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

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

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

Cain’s worship in this brief story was a symbol for Canaanite religious practices. According to the biblical story, Reality/God favored Abel’s religious practice over Cain’s religious practice. Understanding the text here is not easy, for we may not be clear about the meaning of animal sacrifice to those ancient people. An animal that had come into human possession was viewed as a gift from God, a food source not so easily come by. So in Abel’s religious practice, we are seeing a big gift from the Grand Giver that is being given back to the Giver. This is also reflected in that story about Abraham being prepared to give back the gift of his only son Isaac to the Giver of Isaac. This is a view of “sainthood” that was also seen in the life of Jesus, whose death was seen as Jesus giving back his life to the Giver of his life: “Into thy hands I commend my consciousness.” Luke: 23:46

Cain presented as his gift to Reality works of his own hands. According to the biblical story, this was less favored by Reality. Nothing is said in the story about how anyone knew whose ritual Reality favored, but let us guess that Abel’s ritual was something like one of those truthful sermons that fill a whole room with Awe so thick that it seems we could cut that Awe with a knife. Cain’s ritual, let us suppose, was like so much of our empty talk; it called forth no Awe at all.

Somehow Cain saw that Reality favored his brother’s ritual, but rejected Cain’s ritual. At that point in the story, we find this key message being said by Reality/God to Cain:

If you practice realism, you can hold up your head,
If not, then demonic action is crouching at the door;
it is eager for you, but you must master it.
Genesis 4:7 a very slight rewording

In this old story, Cain does not master his envy, his anger, his resentments. He chooses to go with his angry resentments, rather than with his deep freedom to master such resentments and perhaps ferret out what they meant.

Cain’s overt actions follow from his primal choice. He cannot kill Reality, but he can kill Abel and he does so. In this story, Reality notices Abel’s death and says to Cain: “Where is your brother Abel?”

Cain answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s shepherd?” This was a double lie. He did know, and he was his brother’s keeper, just as we humans are all built to care about all the neighbors that God/Reality provides to us.

Reality speaks again: “What have you done? Hark! Your brother’s blood that has been shed is crying out to me from the ground.” Reality in this story goes on to spell out all the ways that Cain is now estranged from the ground that grows his food, from himself, from other people, and most of all from Reality. A mark of this estrangement is placed on Cain’s forehead.

We need to understand that Cain as well as Abel is as aspect of each of us. Cain is humanity, sustained, protected, even forgiven, yet stained with the mark of a murderous impulse.

The story ends with these poetic and sobering words: Cain went out from Reality’s presence and settled in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. The word “Nod” can be translated “Wandering.” Cain is now wandering away from the land of Mysterious Realism. He has killed Abel in himself as well as in his fellow human. He is wandering, looking for his Home Reality, his promised Land, but not finding it. He is wandering somewhere to the east of authenticity.

Cain’s story is about the European immigrants to Tasmania who killed every Tasmanian and to the European immigrants to Australia who killed most of the Aborigines of that land.

So it is with the European immigrants to North, Central, and South America who killed huge numbers of natives in that land. So it is with a German population who killed 10 million or more Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and others. This grim story continues to go on in many ways in many places. This is done by our species of life on this planet. The Mark of Cain is on our foreheads.

Both Cain and Abel are humanity. Every man and every woman is both Cain who has lost his Abel-ness, and an Abel-ness that is an offense to Cain. Jesus is such an offense from the perspective of our Cain-ness, for Jesus is Cain’s own lost Abel which Cain has killed. Our Cain-like humanity killed Jesus because our Cain-ness perceived Jesus-hood as an “enemy” who dared to expose our Cain-hood by setting before us the possibility of our Abel-hood of uncompromising realism.

It was our Cain who brought black slaves to the U.S. and continues to mistreats their descendants. It is our Cain who rejects Hispanic immigrants coming to this land for asylum.

Perhaps we can hear the blood of Abel in those Hispanic children separated from their parents who is crying out to to be heard from what is left of the Abel-ness in our common humanity.

So let us look more fully at what this strange old story has to do with our daily lives today. Let us consider our politics, as an example. Politicians who tell lies create a movement that is murderous. Politicians who tell the truth create a movement that is hated by the liars, but which opens us all to the possibilities of truthful living.

This murderous hatred arising in we liars is a strange blessing, an opportunity for our Cain-ness to master his or her envy, hatred, and resentment with the truth of our freedom to live a truthful life.

Finally, I want to rescue this ancient story of Cain and Abel from one more serious misunderstanding. This story is not about Jewish religion being better than Canaanite religion or about Christian religion being better than Jewish religion and Canaanite religion. This story is not about what I say about my religion or about your religion. It is not about what you say about my religion or about your religion.

This story is about what God says (that is, what Reality says) about my religion and your religion and everyone’ else’s religion. If we have no idea what it means to listen to what Reality is saying about my religion, or your religion, or anyone’s religion, then we have no idea about what religions is or what religion is for in human life.

The critique of religion by Reality is step one in the healing from our Cain estrangements. Step two is our mastery of our envy, hatred, and resentment with a freedom that leads to a release of our essential care for all our neighbors—for Cain and Abel.

The post Wilderness Abel and Canaanite Cain first appeared on Realistic Living.

Faced with such writings almost 2000 years old, biblical interpretation today requires a bit more work than simply reading the stories. It is important to know that most of these biblical stories are not scientific history, but it is needful to do a bit of scientific history to find what these stories meant to their authors. But such history is only the beginning. Here are my four steps for interpreting a passage of biblical writing.

1. Scientific History: What do we know about when and where this text was written, who wrote it, and what probable meanings were being given to the specific words used by this time-bound story teller?
2. Literary Analysis: Was this a poem, a teaching, a fictional story, a historical legend, a theological myth, etc.?
3. Metaphorical Translation: Interpreting any transcendent, two-layer, story-talk with our contemporary, existential, one-layer, transparency language.
4. “Word-of-God” Suggestions: What might this passage be saying to us today about the living of our authentic lives and about the power of these Christian symbols for our own depth living?

1. Scientific History

So when was the above baptismal story written and by whom, and what do some of the words in this story mean? The Gospel of Mark was written about 70 CE by the first of the four Gospel writers we find in our New Testament. Mark was the name of one of Paul’s followers, but this Mark may be some other man or women. Whoever Mark may have been, this person was putting together stories that were perhaps three decades old. John the Baptist had built a significant movement by the time Jesus was in this late 20s, and Jesus apparently joined the Baptist movement rather than the Zealots, Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees, or some other movement of that time. The Christ-way movement that Jesus and Mark represent was a parallel movement with the John the Baptist movement that was still part of the public memory, and was perhaps still going on when Mark wrote this gospel. The ritual of baptism, in a slightly altered form, was part of Mark’s movement. It was important to Mark to both affirm the John-the-Baptist movement and to distinguish the Christ-Jesus movement from it.

What we know about the meaning of John’s baptizing is important for understanding the Jesus movement and the above passage from Mark’s gospel. John saw himself as part of a religious culture that was deeply sick, deeply estranged from its religious foundations, doomed in fact to be utterly destroyed along with that whole Imperial era in which it was tragically embedded. The Sadducees were thoroughly compromised with the curse of the Roman rule, the Zealots were trapped in serious anger and even military revolt against this unbeatable foe. The Pharisees were reducing the whole crisis to a set of superficial moralities, and the Essenes were escaping to a mystical dream land. These are my words, but I am attempting to picture how thoroughgoing John the Baptist was with his critique. He was washing people of their whole era of corruption. He was calling for a thoroughgoing repentance from the entire state of that religious people. Things were so bad in John’s view that he expected the Final Realty of cosmic history to clean house soon, to wash the world with a wrath only rarely experienced in the story of this religious people.

Jesus joined this movement. He came to John to be washed of his entire era. When John the Baptist was beheaded, Jesus picked up where John left off with his own style of response to these grim times. Jesus announced a dawning of a positive alternative; the Kingdom of God, he said, was arriving in the very ministry he was conducting. John was a forerunner of his work, but Jesus and his disciples viewed John as a fabulous forerunner. The washing of baptism remained as a ritual that Mark’s Christ-way movement was still performing. A washing of this entire evil era was still seen as the first step in the journey of spirit that Jesus was leading.

2. Literary Analysis

This passage is part of the opening pages of a new literary form—the gospel. Mark, we might say, invented the gospel. This writing is not a scientific history. It is not a fictitious novel. It is not a historical novel. It is a piece of theologizing put in the form of highly symbolic and artistically constructed narrative. This is a religious work with all sorts of fancy symbols: “up out of the water;” “the heavens split open;” “the Spirit coming down upon him like a dove;” “A voice came out of Heaven, saying, ‘You are my dearly-beloved Son.‘ “ These story elements are meant to get our attention, and to provoke us to ask this primary question: “Who is this guy, reality?”

3. Metaphorical Translation

Almost every phrase that Mark includes has some sort of secret meanings. “Up out the water” can pass unnoticed if we do not associate this immersion with dying to the evil era. If we do see the allusion to dying, then “up out of the water” is an allusion to resurrection. In this story Jesus is becoming the resurrected one.

“The heavens split open” is an even more cryptic piece of poetry to a modern person who does not know what to make of the word “heaven” and certainly finds it very odd to speak of seeing “the heavens split open.” Translating that phrase from its transcendence metaphorical imagination to an existential transparency type of poetry takes a bit of thoughtfulness. “Heaven” means the realm of Absolute Mystery, and Mark is picturing that dynamic as right above our heads. There is a sort of big punch bowl with stars on it and if that bowl were to split open we would see right into the Eternal heaven. I believe that Mark is thinking more metaphorically and less literally than that may sound; seeing into the Eternal is the meaning of the text. As Jesus comes up out of the watery tomb in which John has dunked him, the punch bowl of Awesome Absolute Mystery splits open. What a story!

Next, this profound-eyed person Mark sees another signal of profoundness: “the Spirit coming down upon him like a dove.” Spirit, for Mark, is the Absolute Mystery itself manifesting as a state of our whole life sometimes called “Wonder” or “Awe.” And for anyone who has the courage for a dreadful, fascinating state of Awe, this happening is a gentle thing, like a dove settling on your head or shoulder.

Finally, Mark gives us one more symbol for how this baptism was an outstanding event: “A voice came out of Heaven, saying, ‘You are my dearly-beloved Son.‘ “ We need not believe that a tape recorder would have heard this voice. Mark included this bit of poetic flair to complete his view of the significance of this baptism for this simple roof-repair man’s son from the nowhere of Nazareth. And what does “Son” mean here? It means that Jesus is having a new birth, not of a father in Nazareth, but of a Spirit from Eternity. This is Mark’s “virgin birth” narrative. Mark is implying a virgin birth for Jesus, a birth sired from heaven that was now taking over his whole life from his biological birth in Nazareth.

The Awed One (Jesus) is filled with Awe (Spirit) sourced from the Awesome (Eternal Mystery.) This whole secret Trinity of Divinity is happening among us, to us, to humanity in these opening pages of Mark’s story. For the rest of Mark’s strange narrative, Jesus is the washed one, the resurrected one, a beloved of Reality one who is born among us to lead us into our own profound humanness. For the rest of Mark’s gospel we will see what a person of resurrected humanity looks like—walking, talking, calling, teaching, healing, feeding, eating, celebrating, living, suffering, dying. Women coming to honor him in his tomb find nothing there but their own resurrection.

4. Word-of-God” Suggestions

So, what might this passage be saying to us today about the living of our own authentic lives and about the power of these Christian symbols for our own depth living? Perhaps we might give Christian symbols a second look. Perhaps we might view these long-preserved stories as being clues to our own most profound matters of living. Perhaps we might ask of Mark and other resurrected witnesses, what must we do to inherit this life abundant. Perhaps we are drawn to read further in Mark’s story to see where our own particular healing is required to be washed of our own grim era—washed in order for us to enter here and now into this communion of the saints, this Kingdom of God, this Reign of Reality, this commonwealth of profound realism. Perhaps such an enigmatic interior baptism is the first step for each of us in beginning a walk with Jesus for the rest of our own life story. Who knows what our next steps will be?

I am in the process of rewriting a detailed commentary of the Gospel of Mark. I have completed the last three chapters on crucifixion and resurrection. Here is the downloading code for those pages.

http://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/MarkCrossResurrection.pdf

The post Washed of Your Era first appeared on Realistic Living.

But I am more of a preacher than a scholar. I am still leaning to write after a lifetime of preaching. I am also a proponent of every Christian becoming a theologian at the very strongest level of their experience. And I believe that each of us have the authority of our own experience— from which experience we are entitled to critique even the scholarly luminaries we deeply respect. The four men mentioned above lived several decades ago, and we still living 21st Century Christians have experienced life challenges that they did not live to see. And they are all four men. We need to learn from the experience of women. The four men named above did not live to see the full flowering of feminism, ecology, or interreligious dialogue and interreligious cooperation in social action. Technology, economics, and politics have also not stood still. The perpetual revolution in Christian thought that was emphasized in Tillich’s “Protestant principle” has continued. I have attempted to keep up with this historical flow. All this experience entitles me and you to say more, not less, than the above four mid-20th Century luminaries were privileged to say.

Thomas Altizer, like me, has claimed to be a preacher more than a scholastic theologian. I am a critic of Altizer, but not of his excellence in obliterating people’s obsolete views of God. I am, however, a critic of his substitute set of religious assertions that, from my perspective, result in a religion that is alien to the New Testament revelation. Of Karl Barth I have a different kind of critique; he, from my perspective, clings too firmly to the old forms of Christian expression that have become obsolete in terms of the most lucid philosophies of religion that now drive what I view as “edge theological creativity.”

In addition to being an amateur Christian theologizer, I am also an amateur philosopher of religion, but a very passionate one. I have written a whole book on this topic entitled The Enigma of Consciousness: A Philosophy of Profound Humanness and Religion. For popular consumption, this book may be one of the best things going on this topic. I certainly recommend it, even though such an unknown as myself will be read by few scholarly philosophers who discuss this topic.

I am mentioning my philosophy of religion in this spin, because I want to share with you how important it is for me to do Christian theologizing within the context of a philosophy of religion that honors all religions. My philosophizing includes carefully defining the very word “religion,” so as to distinguish religious superstition from the essential social process called “religion” that is part of every society, along with education and sewage disposal. A good philosophy of religion disposes of the superstitious “sewage” that the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, and others have managed to dream up.

All religion is “dreamed up” by the human species. No religion has dropped down from a top-story realm of supposed absolute truth. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as good religion as opposed to superstition. Good religion points beyond itself—beyond its rational assertions, beyond its rituals, icons, and myths, beyond its communal life organizations—to the Eternal, Everlasting, Mysterious, Empowering Every-thing-ness and No-thing-ness that is experienced to be simply THERE judging every human creation as either helpful or crazy.

When Hinduism points to a Brahman Otherness that promotes an Atman inwardness, and when Christianity points to an Almightiness in the flow of unstoppable time that promotes an inward Holiness of Spirit, we are seeing two very different religions point to the same overall experience of a primal realism that all humans face. To talk meaningfully about religion we must honor this pointing-beyond quality of any religion that is doing its job as good religion. This pointing-beyond quality is the secret to experiencing an actual “Word of God” for Christians or an actual “Enlightenment” for Buddhists.

If there is no beyond-the-temporal for a religion to point to, then there is no validity to any religion. In that case all religions are superstition—merely opium for people who have lost their courage for a quest for truth or for an obedience to social responsibility.

And it requires an extreme carefulness of thought to distinguish a truly objective philosophy of religion from a subtle universalizing of my own religious inventions that I then foist upon others who practice a religion other than my own. But unless such an objective philosophy of religion is possible, no religious critique of my own religion is possible, and no honoring of a religion other than my own is possible.

And what do I mean by “my own religion”? As a Christian I have what H. Richard Niebuhr calls a religious “point of view.” For example, I follow the Old Testament point of view that views an Eternal Presence in the flow of time with which we in my community of devotion are in dialogue—Thou-we-Thou-we-Thou-we-Thou. I also follow the New Testament point of view that views the “character” of this Eternal “Thou” in the flow of time being revealed in a specific event, including the life, teachings, deeds, and death of one Jesus. This Christian point of view needs to be further spelled out, but it basically means accepting the job of religious creativity that flows from accepting that this one event of Jesus, seen as Messiah, reveals the meaning of what is happening to us in every event of our personal lives and of every event in our social history. However preposterous this enduring paradox may remain for most of us, this is my Christian point of view by which the validity of any past or further development of the Christian religion is being judged by me. My religious point of view is not shared by Buddhist theorititions who do their creative thinking from another point of view.

I will not attempt in this brief spin to spell out what I view as the best of Buddhist thinking and how it overlaps and differs from my Christian theologizing, but this can be done. These two contrasting points of view can be viewed from the perspective of a philosophy of religion that honors both the point of view of Buddhism and the point of view of Christianity without universalizing or dishonoring either point of view. Doing an objective philosophy of religion includes giving up every religious point of view as universal. Each religious point of view is relative, not absolute—a temporal creation by part of the human species. In other cryptic words, the Eternal can be revealed in the temporal without the temporal becoming Eternal.

The existence of such an objective approach to the philosophy of religion can be very important in our current world in which Christian bigotry, Islamic bigotry, Jewish bigotry, Hindu bigotry, Buddhist bigotry, etc. are serious enemies of a viable future for humanity along with racism, sexism, nationalism, nativism, and yes even humanism of a dogmatic quality.

If you have not done so already, take a look at my book on these matters:

The Enigma of Consciousness:
A Philosophy of Profound Humanness and Religion

http://www.realisticliving.org/books.htm

Also, if my elaboration of the Christian point of view is of interest to you, take a look at my book on that topic, which you can see on this same web site page.

The Love of History and the Future of Christianity
Toward a Manifesto for a Next Christianity

The post My Contemporary Theologizing first appeared on Realistic Living.