The Invisible Church Quotes

“Many theologians and psychologists have tried to view the Christian myth through a new lens, to view it as a myth with great power and efficacy for meaning, wholeness, and psychological health. Critics will say that this is an attempt to psychologize Christianity. Adherents will say it's opening up and revitalizing the religion. In the end, each one of us gets to choose and decide. The only tragedy is using this myth as an authoritarian fear tactic to keep people subordinate and infantilized. To me, that is the real evil.”
― J. Pittman McGehee, Invisible Church, The: Finding Spirituality Where You Are

“But for my money, and for my understanding of Jung and depth psychology, the stories of the Bible (and all sacred texts and oral traditions) emerged out of the collective unconscious. Paradoxically, this doesn't make them any less valuable. It makes them much more valuable to us, because they reveal to us the nature of being human, which is the purpose of religion.
If religion is about the business of helping us to become human, then these sacred stories are about how to be human. That is what religion is. To me, the idea that these myths welled up out of the collective unconscious is a liberating and empowering realization. I get it now! What a relief!”
― J. Pittman McGehee, Invisible Church, The: Finding Spirituality Where You Are

“The sacred stories we have are not about understanding God, but about understanding how we have imagined God through our God images. Foremost, this is what the Bible is about, a chronicle of the human imagination of God during one era and place in history, written by a bunch of late Iron Age desert scribes. If you were to sit down and read the Bible for yourself, instead of relying on an authority to interpret it for you, you would see that there are lots of different imaginations about God, even within this one single religious tradition.”
― J. Pittman McGehee, Invisible Church, The: Finding Spirituality Where You Are

“Once we give up on being God, then we can get about the enterprise of becoming human, which in itself is a pretty awesome task. Once we decide that this is a worthy task with life-affirming meaning and value, the first thing we need to do is give up on understanding God. We need to let that go. It's not going to happen, and the people who claim they understand God, or speak for God, scare me to death, for they have visited unspeakable physical and psychic pain upon this world.”
― J. Pittman McGehee, Invisible Church, The: Finding Spirituality Where You Are

“God knows we need structure. We long for a father to establish limits, just as we long for the mother's nurturing. It is important for the wisdom of the elders to be passed on, and the wisdom is, "These are norms for human behavior. This is what works in our culture. And this is what's abnormal. This doesn't work in our culture.”
― J. Pittman McGehee, Invisible Church, The: Finding Spirituality Where You Are

“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”
― J. Pittman McGehee, Invisible Church, The: Finding Spirituality Where You Are