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June 6 - June 17, 2025
Miracles then reappear in the Elijah story and carry on to Elisha, before disappearing again for about eight hundred years.
miracles are not scattered throughout the biblical story as so many people seem to think; they are gathered around heroic figures.
however, it appears that miracles may not be moral or even desirable.
after the death of Joshua. There will be a hiatus of some four hundred miracle-free years.
Elisha also raises someone from the dead (II Kings 4:18–37). He restores a child in stages, initially from a distance by having his servant rush ahead with Elisha’s staff and laying this staff on the face of the boy. When Elisha arrives, he restores the child to life and presents him to his mother. So Elisha was able, like Moses and Joshua, to control nature and, like Elijah, to raise a person from the dead.
Both did nature miracles. Both split bodies of water so they could walk across on dry land. Both expanded the food supply. Both carried the miraculous theme to new levels.
Elisha took it one step further with the first recorded healing miracle, curing Naaman, a foreigner, of leprosy.
chapter 11 is the account of Jesus raising the four-days dead and buried Lazarus. This is once again a story never mentioned in any other part of the New Testament.
If there is no mention of a miracle being associated with Jesus for forty years after his death, can miracles really be viewed as literal accounts of historical happenings?
Paul never mentions a miracle being connected with Jesus in the entire body of his authentic epistles.
The gospels do not require that we suspend our intelligence and try to accept the premise of supernatural intervention as the only way to read or to learn from the Jesus story in the twenty-first century.
The phrase “Jesus died for my sins” is not just dangerous, it is absurd. Atonement theology is a concept we must escape.
original sin and atonement theology go together;
For many people there appears to be a deep human yearning for oneness with that which we call God or even what we call meaning,
There is indeed a discernible and radical loneliness that appears to be part of every human life.
Much of what we call “the experience of God” is fashioned to meet us at this point of our human vulnerability. It was St. Augustine, writing in Confessions, who gave these words to that experience: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself alone and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”*
Christianity took this valid human experience and transformed it into a doctrine. “Original sin” was the way the church articulated this problem. “Salvation” was the church’s stated resolution of this problem.
Jesus did not die for your sins or mine! This distortion of Christianity, atonement as traditionally conceived, must be lifted out of the unconscious realm of our faith story, challenged and expelled.
We human beings are all fallen people. Sin is the universal mark of our humanity.
How was this Jesus going to accomplish this task of saving the fallen? Here the doctrine of the atonement gets even stranger. God would force the divine Son to suffer the fate that all human beings deserved, but which no human being could possibly endure. Jesus had namely to absorb the punishment that God required in order for the justice of God to be totally satisfied. That is how the story of the crucifixion was told.
What kind of God would that be? A deity who had been wronged; a God to whom restitution had to be paid; a God who needed a human sacrifice and a blood offering before the restoration of the sinful could be achieved.
Protestants apparently want to bathe in the blood of Christ, because they sing hymns about fountains of blood in which they wish to be washed
Atonement theology must be abandoned if there is to be a Christian future.
We are evolving people, not fallen people.
Second, there is hardly an Easter detail proclaimed in one part of the New Testament that is not contradicted in another.
Paul and the gospels disagree on both whether there was a tomb into which Jesus was laid and whether that tomb literally became empty.
only two of the five major writers of the New Testament even mention a miraculous birth, making it tangential, not central, to the Christian story,
recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God.
Resurrection, I now believe, was not a physical act. No formerly deceased body ever walked out of any tomb,
I submit that it was. That experience suggested that God and human life can flow together. It persuaded “believers” that every limit on our humanity can be broken. That is what those early Christians meant when they said: “Jesus lives. We have seen the Lord!”
Sorry, Bishop Spong... I really can't believe you on this one. I'm not buying that the early christians were using "resurection" to mean this metaphorical bullshit. The early christians believed in a reanimated corpse, most likley.
The Easter experience in the New Testament, contrary to what we have traditionally been taught over the years, is not about bodies walking out of graves. It is far more profound than that. It is about God being seen in human life. By “God” I do not mean a supernatural, invasive God, who violates the laws of nature in order to enter time and space.
but, it is... the new testiment teaches us about reanimated corpses
The most obvious Elijah story that Luke retells about Jesus, however, is the story of Elijah’s ascension.
At the end of Elijah’s life, the text informs us, he took his single disciple, Elisha, and they journeyed together into the wilderness to have a rendezvous with God.
a magical, fiery chariot, drawn by magical, fiery horses, appeared out of the sky and swooped down to the ground, coming to a halt at exactly the spot where Elijah and Elisha were talking. It was as if this were a regular stop on this heavenly chariot’s bus route! Without so much as a fare-thee-well, Elijah stepped immediately into that chariot to begin his ascension into heaven,
The result was the story of the ascension of Jesus into heaven and the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,
Luke knew that his ascension story, along with his Pentecost account, was not literal history, but he also knew that the inclusive love of God was universal, so he told this story.
it's hard for me to assume, or even grant, any kind of metaphorical intent. it seems to me that if Luke wrote this down, he probably believed it. why would we give him this kind of crazy benifit of the dowbt? the most logical explaination is that he was a religious zealot who believed in a supernatural assumption
The ability to define and separate good from evil can no longer be achieved with appeals to ancient codes
Contemporary moral standards must be hammered out in the juxtaposition between life-affirming moral principles and external situations. No modern person has any choice but to be a situationist.
the Hebrew scriptures contain three versions of the Ten Commandments and they do not agree with each other.
Tradition alone has dictated that the version found in Exodus 20 is the official version.
the version of the Ten Commandments found in Deuteronomy 5,
third version of the Ten Commandments, but probably the oldest of the three lots, is found in Exodus 34.
The last commandment in this group of ten states: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” I must confess that I have never even been tempted to violate that commandment!
Marriage as the precondition of sex has faded. It was a rare wedding that I performed, especially in the latter half of my ministry, in which the couple was not already sexually active, and in many cases, even living together. Sex only inside marriage may have been the norm once, but it has become the rare exception today.
No great effort was made to guard the virginity of girls born into the families of peasants, however, nor was any effort made to rescue prostitutes.
The risk of pregnancy was almost totally removed by safe, effective and legally available birth control methods.
If a sexual practice becomes almost universal, does condemning it allow you into a dialogue with reality? Or does it simply reduce your voice to the fringes of society?
Until very recently, one who completed the act of suicide was not given the privilege of an ecclesiastical funeral. Suicide represented human pridefulness of making a decision that rightfully belonged to God and was thus condemned as sinful.
Prayer, understood as a request made to an external, theistic deity to act in human history, is little more than an hysterical attempt to turn the Holy into the service of the human. Most of our prayer definitions arise out of the past and are thus dependent on an understanding of God that no longer exists. The God who answers our prayers has ceased to be a believable God in our day. A new way to understand prayer cries out to be developed.
the task of developing what I call “A New Christianity for a New World,”
