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November 2 - December 8, 2019
Until my late thirties, I saw the Christian life as being primarily about believing.
Now I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that God is and that the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.
if I were ever to write my spiritual autobiography, I would call it “Beyond Belief.” The fuller title would be “Beyond Belief to Relationship.” That has been my experience. My own journey has led beyond belief (and beyond doubt and disbelief) to an understanding of the Christian life as a relationship to the Spirit of God–a relationship that involves one in a journey of transformation.
The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer Univ. Press, 1990).
The church throughout its history has consistently referred to the authors of the gospels as evangelists. The term rightly suggests that they are not disinterested reporters or straightforward historians, but proclaimers of a message: the “good news” of the new life available through Jesus.
not only adapted the traditions about Jesus to new circumstances, but also continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death.
the few Jewish persons involved in the events leading to his execution were a small but powerful elite whose power derived from the Romans.
birth of Jesus is referred to only in two relatively late sources, the gospels of Matthew and Luke, both written in the last twenty years of the first century.
postcritical naiveté
hear their rich symbolic affirmations without needing to believe them as historical reports.
In short, we do not have any historically reliable stories about Jesus before about age thirty.
Jesus’ environment was considerably more cosmopolitan than we have typically imagined.
there were four other cities within about fifteen miles of Nazareth.
whole of Palestine was under Gentile control. Since 63B.C., it had been part of the Roman Empire, ruled by “client kings” appointed by Rome.
He would have observed and celebrated the great Jewish holidays, three of which were pilgrimage festivals,
Passover, in the spring, recalled the exodus from Egypt.
Pentecost (or “the Feast of Weeks”), some fifty days later, was an agricultural festival celebrating God’s ownership of the land a...
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Tabernacles (or “the Feast of Booths”) was an eight-day harvest celebration in the fall, marked by much music, feasting, and dancing; it recalled...
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in his late twenties or around the age of thirty, he left Nazareth and became a follower of a wilderness prophet named John.
“conversion experience.”
religious impulses and energies become central to one’s life.
Mark dates the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to John’s arrest, which suggests minimally that, with his mentor in prison, Jesus stepped in to carry on.
generating an image or gestalt that draws together into a cohesive whole the various elements of the tradition judged to be historical.
we have no way of knowing whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah or as the Son of God in some special sense.
the pre-Easter Jesus consistently pointed away from himself to God. His message was theocentric, not christocentric–centered in God, not centered in a messianic proclamation about himself.
in all likelihood the pre-Easter Jesus was noneschatological. That statement needs precise formulation in order not to be misunderstood: what is being denied is the notion that Jesus expected the supernatural coming of the Kingdom of God as a world-ending event in his own generation.
last ten years, the image of Jesus as an eschatological prophet, which dominated scholarship through the middle third of this century, has become very much a minority position.21
spirit person, one of those figures in human history with an experiential awareness of the reality of God.
teacher of wisdom who regularly used the classic forms of wisdom speech (parables, and memorable short sayings known as aphorisms) to teach a subversive and alternative wisdom.
social prophet, similar to the classical prophets o...
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movement founder who brought into being a Jewish renewal or revitalization movement that challenged and shattered the social boundaries of his day,
exceptionally intelligent. Not only were his insights pointed and illuminating, but he was very clever in debate, often turning a question back
public actions. He ate meals with untouchables, which not only generated criticism but also symbolized his alternative vision of human community.
entered Jerusalem at the head of a procession on a donkey–a virtual parody of prevailing ideas of kingship.
There was a radical social and political edge to his message and activity. He challenged the social order of his day and indicted the elites who dominated it. He had a clever tongue, which could playfully or sarcastically indict the powerful and proper. He must have been remarkably courageous, willing to continue what he was doing even when it was clear that it was putting him in lethal danger.
He was a remarkable healer:
more healing stories are told about him than about anybody else in the Jewish tradition.
his public activity lasted perhaps as little as a year (according to the synoptic gospels) or as much as three or four years (according to John).
The most crucial fact about Jesus was that he was a “spirit person,” a “mediator of the sacred,” one of those persons in human history to whom the Spirit was an experiential reality.26
The realization came to me initially not from the study of the Bible or the Christian tradition, but from the study of non-Western religions and cultural anthropology.
what the phrase is meant to convey: a person to whom the sacred is an experiential reality.
Spirit persons are known cross-culturally. They are people who have vivid and frequent subjective experiences of another level or dimension of reality. These experiences involve momentary entry into nonordinary states of consciousness and take a number of different forms. Sometimes there is a vivid sense of momentarily seeing into another layer of reality; these are visionary experiences. Sometimes there is the experience of journeying into that other dimension of reality; this is the classic experience of the shaman. Sometimes there is a strong sense of another reality coming upon one, as in
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name it–as Yahweh, Brahman, Atman, Allah, the Tao, Great Spirit, God. This is not to suppose that all these names (and the concepts associated with them) mean the same thing.29 But it is to suppose that the impulse to name something as sacred flows out of the experience of the sacred.
they become funnels or conduits for the power or wisdom of God to enter into this world.
Anthropologically speaking, they are delegates of the tribe to another layer of reality, mediators who connect their communities to the Spirit.
It is important to note that the experience of spirit persons presupposes an understanding of reality very different from the dominant image ...
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from the Enlightenment, sees reality in material terms, as constituted by the world of matter and energy within the space-time continuum. The experience of spirit persons suggests that there is more to reality than this–that there is, in addition to the tangible world of our ordinary experience, a nonmaterial level of reality, actual even though nonmaterial, and charged with energy and...
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A spirit person is one in whom those screens of consciousness are unusually permeable–compared with most of us, who seem to have hardened rinds of consciousness instead.
Mount Sinai–the sacred mountain that symbolically is the navel of the earth, the axis mundi connecting this world to the other world–and there was in intimate communion with God.
Moses is presented as one of these mediators. He “knew God face to face,” as his brief obituary at the end of the book of Deuteronomy puts it.31
