom unto death:

“You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms.

Which road should you take? The most craggy assent! It is the one I also take: follow me.

Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.

Learn to command, Only he who can give commands may represent me on earth.

Love responsibility. Say: “It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.” (Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Saviors of God. pages 67 & 68)

These words describe a commitment to the gift of radical freedom, and they also imply a deep guilt in my not living my free responsibility. Taking on such a radical commitment does not mean that our choices always succeed in saving the values we seek to save. Our freedom is indeed a finite power. Our power to bend the course of history is limited. We will, therefore., be guilty of failures, as well as guilty of mistakes. In addition we may even be guilty of betraying our gift of freedom through crawling back, in a cowardly fashion, into one of our well-practiced slaveries.

Nevertheless, in the practice of an authentic version of Christian faith, we can resist the temptation of the determinists and fatalists who tell us that we have no guilt, because everything works out the only way it can in accord with some overall dance in which we play no role in creating the choreography to which we dance. Instead of attempting to handle our guilt in this illusory way, we can take on a full consciousness of our guilt, when we are also taking on a full forgiveness from the Profound Reality that judges us guilty of our unrealism.

This Christian faith not only resists the notion of a totally determined existence, but also views each conscious moment as a fork in the road between being our freedom and fleeing our freedom. We have to choose which fork to take. Choosing freedom has a different quality than choosing slavery. Choosing freedom is a surrender to the gift of freedom as it is being given to us in the situation of each moment of choice. We do not accomplish freedom. We do not create freedom. We choose the freedom that is being given to us with which we at the same time are freely choosing among the options that lie before us.

On the other hand, choosing slavery is choosing an obliteration of the freedom already being given. My choosing slavery as my operating identity creates a slave version of me from which I am not empowered to escape. Choosing slavery renders a bondage of our will—a bondage of our own choosing for which we are responsible. Freedom cannot be chosen by a will that is bound in slavery to something other than realism. The will that was meant for freedom is no longer free. The will is now caged within a prison cell of a slavery that we have chosen. The restoration of our essential freedom requires that Profound Reality come to our rescue, restoring us to that deep realism that includes freedom.

The gift of freedom means that we are now free to leave the cage of slavery through enacting the gift of freedom—that is, by making specific choices with that gift of freedom. Our liberation from bondage is completed not by fate, not by cause, not by chance, but by a choice to use of our given freedom to choose freedom.

I recently viewed the film Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons. Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.

This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about an ordinary human being laying down her life of her own free will. She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery. Her cool, effective freedom of action under such pressures illustrate the meaning of this text:

“No one takes my life from me, I lay my life down of my own free will.” John 10:18

Christopher Fry, in his play The Ice Man Cometh, has an alcoholic drunk pronounce the word freedom as “free-doom”—a cute, but also profound insight. Freedom is the doom of all the slaveries of spirit that we may prize. And such freedom is the aliveness, courage, and grandeur of our essential being.

The post Freedom and Death first appeared on Realistic Living.

This is just a story, but all we have about Moses is just a story. The stories we have were were first written down around 1000 BCE about an event that some modern scholars calculate happened around 1290 BCE. So a lot of oral telling took place for about 300 years before the Exodus event was put down in the written records we now see in the Bible. And the story telling about Moses and the Exodus continued to be expanded upon for several more centuries. So what really happened in a scientific sense is pretty murky. Nevertheless, what happened to this people as a revelation of lasting truth about Profound Reality is more clear, however controversial that revelation may be. Following are a couple of paragraphs on my view of some of the core truth of that revelation.

The Exodus from Egypt was not a work of the universe acting through the lives of a selection of humans; it was the vision of one solitary man put into action by sharing his burning-bush vision with others of his clan and then enacting that vision with them in the tough obstacles of real world history.

At root, Moses’ vision was about the nature of history, the nature of human life, and the nature of Profound Reality. Here are elements of that revelation that are most important to me: The life of a community of people does not unfold in some prescribed way. Social arrangements do not have to stay as they are. History itself is massively open to human agency. Such truths as these were seen by the Moses followers as more than wild-harried ideas swinging through the head of this imaginative Moses. I view Moses and his listeners as believing themselves confronted with fresh understanding about the way that historical reality actually works. The religious heritage that Moses shared with his Hebrew clan of slaves surely informed his interpretation of his “burning that did not consume.” Later writers called this a message from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With such a vision, Moses aroused his people to their freedom to live differently.

This simple but profound revelation of raw freedom has characterized the best disciples of Moses unto this day. As the old stories tell, Moses continued with his history-making free responses by laying down ten guidelines for how this wilderness society had to be conducted if they were to continue to be as a society built upon trust in this Profound Reality that gives to ordinary humans the freedom to determine the course of time. For 40 years, so the story goes, Moses made grim, but lively and realistic choices that produced a group maturity that enabled continuation after Moses’ death. Another charismatic leader, Joshua, lead this people into a wider destiny beyond this desert cradle of their social infancy. However crass the stories of Joshua may seem to our contemporary moralities, without this transition into that wider history, we would never have heard of the Exodus revelation. I see the raw essential freedom of our human essence as one of the awarenesses revealed in that Exodus event.

The Power of Human Freedom

Obviously, our human freedom is not infinite in its historical power. Human freedom is a limited power that must work within a much larger set of powers. Obedience to Reality is required to enjoy this Reality-granted freedom to change the course of human events. This Profound Reality of the biblical devotion has been said to have Infinite Freedom. And that Mysterious Power of Infinite Freedom is said to be granting to us living humans a limited, but meaningful role in choreographing the outcomes of our human dance on planet Earth. To say that what we humans face in life is just a dance of outward and inward forces about which we are only the watchers is a half truth.

We aware watchers are with that very capacity for awareness also granted (or graced with) a freedom to make history-bending choices. Also, this blessed freedom can sell itself out into patterns of bondage to the various delusions that are made possible by our big-brained minds and our advanced awareness. With our freedom we can create a “bondage of spirit” (as some have called it)—a bondage from which we have to be rescued by acts of Profound Reality. This bondage is like being a prisoner in a cell. In this cell our essential freedom is but a shadow of its fuller self. It is like being limited to walking around within four restraining walls. This estranged human also bends history, but in destructive ways. As Jesus is said to have put it, “A good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit.”

Another Story about Freedom

Years ago, I read a novel entitled “The Ronin.” It was a story about an oriental swordsman who was so skilled with his precious sword that he was able to live almost without limitations. He did a lot of arrogant killing to maintain this quality of life. The crisis of the story came about when the full horror of that chosen form of life became clear to his consciousness. He threw his sword as far away as he could fling it, crying out, “I did it, I did it all.” And henceforth he did something different with his great strength—something that was more of use to his social companions. The details of this fine novel provide much more of the raw feelings of this life journey, but even my rough outline tells the story that human life in its essence is freedom, a freedom that is not determined by any other factor than the freedom to access that essential freedom.

You and I may not have done a Moses-level revelatory action of freedom or even a big change from a useless and destructive life, but we may well have come to see that some earlier choice of vocation, or marriage, or group engagement was a wrong turn—a mistake of significant proportion. If searing guilt was not blurred by excuses, we might have been able to cry out with the Ronin, “I did it, I did it all.” In other words, we might have been graced to freely confesses this guilt, and see Reality’s forgiveness for a fresh start, and then grasped our freedom to go elsewhere with our living.

My first personal experience of such a turning point was my abandonment of my father’s plans for me to be a mathematician and physicist for which I was well qualified and become instead a novice religious student and pastor for which I was unprepared. And after I became more experienced on this new path, many other such watershed freedom discoveries and freedom enactments have come my way to be opted by me. Telling my tales of these repentance moments is very complicated and difficult to even remember accurately, but the essence of them lives on as trust in those here and now possibilities that still open in the ongoing nowness of living.

I have no doubt whatsoever that human life is at bottom nothing but freedom. I don’t actually know who I essentially am, for I am nothing at all but the becoming of what I now am not. And such becoming can be a perpetual surrender to freedom.

Living the Life of Freedom

My consciousness includes freedom. Living the life of my conscious freedom means using my mind to create deeds of freedom. My mind is not a block to freedom, but a tool of freedom—unless I am insisting on using what freedom I have to serve the stories and images of my mind.

Anti-intellectualism or any other contempt for my mind is using my freedom to serve an idea in my mind. Anti-thoughtfulness is an estranged idea in my mind created by my freedom to be a slob without the freedom of thoughtfulness. The mind, it is true, contains a host of estranged ideas created by my freedom in my mind—illusions of all sorts, excuses of all sorts, suppressions of guilt, hidings of truth, hopes for the impossible, and this list is endless. But all these unrealisms are not the fault of the mind, but the mental creations of my freedom. The mind is just a wondrous biological servant of my conscious freedom along with my heart and my fingers. All these estrangements from realism are established modes of responding made by my freedom to the possibilities of my life.

It is true that I share most of my estranging thoughts with my culture. We call this “cultural conditioning” as if the cultural did this to us. But actually, we chose to go along with our culture, or we chose not to go along with our culture. In both cases, “we did It.” We joined our culture in these cultural estrangements. And perhaps we also distanced ourselves from some of those cultural estrangements. Whatever we have done in relations with our culture, we did it. Our culture did nothing more than provide us options, plus some pressures to accept these options. We took those options. We did it. We are guilty of every estrangement we have taken from our culture. And we are responsible for any detachments from our culture that we have made in favor of something better. We did that too.

It is so easy to be estranged from our authenticity, because estrangement in every case is simply confusing some humanly created mental content with what is real. Those who argue that the rational is the real, are not noticing the truth that the real Real is forever more than our rationality has encompassed. The Real remains mysterious, no matter how well we have approximated the Real with our imaginative thoughtfulness. Our thoughtfulness is a human creation open to improvements, where improvement in our thoughtfulness means closer to the Real.

Thinking in a dog or in a human is descriptive of the Real, predictive of the Real, and an approximation of the Real. Thoughtfulness in a human is more complex than in the dog, but like the dog our thoughtfulness is essential for our survival and happiness. This thoughtful description of thoughtfulness is not a disparagements of thoughtfulness. The mind of the contents of the mind are part of what is real, but the reality held by the thoughts of the mind can never fully encompass the Real.

“Estrangement” can be defined as confusing a thoughts of the mind with the Real. And “Authenticity” can be defined as a confession of our ignorance about the Real, as well as a freedom of commitment to our partial holds on some approximate truths about the Real.

And as we enter into our ever-fuller awareness of the Real, we will always find included in this Massive Mystery of the Real an awareness of our conscious freedom as an aspect of the Real. Any denial of human freedom with thoughts about a total determinism that excludes human freedom (or even dog freedom) is an estrangement from the Real. Such deterministic thinking is a way of being lost in our minds at the expense of not experiencing the Real. Our experience of the Real includes our freedom. Any true openness to the onrushing Real includes being open to our freedom to respond to the Real.

We are, of course, determined in the sense that we are determined to be, among other things, our conscious freedom that is in itself a life-determining factor. Of course. our lives are much more than our conscious freedom. Nature determines our heart beat, our sleep, and our dreams without any assistance from our conscious freedom. With our freedom we can fight with nature about going to sleep, but sleep is by definition an absence of our conscious freedom. With our freedom we can exercise our body to increase our heart beats. And with our freedom we can recall and interpret our dreams. But only part of our lives can be called “freedom.”

Attempting to handle our guilt by denying it can be our motivation for not believing in a nature that includes our freedom. All of us may wish to deny the many delusory turns we have made with our freedom. We may wish to deny our many losses of realism to some set of addictive behaviors. But instead we could cry out, “I did it!” We could confess our guilt, open to its forgiveness, and accept a fresh start into a more realistic style of living. Indeed, a rediscovery of our freedom begins with confessing our unrealism with this cry of freedom: “I did it!”

The post I Did It! first appeared on Realistic Living.

This simple poetic prayer was taught to me as a pre-schooler. I prayed it at bed time. With my 88-year-old memory, I have forgotten many things, but I have not forgotten that prayer. It may be living in me unconsciously even now when I allow myself to sleep, trusting that all will be well.

It was not my college-professor parents who taught me this prayer. When my sister and I were preschoolers, we had a live-in maid. Mrs. Rush was a our caretaker most of the time. She was an avid Nazarene church member. She read us stories from Hurlburt’s Stories of the Bible. It must have been her who taught me that prayer..

In the religious culture of the Nazarene church, as well as the more liberal Methodist church that I attended, this little prayer existed within a master myth about soul and body— a sensory-rich mortal body substance and a ghostly, enigmatic immortal soul substance. As a modern adult, I no longer dwell within that two-substance way of describing my being. Nevertheless, this old prayer hangs around with meanings that do not presuppose that ancient worldview. I need a new view of soul

After much contemplative inquiry, “soul” now mean for me my enigmatic consciousness of awareness and freedom. This awareness is temporal: it is limited and changing, it rests during my sleeping, This freedom to met challenges, choose options, and make history is limited freedom within a limited awareness of an immense cosmos of mystery and surprises. So this soul of awareness and freedom is a temporal reality. that does not survive my death. Nevertheless, this enigmatic awareness and freedom is distinguishable from what I interiorly experience as “mind” or exteriorly experience as “brain” or nervous system. My consciousness or “soul” is an active agent that uses my mind for conducting my thoughtfulness, moving my body, accomplishing my purposes. I am guessing that somewhat less expanded form of consciousness (awareness and freedom) is a factor in the dynamics of aliveness in all animal life.

I am guessing that animal consciousness evolved as a survival benefit. The more conscious life forms became, the more adequately they could anticipate future events, avoid dangers, and engage in alternative outcomes to their benefit. As wondrous as this is, there is no need to believe that the souls of animals or humans are immortal. Consciousness or “living soul” can be viewed as one of the many strange forces in the cosmos—along with gravity, electromagnetic radiation, and others. Aliveness is one of those counter-currents to the massive processes of a cosmic running-down from heat to cold, from organized to disorganized. When death takes over a living body, every aspect of its organization begins to disorganize. Bones can last the longest, but even they will become powder over time.

Humans, with our capacity for art, language, and mathematics, are equipped with an intensity of consciousness that no cat, dog, or horse possesses. These other animals are obviously conscious with layers of consciousness that are similar to layers of my own consciousness. But I also possess in my art, language, and mathematics an enhanced layer of conscious with which no cat is troubled. I face options for living that no horse needs to confront. Not all my behaviors are a result of my aware choices, but these aware choices also take place, alongside all the determined factors in my overall operation. Some of my determined behaviors are also chosen. Some of my determined behaviors are restricted and altered by my choices. Choice-making is an aspect of my consciousness, and this consciousness, this awareness and freedom is my “soul.”

So in my currently operating vocabulary, the word “soul” indicates this ongoing process of being aware with an awareness that is an agent choice making, a freedom that is granted by Eternity, but whose responses to Eternity and all my temporal encounters are initiated by freedom itself. This “soul” of freedom and awareness is not a static substance but an ongoing process of change. “Who I am?” is never set in stone. I am a becoming. I am freedom. Awareness and freedom comprise my soul.

My childhood prayer about laying down my soul to sleep can now be viewed as laying done of my highly enriched human consciousness to rest from its controlling role in my living. Sleep is an out-of-control state similar to death. Sleep can be feared in the ways death can be feared, for we do not know if we shall wake from our sleep. Waking is like a fresh gift of consciousness—a starting over with a new short-time lease on living consciously.

So, in my pre-school existing, I probably used that simple prayer to opt for a trust in the Power that runs the cosmos of events to care for me and to awaken me again from this “little death” of sleep. Such simple trust in the Radical Allness that I confront is a description of a profound sort of living that can apply to child and adult. I need not entirely dismiss this little prayer simply because its surrounding mythology is now out of date for me. Rather, I can translate the existential meanings of this prayer into a fresh set of myth meanings and overall thoughtfulness that can govern my adult life in century 21. Let this be an analogy for dealing with Christian scripture.

Scripture Interpretation

Similar to interpreting this childhood prayer, my method of interpreting Christian scripture and other church traditions requires some translation from old to new form of thinking. The very old religious resources of the Christian Bible were created within a now obsolete mythology, but their existential intent and the capacities for lively meanings are as powerful today as they ever were. There is no recovery, however, of these resources for a viable and vital Christian practice without a mode of thought form translation. The fact that these writings were written by finite, time-bound persons living in a very different cultural settings is not a barrier, but a factor in doing accurate interpretation. Gone is the notions that these writings dropped down from some super-space into the passive temporal minds of the biblical writers. And these humanly created writings require a humanly created means of seeing their truth.

A helpful unraveling of Christian scripture meanings can begin with a translation for our century of these two Old Testament words for God: “Yahweh” and “Elohim.”

“Yahweh” in the vocabulary of biblical writers may date back to at least 950 BCE and oral use of that name for an ultimate devotion may date back to the Exodus happening some claim took place around 1390 BCE. That would for 400 years before Yahweh was written down in book Genesis. When this long enduring community of writing was living in exile in Babylon 400 years after the beginnings of these Genesis texts , the name Yahweh was still in use. The Genesis story-teller we meet in Genesis 2 claims that Yahweh was the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph, and others long before the Exodus. The migrations from the Euphrates river city of Ur that Abraham is symbolizes took place as early as 1800 BCE. So Yahweh is supposed by the biblical writers to be a very enduring object of devotion.

Indeed, the biblical writers view Yahweh as that unchanging Mysteriousness, that Unknown Master Power that is always being met by humans in the past, present, and future. Yahweh is an ever-surprising Awesomeness that is experienced in both horror and glory, as the giver of both birth and death, the source of all gifts for living and their limitations. Yahweh is a symbol for that active Truth and Power that is other than and yet in or behind each and every event that happens to everybody and to every society in every era. Yahweh is the enigmatic All-in-All Oneness that we can also call “Profound Reality” present in all passing temporal realities. Yahweh can be absent from our consciousness, but is never absent from all the realities we experience.

The biblical word “Elohim” has many meanings, but in contrast to “Yahweh” the word “Elohim” had meanings in the direction of “a divine devotion.” We can speak of many Elohim, not just one. All the Canaanite Gods and Goddesses were Elohim—objects of devotion such as the temporal powers that we still worship today in both limited and ultimate ways: love, war, wisdom, sex, procreation, etc. So the statement. “Yahweh is my Elohim,” can mean, “The All-in-All Reality is my core devotion.”

This understanding may have been present in the name that was taken by the prophet Elijah. who was considered the grandfather of the great prophets. “Eli” means “my God” and “jah” is short for “Yahweh.” So it is likely the case that the prophet Elijah took for his name, “My God is Yahweh.”

However that ma be, this singular devotion to Yahweh is clearly present in Psalm 90. I am going to restate this Psalm with a few minor word changes to aid us in seeing more clearly the lasting human meanings that were meant in this old piece of poetry as well as in all the other Psalms:

Yahweh You have been our fortress
from generation to generation.
Before the mountains were raised up
or Earth and cosmos were born in travail,
from everlasting to everlasting You are the One Lasting Power.

You turn humans back into dust.
“Turn back” You command the offspring of Adam;
from Your perspective a thousand years are as yesterday;
a night watch passes and You have cut off each human being,
They are like a dream at daybreak,
they fade like grass that springs up in the morning
but when evening comes is parched and withered.

So we are each brought to an end by Your negating power.
In mid-speech, we are silenced by Your fury.
You lay bare our illusions in the full light of Your Presence.
Each day goes by under the shadow of Your furious realism.
Our years die away like a mummer.
Seventy years is the span of our life,
eighty if our strength holds;
the hurrying years are labor and sorrow,
so quickly they pass and are forgotten.

Who can feel the power of Your negations,
who can feel Your fury like those who are devoted to You?

So teach us to count our days,
that we may enter the gate of wisdom.

This same Yahweh was seen as the overarching historical actor in the events lived by Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and 2nd Isaiah. And this is this same Yahweh is the One Jesus calls “abba” or papa. Jesus announces that papa Yahweh is bringing forth a restored humanity in Jesus’ own living presence, in Jesus’ aggressive ministry, and in lives of those who are responding to the living of his message. This fresh blossoming of our essential humanity is seen as a new Adam and Eve—the kingdom of Yahweh replacing the kingdom of Rome and the then sickened people of Israel.

With these clarifications about Yahweh, the whole Bible begins to come alive with the sort of truth that is still happening to us. Yahweh is still acting in history Exodus-wise, Exile-wise, return from Exile-wise, and Jesus-wise in our lives today, and will do so forevermore. The Bible, a human book, reveals the forevermore. Such a recovery of the Bible is essential for the continuation of a viable and vital next Christian practice.

For more on these topics I want to announce the release of my new book:

The Thinking Christian

Wipf and Stock has placed on Amazon.com the opening chapters of this book.
Simply go to Amazon.com, then books, and then search for:
The Thinking Christian by Gene W. Marshall.

The post The Soul of Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Proclamations of Jesus

Jesus was remembered as a proclaimer of good news, a teacher of healing truth, a new kind of rabbi with a new kind of authority. The core of Jesus’ proclamation ministry centered around the proclamation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God.

In his time and place, what did this proclamation of the coming Kingdom mean? It was a happening in the lives of real people, but we are missing much of the meaning of this happening if we view this Kingdom only with our psychological imagery. This was a sociological happening, first of all. This Kingdom of God was understood to be an alternative to the Kingdom of Rome. It was also understood to be an alternative to the first century state of the captive nation of Israel. It was understood as a restoration of the essence of being the “People of God”—a calling that had been lost during the period in which these people were so harshly enslaved within the Roman “Peace.”

“The People of God” was understood at that time as both a specific peoplehood already in history and also as a coming peoplehood in which not only Israel reaches its perfection, but also the entire world of nations are called to manifest this Kingdom. This passionate hope for a positive future was grounded in the understanding that this new sociological reign is being established by an all-powerful Profound Reality. Any revolts against this all-powerful “Reign of Reality” cannot last, because Reality always wins in the end. That is what Reality IS—what wins in the end, because Reality is Power without limit. Any losing to humanity on the part of Reality is being allowed by Reality.

The revolt from Reality by “Satan’s Reign” includes not just persons, but organizations of whole human kingdoms of estrangements from Reality—constructions that are doomed to collapse. This is so because that is what Profound Reality is—the undoing of all unreality, the defeat of Satan, the burning to ash of all estrangements from the Real.

Jesus’ proclamation was that this end-of-time expectation of rightness was now arriving in human life on Earth. Jesus was asking humans to look and see what is happening to the hearers of his proclamation. The sick of spirit are being healed, the poor are being lifted up from their despised status, the hypocrites are being put down, those who were blind to realism are seeing, the hungry for meaning are being fed, the outcasts are included, the crippled souls are walking their lives, and people with dead lives are living again.

“But,” complained the complainers, “nothing like this is happening to everybody, and for many what is happening to them does not last long.” So Jesus tells a parable about the casting of seeds. Here is what the Kingdom of God is like: a sower went out casting seeds, some seed fell on the rocks and did not sprout, some seed fell on weak soil and came up quick but died soon, other seed fell among weeds that soon choked it out, but some seed fell on good soil and produced a hundred fold or more.

According to this parable the proclamation of Jesus was working, but Jesus himself was not in control of the outcome. What would happen to each seed falling upon each person was dependent upon the choices of that person and upon the actions of God going on in that person’s life.

Similarly, any proclamations of religious truth that you or I might make will also face this same circumstance. As proclaimer of good news, we will not be in control of the outcome. We can participate in fashioning good seed to spread, but even the best of seed do not always grow or last long when they do. But the overall harvest from good seed falling on good soil can be the making of a huge movement in obedience to Profound Reality— that is, obedience to the Reign of Reality, our appropriate God-devotion.

Another parable of Jesus says that the Kingdom of God can start as a very small seed that can grow into a huge tree, in which birds come and build their nests. There is also a parable claiming that the Kingdom of God is alike a woman making bread—a tiny bit of yeast can levin the whole loaf.

So what in contemporary life we are talking about here? What bold proclamations of good news about the restoration of realism might catch fire among enough people to be a social movement that will make headway against the strong winds of delusion? Let’s warm up to that question with two more example from the past.

The Proclamation of Martin Luther

Luther’s Reformation of Christianity strongly emphasized the religious method of preaching. The homilies and preaching being done by the established Christianity of Luther’s time was not starting any fires. Luther’s revival of relevant preaching was good seed falling on some well-plowed soil aided by aware predecessors like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. So what was the basic characteristic that made Luther’s proclamation good seed?

“Healing by grace through faith alone” is one way of summarizing Luther’s basic proclamation. Here is another way to say this: “The healing of human estrangement comes about through the gift of trusting the trustworthiness of Profound Reality’s complete forgiveness.” The Lutheran version of this proclamation was crafted from the letters of the apostle Paul, and crafted to speak to a 16th century time swamped in the anxiety of guilt. Luther attacked outright the core axioms of the then common message of the church that stated or implied that religious works and moral works were the thing that prepared the way for an Eternity-supported destiny. Luther’s contention was that we humans contribute nothing to our healing except trust in God’s gift of forgiveness and that even that trust is a gift that we are privileged to receive, but not in any way to deserve. Luther did not actually deny that we have to actively choose or intend that trust or faith. Also, Luther was clear that better behaviors did grow from the good tree of living that faith. But this good tree is made present to us by the grace of that Profound Realty that we confront every day in every event of our lives. A person of faith lives in an absolute dependence on Profound Reality for both their life and their deliverance to the realistic living of their life.

Luther translated the whole Bible into German and emphasized Bible reading and Bible preaching on both Old and New Testaments. He wrote hymns and emphasized singing. He reshaped sacraments and worship practices. He thought through overall guidelines for a fresh ethics of practical living in church life, everyday life, and states-craft. Yet in all these quite revolutionary actions, his main concern was maintaining a religious movement that countered the spirit-level corruptions of the current religious culture’s immense tyranny over human lives. Luther’s changes in all these practical areas derived from his core concern to protect and spread further his healing proclamation.

The Proclamation of John Wesley

Wesley also gave some fresh emphasis to the proclamation of the good news. He rode horseback all over England preaching a set of existentially hot sermons over and over and over to masses of people who were neglected and estranged from the current Church of England and its rigid intellectualism and determinism. In order to meet this situation, Wesley claimed that our healing comes 100% from the grace of God, but also 100% from each person’s intentional leap of faith. His sermons called for some right-now choices for an actively disciplined life of practicing good religious practices that made God’s gifts more likely. Such were his “methods” that gave Methodism its name.

His emphasis on the acts of faith and on including the masses of humanity in this needed movement of spirit undergirded a more democratic religion and a more democratic secular governance. The Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield era of Great Awakenings in the Americas were influenced by Wesley’s pioneering of these core proclamations of good news. The American political revolution had other sources as well, but these religious awakenings were certainly one of them.

Our Best Case Proclamation in 2020 North America

These brief historical dips into the proclamations of Jesus, Luther, and Wesley raise the question about what proclamation contains the appropriate emphasis for the culture of North America in 2020. Today, the very idea of “proclamation” has some resistances to overcome. Our culture has become adverse to being emotionally manipulated, or charismatically led, or even rationally convinced, much less being simply told outright good news about the nature of Profound Reality for everyone. In such a context of reflection, “proclamation” has become for many a negative word.

So first of all, I want to say outright that the Christian proclamation for any time is not a dogma or a moral teaching or any sort of advise, and it needs no manipulation or convincing. It is presented as an option for the consideration and decision by a fully participating listener. The Christian proclamation for some specific period of time in some particular place has to meet people where they are actually living. The Christian proclamation must also deal with people’s specific sensibilities to Reality and their lack of sensibilities to Reality. The Christian proclamation must expose the specific delusions that are limiting awareness of what is real. This could include a wake up call from some common sleepiness, a light shown on some common blindness, a way out of some common dead end, a counter to some common addiction. In fact, an appropriate Christian proclamation may cut in several of these directions at once.

The proclamation will also include specific forgiveness for some specific unrealism and thereby illuminate specific fresh starts in realism. And the proclamation will include a call for decision that presupposes an essential freedom in each person—a freedom that can be called forth into action, a freedom that is able and willing to make radical changes for which no precedent exists and no past reasoning can justify.

The Christian proclamation may clear out excuses people have to an acceptance of the proclamation; nevertheless, the proclamation must not be a manipulation or the draw of the proclaimer’s charisma or station or power or rational prowess. The motivation for the acceptance of the proclamation must come from the inner being of the person who is hearing the proclamation. Healing requires that the truth of the proclamation be personally “heard” “seen” “felt” “taken in” and personally obeyed in personal action by the person hearing the proclamation.

Tailored for the Times

The Christian proclamation will need to be tailored for the times, but this will not be a compromise with the times. This proclamation is a proclamation of the Word of Profound Reality that is true for any time. Yet the proclamation is a proclamation for the people of a given time. This means that the specifics of the proclamation do change. Following is one example of a specific element that needs to characterize the Christian proclamation of the Word of God for the 2020 period of time in North America:

Both Luther and Wesley emphasized freeing the individual person from the tyranny of an established religious culture. The choice for personal faith by the solitary person was the main emphasis during the whole Protestant Era. Politics was thought about and innovations were made, but the proclamation itself during the Protestant Era had little of the sociological character that the Christian proclamation requires today.

How shall I illustrate this? While the individual person is not to be neglected or ignored or manipulated, the individual person needs to be shown that he or she is humanity on planet Earth—each person is an able-to-respond representative of the whole human species, and therefore responsible for the whole response of humanity—responsible for both the glorious and the wicked responses of humanity.

Such a sociological perspective means that each of us is guilty for every estrangement and horror preformed by human beings in our entire human history. These estrangements are not only those of someone else—all these estrangements live within each of us. The proportions may be different in different persons, but our participation in the “Hitlers” is just as real as our participations in the so-called “saints.” Each human is humanity, and this makes the guilt burden so deep in each of us that we cannot allow full conscious of that guilt without the companion conscious of our forgiveness by Profound Reality. Choosing forgiveness in your or my here-and-now living means choosing a pro-offered fresh start in realism on behalf of a guilty humanity.

And this forgiveness is not received for “me alone.” This forgiveness is received for the entire human species. I may be among the few who receive this forgiveness, but if I do receive it, I receive it for all of us. “Have mercy on us all” may be the core healing prayer for our era.

If I accept this forgiveness on behalf of all, this means that I then relate to everyone as forgiven. That forgiving posture will be a crucial aspect of our fresh start in faith. In faith, I trust in the trustworthiness of Profound Reality as a fresh start toward realism on behalf of the totality of humanity.

“Forgiveness by Profound Reality” needs some commentary. We err in imaging “Profound Reality” as a Supreme Being in some mystic Un-place who has a viewpoint understandable to the human mind that invented this Supreme Being fiction. The forgiving Supremeness that was being told about in the old mythic talk was and is nothing more nor less than the Background Wholeness of Reality that we are encountering in every event that happens to us. Every heart beat is an act of the Profound Reality that is always being encountered by us.

It matters not that we commonly insist on being blind to this perpetual encounter with Profound Reality. This Reality is present in every sunrise, earth turn, wind blow, water fall, baby birth—as well as in the beginnings and endings of each and every thing that we can conceptualize with our limited minds. This Profound Reality symbolized as a Supreme Being who forgives us is none other than that Irresistible Power that makes the past past, the present here, and the future coming. It is this Absolute Power that counts humanity’s deeds of estrangement from realism over and done, their karma broken, and a fresh start in realism set before us. The new reality that is set before us includes our own freedom—our response-ability, our gift from Absolute Power to choose options and thereby bend—not control, but bend the course of history.

Accepting such realism includes acknowledging the unrealism of our past deeds and the self-deserved despair that accompanied our having confusing the unreal with the real. If we humans accept forgiveness for all our horrific, wretched living, we find that our wretchedness is no longer a grueling guilt, but simply instructive lessons of what not to do with our one potentially realistic life. Accepting a call to realistic living includes accepting the freedom that is being given to us for living realistically our next steps of living.

This sociologically framed proclamation of Good News can be proclaimed relevantly to each culture, each generation, each society, and each human life in today’s world. Nevertheless, it remains true that each human being must opt all alone for this offered freedom from the past and this offered freedom for the future. This forgiveness, announced in a contemporary-style-Christian proclamation, is signaled by the proclaimers proclamation; yet this forgiveness is given by Profound Reality. Healing forgiveness is given to us only when you or I can hear thus forgiveness “spoken” from the “mouth of God” (that is, when this forgiveness is found in our experience of Profound Reality when treasured by us as our God-devotion). Accepting this forgiveness, restores us to our virgin-born relation with the Eternal (that is, with our relation of commitment to the realistic living of our lives as our best-case scenario.)

So, let us clearly affirm that the Profound Reality Presence of this Good News can be occasioned by a Christian-language-worded proclamation. And as Christians it is our assignment (our calling) to craft that 21st Century proclamation and proclaim it.

It must also be said that because this Good News is a universal verity, it can also be proclaimed, and is being proclaimed, elsewhere and else-wise than with a Christian vocabulary. Let this bit of awareness not worry us as Christians, for as Jesus himself is said to have said “whoever is for us is not against us.”

The post Liberating Proclamation first appeared on Realistic Living.

The meaning of “freedom” and the meaning of “truth” are closely related symbols in the Christian heritage. The “Truth” we are talking about here is “Truth” that yields the “freedom” we are also talking about here. And the “freedom” we are talking about here is a freedom that follows from taking on, for the living of our lives, the “Truth” that we are talking about here.

The Truth

The “Truth” indicated in the above scripture is a deeper sort of truth than the approximate truths we learn through our ever-moving scientific approach to truth. Yet, these approximate truths of science are probes into the same Mysterious Encounter with Truth of which our text are speaking. The truth we know through our contemplative approach to truth is also an approximate sort of truth. We can see truth with our own consciousness looking into our own subjectivity, but we see with a finite consciousness, and we tell about it with a finite mind. Truth is being approached by our contemplative inquiries, but the Eternal Truth of Mysterious Reality is never reached, only approximated in our contemplative inquiries. Furthermore, we approach truth through our interpersonal, I-Thou experiences—truth that we can never learn through the scientific and contemplative approaches to truth. And we all also participate, whether we know it or not, in a fourth approach to approximate truthfulness—an approach that arises through living within our sociological fabrics and changing those economic, political, and cultural manifestations of social workability.

All four of these approximations of Truth are valid guides for our living and none needs to be seen as inconsistent with the Eternal Truth. Yet they are only partial truths—truths that we change as life goes along, truths that get transformed through and through, truths that become obsolete or subsumed into more expanded truths. The Truth indicated in above scripture points to an Eternal quality of Truth, the Whole Truth of which these other approaches to truth are approximations.

Human consciousness can encounter Eternal Truth in the everyday experiences of our lives, but we cannot hold this quality of Truth in words, language, art, or mathematics. It takes paradox or parable—myths, icons, rituals, and other cryptic expressions—expressions that require shifts in our core consciousness in order to see the meanings that such religious tools were invented to help us to become aware of and to speak about to one another. We cannot hold Eternal Truth rationally with a finite human mind. We can only speak the secret of Eternal Truth to one another with religious symbols.

Freedom

I will illustrate the “freedom” that this Eternal Truth sets free with a story. I could use a story out of my own life, a fragment from a novel or movie, a story made up by me, or something else. I have decided to retell in my own words the story of Moses. I believe that there was in that dim past a person named “Moses,” but his story has become legend, myth, parable retold for centuries—retold because this story was about a dialogue with Eternity—a dance with Final Wholeness of Reality.

Moses

Moses, in my story, was a member of a slave community in one of the world’s most well developed multi-city civilizations in the 14th century before Christ. The life being lived by Moses and his companions was harsh. This immigrant population had come to Egypt during a famine and got stuck there as part of the bottom layer of that strict hierarchy. Moses was an unusually talented boy who benefited from both Hebraic and Egyptian brands of culture. In my story he worked as a slave during record keeping alongside the more severe hardships of brick-making. He knew the people of his culture and he knew the state of those people.

One day, Moses witnessed an Egyptian soldier mistreating one of Moses’ fellow Hebrew slaves to the horrific extent that Moses lost his cool and killed that soldier. This being a capital offense for a person of his standing, Moses fled to the outback to live with an uncle, married his daughter, made a life there, and was never found.

Being an unusually aware person, he kept up with the horror stories of the hierarchy. He and his Hebrew family had absorbed a religious history that remembered stories (perhaps similar to the later stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). Moses also participated in dialogues of prayer with the “God” of those realism-loving ancestors.

One day while herding sheep out in the bush, a particular bush caught his attention. He reported to his fellow Hebrews that this bush burned without being consumed. Actually, we can surmise that Moses was seeing in his experience of this bush his own massive interior burning. His whole self was being burned away, yet the given particulars of his life were not being consumed. Everything about him was the same except that his entire selfhood was being burned away; nevertheless, nothing was lost. He was not being turning to ash, only an unreality was being consumed.

On this place that he called “holy ground,” he saw himself encountering the Profound Realty that was revered by his ancestors. And the message forming in his being within that “holy encounter” was, “Let my people go.” A number of other groups of slaves had attempted to escape to the wilderness. Most of them had been run down by the Egyptian chariots. Nothing was ever heard from those who made it into the wilderness. The whole idea of feeling called to do this sort of thing not only seemed preposterous and super dangerous to Moses, but doubts of all sorts rose in his mind about his own ability to lead such an extreme enterprise.

First of all, would other members of his culture even follow “meager me?” Yet here he was face-to-face in give-and-take relation with the Realty of Realities as perceived and adored by his sub-culture. His old images of himself were being burned up, and an unfamiliar Moses was being exposed to his consciousness.

His first response to this horrific calling was making excuses of all kinds. He tried to claim that his brother was a better speaker. But the answer that clarified for him about that excuse was, “Take your brother along, but you are the one being called here. You have to tell him what to say, when to say it, what to do, and when to do it. This whole adventure has to be your initiative.”

This was one hell of a jiggle in Moses’ inner being, and what was getting to him was the prospect of this jig, this dance that Moses would be volunteering to dance with the rest of his life. The adjective “awesome” only begins to describe the feel of this. The inner life forms of the previous Moses were evaporating, and the only symbol he found to tell his story was “a burning bush that was not consumed.”

As Moses begins to respond to this awesome calling contained in this history-making moment of his life, he is amazed with the results. People considered him charismatic. Some thought him crazy. But more found him and his story a sign of hope coming from their God. When the course of events opened up an opportunity to flee this slavery, hundreds of men, women, and children were ready to go. They picked up their belongings and babies and followed this dangerous call.

The actual escape before the onrushing chariots was seen as miraculous. When those chariots got stuck in the mud, the fleeing slaves were convinced that the Almighty Reality of all historical outcomes was able to offer openings for success to such bold intentionality. Moses was then determined to build upon the energy of this revelation of Almighty friendliness a culture of disciplines for these escapees—rules, religious practices, and laws based on a continuing trust in the friendliness of that Almighty Mysteriousness met in the outcomes of history. Within this hopeful set of convictions and communal disciplines, a spirit intensity was generated to follow Moses in solidifying a cultural revolution—working their Egyptian enculturation out of their lives and creating in its place a freedom-loving set of bold norms for living within this forbidding desert environment for another 40 years until Moses’ death. Other spirit leadership by then had emerged and they continued the core elements of this innovative heritage.

Later descendants of the Mosaic spirit clarified that not only had a temporal freedom from Egyptian slavery come about, but freedom of spirit itself had been discovered on behalf of the entire human race. They came to see that the freedom to risk death in order to break chains made of iron was the same freedom it took to risk security and selfhood in order to break cultural, institutional, and psychological chains. Indeed, if we in our time can be aware within our being of the raw freedom to use whatever power we have to bend the course of events, we can thank Moses for his assistance with this revelation.

The Truth of how Eternity deals with human beings was opened-wide through the Exodus experience. Finding the Final Reality we all meet in every moment of our lives trustworthy is a Truth that sets us free. Moses and his company enacted that trust and experienced that freedom.

A New Exodus

The crucifixion/resurrection revelation also awakened the Truth about the friendliness of Eternal Reality—theTruth that sets us free, the Truth that includes freedom. A New Exodus was made on behalf of humanity from the many estrangements of our species by this New Exodus community. But that is another story—another cryptic story exposing the Eternal Truth.

Here, once again, is how the writer of the Fourth Gospel put it:

You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.    John 8:32 New English Bible

The post Truth and Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

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/New/

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.

In other words, Mark is the theologian that we are reading in the Gospel of Mark, not Jesus or Paul, and not Luke or Matthew or John. Mark is himself an unusually clever writer and a profound theologian. This truth is fundamental for understanding this commentary.

What do you think about Mark being the creator of Christianity?

How is it important to you that the historical Jesus of modern scholarship differs significantly from the Jesus of Mark’s narrative?

What is Theology?

Not all religions have a theology, but Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do. Buddhism has Dharma sutras and many Dharma talks that are still being given today. These thoughtful efforts of the Buddhist religion are something like a theology. It is fair to say that all religions have a “theoretics”—something that its members do to reflect upon the core topics that characterize that religion’s ongoing community of thoughtfulness about their life together, their message, their mission, as well as their religious practices and ethical guidelines.

Christian theology begins its thoughtfulness with reflections upon a specific event (a specific complex of happenings in history). The happenings that constitute this “event” are understood to reveal the profound essence of every event in human history. That event has been given the name “Jesus Christ.” An ordinary first century man named “Jesus,” understood to be the “Messiah,” was viewed as a revelation about living in an ultimate devotion to the Ultimate Reality that we encounter in every event of our personal lives, and in every event of our social history.

Judaism does something similar in its theologizing, but in this case the core revelatory event is “The Exodus from Egypt of a collection of slaves plus their revolution in law-writing.” Islam also treasures a revelatory event—in this case, “the Advent of Mohammad as a Messenger of the One Ultimate Creator of all things and events.” Obviously, in each of these religious groupings, there is good theology and bad theology, depending on whether those theological reflections appropriately reflect what their revelatory event revealed about the essence of living a human life. Good theology also depends upon whether a particular bit of theological thoughtfulness has resonance with living people in their contemporary settings.

This commentary on the Gospel of Mark intends to be “theology” in the sense just defined. I prefer the word “theologizing,” for I see Christian theology as an ongoing process of a community of people. My contribution to the ongoing process of Christian theologizing may be minor or large, but that is not entirely up to me. The community of those who are grounded in the Christ Jesus revelation will value or not value, preserve or not preserve, my contributions to the ongoing theologizing process of those who are captivated by the Christ Jesus revelation.

I see myself doing a radical form Christian theologizing. It is “radical” because this thoughtfulness is my attempt to return to the “roots” of the Christian revelation from the perspective of a radically contemporary understanding of the nature and role of religion in human society.

“Religion,” as I now understand that word, is not a set of stable doctrines and moralities allied with a once-and-for-all finished set of solitary and communal practices. The only stability that a religion has is its radical root. Religious doctrines and moralities, as well as religious practices are all in flux. Today, that flux is huge for every religion on Earth. The sort of Buddhism that is sweeping the North American continent is not stuck in the ruts of previous centuries. It is a fresh, creative accessing of ancient roots. In Christianity we are seeing something similar. I count this commentary part of that fresh effort to see the Christian revelation with new eyes and to hear this “good news” with new ears.

How in your life have you participated in Christian theologizing?

Whose theologizing has helped you most with your own?

The Death of a Metaphor

Some members of the Christian community speak of “the death of God” or even “the end of theology.” In this commentary (and in all my theologizing), I take the view that “the death of God” does not refer to an end of all use of the word “God,” I choose to understand “the death-of-God discussion” as pointing to the end of something temporal—namely, the obsolescence of an ancient metaphor of religious thinking held in the word “transcendence.” For 2000 years Christian theologizing has used this familiar metaphorical narrative: a vivid story-time imagination about a transcendent realm in which God, angels, devils, gods, goddesses, and other story-time characters are living in an other-than-ordinary “realm” and “coming” from that “realm” to “act” within our ordinary human space and time. That is metaphorical talk. Being metaphorical, however, is not the problem. The problem for us today is the obsolete quality of that double-deck metaphor.

I am using an alternative metaphorical system of religious reflection in my mode of Biblical interpretation. I view our ordinary lives as well as our profound lives as participants in “One” realm of being. This “One Reality” has a depth that is invisible to both human eye and mind. I am using the capitalization of “Realty” to mean something different than our mind’s sense of realty. Reality is a “Land of Mystery” that the human mind cannot fathom. This profound depth of Reality shines through the passing realities of time that are visible to eye and mind. This Invisible Eternity can be said to “shine-through” temporal events. An ordinary bush can indeed burn with Eternity. An ordinary human being can indeed glow with the Presence of Eternity. But this Eternity is a not another space that is separate from our ordinary space/time of living. Furthermore, this fresh view of Eternity does not imply a contempt for the temporal realm. Rather, it implies a fulfillment for each and every ordinary temporal event of our lives. Each temporal event has an Eternal depth or glow or burn. Eyes and ears alone cannot grasp our profound humanness and its Eternal connection. Only our enigmatic consciousness can “see” the Eternal, and this “seeing” is an internal experience that is “seen” in absolute solitude.

In this fresh context the words “ordinary” and “extraordinary” are viewed as mere categories of human perception. We live in One, and only One, realm of Reality with many temporally viewed aspects. Among these many aspects, we can speak of this basic polarity: the impermanent and the permanent—the temporal and the Eternal. This polarity is not in Reality itself, but in our human consciousness of Reality. Temporal and Eternal are both aspects of our one experience of one invisible One-ness that our minds cannot comprehend.

And this One-ness is not seen by eye or mind. We do not “see” One-ness directly. One-ness is a devotional category that means that we are devoted to serve all aspects of our Real experience, rather than viewing the Real as part friendly and part enemy. From this One-ness point of view, the only enemy is our own and other humans’ estrangement from the One Reality within which our own persons and all other persons dwell.

This One-ness viewpoint within Christian faith is not a denial of the diversity of our experiences of the Eternal or of the temporal. Differentiation and multiplicity obviously characterize our temporal lives. Multiplicity also characterizes much of our God-talk. In the God-talk of the Bible, there are many angels or servants of the One that express and carry out the actions of the One. But this One-ness is maintained in spite of the many-ness that is understood to be aspects of the Eternal, sourced from this One-ness. In the opening verses of the Bible, the One God says to some angels, “Let there be light!” and this was done by the One’s many servant forces. Such poetry was intended to preserve the One-ness of Reality, not to fragment the One-ness of Reality that is fundamentally worshiped in the life of Christian faith.

How has it been hard or liberating for you to give up the old double-deck metaphor?

What has been your struggle with devotion to One Ultimate Reality?

The post The Creator of Christianity first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

When Sally walks into the room, the Ultimate Message walks into the room. When Sally speaks, the Infinite Silence speaks the Ultimate Message. When Sally notices the despairing living going on her class, that despairing living knows itself noticed by the Infinite Silence, audited by the Infinite Silence, forgiven by the Infinite Silence, and called by the Infinite Silence to a free, trusting, compassionate, tranquil sort of living. Sally constantly confronts each member of her class with the option of living human life in victorious freedom. Sally is a person through whom the Infinite Silence speaks. She challenges her class to live their lives with courageous freedom—to live with compassionate freedom the same lives over which each of her class members quite commonly despair.

The men in her class who feel they have no feelings worth expressing learn from Sally to experience, to trust, and to express those feelings. They learn that every anger, every fear, every hostility, every compassion, every bodily desire, is part of the goodness of life. The women in her class (most of whom always thought that being nice was the one thing that a proper woman should do) learn from Sally that being firm and ruthlessly honest is the sort of aliveness approved by Eternity. The parents in her class (most of whom live in despondency with the thought that they are to blame for every failure or flaw in their offspring) learn from Sally to realize that each of their children is virgin born, an offspring of the Infinite Silence–that children are strange and mysterious beings who must do their own despairing, failures, depravities, as well as find their own buoyant living and astonishing novelties. “Parents,” Sally says, “who love, feed, and protect their children from injury, are doing their job.” “And loving them fully,” she says, “includes allowing them the freedom and the dignity of going astray in their own way.” “Maybe,” Sally says, “you might pray without ceasing that your children will find trust in the Infinite Silence, but if they don’t, it’s not your fault.” In these and many other ways, Sally is the Ultimate Message in human flesh. Sally is the Resurrected Jesus to this particular flock who come each week to probe with Sally into the secrets of living life in an ongoing trust of the Infinite Silence. Sally is the Good Shepherd. Before Abraham was born, this strange Sally IS.

Sally is not appreciated by every person who has attended her class. Some left in a huff and never returned. One particular official in the church sought to have her class disbanded. “A disgrace,” he called it. But Sally believes that such opposition is to be expected. She even uses this opposition to teach her point that we live in a world of darkness that opposes the light. As to her own inconvenience and grief over being opposed in these ways, Sally says, “The Good Shepherd lays down her life for her sheep. Therefore, a bit of grumpiness from the congregational establishment does not discourage me.”

Now my story might have taken place in some other environment than a church. Sally could be a teacher of secular wisdom in some university. Sally could a teacher of Buddhism. Or perhaps Sally is not a teacher at all, but a plumber who comes to fix your water faucets. Perhaps Sally is a political leader who knows how to take care of her staff. Perhaps Sally is as organizer of a revolutionary movement. The Jesus Christ-dynamic, since it is the Ultimate Message from the Infinite Silence, is not limited to the communication that might go on in the context of a Christian church. The communication of the Ultimate Message does not even require the context of Christian symbolism.

Any person who communicates in any way that we are loved by the Infinite Silence is a fleshly embodiment of the Ultimate Message. That person can be said to be “in Christ.” That person is living “in the name of Jesus, the Christ” Indeed, that person, insofar as he or she actually embodies the Ultimate Message, is the Resurrected Jesus Christ!

Those two words “Jesus Christ” do not only point to a first-century peasant teacher from Nazareth; they also point to a dynamic of healing that is built into the cosmos. Perhaps you have noticed the opening verses of John’s narrative that this dynamic, “The Communication of the Infinite Silence,” was present at the creation of everything. This was poetry, but poetry about the everywhere presence of this Word of healing.

There are many deep, profound, compassionate persons who do not call themselves by the name of “Jesus.” We who do revere Jesus in an ultimate way can, however, view any authentic spirit messenger as “Jesus Christ.” Why? Because these two words, deeply understood, speak of a dynamic that can happen anywhere. The true flock know their Shepherd wherever and whenever that Shepherd shows up. Yes, the Resurrection of Jesus really happens, happens indeed!

Every Good Shepherd is the second FACE of the triune experience of Divinity. Every Good Shepherd is the Beloved Offspring of the Infinite Silence, the Ultimate Message in human flesh, the New Adam or Eve who knows the Eternal as Love and in that context lives the full ambiguities of a human life. Perhaps you have met some Good Shepherds who have laid down part or all of their lives for some fragile sheep like, for example, you.

The post The Good Shepherd Lives first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

These initiatives can be categorized as many types—here are four types of initiative that have characterized the Christian practice called “prayer”: (1) confessing our unrealism, (2) giving thanks for our life, our possibilities, and our forgiveness, (3) making requests of Reality for our own temporal being and for its further realization, (4) making requests of Reality for specific others and for the general social conditions that care for whole groups of people as well as for the circumstances of our home and planet. Such initiatives involve more than thoughts in the mind; they are acts of inner choice. These prayerful initiations are proposals for speech and for bodily movements of action in the world. These deep interior acts of Primal Merging with Freedom are intentions to engage in real life. True prayers are internal initiatives that change my actions and thereby change the course of history through the attitudes and actions that flow from such a life of prayer.

Such prayerful initiatives access the power of our true being—a power that is not an achievement or a possession of the ego or a quality of the personality. Such freedom is a capacity for initiative—a gift given to us by the Power that posits us in being. Our access of the power of freedom is not an accomplishment, but a merging, an allowing of our awareness to merge with the capacity of freedom that characterizes our deep being. This deep initiative is a capacity to create “out of nothing” responses that have no cause except our own initiative. It remains true that many of our responses are automatic actions that derive from our genetics or our social conditioning or our personality habits. We can be surprised by the extent to which an old childhood-developed habit imposes itself inappropriately into our present living. But along with all this past-determined behavior, something more exists in our now of living. We simply ARE a capacity for uncaused initiative that no psychological theory can explain.

From time to time, our experience of this profound freedom can break through our personality habits. This radical freedom is a permanent aspect of our true being. We have no excuse for not being our freedom. Our flight from freedom is our own doing. We use that freedom to choose no longer being free. And when we deny our freedom, we become stuck with an enslaved self.

The Inherent Purity of Being Freedom

Freedom is an Inherent Purity that includes living beyond the good and evil that our minds can forge. Freedom means living beyond the stories our superego holds—our oughts, duties, customs, and morals. Freedom means living beyond the approval of our parents, offspring, friends and other social peers. Freedom means living beyond all the libraries of ethical thought, and beyond all the definitions of our dictionaries. Dictionaries are past oriented. Freedom is openness to the future, including dictionary writing. This freedom also includes living beyond all the preferences of our own bodies, minds, and habits. Our pure freedom is an Inherent Purity because it is an obedience to the true state of affairs of our profound being.

Freedom is an audacious boldness that can use our personality gifts when appropriate, but will also contradict all personality habits and values without qualms. All impulses to be righteous in terms of superego conditioning are bypassed in the act of freedom; a new form of righteousness reigns: freedom itself. That we spend most of our lives squeezing freedom into some narrow box of morality or social acceptability does not contradict the fact that a deep audacious boldness is our true being. We insist upon being guilty before our social norms rather than alive in our inherent freedom. Nevertheless, living “beyond good and evil” characterizes the real “me.” In spite of the fact that our parents, our community, our friends, our enemies teach us good and evil, we are each an audacious boldness that uses these teachings and also leaps beyond these teaching as we deem appropriate to the situation.

When we understand this truth about our true being, we can understand the story of Adam and Eve who ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thereby experienced a fall from their authenticity—which fall, the following Genesis stories imply, results in all the estrangements known to the human species. That so-called knowledge of good and evil promising to make us divine turns out to be a deadly illusion. The snake in this story lied. The knowledge of good and evil is not a step up toward divinity, but a fall down into human depravity. The knowledge of good and evil is a forbidden food—forbidden by Reality. Our essential being is and remains ignorance-of-good-and-evil—an ignorance that is also freedom.

All our actual decisions are ambiguous. Many standards of good and evil may bring thoughtfulness to our free decisions, but contradicting values and standards are always present. We are vulnerable without any known final justification for what we do. We are choosing all by ourselves from an abyss of freedom that frightens us as much as it may also fascinate us. We are making wild leaps into unknown futures. We are making choices that are determining our own future and the future of the world. If we can embrace our fear of this gift, we can also experience its glory, its courage, its flexibility, and its knowledge of forgiveness before, during, and after we act.

The Attuned Working of Freedom

Reality is not a fixed fate, automatically working itself out like a piece of recorded music. Rather, Reality is an “open-for-options” fluidity that can work out in a large number of different ways, many of which can seem impossible or miraculous to our self-contained personality and ego establishment. It is in this sense that “Attuned Working” means living beyond fate. It means giving up all fatalism. This does not mean that we create our own reality, as so many false teachers claim. We do indeed create the worlds that our minds believe to be true, but these creations, being human made, are therefore illusory in some or all of their components. The effects of these self-created mind-worlds on the actual course of history are unpredictable and typically tragic in some way or another. These self-created mind-worlds always involve some sort of neglect of Reality, and thereby yield disappointments so extreme that despair eventually overwhelms the so-called “reality creator.” Freedom is realism, but freedom does not “create reality.” Freedom only alters reality in accord with realism. Freedom is “Attuned Working”—an obedience to realism in the real situations that we are being given and within which real situations we are called to be free.

In other words, freedom is a response to the gift of a situation with the gift of freedom to respond. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is given to say, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:17 Revised Standard Version) Attuned Working is such working in the context of “what-is-doing” in the overall course of things. Attuned Working pays attention to what is going on, and then is obedient to that “working,” not in some robotic fashion, but as a free being attuned to the real options. Such living can be very powerful; our tiny little actions can instigate an echo from the whole of Reality.

When out of his deep awareness and honesty, Martin Luther nailed some discussion topics on a cathedral door, he could not have imagined the echo Reality would give to his action. It was as if the whole of European history turned on the pivot of this man’s persistent working. Some of Luther’s responses may not have been well tuned, but he nevertheless rang a bell of Freedom that enabled nobles and peasants to break with the stodgy traditions and the oppressive familiarities of that time and place. Many of the consequences of Luther’s actions were unintended and some may be judged tragic. Nevertheless, his attunement to what was so in his time joined with the existing trends and potentials, creating an avalanche of historical change. Luther’s Attuned Working, combined with the Attuned Working of others, set in motion a new era of human living that was less estranged from the deep truth of our true being. Freedom itself was set loose in the world.

In the lives of most of us, Attuned Working may not be Luther-level dramatic, but each of us has in our essential being this same potential for Attuned Working within the times of our lives. We are manifesting Attuned Working when we act out of our sense of how the cultural, political, and economic liberation of women is relevant for all of us in today’s world. We are manifesting Attuned Working when we act out of our sense of the relevance for all of us of the care of the Earth—its climate, its soils, its water ways, its diversity of species, and so forth. Freedom as Attuned Working means creatively living within the actual challenges of our times. Flight from these challenges is flight from Freedom; such flight is a cowardly compulsion, or a greedy obsession, or some other cop-out of estrangement from our real lives of courageous and free response within actual events.

Attuned Working can break through our personality habits as a state of being that happens to us from time to time. And we can also realize that Attuned Working is a permanent dynamic of our true being. This Freedom is given and supported by Reality; we never need to choose unfreedom. And if we do, we are dependent upon Reality to rescue us from our departure.

The post The Flight From Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

According to the further elaboration of this poetry, Moses witnessed that the whole scene around that bush had became Awe-filling and that it spoke to him about rescuing his people from their slavery.   This was the last thing in the world Moses wanted to do.  He raised the fact that his speech-making talent was far inferior to his brother’s.  Take him then, said the bush, but be clear that I am speaking to you, not him.  You will have to do the speaking to your brother.  You are the one I am calling to this task.  Your brother is not here for this awakening in your being.  After a bit more excuse making, Moses set out to do this.

Now what had Moses encountered?  “The God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob,” the story says.  “The Mystery of History” is another clue to understanding this encounter.  Moses is looking into the black hole of the Eternal Abyss about which human beings know nothing.  And Moses is receiving a revelation concerning that essence of that  Still Lasting Mysteriousness.  What did Moses see?  What viewpoint on the Abyss did Moses learn from this conflagration of the temporal Moses that left him still alive, but in a whole new way?  Let’s just say this revelation had to do with the topic of historical possibilities.  The story continues.

When a series of cracks in the seams of Egyptian society offered an opportunity to slip out, Moses had already prepared the people to do so.  We do not need to factually believe the exaggerated story-telling that elaborated these events.  I don’t believe that Moses ever had an audience with the Pharaoh.  Perhaps in his dream life, Moses said to Pharaoh ,”Let my people go.”   I don’t doubt that plagues happened in Egypt.  Such things happen to every society.  I can also believe that this religious people already understood that every event emerges from that Mysterious Abyss served by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Anyhow, on one highly opportune day a fairly large group of slaves got underway before the Egyptian CIA noticed them, alerted the authorities, and got a detachment of fast-moving military chariots in pursuit.  I believe that the real historical miracle was more like the chariots bogging down in the mud of the Reed Sea rather than that there were walls of water as pictured in the Red Sea myth.  But however that was, the big happening was that this group, like many others, actually escaped.   It is likely that most of those other escaping groups did not find a way to survive in the challenging wilderness.  They did not have a Moses who could explain to them how Mysterious Reality was for them (Mose insisted that they remember the Exodus and how to remember it).

I can imagine Moses saying, “Let us view our freedom from slavery as an ongoing realism that applies to the current situations that are now at hand.  Here are five ways to not forget the Exodus and five more ways on how we need to treat one another if we  are to be true to what we have learned about Reality and about being free souls who can dare the impossible and win.

At Mount Sinai Moses was giving an elaboration of the burning bush revelation about how Mysterious Reality IS and how humans who are true to this truth will find their “better angels” in their own inner depths and live those profound states of living. This profound living includes embracing the freedom to bend the flow of history.

Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others accessed the Moses-initiated vision into the Mysterious Abyss for their new situations and thereby expanded upon the relevance of the Exodus experience for all humankind.

John, the Baptist and Jesus also applied the Exodus experience to their situation,  John, the Baptist washed people of their evil era in the Jordan River.  And Jesus carried out his loyalty to the Mosaic revelation to such an extent that his followers called the result “a New Exodus.“  Jesus emphasized a positive “Exodus” from the entire Kingdom of Satan into the now available Kingdom of God on Earth.

What do these symbols mean?  They mean that we humans can exit our estrangements and find our authenticity in the living here and now of every event that comes our way.

This revelation, this viewpoint on the essence of the Mysterious Abyss, was also spelled out in the symbols of Cross and Resurrection.  When we allow our false expectations to be crucified, we can be raised up to the true and glorious life that is being given to us in this real-time moment.  “Hallelujah, the Body of Human Authenticity is Risen.”

The elaboration of this revelation about the essence of the Absolutely Mysterious Abyss continues.

The post The Revelation of Moses first appeared on Realistic Living.

Deep river
My home is over Jordan
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground

These opening lines to an African American church-song illustrates the depth of Christian awareness that is hidden in many of those old songs. This “deep river” is an allusion to the cross—understood as an inward death to all our temporal idols. And “campground” is an allusion to the resurrection—to the authenticity that is experienced on the other side this “deep-river crossing.” Few church goers, black or white, have probed the depth of this understanding of the cross and the resurrection. Few of us actually view the resurrection as the hidden side of the cross, or see both cross and resurrection as possible experiences in the depths of our own human authenticity.

Oh don’t you want to go
to that Gospel feast
that promised land
where all is peace.

The death/resurrection crossing is a feast, good news, a promised land of living in peace with the WAY IT IS essentially for all human beings everywhere, no matter what their grim or privileged circumstances. These deep meanings of the Christian revelation are missing in most of the living that goes on in the world today. Why is that so? That will be the question of this essay.

A Next Christianity

This essay is part of my dialogue with three lectures by Paul Tillich that Joyce Marshall, Alan Richard and I studied together. The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message was published in 2007 from Tillich lectures given in 1963, two years before his death.

In opposition to the Christianity known by most of us, a more relevant next Christianity has been emerging for well over a century. Key to this next Christianity is overcoming the irrelevance that prevents this tradition from meaning something to aware people living in the 21st Century. Forms of Christianity that may have been meaningful to aware people in earlier centuries can appear completely foolish today—supportive of what is now clearly obsolete, and irrelevant to the pressing questions and social challenges that now demand realistic responses.

So what are the characteristics of a next Christianity that can be relevant to people who are living with awareness in 2017 and beyond? I am going to explore two characteristics of this next Christianity: “The End of the Vertical Dimension” and “The Resurrection of the Depth of Love.”

The End of the Vertical Dimension

A quality of our contemporary culture that makes Christianity seem irrelevant to many aware people today is what Paul Tillich called “the end of the vertical.” Tillich was pointing to the religious metaphor that has characterized the whole of Christian history until very recently. We know this metaphor as the picture of a realm that is above the Earth and populated by God, angels, and devils that are agents of action in this ordinary realm of time and space. We now know that this picture was mythological or story-time talk about a dimension of depth or ultimacy in our real lives. But we now have difficulty identifying where in our lives this so-called ultimacy is operating. The vertical metaphor both in its literal and metaphorical interpretations has ceased to be meaningful to the most aware members of this post-modern culture.

The Death of the Vertical
among Right-Wing Christians

The more conservative Christian interpreters have tended to take the vertical metaphor literally—holding that there is a real place called “heaven” occupied by a Super Being and his angels. This literal viewpoint is a form of death for the vertical dimension. Such literalizing makes “God” one more being in the world of beings, rather than something Totally Other to the temporal beings that populate our lives. This destroys the divine as understood in the Bible.

Most of these right-wing Christians are loath to accept that Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, and many more great theologians did not take this metaphor literally in the way that we modern people mean “literally.” We who live in this scientific age tend to view “literal” to mean something that eyes can see and ears can hear, if they are in the right place to do so. The divine. as discussed in ancient times, was not understood that literally. The great theologians of Christianity were aware that the divine cannot even be described in words. As Luther clearly says, the word “God” is basically a devotional word directed toward a Complete Void or Absolute Mystery that human minds cannot contain in words. In those earlier times, metaphorical talk was viewed as normal discourse for saying what could not be said in ordinary discourse about our experience of these divine topics.

The Death of the Vertical
among Left-Wing Christians

The more liberal Christian interpreters have tended to talk about the divine more metaphorically, but in a way that also makes what they say part of the temporal realm of processes. “God” as used in such liberal discourse is not something Wholly Other to the temporal processes, but one of those processes that make up part of our self-serving Christian influenced humanism. In this understanding there is no revelation about an Absolute Mystery loving us. There is nothing Absolutely Mysterious to reveal something about. There is no active wrath against our estrangements from realism. There is no power of grace that heals us from those estrangements. In much liberal Christianity the human predicament of extensive estrangement from realism is unexamined. We do not see ourselves as needing to be healed or saved. We are being seen as rational beings and potentially moral persons choosing between the good and the bad according to our parents’ morality, or our culture’s morality, or the morality of our selected peer group. We are locked in captivity to some law; we do not actually see any room for a Mysterious realism that tends to upset everything in order to bring us to a more realistic mode of living.

The Death of the Vertical Resurrected
in a Horizontal Fashion.

Therefore, our religious thinking must go farther than either the right or left Christianity that I have so briefly characterized and debunked. We simply do not need the vertical metaphor any more, but we need to recover what the vertical metaphor was pointing to in human experience, and tell about it in a horizontal manner of thinking.

This transition is not so easy, for it includes both seeing the experiences that the ancients were pointing to and saying those same profound experiences in our own words in an equally useful and powerful way. The first stumbling block we have to overcome is our unconscious rationalism—that is, we unthinkingly think that what we think is reality. Hopefully our thinking does have some correspondence with reality, but we are typically unaware of the extent to which all that we know is a gross approximation of the Real with a capital “R.”

All our knowledge is a pattern of abstractions created by we humans, and these humanly created perspectives screen-in only part of Reality and screen-out far more of Reality. No self-constructed reality is Reality with a capital “R.” Some people do not believe that there is a capital “R” Reality. “Reality” for them is simply whatever they want to believe is true—even to the extent of denying both long-established scientific knowledge as well as inwardly visible common sense.

A sense of perpetual ignorance is a characteristic of true scientific research. Scientific knowledge is forever changing—giving up its current approximations for better, but still approximate knowledge that remains open to be improved once again. Our state of scientific knowing is even more drastic than that—our knowledge is like a small leaf floating on a chaos of water. The more we know about nature, the more we know we don’t know. Reality is being seen today as more, not less, Mysterious than it was seen centuries ago. We now know, if we want to know, that what we know is infinitely exceeded by what we don’t know. This does not mean that what we know is any less valuable; we could not function at all without what we know. The mind and its knowledge can be and need to be fully affirmed.

The anti-intellectualism so prominent today is sheer foolishness. But, it is true that an Unknown Void yawns before our consciousness. Silence engulfs our human noise. Awesome Power overpowers our human powers. Uncontrollable Force limits our most prominent control of nature. These awarenesses have long existed, but they have become even more vivid for those of us today who want to be honest, rather than bigoted fools.

This weakness of our human knowing also occurs in our contemplative inquiry—that is, our looking within by our own consciousness at the enigma of consciousness itself and its flow of contents. We have learned a lot through this inner quest, and expressed a lot of this wisdom in our philosophies, psychologies, essays, painting, sculpture, drama, music and all the other arts and humanities. These huge cultural deposits of wisdom tells us much, perhaps half of what we know. But, our inward knowing also falls far short of what can be learned through the inward quest. Outwardly and inwardly we are perpetually overwhelmed with the Sheer Mystery of it all.

Our awareness of profound Mystery is both our ignorance and our wisdom about the divine as Absolute Other. This wisdom describes our experience of the Absolute Other in a horizontal manner. This all-encompassing Mystery is the same divinity that the ancients used story-time, mythic talk to discuss. We no longer need this ancient vertical metaphor.

The symbol “God” adds to the Absolute Other only one thing: our devotion, our trust, the obedience of our faith. Such faith is a leap of deep freedom. It is a gift from the Absolute Other of the freedom to make this leap, but we ourselves must employ this freedom in making this leap of freedom.

In the midst of the conditional experiences of our lives, we can meet the Unconditional and as true Christians trust this Unconditional Reality. In the midst of the temporal, we can meet the Eternal. In the midst of the finite, we can meet the Infinite. We can talk about burning bushes of temporal stuff that burn with the Awe of the Awesome Overallness. We can talk about an Awe-inspired glow of authenticity is the faces and behaviors of some of our neighboring humans—provided that we have developed the Awe-sensitive vision to see such things. We can trust this Awe and this Awesomeness that awakens this Awe in our inner being. With this trust, we make the Awesome our God, our devotion, our ultimate concern in the living of our whole lives.

The vertical metaphor is gone in the above discussion, but what the vertical metaphor pointed to in ancient theologizing is still present to us. If we have eyes to look and see this hidden depth in the horizontal, temporal processes of our ordinary lives, we see also the face of God as revealed in our ancient Bibles..

The Resurrection of the
Depth of Love

What I have said so far is only about the symbol of the cross—the crucifixion of our many temporal devotions in favor a devotion to the Eternal. Beyond this experience of detachment from temporality is the companion experience called “the resurrection of the temporal body.”

This detachment from the temporal is not enough without our openness to being truly human in devotion to the Eternal. This devotion to the Eternal includes love for the temporal and the Eternal. Our entire bodily life in its natural and cultural setting is resurrected. We love ourselves unconditionally, and we love others unconditionally, and we love the entire natural realm unconditionally.

We see the truth of our Infinite relatedness as a powerful grace that is accepting our true humanity—that is accepting us in spite of all of our departures from living that true humanity. We see that grace as opening us and calling us to a life-long journey of repenting from our reality-departures, and thereby opening us to the gifts of our essential goodness given with our birth, with our everyday lives, with our little deaths, and with our final conclusion.

This deep love that we can have for ourselves and others must be distinguished from other meanings of the word “love” (libido, friendship, and passion for the good, true, and beautiful). “Agape” is the Greek word used in the New Testament for this Eternally rooted quality of love that accepts the unacceptable in ourselves and others, that loves the enemy as well as the friend, and that loves others as we love ourselves. This quality of love gives life its meaning, no matter how meaningless various circumstances may appear.

And it is the expression of agape in specific everyday ways in the here and now that gives agape its actuality, rather than being simply potential. The expression of agape creates what we call the true church, the communion of saints, the community of love for all the specifics of human life. It is the expression of agape that creates the resistance of the Christian community to the social environment of personally and socially estranged humanity in all its actual historical predicaments.

It is the expression of agape that produces resistance to the current human abuse of nature in ourselves and toward this entire planet. This planet is not only our provided home (part of the love of Eternity for us and for all that we love) but this planet is also our responsibility, because of our assigned role as this planet’s self-aware portion.

The resurrected life of agape expression is an uphill road of active living for any human being. And for some of us this uphill road of active living includes the rebuilding of the Christian practice as an effective daily, weekly, and annual nurture for ourselves and for all those who are likewise called to be and do this profound Christian renewal.

Oh don’t you want to go
to that Gospel feast
that promised land
where all is peace.

Deep river,
I want to cross over into campground

The post Deep River Crossing first appeared on Realistic Living.