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.

Evolution is more complicated than cause or chance explanations can fathom. Choice is another human explanation that must take its place alongside cause and chance explanations. The myth that cause and effect can be the whole explanation for the doings of nature is incomplete. The myth that probability explanations can completely fill the gaps that cause explanations cannot handle is also incomplete. The human explanation called “choice” is also required to handle our experience of this ever-more mysterious actuality we call “nature,” or perhaps “Final Reality.”

Watching our cat choose or not choose to jump up on the table is another bit of data for my master view of thoughtfulness about nature. This choice is being made by this cat who knows it would be easy and fun to do this and who also knows that I strongly disapprove of this behavior. This cat is not using my language and mathematical skills to make this choice. His mental mechanisms are composed of more primitive multi-sensory reruns that I call “images,” rather then “symbols.” But these mental processes, that I also use, are good enough for cat consciousness to make all sorts of choices that make cat life what cat life is.

I am blessed with a power of consciousness that uses art, language, and mathematical symbols to make choices no cat has the power to make. Even a worm has a level of consciousness, and worm consciousness also makes choices. “Nature” we might say waits to “work out” what the future will be until each worm, cat, and human decides what his or her gift of consciousness will choose to add to the history-making process.

Herein is my description of what consciousness is: attention and intention—taking in reality and putting forth reality-bending acts. We also call these two dynamics “awareness and freedom.” In all levels of its intensity, consciousness is both of these dynamics. Consciousness is always both awareness and freedom.

As a human being, I am not only determined by millions of causally understood forces, but I am also myself a determining force—a freedom sourced in the essence of my human consciousness. My choices make a difference in the course of time. Nature as a whole waits to decide what the future will be until I decide what I will be and do now.

Let us notice that the explanation “choice” points to a truth about nature that differs infinitely from the explanations of “cause” or “chance.” Choice means opting for an option based on no cause and no chance. In this sense, every choice is a choice out of nothing except choice itself. If there is some cause for a choice, then it is not a choice. If there is some probability for a choice then it is not a choice. Choice is a third overall explanation of events that differs completely from cause and chance explanations. So let us look more closely to these three ways of interpreting events.

Cause

Is “cause and effect” a pattern of nature, a pattern of the human mind, or both. It is both, but it exists in nature as something different than how it exists in the human mind. In nature “cause and effect” means an approximation of the workings of nature. In the human mind “cause and effect” means a creation of the human consciousness using the human mind. What is not true is that cause-and-effect explanations can explain everything. Yes, Reality is one huge connectedness, but that connected wholeness is more complex than a cause-and -effect network of reasoning. Nature is mysterious beyond all our cause-and-effect interpretations. The truth about nature is more complex than “causes we have not yet discovered.” Nature breaths a Mysteriousness or a Profound Reality that no finite mind (horse, cat, or human) may never be able to fathom. A thousand years from now humans will fathom more, but will that be all? As far as you and I are concerned, the answer to this questions is currently unfathomable. I am not standing aside from this questions. I am guessing our knowledge will always be limited by the finitude for the human mind.

Chance

Chance or probability is another creation of the human mind that can also be an approximation of nature. We use it all the time. When we throw a six-sided dice that is carefully carved and well balanced, each side has an approximately equal chance of landing upward. You might be able to explain that side coming up with a few thousand tiny causes, but you cannot measure them, so probability is a type of explanation we use quite frequently. The whole of what we call “statistics” uses a probability type of mathematics. And probability explanations differ profoundly from cause and effect explanations.

In the super-microscopic realm of sub-atomic processes of tiny discrete energy quanta we find our situation to be somewhat like throwing dice. The mathematics of probability serves us very well in this realm. The attempt to measure causes and their effects is rendered impossible by the fact that our measuring beams significantly change what we are attempting to measure. In this realm of nature we also run into the strange truth that every distinguishable item turns out to be a ripple in an energy field that spans the universe. This means that every entity in this realm of physical reality can be visualized as both a discrete particle and a wave in a comic-wide field. I will not attempt to describe those complexities further in this essay. For now, I only want to note for our overall thinking that the truth about nature has been expanded by the chance/probability mode of careful thoughtfulness, right alongside cause and effect explanations. We can arrive at wonderfully accurate approximations about the goings-on in the sub-atomic realm using probability thoughtfulness. We don’t need to know the minute causes.

Einstein, you may recall, complained about having to stop with these probability explanations with the comment that he “did not believe God played dice with the universe.” I take this to mean that Einstein preferred rendering the truth of every natural process in terms of a mathematics of the cause-and-effect type of thinking.

Choice

If this conflict between probability explanations and cause-and-effect explanations gives a lurch to our hope of having a “rational view” of Reality, the explanation we call “choice” further frustrates any hope of creating a rational view of the every-thing-ness of our lives. Yet, we find ourselves using the choice interpretation all the time. For example, in playing a game of cards we not only use probability to predict the next card we draw and cause and effect to explain moving a card in our hand to the table, but we also use choice to describe playing our queen rather than our ace in that often-faced crossroads in the game of bridge.

Also, we expect our cat to make the choice to remain on the floor or in a chair rather than jump up on the table. We commonly assume that even grasshoppers (with a consciousness more limited than cats) make choices. When a grasshopper in my garden becomes aware of my presence, she (perhaps he) moves to the opposite side or the stem on which she is clinging and apparently assumes a readiness to leap off in an opposite direction from me if she is further observed or threatened.

I am willing to hypothesize that all living forms have a level of consciousness, and that all these levels of consciousness manifest both of these two dynamics of consciousness: awareness and choice, attentionality and intentionality, presence and freedom.

So what is a choice? Some have attempted to show that every choice is so conditioned by cultural influences, peer-group expectations, personality patterns, and other near invisible causes that a choice is actually nothing more than a figment of our imagination, or that choice is an after-thought about our totally determined actions. In other words, that living beings are an unbroken system of causes. To say this means that we are guessing that human consciousness does not actually intend anything; it simply watches.

But no creative artist actually believes that their consciousness simply watches. A poet, a novelist, a painter, a composer, a choreographer experiences their own consciousness creating something new out of the many products, trends, and influences that surround them. This bit of newness comes from nowhere other than that conscious being’s consciousness. It comes from human freedom being freedom. It comes from choice being choice. “Choice” we might say is an uncaused cause bending the course of history alongside many other causes.

Humans are especially gifted in being benders of history. Thousands of other forces condition history to be its actual outcomes, but human freedom adds a cause to all these other causes. Or to put all this in another metaphor: we humans are response-able. We are able to respond to the cosmos of realities approaching us in history. I am going to accuse most people who deny this response-ability that they are hoping to handle their guilt by denying the existence of guilt. The courage to confess guilt and trust its forgiveness is how guilt is handled in most of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thoughtfulness.

We spirit descendants of Abraham have commonly spoken of confronting Profound Reality and of responding to this encounter. We have not meant that as an illusory reflection, but as a prime agony in the now of living. Life has been described as a process of dialogue: Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou. “Thou” gets the first and the last word in this dialogue, but the human also speaks back to this Thou-of-Total-Reality and then this Thou-of-Total-Reality speaks back to the “I” of human consciousness. This is metaphorical talk, but it is artful talk about the actual historical flow of time as lived by a human being.

Spirit Freedom

“Spirit Freedom” can be defined as human consciousness operating beyond the rational expressions of art, language, and mathematics. Of course we can point to causes that are functioning in all the performances of our bodies and psyches, but Spirit Freedom is NOT CAUSED by any other factor than our own consciousness consciously intending a contribution to some specific action of our being.

This understanding of freedom is a Western interpretation of the existential meaning of the Buddhist “no self” awareness. We can agree with the East that our human self image or ego is merely an idea created by the human. Such a self-created “self” is nowhere to be found in our actual experience. What we can find, however, is this NOTHINGNESS of UNCAUSED SPIRIT FREEDOM.

Consider the life of a research scientist who is seeking to create a better causal explanations for the events of nature. His or her act of creating a whole new theory of science is not itself caused by some causal conditioning. The scientist with his or her own Spirit Freedom creates that new theory that then proves it to be a better approximation of the causal factors of some specific set of natural processes. Scientific research is a super-rational process of thoughtfulness that is, nevertheless, at its creative core irrational inventiveness. Or if you wish, scientific research is trans-rational; it dips into a creative freedom that we sometimes call “intuition.” “Intuition” is a word that we use for a sort of thoughtfulness for which we have no causal explanation. “Sprit Freedom” names this intending side of whatever the word “intuition” is indicating on the awareness side of our profound consciousness.

It is understandable that the poetry of Christian theology calls both intuition and Spirit Freedom “Holy Spirit” and views “Holy Spirit” as a “wind” breathed from the mouth of that Final Source or Profound Reality that is the God-devotion of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus—Sarah, Deborah, and Mary—and perhaps you and me.

The post The Choices of Horses 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.

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

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

Both Niebuhr and many careful Old Testament scholars, beginning for me with Bernhard W. Anderson, enabled me to see how the Exodus revelation initiated a perpetual revolution in law-writing. For example, what we have in the familiar version of the ten commandments in Exodus 20 is a statement of law-writing that is already centuries older than whatever was the original Moses version. Law-writing in the community of Israel continued as an ongoing process, elaborated over a period of 600 to 700 years in the first five books of the Bible. These laws included both religious forms and the more general social forms for the whole of Israel’s life.

This same perpetual revolution of religious forms can be seen in the writings of the community of people who formed the New Testament. Paul was already conducting a revolution in religious forms, only a decade or so after the crucifixion. The Gospel of Mark introduced another revolution in Christian forms that was elaborated soon after by Matthew and Luke. The Gospel of John was another major revolution in Christian forms. And this process of perpetual revolution in religious forms continued in the still later New Testament writings that date as late 120 CE.

After the first century and early second century flurry of perpetual revolutions in Christian religious forms, such revolutions do not end. Revolutions in religious forms continue all the way to Augustine who pulled together religious forms that endured and were elaborated and modified by such innovators as Benedict, Hildegard, and Francis. There were many revolutions within the Augustinian basics. It was 800 years after Augustine, before another thoroughgoing revolution in Christian forms was conducted by Thomas Aquinas. In spite of Thomas’ continuing influence in Roman Catholic Christianity, Martin Luther instigated another major revolution in Christian religious forms that has reshaped the ongoing Christian formation process among Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians all across the planet.

Søren Kierkegaard initiated another major revolution in Christian formation that has been further elaborated and modified all the way to my H. Richard Niebuhr and Joe Mathews experiences in the perpetual revolution in Christian forms.

Since Joe Mathews death in 1977, I and others in the Realistic Living constituency have continued this ongoing perpetual revolution in Christian religious forms. If I name areas in which this perpetual revolution in Christian forms has continued in my life since 1977, these four areas are clearly included: radical feminism, radical ecology, radical interreligious dialogue & cooperation, and a radical replacement of the clergy-laity split with a practice of intimate circles of co-pastors who minister both to one another and to their bioregional parishes of responsibility.

In 1984 I self-published 1000 copies of a book entitled A Primer on Radical Christianity. Perhaps the most radical contribution of that book was its post-literalism manner of sharing how we can metaphorically translate for our times the words, Spirit, God, Christ, Sin, Grace, and Church. And my own perpetual revolution in Christian religious forms has continued since 1984. An opportunity has now been given to me by Wood Lake Publishing to do an update of A Primer on Radical Christianity which will be entitled Radical Gifts: Living the Full Christian Life in Troubled Times.

As I work on this update and also on our coming June 2018 summer program, I am realizing that most of all the word “radical” means for me “the perpetual revolution in Christian forms.” And this includes the perpetual revolution in all social forms, for social justice is one of the radical gifts of Christianity—to be a social justice mission for the perpetual revolution of human society, planet-wide and history-long. Such justice now includes a foundation in Earth ecology for every other social justice topic.

One of the deepest aspects of the current perpetual revolution in Christian forms has to do with the use of the word “God.” This topics comes up in all three groups of monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. H. Richard Niebuhr’s book on Radical Monotheism and Western Culture was written mostly for Christians, but it can also apply to Jewish and Muslim rethinking. “Perpetual revolution” and “radical monotheism” are corresponding concepts. Radical monotheism is about the perpetual revolution in the meaning of the word “God.” “God,” according to Niebuhr, is a devotional word for our ever-changing perception of the Eternal Reality we face in the ongoing temporal processes of history and personal living.

The Eternal does not change, but our perceptions of the Eternal do change. Therefore, our dynamics of devotion to the Eternal change, along with our changes in perception of the Eternal. Devotion to the Eternal manifests in the writings that surround Moses, Amos, and Jesus. This continuity is there, even though those verbalizations differ, and all three of those types of verbalization differ from what we must do today. As our perceptions of the Eternal change, our religious formations change as well. Our Christian religious formations are humanly created forms that give expression to our devotion to the Eternal. All humanly created forms are in perpetual revolution.

As devotion to the Eternal, however, our biblical and Christian religious forms reflect a type of continuity. This continuity is invisible, however, if we only consider the rational forms rather than THAT ETERNALNESS to which these forms point. When we read our Old and New Testaments we see religious forms that are very different from what is appropriate today; including vocabulary, philosophical assumptions, and the basic metaphors of that ancient religious thinking. Nevertheless, we can still hear through this sequence of changing forms what we call “the Word of God.” Perhaps we now prefer a companion vocabulary like “Communications from Eternity” or “Revelations from the Silent Abyss.”

This leads me to the revolutionary insight that “radical monotheism” is itself a temporal religious form that is dedicated to the perpetual revolution in religious forms. Perhaps there are other religious forms that are dedicated to the perpetual revolution in religious forms. I would nominate Alan Watts’ view of Hinduism as an exposition of a perpetual revolutionary quality within Hindu and Buddhist religious forms. But however that may be, radical monotheism, as outlined by H. Richard Niebuhr, is certainly an affirmation of the perpetual revolution in religious forms.

So with the importance of “perpetual revolution” in our minds, I will work a bit more in this essay on the perpetual revolution in the use of the word “God” in past and future Christianity. I will begin with the following gimmick that employs some of the old Hebrew words for “God.”

Let “Yah-weh,” where “Yah” is pronounced with an in-breath, mean an experience of the Eternal Void or No-thing-ness.

Let “YAH-weh” where “YAH” is pronounced with an out-breath, mean an experience of the Eternal Fullness or Every-thing-ness.

Then, let us assume that the word “Elohim” refers to any “god” that a human being might honor. Indeed, let us assume that the word “Elohim” simply means “my god” whatever the “object” of that god-reference may be.

So, in terms of such definitions, the words “Yahweh is my Elohim” means “Void/Fullness is my ultimate devotion.”

In my vision of a renewed Christian practice, the word “God,” means “my Elohim” or my ultimate concern (Tillich) or my final trust (H.R. Niebuhr) or my true obedience (Bultmann) or simply my paradoxical faith (Kierkegaard). All these sources of Christian theologizing reference the Eternal as the “object” of an “ultimate devotion.”

This use of the word “God” is not a return to the story-time talk that has dominated classical Christian thought. (For example, even speaking of “God as the Creator” is story-time talk. Throughout the Bible and most of Christian theology, God is spoken of as a character in a story. Stories are a means of expressing truth, but stories must not be taken literally.) The post-Kierkegaard God-talk is a metaphorical translation of story-time talk for our time in history. Here is one of the amazing results of this metaphorical translation: our renewed “God” usage is a recovery of the essential contribution to us of all 3000 years of “Christian” theologizing. The old stories of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Amos, etc. still live. Indeed, the whole Old and New Testaments can all be seen as Christian theologizing in accord with our current, transformed view of the Christian theologizing needed for a vital recovery of Christian practice.

If we allow the word “God” to go unused because it means so little to so many people in our era, then we lose the entire 3000 years of Abrahamic religious tradition—including Jewish, Christian, and Islamic heritages.

We also lose all those heritages if we take literally the story-time-talk in which “God” is a character in a story. “God” in our current relevant theologizing is not a being—not a being in this cosmos or above this cosmos or in some other cosmos. And the word “God” adds no content to this cosmos or to the Absolutely Unspeakable, Mysterious Eternal that we see only with our third eye through the frame of our current cosmology. The word “God” adds only our ultimate devotion to our sensibilities and understandings of all that we experience of what constitutes the Eternal and the temporal in which, and only in which, the Eternal appears to us.

Finally, the above spin brings some clarity to the “death of God” conversations among those of us who call ourselves “death of God” theologians. The “God” that has certainly died is the understanding of “God” that happens when we take any sort of literal view of the biblical stories in which “God” is a character in a religious story. What has died is the story-time talk about God which, being literalized, makes God a being alongside other beings. But today’s God-talk must be done in an era in which “God” is an intellectually contentless devotional word for relating to the Eternal that is met, not in some magical visit from another realm, but in our encounters with the Absolutely Mysterious Eternal that we met in the events of down-to-Earth history and in the events of our personal life history.

Of course, the word “Eternal” is an offensive term in those philosophers who find no place for for the word “Eternal” or for the word “God.” If everything is changing, they appear to argue, then there is no Eternal. Similarly, if everything is impermanent, then there is no Permanence. But the Eternal is not a thing of any sort. The Eternal is that ultimate “Power” that renders all impermanence impermanent. Even the word “power” is misleading, if “power” is taken as a literal thing, rather than as a symbol for the quality of the “Whole of Reality” as “Almighty”—All-Powerful in the sense of being determinative for all “realities” that human thinking separates out from “Reality.”

So how or where do we personally experience this so-called “Mighty Eternal”? We experience the Eternal in our experiences of impermanence. The Eternal is the Void we experience when something we treasure ends. The Eternal is the Total Demand we experience when we opt to live realistically among these passing things. And the Eternal is the Fullness we can experience when we are enchanted with this demanding life of love for all passing things in this actual ongoing drama of temporal comings, stayings, and passings in which, and only in which, we encounter the Eternal.

Again, I want to emphasize that the word “God,” in the biblical use of that word, adds nothing to the word “Eternal” except our devotional attitude toward the Eternal and toward all those specific temporal events in which this Eternal is being met. The word “God” adds no intellectual content, nor does the word “God” subtract any intellectual content. All intellectual content is temporal made up by human beings. The Eternal meets us as a continuing audit or judgement upon our intellectual inventions, thereby calling us to share in the continuing revolution of all thought.

Informed by such careful thinking as outlined above, Christians do not need to give up their use of the word “God;” they simply need to transform their use of the word “God.” They need to accept themselves as members of a community of religious practice that reveres perpetual revolution in the use of the word “God.” On the other hand, giving up the word “God” destroys the perpetual revolutionary practice that a radical Christianity has always been, still is, and can continue to be. Without the word “God,” or some word like it, we are without a devotional response to the Eternal. So those theologians (or perhaps they are un-theologians) who choose to move forward without the word “God” will be moving forward without 3000 years of perpetual revolution in the use of the word “God.” And they will thereby be solidifying their witness into some alternative temporal religious practice that misses out on the next 3000 years of perpetual Christian revolution in our use of the word “God.”

For more on this profound topic, see my book:

The Love of History and the Future of Christianity

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

The post Perpetual Revolution first appeared on Realistic Living.

The differences between these three religions are important, and their historical battles in previous centuries were seriousness conflicts that smoked out deep truths and social benefits for the future of our species. But today, the overriding imperative is to honor our common humanity. This honoring includes making allies among the true followers of the Exodus revelation of realism, the Jesus as Messiah revelation of realism, and the Mohammedan revelation of realism. We can picture this companionship as three different spirit explorers staring into same deep pit of Mystery—each one telling us in a different language what they see. Like blind persons touching different parts of the same elephant, these and other vital religious heritages present different pathways to the same overwhelming, inexhaustible Mystery.

This companionship, however, does not mean watering down the depth of these prominent religious traditions into a common denominator of superficial agreements. Rather, it means seeing into the depths revealed by each of these viewpoints on the same Reality. All three of these Arabic originated faiths, have used the metaphor of “monotheism” to point to something profoundly human. This “Oneness” metaphor is not being deeply understood when we view “monotheism” as a rational doctrine opposed by other rational doctrines.

If “monotheism” only means to us a rational belief in “a supreme being” in some supernatural realm, we are stuck in an endless battle of minds. For a deeper grasp of “monotheism,” let us view it as a oneness of trust in the trustworthiness of all aspects of Reality. According to this trust, we do not face two Final Realities—one that is for us and one that is against us—one that is good to us and one that is bad to us—one spiritual and one material—or one holy and one satanic. Rather Reality is One. ”Life and death are two wings on the same bird,” said the Sufi Muslim poet Rumi. And here is the core Muslim cry (with my slight rewording): “There are no ultimate devotions worthy of the human (long pause for the “radicality” of this to sink in), save THE ONE.” And in Jewish writings, we find a similar cry: “Hear Oh Israel, your appropriate devotion is ONE.” And both Jews and Christians, rehearse this first commandment: “You shall love THE ONE, your ultimate devotion, with all your mind, with all your heart, with all your consciousness, and with all your strength.”

Since we are all temped to raise some temporal object or idea or aspect of our lives to the role of our ultimate meaning, a monotheistic path turns out to be a bumpy ride of continual humiliations and fresh becomings. But among persons who understand their monotheism deeply, we can see a common spirit among monotheistic friends operating across these ancient Jewish, Christian, and Muslim divides—a connection that theses deepest monotheists do not have with members of their own religion who are still clinging to narrow, obsolete, and perhaps bigoted forms of their respective religions.

In the rests of this brief essay, I am speaking to Christians about three flash points of an emerging interreligious dialogue and social cooperation that can and is happening among the awakening members of these three Abrahamic religions.

1. The Oneness of Devotion

At their best, all three of these religious traditions look into the same Abyss of Final Reality and see One Reality expressing itself in the manyness of temporal living. Zoroastrianism looking into the Abyss of Final Reality saw two overarching powers—one that supported progressive human values and aliveness and one that supported reactionary motifs, chaos, social corruption, disintegration, and death. Zoroastrianism is actually a form of humanism, for it is human values that actually define this so-called divine good and this divine evil seen as the twin-operation of the cosmos. So contexted, human life was seen by Zarathustra and by generations of people since as a battle between good and evil in our selves, in our society, and in our cosmos. Zarathustra launched a significant religious revolution and his insights gave power to revolutionary change to his home Persia and to societies every since. But Zarathustra in his primal devotion was not a monotheist.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at their best, rejected this dualistic view of Reality. The Book of Job makes clear that “satan” is a servant of the One God, that the overall truth is that we confront One Reality in all that we like and in all that we don’t like. This mono-devotion is not a description of the final Abyss of Mystery. Rather it is a description of a devotion to that final Abyss of Mystery as we face what we don’t like as well as what we like. In both liking and not-liking, the people of this mono-devotion-viewpoint trust that this Absolute Mystery is doing what is good beyond any “good-and-evil” made up by humans.

Augustine, who defined the raw core of the Christian revelation for the following 800 years in Europe, insisted that evil is but a hole in the good, that all that happens to us has one divine meaning, evil means only our human estrangement from the good life as it is founded in Final Reality. In other words “all that IS is good.” There is no two-ness in our relation of devotion to Final Reality. Rather it is an Either/Or choice. Either we trust the whole of Reality—OR we despair over the whole of Reality, as Søren Kierkegaard also pointed out.

2. Beyond Ritual and Moral Fabrics

A relationship with the Absolute Otherness of Final Mystery has consequences in moral custom as well as in religious symbols, language, myths, and overall ritual practices. Nevertheless, morality and ritual are only the leaves on each tradition’s religious tree. These leaves may witness to the deep roots of the tree, but it is the roots, rather than the leaves, that define the essence of every religion. Each religious community, at its best, witnesses to the Spirit of a profound humanness that is aware of a Final Mysteriousness.

For example, the ten commandments that grew from the Exodus revelation were a legal summary that was created by humans and elaborated by humans for hundreds of years. This new style of social law-writing was done in the context of a common historical memory of that freely chosen and courageous Exodus from the standards of a hierarchical civilization into the raw wilderness of social creativity conducted on a very different foundation—namely, loyalty to an Absolutely Mysterious Otherness that grants humans the deep freedom to bend the course of history.

Forbidding murder, theft, and false witness were laws that flowed form this overall integrity. And such laws applied equally to rich and poor, leaders and followers, the learned and the learners. Similarly, the law that set aside one day in seven to rehearse the group memory and rest from temporal labor also flowed from this overall integrity. of trust in ONE Trustworthy Finality.

These Exodus Spirit adventurers, looking backward to the ancient stories about Abraham and Sarah, saw this pair as heros who left the Mesopotamian city of Ur, walking toward a promised land, not knowing where they were going. The Exodus people saw that this trust in Final Reality preceded the post-Exodus law writing. The radical freedom of Abraham and Sarah impressed not only generations of post-Exodus Israelites, but also the Christ-way Paul and his followers.

Paul saw afresh that the revelation of Reality’s trustworthiness precedes in time and importance the giving of legal form to the communal life of the resulting people of trust. Judaism and Christianity have a common critique of moralism, legalism, ritual bigotry, and other clinging to humanly created forms of social practice rather than to a devotion to that One Reality that gives overriding context to the creation of human social forms.

Even though Mohammed was a vigorous politician and law-writer, his religious movement, like Judaism and Christianity, was first of all a return to the primacy of trusting the trustworthiness of Final Reality. The legal forms of Islam are secondary to that trust. The poetry of the Koran is secondary to that truth. This basic relation of trust before law was fought for again and again by all three of these religious communions. Students of Luther and Calvin can see that Protestantism in its origins was most of all a restoration of trust in Reality over morality and beliefs.

3. Love of Personal Authenticity
and Love of Justice for All

The ethical basics that derive from radical monotheism includes the love of every neighboring being given to us by this One Reality. We are to love both friend and enemy, both the just and the unjust, both the in-group and the out-group, both the spiritually healed and the spiritually sick. And this includes how we are to love our own selves, both the despairing foolishness that requires repentance and the healed realism that issues in costly active love for others.

This love is directed toward the conscious realization of human authenticity in each person, but not only that. This love is also directed toward social justice for all persons, whatever their state of spirit health. Today social justice includes a responsibility for the well-being of the planet that supports all human life and livingness itself. Justice in our social forms includes seeing the critical gifts of this planet and how those gifts can be equitable distributed among humans and between humans and the other forms of livingness. Justice includes having political power equitably distributed to all members of a society. Similarly, such justice requires that cultural gifts be equitably distributed to all of us. Such monotheistic-derived justice implies a critique of all forms of racism, sexism, nativism, religious bigotry, and any other “my-group-ism” imaginable by the un-loving minds of inhuman-kind. Love of this depth and scope is the heart of radical monotheism.

Conclusion

Much more can be said about each of these topics of profound richness that are arising among the awakening Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And finding common spirit among these three Abrahamic religious communities is not the only opportunity for common spirit. Buddhist and Hindu religions in their deep forms can also be seen to overlap with these monotheists in common spirit. But that topic can server a different essay. In this spin I want only to note that the awakening members of a monotheistic religion are allies, not enemies, in this era of massive challenges to be fully human and fully just on a planetary scope.

For more on radical monotheism see this book:

The Love of History and the Future of Christianity

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

The post Interreligious Relations first appeared on Realistic Living.

For example, it is certainly true that African American persons in the United States confront an up-hill slope compared to their white brothers and sisters. To even be a candidate for the office of president, Barack Obama had to be qualified way beyond the norm for this job. Though we might not support some of Obama’s policies, we had in him a superbly qualified person: a law scholar; a public speaker of Abraham Lincoln class (many of whose speeches will be remembered for centuries); a talented comedian seldom seen in public office; a person of self control, obvious sanity, and sincere intent to be a positive influence. Had he had any of the flaws or weaknesses of Donald Trump, he would never have been elected Senator, much less President. Can we imagine the response of voters, had Obama said things about women that Trump apparently got away with (at least with millions of voters)? A white man in our culture often avoids sufferings that a black person will almost certainly experience.

And this was only the beginning of the innocent suffering inflicted upon our first black president—falsely accused of not being a citizen, irrationally opposed by Republican leaders, assassination threats beyond the norm. And even all of Obama’s sufferings are less than the innocent suffering faced by every black inner city boy who is often instructed by his parents on how to avoid getting killed by the police or vigilantes walking home from school. “Black Lives Matter” is indeed a slogan that speaks to this innocent suffering.

There is no fault involved in being born black or brown or tan, so this is properly called “innocent suffering.” Women also face innocent suffering: their opportunities are still restricted compared with men of equal qualification; our culture also allows various dangers to their person (and life) that exceed those of most males. Innocent suffering is certainly endured by the poor: their pathway to success and prosperity is becoming more, not less, restricted. Gays, lesbians, and transgender citizens face innocent suffering of a most insidious form. Innocent suffering is likewise endured by the mentally ill. And we must not overlook the worshipers of a religion that is not typical in the general society. This list of innocent suffers goes on and on. Suffering of all sorts is unfairly distributed in every society, and this unfair distribution tells us much that we need to know in order to prioritize our fight for justice.

Yet, there is a problem with fully understanding the concept of “innocent suffering,” for all people suffer and no person is wholly innocent. If we view “innocence” from the perspective of not being estranged from our profound humanness, then in terms of this baseline, we are all guilty of being less than human. We are all on a journey either forward toward more authenticity of living, or on a journey backward toward more debauchery and other escapes of our essential being. “Innocent” is not the whole story about suffering.

Guilty of Despair

Innocent before some law can be fairly cut and dried. That is why we have courts and judges and juries—to figure out that sort of innocence or guilt. But on the more profound level of our being human, “guilt” means something far more basic than violation of a law. The deep refusal to live our real life is a guilt that we do not get away with, Reality catches up with us and casts us into some form of despair. We are all guilty of the suffering of despair.

Also, no one avoids the temporal sufferings of ordinary living. It is often true that suffering is about half of our lives. Pain and pleasure are both experienced by all of us. Success and frustration are both there in our lives. Both approval and disapproval come our way. Both beauty and ugliness happen to us. Our lives includes many “little deaths” to our living, as well as that final ending in total biological extinction.

And in addition to all these qualities of our temporality, we add suffering to our lives by our attitudes toward our temporal ups and downs. By clinging to these impermanent realities, we create a suffering that need not be. By hoping for things that can never happen, we create a suffering that need not haunt our lives. We can needlessly despair over anything, both our so-called “ups” as well as our so-called “downs.” Mostly we despair over our “downs”—over our loss of a mate we wanted but did not get, or had for a time and then lost—over a job we loved but cannot no longer perform—over a discovery about our own person of something we abhor. Despair is the most intolerable of all sufferings, yet most of us are trapped in some form of despair most of the time.

Despair is a suffering that Buddhist practices can assist us to heal—making us ready for the “accident” of liberation from our despair. Despair is a suffering that Christian practices also assist us to heal: this heritage calls this “accident of liberation” the “grace of God.” Grace is a happening that enables us to trust in Reality, a trust that leads to the consequences of freedom, hope, love, peace, and joy. These two religions and others have come into being because humans all face the need to heal from the sickness of despair. In spite of the fact that we all tend to avoid the whole topic of despair, we all need means of healing our despair — of getting loose from the trap of despair and finding release for our true human potentials.

And our despair is basically needless, for it is not built into the structure of the cosmos. Despair is an accomplishment of human beings. It is possible to give up hoping that our temporal lives will cease to be temporal and become lasting in the ways we wish to be “lasting.” However, that deep possibility of being reconciled with our real, authentic, essential lives is not so easy. Our despair is caused by attitudes that are deeply entrenched. If fact, most of the time we have no idea why we are in despair or what it might be that we are in despair over. Even when we do have some insight into the causes of our despair, we may still be strongly bound in clinging to whatever it is that is passing away. Such clinging makes us slaves, bound and groveling in some state of despair. And despair can be very dangerous, for it can seem to us so bad that we can choose not to live at all, rather that go on with the pain of our despair or even the humiliation of its admission and healing.

Most often we find ways of burying our feelings of despair in some form of drunkenness or debauchery or busyness. Even our most noble living may provide a way of escaping a full experience of our despair-dominated lives. But such escapes from despair do not last. Eventually we become exhausted, numb, burned-out, and thereby brought home to an even deeper awareness of our despair.

Most tragic of all, we are capable of taking on a very advanced attitude toward despair—the notion that despair is all there is to living a human life. We can simply resign ourselves to despair and thereby embody some sort of firm hatred toward human living that our despair reveals, making ourselves into a demonic force that lacks all genuine love for others or even love for ourselves—a spirit that hates the cosmos for being the cosmos, and that hates the cosmos for working in the ways the cosmos does in fact work. Such despair-sick lives take on a sort of purpose, the purpose of hating reality and evangelizing others to hate life along with us. This horrid state can endure as a sort of grim fun, until we get tired of it. We know that we can always kill ourselves when we want to quit this weird project of hate. We need not be so surprised when people actually do kill themselves and take a bunch of others with them.

Seeing clearly these consequences to which despair may lead, let us ask further about the possibility of healing despair. Paul Tillich has given us a formula for noticing this path of transformation. First, we look our despair in the face and acknowledge that we are the cause of it, that we are guilty of despair. Second, we notice that the cosmic truth of Final Reality is an acceptance of us—an acceptance of us just as we are, in spite of our self-inflicted despair. This cosmic acceptance offers to us a fresh start for our lives. And third, all we have to do right now is simply accept that fact that we are accepted. Transformation follows. However grim our despair has been, we can be and therefore act differently. We can be reconciled in our overall attitude toward everything.

“Everything” Includes
all Sorts of Suffering

There is suffering that is simply our finitude—the impermanence of every aspect of our lives—our bodies, our health, our peers, our thoughts, our feelings, our lives. This suffering of impermanence is neither innocent nor guilty: it just is. It is just part of our lives to which can be reconciled or needlessly fight against.

Policing Despair

The social role of policing might better be called protecting, for that is the positive meaning of police action, protecting us from the consequence of our despairing neighbors and protecting our neighbors from a despairing “me.” The Declaration of Independence referred to the task of policing with the poetry “domestic tranquility.” We have often developed antagonism toward policing, because we have experienced despairing police officers who are causing innocent suffering. Nevertheless, the true role of policing is to protect us, not cause us more suffering.

The laws of state power and their enforcement do not heal despair, but law enforcement can restrain the despairing from the consequences of their despair upon the rest of us. In love for ourselves and others, we can experience the call to restrain “evil,” where “evil” is defined by just law and by common-sense moral custom. We can restrain such defined “evil” along with promoting the accompanying works of love that have to do with assisting the despairing to be aware of their despair and to find the path of forgiveness that leads toward being healed of despair.

Such healing and such restraint of evil do not contradict each other: these two forms of love support each other. Healing the despairing provides society with persons who do the tasks of justice. And the application of justice can be a tutor to the despairing about their despair, which is the first step toward healing their despair.

Such a balanced understanding of the works of love protects us from seeing ourselves as guiltless avengers at war with the guilty criminals. We all despair. And we all need just applications of law to restrain us. A police officer confronts the delicate task of restraining the consequences of despair, while also noticing the humanity of the people they restrain, a humanity that always includes a potential for humanness, no matter how evil and dangerous that human may still be.

It is not a contradiction that we need to restrain criminal persons as well as treat them with the respect they deserve. Criminals deserve respect in line with the simple fact of their being born into the common life we share with them. The suffering that policing must cause a criminal is a suffering that is needed because of the sickness of despair in that criminal. No permission need be granted to the police to heap innocent suffering on the criminals they care for and protect the rest of us from.

Police work is an honest and needed profession—no less so than nurse or teacher. Each profession has its characteristic temptations. Our police need to be trained to watch out for their own need to be powerful over others, or to hate those it is safe in this culture to hate. This need for a seeming softness of spirit in our police does not contradict the need for our police to be clear, careful, and firm with the destructive consequences of the despairing. We can be thankful for our police as well as for our therapeutic and religious ministries that are aimed at making us ready for the healing of our despair.

For more reflections on these and other slippery topics see our web site:

http://www.realisticliving.org/

The post Innocent Suffering 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.

Contemplative Time

When we look within our own conscious being, we see ourselves living in an ongoing quality we call “now.” Time seems to flow through this now. The past is just a memory taking place now as content in our memory banks. And the future is only an anticipation, taking place now in our guesses about future nows that have yet to “happen.” In our experiences of contemplation or art participation or solitary brooding, “now” continues to be our core experience of time

Being conscious of this now and its here-and-now flow of content is a state we often call “presence.” Presence is a mysterious state of being that we can attempt to describe from both inside the conscious experience of presence and from the outside as an observation of a walking-talking or not walking or talking human being’s manifestations of presence. Presence is not measurable. Now is not measurable. Time as the flow of events through this living now is not measured. In order to measure time we have to move out of our subjectivity into an “objective” observation of a clock or perhaps the sun, moon, stars, days, seasons, and other moving parts of the natural world.

This strange mystery of time flowing through our now of consciousness is first of all a matter of active attention. We conscious beings watch time move; we watch the flow of futures coming into now and going into the past. Watching, however, is not the whole story of what we see using the contemplative approach to truth. We also see deciding among the alternatives confronting us. This deciding has an effect upon the future nows we will confront. We are like baseball players watching a ball coming at us, who at some point swing our bat to meet that ball in hope of some sort of “favorable” result. Results in the real world of time are not wholly caused by us. The actions produced by our free choices are only one of the “causes” of future outcomes. Our limited freedom operates within a larger “reality” that resists and augments the outcomes of our choices. As we choose out of that deep nothingness of personal freedom, we become one, but only one, of the causes of the future. We live in an environment of reality within which many other causes, both outside and inside our being, are contributing to the outcome of our choices. Nevertheless, we humans, using our essential freedom, are also cause agents.

Some have argued that none of our choices are free, that even our choices are caused by some other force of nature; but this is not true. We humans and other living beings make choices that are uncaused causes that join many other causes in determining the future. We might say that we are determined to be free as one of the many determining forces of nature. The apostle Paul put it this way: “For Freedom Christ and set us free.” He is talking about being set free from our bondages of illusion, addiction, compulsion, etc. He is not denying that such bondages exist. He is claiming, however, that freedom can also exist as a state of our being. In fact, freedom is our true being, from which our states of bondage are an estrangement.

Some have argued that all outcomes are predetermined, but this is also an exaggeration. Still others have argued that we are absolute masters of our own lives, that our will is always free from bondages to our various illusions, habits, conditioning, etc. That is also not true. Still others have argued that we have no effects on the future, that we are simply watchers of unfolding events. This is also a half truth at best. The raw nature of consciousness is not only watching, but also choosing. Consciousness is both attentionality and intentionality.

Seen from the contemplative approach to truth, the truth of living shows us to be in dialogue with other powers that are coming at us. Our choices do matter; yet our choices do not matter as much as we might like or guess or hope. We act for some purpose, but that purpose is restrained and/or augmented by forces beyond our understanding or control. These other forces than our own freedom continue to surprise us with next opportunities to respond with our freedom. We continually make further contributions to this ongoing dialogue with other forces in this medium of enigmatic time. For good or for evil we are benders of the course of time. We are responsible beings. Those who deny this are not facing the whole truth.

In a deep understanding of Christian faith (as well as Jewish and Islamic faith), we trust that all the very many opposing dialogue partners have a singular meaning for us: A Grand Oneness of Power operating within time—demolishing the past now, sustaining the present now, and presenting us with a yet-to-be-determined future now whose coming is challenging us to participate in shaping that future now. If we call this Overall Oneness of Power “Thou” or “God” or “Yahweh” or “Allah” or some other devotional word of commitment, we are choosing to affirm our membership in this ongoing dialogue within time. In such a vision, “faith” means a leap of choice—an act of our freedom into openly being this dialogue. Such faith includes accepting our freedom from the passing past (that is, renouncing our clinging to the familiar) and opening ourselves for the impending future that will surely include surprises to our familiar patterns of understanding and living. The coming future can kill our falseness, but the future can also raise us up to newness of life, a life that is more realistic.

The theologian Rudolf Bultmann defines Christian faith as trust in this Grand Oneness of Power that is manifest in the flow of time. Faith, therefore, is quite simply freedom from the past and openness to the future. Living within such an “obedience of faith,” we can count on having our current self images and familiar behavior patterns audited, demolished, changed, challenged, and more. We discover that whoever we now think-we-are will be revealed to be less or more than who we really are. So who-we-think-we-are is alway open to the “crucifixion experience,” that is also a “resurrection experience” toward being more real than we have known before. These grand symbols point to the life-adventure for which we are volunteering when we face the Final Oneness of Power meeting us in the flow of time, and give that Power the devotional obedience indicated by the phrase: “our God.”

Measurable Time

When the scientific approach to truth is taken, time is a measurable dimension of our thinking and predicting and practical living. Where would we be without our wrist watches and other clocks, sundials, calendars, etc.? The speedometers in our cars are measures of miles per hour of time. Acceleration from one speed to another is measured in changes of velocity per unit of time. The whole of our physical knowledge is based on measuring time. Without such knowledge of reality, our lives would be unmanageable.

Sir Isaac Newton and others clarified for us how we scientific thinkers view time as a line severed into two parts by a contentless point called now. According to Newton, this line-of-time extends endlessly into the past and endlessly into the future. The point of now has no measurable length. It is nothing. The scientific “now” is just an abstraction— a point on the abstract line-of-time. At that abstract point of now, we imagine an abstract scientific observer observing from that space/time coordinate. This whole line—past-now-future—is just a picture in our rational heads. In our conscious experience of living, now does not mean an imaginary point. Yet using our contemplative approach to truth, we know that now is everything. The past is gone, the future is yet to be. Our lives are now and only now.

Though this scientific line-of-time is an abstraction, it is a very useful abstraction. We could not get along with it. In the scientific method of seeking truth, we pay attention to the facts being observed, not to the observer. Though we scientific thinkers are never allowed to forget that observers are involved, the scientific method of truth seeking is not searching our inner experience; it is searching our outer collectively observable experience for rational orderings that make temporal events more understandable, ordered, and predictable.

Science is hugely useful to us. We often take our scientific knowledge for granted without even noticing how useful it is, and how useful it has been for our species far into the distant past. At the same time, we seldom notice how abstract this universe of measurable time is from our inwardly experienced reality of time as a flow through an ever-present now.

Nevertheless, this abstract time-line in our heads is absolutely necessary in order for we humans to create our scientific storehouse of operational wisdom. But this line with that contentless dot of now is not our actual experience of time. Our actual experience of time is living in an ongoing something we call “now.” Reality flows through our now from future nows to past nows. We live only now. We know that we lie, when we try to live in the past or in the future.

The above discussion means that the whole of our physical knowledge is a world of abstractions, not the world into which we are physically born. Some try to argue that it is our inner world that is the illusion and that our scientifically perceived world is the reality. Nevertheless, we know with our consciousness that the opposite is true. Our inner experience is Real, however irrational it may clearly be. The scientifically perceived world is an abstraction of the Real. This abstraction is a useful approximation of the Real—an approximation that good enough for now, but due to be improved in the future.

It is true that our rational views of our inner experience are likewise approximate understandings of our inner reality, but this inner reality about which we have approximate knowledge is real with the same force that our outward reality is real. The dynamics we point to with the words like “consciousness” and “freedom” are real dynamics however poorly or well we describe or understand them. We humans create our descriptions and give our artistic expressions to consciousness and freedom, and these inner realities are not just ideas: they persisting realities quite beyond our abilities to create approximate rational models of them. Our rational models and artistic expressions of our inner realities are useful for our living, even though we know that all these models and art forms are approximations of an inner truth that is always more mysterious that we know.

Similarly, the abstract nature of our scientific knowledge does not make scientific knowledge any less useful. We avid fans of contemplative truth must not suppose that we know all we know through our contemplative excellences. Our scientific approach to truth is an actual approach to truth, and we would be helpless without it. Without the scientific approach to truth, we would know nothing of the weather, baseball, history, dinosaurs, galaxies, planets, suns, cultures, societies, education, and much, much more.

Yet the whole of scientific knowledge is just an array of mind-orderings in our heads that help us understand the real environment we confront personally. Good science corresponds to a significant extent with our actual experience of the environment. We honor the facts of our objective experience even though we may also know that those facts are themselves constructions of our minds that we must often improve as more information is taken in by our senses. We live in between these two seemingly contradictory truths: (1) that our scientific knowledge is truth that we need to honor, and yet (2) scientific knowledge is never the Truth with a capital “T,” for it will surely be replaced later by a more inclusive truth that is still not the Truth with a capital “T.”

Here is an illustration of this paradox from physics itself. Newton viewed the line of time as independent from the three dimensions (3 infinite lines) of space. These abstractions served the advance of science quite well for 200 years, and we can still get by in many areas of our living with these Newton abstractions. But the general community of physics has now faced up to facts coming to their attention that have firmly established that space and time are not independent from one another. We can now better see ourselves living in space/time, rather than in space and time. Further, space/time is an interacting fabric of reality with warps and curves and that strongly influences every event. Space/time is not a straight-line emptiness in which all “things” simply happen. Space/time is itself a participant in the universe of events.

We experience the fabric of space-time every time our car accelerates. When we speed up, we are thrown against the seat. When we slow down rapidly we are thrown forward. When we swerve to the left we are thrown to the right. These results are understood in post-Einstein physics as experiencing the resistance of the structure of space/time. We are at-rest-with the pattern of space/time when we are moving with a steady velocity (including stillness). Whenever we are accelerating (faster or slower or turning), we are feeling the surrounding space/time.

Even more astonishing to our Newtonian familiarities, we are moving in accord with the surrounding space/time medium when we are free-falling toward the center of the Earth. In the midst of such falling we feel no gravity. We feel gravity only when we are resisting the warped fabrics of space/time in the vicinity of the Earth, or some other large body of mass. When we are being pressed downward toward the center of the Earth, we are experiencing the structure of space/time rather than as Newton supposed being mysteriously pulled by some distant force. This space/time fabric of the cosmos is a better abstraction than the Newtonian abstractions for understanding and predicting many of the events of the natural world. In viewing this massive shift in scientific abstractions we get to notice that all of science is just abstractions that have more or less correspondence with our sensory experience of the natural world.

Ethical Time

Ethics is a part of the discipline of learning we call “philosophy.” A comprehensive or inclusive philosophical vision must draw from both scientific truth and contemplative truth—combining them into useful fabrics of understanding that can guide our current culture in meeting its historical challenges. In the context of a responsibility ethics, time is a mixture of measurable time and the inner experience of time accessed through contemplating our now of paying attention and our now of making history-bending decisions.

As we mix these visions of time, we err when we overemphasize the abstractions of science into some sort of deterministic ethics that does not adequately honor the decisional power of human beings. And we also err if we overemphasize the contemplative components of truth toward some sort of exclusion of the importance of science in the making of informed decisions.

In such an understanding of ethical time, the contradiction between the scientific and the contemplative visions of time is handled—not resolved with a rational overview of the nature of time, but united through a willingness to have our lives be as mysterious as our lives actually are. This deep humbling of our human intelligence is not a temporary condition. This will always be the case. No genius will ever resolve the scientific and contemplative approaches to truth into some sort of rational oneness. How do we know this is true? What we know about the nature of scientific truth and what we know about the nature of contemplative truth prove this to be the case. There is no rational consilience between scientific and contemplative truth. Life is a Mystery PERIOD. This we can count on.

Our responsibility ethics can usefully integrate these two approaches to truth into workable patterns of action for our culture in its historical setting with its historical challenges. This ethical necessity for integrating these two very different modes of truth amounts to a third approach to truth—the truth-of-workability for our personal lives, and for the common challenges of our society. Our ethics includes asking questions like: “What combination of scientific and contemplative truth will best inform our culture in this moment of our historical time?”

For more exploration of truth, time, and related topics,
consider the following book:

The Enigma of Consciousness
a philosophy of profound humanness and religion

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

The post Time? 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.

(1) Scientific History: What do we know about when and where a 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?

Here is an illustration of Bible-based theologizing for a next Christianity. Following is a text from Luke 9:28-36 (J. B. Phillips translation) and my commentary on this story of the transfiguration of Jesus:

About eight days after these sayings [about the son of man coming in his glory], Jesus took Peter and James and John and went off with them to the hillside to pray. And then, while he was praying, the whole appearance of his face changed and his clothes became white and dazzling. And two men were talking with Jesus. They were Moses and Elijah—revealed in heavenly splendor, and their talk was about the way he must take and the end he must fulfill in Jerusalem. But Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, and it was as they struggled into wakefulness that they saw the glory of Jesus and the two men standing with him. Just as they were parting from him, Peter said to Jesus,

“Master, it is wonderful for us to be here! Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

But he did not know what he was saying. While he was speaking a cloud overshadowed them and awe swept over them as it enveloped them. A voice came out of the cloud saying,

“This is my Son, my chosen! Listen to him!”

And while the voice was speaking, they found there was no one there at all but Jesus. The disciples were reduced to silence, and in those days never breathed a word to anyone of what they had seen.

Here is my take on interpreting this story: First of all, it is helpful for us to know some historical facts, like the highly probable fact that this story was written years after the crucifixion. The whole story is fiction—not a word of it is actual history except for the names of the people. “They never breathed a word to anyone of what they had seen” is an admission of the story teller who first told this story that he or she is making up this story. Seeing Jesus in his glory (as the Christ) did not happen until the “resurrection experience” happened. Indeed, seeing this glory of Jesus by the disciples, or by us, is the resurrection.

So, this story is about the meaning of resurrection, told and read by resurrected persons after the horror of the crucifixion became for them a doorway into the deeps of life. The teller of this story knows that “there was no one there at all but Jesus.” That dynamic applies to us today: until we participate in the resurrection experience, there is no one there at all but Jesus.

The bulk of this story is told in a type of dream imagery. The dazzle of Jesus garments is something seen only by transformed people who see the dazzle of Jesus along with the dazzle of Moses (author of the law) and the dazzle of Elijah ( grandfather of the prophets). We can translate the meaning of this dazzle for our mindsets as an experience of awe—a dread and fascination moment that is mysterious, that requires courage, and in the end redirects our lives.

I reject the sort of literalism that implies that a tape recorder would have picked up that voice from a cloud. I view this cloud as a symbol used to indicate the “heavenly source” of the message. And “heaven” is also a symbol for what we today might call, “the realm of Mystery that can penetrates any ordinary moment.”

And what does this dream-world “voice” say? It says, “Pay attention to Jesus, for this human being is revealing the nature of the Mysterious EVERY-THING-NESS/NO-THING-NESS that Moses and Elijah were also dazzled by, and that awake people today might meet in every moment of their lives.”

“The disciples were reduced to silence.” In other words, these still-learning disciples had no words for what they, in this story, were experiencing. They were, in this story, experiencing a preview of the resurrection, that rebirth on the other side of having all their illusions crucified in an event that so shattered the foundations of their lives that they never got over it. Only when this shaking of the foundations is complete, does the dazzle noted in the story appear. Only when all our illusions are exposed for what they are— when we have died to all our egoistic projections upon Reality, does the dazzle of Reality appear to us.

Peter cries out, “Let us build some altars [some religious formations] at this place.” In this story, Peter did not know what he was saying, but he did know that he was experiencing Final Things, appropriate for marking this place with some sort of humanly invented religious something.

In this story, all the above happens to these three disciples as “they were struggling into wakefulness.” We can identify with this phrase, for this story is what it is like for any of us to struggle into wakefulness, concerning our true being and our encircling Reality.

I have shown how we can translate a bit of New Testament text from first century poetry into contemporary language that might enable 21st Century humans to notice the “Awe-level” or “Primal-truth-level” that this story contains for our lives today. The final step (step four) is examining what it might mean to “Hear the Word of God” in this passage of Christian scripture.

So, what might we have heard at this deep level? In reflecting more carefully on this passage, we may have realized that we may have been walking with Jesus to hillsides and villages, so to speak, but it will take his death to wake us up to being the body of Christ who sees Jesus as the Christ, as the Truth, the Life, and the Way to live our lives. This story may also be telling us something about the human experience of “the resurrection from the dead”—the transformation from our deadly, despair-destined deludedness to our essential being in the body of the resurrected Jesus. If we do indeed feel some shallow deluded approach to living our lives, we are hearing the Word of God. If we do indeed see more clearly what authentic living might be for us, we are hearing the Word of God.

For more on death and resurrection as the core of the New Testament witness, I recommend the following portion of my commentary on the Gospel of Mark:

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

The post New Testament Living first appeared on Realistic Living.