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May 9 - July 29, 2017
“The purpose of a book,” suggests Thomas Merton, “is to teach you how to think and not to do your thinking for you. . . . As soon as any thought stimulates your mind or your heart, you can put the book down, because your meditation has begun.”
Second, Jesus is significant. Then and now. Because he is one of us. He is the embodiment of human possibility. He shows us our capacity for “knowing God,” our capacity for courage, loving-kindness, and doing justice. This is hopeful.
Jesus has been described as the face of God turned toward us. We see not only God in his life and even death; we see ourselves. We are given disclosures of “the way.” A lot to ponder.
Why be a Christian in the twenty-first century? Because it gives us a vision. And a hope. And a way.
The vision of Christianity for a just, sane, nonviolent world is not utopian. It is within our capacity. And such capacity requires that we take up the crucible of transformation. Transformation, individually and collectively, is the key ingredient for liberation.
Without our participation in transformation and embodying lives of compassion, the kingdom of God will not come. It is up to us, and we are not alone.
What Jesus was, historically speaking, was a Spirit-filled person in the charismatic stream of Judaism.
The notion of a “world of Spirit” is a vague and difficult notion in the contemporary world. By it I mean another dimension or layer or level of reality in addition to the visible world of our ordinary experience.
What is most important is the notion of another level or levels of reality rather than any particular set of terms. Moreover, the “other world”—the world of Spirit—is seen as “more” real than “this world.” Indeed, the “other reality” is the source or ground of “this world.”
Second, and very important, the “other world” is not simply an article of belief, but an element of experience.
The cultural tradition in which Jesus lived took for granted the central claims of the primordial tradition: there are minimally two worlds, and the other world can be known.
The Hebrew Bible is Israel’s story of events that were seen as disclosures of Spirit, of people who were experienced as mediators of Spirit, of laws and prophetic utterances believed to have been given by the Spirit.
Language about the “other world” is necessarily metaphorical and analogical, simply because we must use language drawn from the visible world to try to speak of another world constituted by very different realities and energies. If anything is to be communicated at all, it must be by analogy to what we know in the ordinary world or in images drawn from the ordinary world. Thus God is like a father or mother, like a king, like a shepherd, like fire; but God is not literally any of these things. Yet, though the language is metaphorical, the realities are not.
To use somewhat technical but useful theological language, for the biblical tradition God is immanent (everywhere present, omnipresent), even as God is also transcendent (not to be identified with any particular thing, not even with the sum total of things). As omnipresent and immanent, God and the world of Spirit are all around us, including within us. Rather than God being somewhere else, we (and everything that is) are in God.12 We live in Spirit, even though we are typically unaware of this reality.13
Even biblical scholarship in the modern period has generally not known what to do with the category of “Spirit.”
Thus, because we do not know what to do with the world of Spirit, we tend not to give it a central place in our historical study of the biblical tradition.
In any case, quite apart from the question of ultimate truth, it is necessary to take seriously the reality of the world of Spirit if we wish to take the central figures of the Jewish tradition seriously. To try to understand the Jewish tradition and Jesus while simultaneously dismissing the notion of another world or immediately reducing it to a merely psychological realm is to fail to see the phenomena, to fail to take seriously what these charismatic mediators experienced and reported. For many of us, this will require a temporary suspension of our disbelief. Jesus’s vivid experience of the
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I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I’m deeply grateful for my Lutheran heritage. But one of the consequences of that Lutheran upbringing is that I thought that being a Christian was primarily about believing—about believing in the Bible, believing in Jesus, believing in God, believing in the truth of the Christian tradition. Among the reasons I thought it was about believing was because of the primacy given to faith in the Lutheran tradition, which I understood to mean belief.
I now see the Christian life very differently. I now see it as a journey. Here I am using “journey” as a comprehensive metaphor or image for what the Christian life is like and most centrally about.
To be on a journey is to be in movement. Moving from place to place—there is change in such a life. A journey is a process that involves our whole being. It involves our feet as well as our minds and our heads. A journey involves following a path or a way. To be on a journey is not to be wandering aimlessly, though there may be times when it feels like that; people have gone on this journey before us, and there is a trail, a path, a way that we are called to.
Whatever his reasons, the journey image suggests for us that the Christian life involves leaving an old way of being.
The Hebrew word for faith in the Old Testament is emunah. What makes that word interesting is that it’s the sound that a baby donkey makes when it is calling for its mother.
The point is that faith in the Hebrew Bible is like a baby donkey calling or crying out for its mother. There’s something kind of wonderful about that.
The first of these last three is faith as fiducia. We get the word “fiduciary” from it. This is basically faith as trust, faith as radical trust in God, which can go along with great uncertainty about beliefs. The opposite of faith as trust is not doubt. The opposite of faith as trust is anxiety. You can measure the amount of faith as trust in your life by the amount of anxiety you have in your life.
The second of the ancient and authentic meanings of faith is fidelitas in Latin. The English, of course, is “fidelity.” This is faith as fidelity to a relationship, fidelity to the relationship with God, in other words faithfulness.
The third and final of these more ancient and authentic ways of understanding faith—I don’t have a Latin word here—is faith as a way of seeing and, in particular, faith as a way of seeing the whole, the whole of that in which we live and move and have our being.
One way we can see the whole of what is is as hostile toward us, threatening toward us in severe form. Of course, this is paranoia.
A second way we can see the whole is as indifferent toward human existence, indifferent toward us. This is the understanding that emerges within the modern worldview, where all is seen as a meaningless collocation of atoms interacting with each other.
The third and final way that Niebuhr says we can see reality is to see the whole as gracious, nourishing, and supportive of life, to see it as that which has brought us into existence and continues to nourish us.
Faith is thus about setting out on a journey like Abraham’s in a posture of trust, seeking to be faithful to the relationship we are called into.
Back to my thirties: soon after these experiences began, a new teaching appointment required that I become familiar with mysticism in Christianity and other religions. That’s when I realized that these were mystical experiences. Especially important was William James’s classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience,
I also learned other ways they have been named. Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) called them experiences of “the numinous,” that which is behind and sometimes shines through our experience of phenomena.
I learned one more thing as I read about mystical experiences; namely, people who had them most often spoke of them as experiences of God, the sacred, the Mystery with a capital M that is beyond all words. It had never occurred to me that what we call “God” could be experienced.
“Glory” in the Bible most often means radiance, luminosity. To affirm that heaven and earth (all that is) are full of God’s glory means that everything is filled with the radiant luminosity of God. God, the sacred, pervades all that is, even though we do not often see it.
The most abstract and generic terms for what is experienced include “reality itself,” “ultimate reality,” or “Reality” with a capital R, “what is” when all our words fall away, or “is-ness without limits”—without the limits created by our language and categories. Buddhists sometimes speak of it as “suchness”—the way things are before our categorizations. William James called it “a more,” a stupendous wondrous “more” that is more than what we had imagined even as it also is present everywhere and capable of being experienced anywhere.
Supernatural theism and parental imagery for God, especially as “Father,” often go together, producing what might be called “parent theism.”
Parent theism, especially God as “Father,” also creates an image of God as the authoritarian parent: the rule giver and disciplinarian, the lawgiver and enforcer. This is “the finger-shaking God” whom we disappoint again and again. It is the God whose demands for obedience were satisfied by Jesus’s death in our place.
A theology that takes mystical experiences seriously leads to a very different understanding of the referent of the word “God.” The word no longer refers to a being separate from the universe, but to a reality, a “more,” a radiant and luminous presence that permeates everything that is. This way of thinking about God is now most often called “panentheism.” Though the word is modern, only about two centuries old, it names a very ancient as well as biblical way of thinking about God.
Its Greek roots indicate its meaning: the first syllable, pan, means “everything.” The middle syllable, en, means “in.” “Theism,” comes from theos, the Greek word for “God,” the sacred. Simply and compactly, “panentheism” means “everything is in God.” The universe—everything that is—is in God, even as God is “more” than the universe.
Its most concise crystallization is in words attributed to Paul in Acts: God “is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being’” (17:27–28). Where are we in relationship to God? We live in God, move in God, have our being in God. God is not somewhere else, but all around us.
So also familiar language from Psalm 139 affirms. The psalmist asks: “Where can I go from your spirit? / Or where can I flee from your presence?” If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. (139:7–10)
To use semitechnical language from the history of theology, panentheism combines the transcendence and immanence of God. “Transcendence” refers to the “moreness” of God—God is more than the space-time universe of matter and energy. “Immanence” (from a root meaning “to dwell within”) refers to the presence of God everywhere. Christian theologians since antiquity have affirmed both.
Thus Christianity is not about getting our theology right. Theology is the intellectual stream of Christianity.
Theological controversies over the centuries have sometimes been treated as if they were really important even though they were also often arcane. For instance, a trinitarian conflict split the Western and Eastern churches in 1054: Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only? In the 1600s, “supralapsarianism” versus “infralapsarianism” almost divided the Reformed tradition. At issue was whether God decided to send a messiah (Jesus) before the first sin (because God knew it would happen) or only after it had happened (because only then was it necessary).
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In a broader sense, theology refers to “what Christians think.” In this sense, all Christians have a theology—a basic, even if often simple, understanding—whether they are aware of it or not. In this broader sense, theology does matter.
But the task of theology is not primarily to construct an intellectually satisfying set of correct beliefs. Its task is more modest. Part of its purpose is negative: to undermine beliefs that get in the way of taking Christianity seriously. Part of its purpose is positive: to construct a persuasive and compelling vision of the Christian life. But being Christian isn’t primarily about having a correct theology by getting our beliefs right. It is about a deepening relationship with God as known especially in Jesus.
They didn’t simply believe strongly in God; they knew God.
Among the reasons that we in the modern world have difficulty giving credence to the reality of Spirit is the disappearance of the deeper forms of prayer from our experience.
But verbal prayer is only one form of prayer in the Jewish-Christian tradition. Indeed, it is only the first stage of prayer; beyond it are deeper levels of prayer characterized by internal silence and lengthy periods of time. In this state, one enters into deeper levels of consciousness; ordinary consciousness is stilled, and one sits quietly in the presence of God. Typically called contemplation or meditation, its deepest levels are described as a communion or union with God.18
As a teacher Jesus made a striking impression, very different from the official teachers: “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). Behind the Greek word for “authority” lies the rabbinic term for the power or might of God, the Gevurah: “He speaks from the mouth of the Gevurah,”28 that is, from the mouth of power or Spirit.
