The Proclamations of Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Proclamation of Martin Luther

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

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

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

The Proclamation of John Wesley

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

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

Our Best Case Proclamation in 2020 North America

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

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

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

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

Tailored for the Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Liberating Proclamation first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

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

https://realisticliving.org/New/

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

So here is the first part of the

Introduction

to the Mark Commentary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Theology?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How in your life have you participated in Christian theologizing?

Whose theologizing has helped you most with your own?

The Death of a Metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Central within the Abraham and Sarah stories is a story about Abraham’s journey to the top of a mountain to sacrifice Isaac—his only son, the son miraculously given to him and Sarah in their advanced age. In this strange story, Abraham is giving back the gift of Isaac, who was Abraham’s only evidence for a promise made to Abraham by the Giver of Isaac—a promise to make the descendants of Abraham and Sarah as numerous as the sands on the sea shore.

Centuries after the Exodus from Egypt, when these stories were being widely told, written, and read, this promise to Abraham was still not realized. The Hebraic people who claimed Abraham as their forefather were not yet numerous. Today, we might assume that all the Jewish people, all the Christian people, and all the Islamic people are somehow descendants of Abraham. If so, then Abraham’s descendants are indeed in the billions. All these people are not biological descendants, but they are at least people who remember Abraham and Sarah and Hagar. Only a few of these billions, however, embody Abraham’s model of sainthood.

Why should we honor the Abraham stories or his model of sainthood? These stories are fiction after all, and rather gross fiction as well. And especially, why all the fuss over this strange story about human sacrifice? Why did a fully sane and renowned 19th century philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, write a whole book about this story?

This essay will be much simpler than Kiekegaard’s book. I am going to reflect on one idea: “Giving back to Reality all that Reality has given to us.”

Human consciousness includes both taking-in Reality and intending changes in the course of Reality—not big changes in the whole cosmic process, but quite small changes in he course of Reality, as this Real Mysteriousness is relating to me or to you about our personal destiny over which we have some real but quite limited control. Our freedom to “bend history,” as we sometimes call it, is a very important part of what it means to be a humanly conscious being.

Also, time marches on relentlessly giving back our whole lives to the Reality that has given us our lives and is still giving us life as well as taking it back. Sometimes I am glad for time to march on. Sometimes I am clinging to times that I do not want to pass. Sometimes I am glad that periods of my life are over. And sometimes I would like to go back to one or more of these past times. But time marches on. We confront giving our lives back in ways that are in accord with our preferences and in ways that are not in accord with our preferences.

Giving back our lives to the Reality that gives our lives is not about preferences. We are discussing an intentional giving of whatever has been given to us. And we are discussing giving back what we have been given within the given circumstances of the neighboring realities that are being given to us as context for the giving back of our many or few gifts to those neighboring realities.

Like Abraham and Sarah, we may have been given a son or a daughter or several of one of both. As a Christian saint, I am asked to give my descendants back to the Reality that gave them to me. If I am clinging to my children as a means of enhancing my own status or pleasure or pride or even shame, I am destroying my children as well as my role as a responsible father, or mother. Indeed, when my children have become adults, Reality has already taken them back, whether I want to give them up or not. And that is the “natural” course for all our gifts—to be given back.

If I am clinging to my vocation simply as a means of holding on to some status or maintaining my survival, I do not yet have a saintly vocation in the Abrahamic sense. To have a saintly vocation, I must pursue my vocation as an expending (i.e. a giving) of my time and energy to values other than my own needs. This giving may include some attention to my own needs. As Jesus taught his disciples, “Serve the Reign of Reality with all your gifts, and you, the servant, will also be cared for as well.“ (I have paraphrased, but only slightly.) When Jesus sent out his disciples to take the Good News to Galilean villages, he instructed them, “Take only minimum stuff, eat what they offer you, sleep where they put you. Don’t shop around for a better bed. Just give and receive the gifts given to you to keep you going with your ongoing giving.” (Again, I paraphrase.)

Luke saw clearly that Mark and Matthew before him had drawn a picture of Jesus that was to be a model for Christian sainthood. So Luke surely had in mind sharing Jesus as his model of Christian sainthood when he pictured Jesus saying these last words on the cross, “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” We can receive this verse as a meaning for our own death and dying: “Into the power of the Giver of my life, I give back my consciousness.” In other words, I can let Reality have my consciousness, however profound or limited that consciousness may be. In so viewing my death, I give over my entire life to the Reality that gave me all that was given to me. Reality, without me, will carry on my giving, my bending of history.

Another famous saying also applies to this perspective, “To whom much is given, much shall be required.” This lesson is the opposite of the all too familiar monopoly-game sense of things, “To whom much is given, even more shall be taken from the losers who are too poor to compete with me.” Contrary to such narcissism, “Response—-ability to God” means day-by-day, year-by-year, giving back our gifts to the Giver of those gifts. We give to the Giver by way of giving our gifts to our neighboring realities, those humans and other beings whom God also loves. This is the Abrahamic faith.

For more on these profound topics, I recommend:

The Call of the Awe: Rediscovering Christian Profundity
in an Interreligious Era

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

The post Giving Back our Gifts first appeared on Realistic Living.

The Depth of Love

What Christianity brings to each social times is a depth of the meaning of the word “love” or “agape.” Such love, understood deeply, is indeed applicable to any and all times. This love is not a set of principles, but a raw attitude toward life and death. Agape love is the essence of the Christian saint. (This also applies to the Jewish and Islamic saint. Hindus, Buddhists, and others also have similar aspirations.) It is to a historically encountered Reality, that is our devotion as Christians. Reality gives us life and all the specific gifts and opportunities of our life. The Christian saint gives all those gifts back to Reality. Just as Abraham was prepared to give back Isaac who was his only son and all the evidence he had for his historical hope, so the Christian saint is prepared to give back all the gifts given to him or her. This giving back is the meaning of agape or Christian love. Everything is given back to Reality, our God. According to Luke’s’ gospel the last words of Jesus were, “Into Thy hands I commend my consciousness.” That is the meaning of death for the Christian saint: the final giving back.

The giving back of death and of our whole life does not take place only at the moment of our biological finality. As was the case with Jesus, the giving back of his whole life began in the gap between his baptism in the river Jordan (a washing or death to the whole evil era) and his vocation (continuing John the Baptist’s radical mission in Jesus’ own fresh radical way.) The 40 days Jesus is said to have spent in the desert was a time of praying through whether on not he would give back his whole being in carrying out the august calling that he saw set before him.

Giving back is the essence of love within whatever vocation in whatever era a Christian saint shows up. And “saint” here does not mean something super-duper special. A Christian saint is just some ordinary person who stops complaining about what he or she has been given and what he or she has not been given, and simply gives back to Reality everything he or she has been given by Reality. “Those to whom much has been given, much shall be required.” This old saying is a lesson about the nature of deep love.

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018

A Christian Social Ethics for 2018 begins with some deep understanding of these times. “These times” means this historical moment in its planet-wide and history-long contexts. Today, the terms “civilized,” “civil,” and “civilization” have come up for fresh definition—or perhaps we need new words altogether. Anthropologists have explored the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to civilizations as a passage through two intermediate stages: (1) Tribal societies of some complexity in agricultural or ocean-fishing abilities and (2) societies that can be characterized as chiefdoms. These two modes of being social are seen as something short of a full-blown civilization with a centralized state apparatus. The word “state” in this analysis means an elite selection of persons who politically rule the people living in a specific expanse of geography. Most of these ruled people are peasants or slaves with little political and economic power. These “underclasses” do choose from time to time which state establishment to serve or how an existing state establishment can be replaced with a “better for them” group of overlords. But until very recent times, not having overloads at all has been unthinkable within anything we have called “civilization.”

If such hierarchical order characterizes our standard definition of “civilization,” then the fairly recent developments in democracy must be seen as a type of dismantlement of civilization. What words do we use for that future post-civilization? “Eco-Democracy” has been suggested.

As civilizations have developed in the industrial period, we have seen the appearance of larger and larger middle classes. Democracy in its earliest 18th century developments was the promotion of middle class people to greater influence over the upper echelons of society through voting and other institutions of governing. Underclasses, including slaves, remained. And while royalty was displaced, there remained and still remains a continuing presence of a very wealthy and influential upper echelon of society. A full democratization of a society means more than ending slavery and giving women the vote; it includes making every member of society middle class—both ending grueling poverty and doing away with a ruling class of excessively wealthy people. This need not mean a complete equality of wealth and power, but it does mean establishing an equity of a hither-to-fore absent extent.

Such a “classless” society has not yet happened. Even moderately democratic societies are deeply threatened by reactionary movements toward authoritarianism. In Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA, we see the presence of a retreat from democracy into oligarchical rule, or even single-ego chiefdom rule. Such un-democracy is a trend of political aspiration throughout the planet. And moving forward toward full democracy is still seen as a radical aspiration, rather than seen as a necessity for peace, prosperity, and wellbeing for this species and the needed ecological sanity for the natural planet.

In this hour of history, Christian love for humanity and the planet means embracing this aspiration for a full democracy. Steps toward this aspiration can only begin from where we now are. And this means creating a united movement devoted to next steps that 51 to 80% of the population can understand and support. Here are some of those next steps that we as a population within the United States are now relatively open to take:

The Flowering of the Women’s Movement
Dismantling Institutionalized Racism
Moderating the Climate Catastrophe
Promoting Equity in Wealth Distribution
The Democratic Overthrow of Authoritarianism
Educating a Dumbed-down Citizenry

Of course these six imperatives might be stated better, and other statements might be added to them or included within them. Nevertheless, these are necessary social ethics imperatives for every awakening citizen of the United States in 2018. By “awakening” I mean awakening to the historical reality in which we dwell. These social imperatives are more than a bit of best-case thinking about realism; from the perspective of the agape quality of Christian love these imperatives are “commands of God.”

If the word “God” is understood as meaning a dynamic of devotion attached to the historical encounter with the “un-word” that we are pointed to with the word “Reality,” then “command of God” simply means the imperative for realistic living.

The prophet of God knows that all the words with which we point to Reality are pointing to a moving target. Reality talks back to us all the time. Reality is never entirely held in our mere words. Even our best current words become obsolete. But that does not bother the prophet of God: we prophets of God know that. We know that what we spoke yesterday and what we speak today may not be good enough for what we speak tomorrow. Such is the nature of our actualization of agape in our historical moments of response.

An ambiguous progression of relative certainties is our Christian calling to social response-ability.

For more on the topic of social ethics see our 2011 book:

The Road From Empire to Eco-Democracy

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

The post The Depth of Christian Social Ethics 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.

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.

In the four years preceding 2011, five unknown visionaries, Ben Ball, Marsha Buck, Ken Kreutziger, Alan Richard, and myself, wrote a book entitled “The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy.” This book named ten positive trends toward a viable and promising future for humanity on planet Earth. Trumpism manifests the opposite of all ten of these trends. If there were a Trumpite book on such topics, it might be titled “The Retreat from Eco-Democracy to Anthropocentric Empire.”

I am going to name those ten trends examined in The Road and give names to Trumpism’s ten retreats that are reversing those positive trends.

1. The Primacy of the Ecological Crisis
& The Denial of Earth Emergencies

2. The Energizing of Full Democracy
& The Undermining of Democracy

3 . The Replacement of the Fossil-Fuel Economy
& The Clinging to Fossil-Fuel Profiteering

4. The Reversal of the Population Explosion
& The Neglect of the Population Plight

5. The Liberation of Women and Girls
& The Continuation of the Drag of Patriarchy

6. The Completion of the Racial Revolution
& The Normalizing of the Curse of Racism

7. The Death Throes of Theocracy
& The Pampering of Religious Bigotry

8. The Obsolescence of War
& The Expansion of Military Industrialism

9. The Regulation of the Banking Crisis
& The Tyranny of Phantom Wealth

10. The Ending of the Horror of Poverty
& The Enrichment of the Outlandishly Rich

Trump and his hypocritical fellow travelers do not admit to these horrific retreats from these summaries of common sense and social sanity, but this deep conflict is what we see when we see the vision of Eco-Democracy. In this fresh view of the world, we see ourselves existing in a time of huge conflict in basic directions and values. This current condition of our history makes impossible the so-called bipartisanship of the earlier post-Roosevelt Era in the United States. We live in a new sort of “civil war”—waged not with rifles and cannons, but with words and protests and votes. We can also wage many decisive battles with fresh viable economic innovations, with local community organizing of activist energies, with court cases, with demonstrations, with innovative press coverages, with educational programs, with e-matter campaigns, with imaginative nonprofit agencies, and with more such available openings in the cracks of this crumbling world.

Primary to all of this is being very clear about the deadliness of lying, and the futility of being unclear with our words. For example, the words “capitalism” and “socialism” are so corroded with hate, exaggerations, misinformation, and down-right lying that these words have become almost useless. Trump’s actual cabinet of executives, in spite of their “capitalist” overemphasis, support “government give-a-ways” for the very rich with a very big government on their behalf. Reagan’s phrase “government is the problem, not the solution” may be the most misleading slogan ever uttered. Without government rules and regulations, there is no free market, no functional capitalism or socialism or any other economic pattern we might imagine. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is indeed a huge part of the solution to every one of the problems we are confronting. Such solutions do not mean turning over our freedom to the government, but turning over our government to our freedom as citizens. We the citizens are the government of a full democracy. To speak of government as “they” rather than “we” is a violation of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and yes even the flawed-but-gifted Constitution of the United States. Government becomes “they” when “we” stop being democratic citizens and expect strongmen oligarchs like the wealthy Donald T to resolve our issues.

Yes, we can be understanding of how frustrated working people can be when our so-called democratic institutions manage to neglect the crucial issues that commoners face, while also pampering the moneyed few with ever-expanding power, wealth, status, and contempt for the needlessly hurting citizens. Socialism is not the reason for this. Capitalism is not the reason for this. The reason for this is citizen apathy, foolishness, and gullibility to the lying, thieving, corruptions that we the citizens have tolerated for way, way too long.

We the citizens need to admit that we are too dumb for this job, that we have been dumbed-down by very, very clever oligarchs of the propaganda world. We have to start our revolution within our own minds, eliminating all the crap that has been infused into us. We are capable beings with capable minds, and the intelligence to use these resources of our amazing biology to shape a viable new world.

And if we want to even pretend to be servants of God in the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim sense, we have to become thoughtful about what is the truth that comes to us from that Final Reality we face, rather than from the liars that we must learn to defeat.

The Global Warming Climate Catastrophe is not a hoax PERIOD. That sentence expresses the sort of God-serving, Truth-telling citizenry we need to become—become NOW through simply surrendering all our foolishness and letting the truth flow into us.

To all you true atheists reading this spin, I want you to understand that I agree with not believing in the gods that you do not believe. I am attempting to describe what it means to trust in THAT Final Reality that none of us can escape.

For more information on The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy, visit:

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

The post The Road and the Retreat first appeared on Realistic Living.