Archive for the 'jesus' Category

The downside of anthropomorphism?

Published
by
Ken
on May 11, 2008
in christianity, god, holy spirit and jesus
. 4 Comments

Reading this post, from Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, about Islamic reaction to the doctrine of the Trinity got me thinking. What are the downsides of thinking about God in anthropomorphic ways?

Along the lines of this post from Exploring Our Matrix, I was also thinking about how the OT God is most often conceptualized as having a location. He was with the Israelites either as the pillar of fire or in the Ark or he was located on Mount Sinai. In all these cases, you could point to one spot be say, “God is there.” At times, God is seen as locating himself, temporarily, in one spot — as with Moses and the burning bush — which de-emphasises his human characterization. The implicit idea is that God was there to communicate with Moses whereas in the previous examples he was more firmly implanted for a longer time frame.

From the NT, we think of Jesus mostly in his incarnated form and as the son of god. We think of him as an historical person (indeed, some Christians fight tooth and nail for an historical Jesus and claim that Christianity is nothing without it) located in a particular place at a particular time. Even now, after his ascension, he is sitting sitting at the right hand of God — an image which restricts both God and Jesus to a particular space.

There is very little in Christianity that focuses our attention away from the human characteristics attributed to God. Sure we talk about his omnipresence but right behind the words is the image of a father. Even in the end, our souls - the numinous part of ourselves - end up located in space, in heaven, where we will be with God and Jesus. You know, I’ve never thought about seeing the Holy Spirit in heaven. Nor have I heard a sermon preached on what role the Holy Spirit will play in heaven. The one part of the Godhead which retains some non-human characteristic is blatantly missing!

The Trinity could be a medium for concentrating on the non-human characteristics of God yet even here we’ve named them God the father and God the son. We force the divine into a human-shaped mold.

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising given the strong anthropomorphic nature of the OT which is Christianity’s heritage. But I think that it is also one reason we react so negatively to other religions. We call the atheistic because they do not have a God that is a father figure. We call them nihilistic because they do not end up in a specific place when they die.

God is more than our anthropomorphic conceptions of him. We can’t even refer to god without assigning a human gender to … him. I think most Christians would be offended if we called God “It.” God is more than our human conceptions otherwise he would not be God; he’d be understood by us. So why do we insist that everyone hold the same limited conceptions as we? Can’t the ineffable be reduced to more than one subset of ideas and still be the same?

Jesus of Iowa

Published
by
Ken
on March 2, 2008
in jesus
. 3 Comments

I was in a Unity church recently and in one of the stairwells there was a picture of Jesus. He was in his shepherd’s garb and was holding a lamb — you know the one. The only problem was that Jesus looked like a farm boy from Iowa. I shook my head in disapproval and kept walking.

Why did I have that reaction? I think it was, in part, a throwback to my Fundamentalist upbringing. If Jesus was an actual, historical, flesh-n-blood person who was born in Bethlehem to Jewish parents then the odds of his looking like that picture are very slim. And shouldn’t a picture of someone look like they did look, or at least could have looked?

What would your response be to my hanging up this picture and saying it was Abraham Lincoln? (Picture credit: www.zztop.com)

That would probably not be very well received. Now, of course, we don’t know what Jesus looked like, but if he was an actual, historical, flesh-n-blood person who was born in Bethlehem to Jewish parents, shouldn’t we at least try to get close?

And what if someone does believe that Jesus was mythological or a conglomeration of ideas or an amalgamation of actual persons? Does that give them “artistic license” to portray Jesus in any manner they choose?

What are your thoughts on this?

Protection

Published
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Ken
on January 15, 2008
in christianity and jesus
. 0 Comments

Massive Attack’s song Protection contains the following lyrics:

I stand in front of you
I’ll take the force of the blow
Protection

Lately, the image that is coming to mind when I hear these lyrics is Jesus on the cross and how he took the force of God’s “blow” and “protected” us.

Then I started thinking about “protection” and how the above seems to me to be a passive kind of protection. Passive with regard to the one being protected, that is. There is no notion of trying to change the one you are protecting. Even Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was made without the precondition that we change. It was made whether we change or not. This, to me, is loving protection.

Active modes of protection would be trying to remove the “force” so there is no “blow” or trying to remove the person so the “blow” doesn’t hit her. Both of these modes attempt to alter the circumstances and are unaccepting of the way things are and so are, in many cases, futile because things are what they are.

Later in the song are these words:

Now I can’t change the way you think
But I can put my arms around you
That’s just part of the deal
That’s the way I feel
I put my arms around you

Here, again is a passive, accepting of the circumstances attitude. I’m not trying to change you, I’m just loving you as you are. Synchronistically, I started writing this post yesterday and read a post on Find and Ye Shall Seek today which talks about Christians not showing passive acceptance towards sinners. It’s a real shame that some who profess Jesus as Lord are so oblivious to how much their actions are so unlike the actions of Jesus.

Jesus is back. And this time he’s funny

Published
by
Ken
on December 4, 2007
in jesus and tim freke
. 0 Comments

Watch Tim Freke talk about his new book The Gospel of the Second Coming. There is also an in-depth interview with Tim by Mark Malaro of The Alcove. For links to more of Tim’s youtube videos go to www.thesecondcoming.co.uk and www.timothyfreke.com.

For those of you not familiar with Tim and co-author Peter Gandy, here is a blurb from his website:

FREKE AND GANDY are internationally respected scholars who have authored five books together, including international bestseller The Jesus Mysteries, which was a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Daily Telegraph. Their other books include Jesus and the Goddess, which was cited by Dan Brown as an inspiration for The Da Vinci Code and The Laughing Jesus, which was critically heralded as ‘one of the most important books that has emerged in this infant millennium’.

TIMOTHY FREKE has an honours degree in philosophy and is the author of more than twenty books. He is a keynote speaker at major conferences and is regularly featured in the media internationally, as well as on websites such as Ken Wilber’s ‘Integral Naked’. He has appeared in the History Channel documentary ‘Beyond The Da Vinci Code’, the Channel Five documentary ‘The Da Vinci Code Myth’, Alchemist Films’ feature ‘Secrets of the Code’ - and he is now completely fed up talking about that damn book! He runs seminars throughout the world exploring the experience of gnosis.

I’ve read a couple of their books and attended two seminars/lectures given by Tim. He is an amazing, down-to-earth, honest, gentle, loving soul with an incredibly important message for all of us.

the Word finds expression in other traditions

Published
by
Ken
on December 1, 2007
in christianity, jesus, quotes, religion and tolerance
. 0 Comments

Found the following on Exploring Our Matrix and couldn’t agree more:

When we hear the words ascribed to Jesus in John’s Gospel, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me’, we do not hear them in a narrowly exclusive way. In John’s gospel, let us remember, the words of Jesus are the words of the Logos, not just of the individual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. That Word or Logos enlightens every one who comes into the world. Those of us who are Christians believe that we have heard it loud and clear in Jesus Christ and that we need not look beyond him. But we do not deny that the Word finds expression in other traditions, and, indeed, in the whole creation

— John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought

Jesus for the modern man

Published
by
Ken
on November 24, 2007
in bible, jesus, myth and rudolf bultmann
. 1 Comment

Rudolf Bultmann in Jesus Christ and Mythology writes:

This raises in an acute form the question: what is the importance of the preaching of Jesus and of the preaching of the New Testament as a whole for modern man?

For modern man the mythological conception of the world, the conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and of redemption, are over and done with. Is it possible to expect that we shall make a sacrifice of understanding, sacrificium intellectus, in order to accept what we cannot sincerely consider true—merely because such conceptions are suggested by the Bible?

Or ought we to pass over those sayings of the New Testament which contain such mythological conceptions and to select other sayings which are not such stumbling-blocks to modern man? In fact, the preaching of Jesus is not confined to eschatological sayings. He proclaimed also the will of God, which is God’s demand, the demand for the good. Jesus demands truthfulness and purity, readiness to sacrifice and to love. He demands that the whole man be obedient to God, and he protests against the delusion that one’s duty to God can be fulfilled by obeying certain external commandments. If the ethical demands of Jesus are stumbling-blocks to modern man, then it is to his selfish will, not to his understanding, that they are stumbling-blocks.

What follows from all this? Shall we retain the ethical preaching of Jesus and abandon his eschatological preaching? Shall we reduce his preaching of the Kingdom of God to the so-called social gospel? Or is there a third possibility? We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so, let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing—an unsatisfactory word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.

. . .

To de-mythologize is to reject not Scripture or the Christian message as a whole, but the world-view of Scripture, which is the world-view of a past epoch, which all too often is retained in Christian dogmatics and in the preaching of the Church. To de-mythologize is to deny that the message of Scripture and of the Church is bound to an ancient world-view which is obsolete.

This is something about which I’ve been thinking lately: if the Bible is the timeless, eternal Word of a timeless and eternal God then how can it depend on a particular time or world view or world philosophy? It absolutely must be able to speak to me, right now, right here and to you, right then, right there. This is only common sense. Therefore, while figuring out the exact intent of each word based on the writer’s time, place, and current mindset may provide some insight into what the passage meant for the writer and the writer’s contemporary audience, it really has precious little insight for me because I, in my time and place and mindset, am so completely different than the target audience. And forcing me to think of the text as if I were living in the time of the author only causes un-rational, un-defensible beliefs that must be defended at all cost because they are too fragile to be intelligently discussed.

Of course, the major problem I see with this is the four letter word myth. We have a difficult time using the word myth when talking about the Bible or Jesus or God. I’m hoping to discuss myth in more detail later but for now all I’ll quote Bultmann again:

Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favor he needs, powers whose wrath he fears. Myths express the knowledge that man is not master of the world and of his life, that the world within which he olives is full of riddles and mysteries and that human life also is full of riddles and mysteries. … Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. … Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly power. … Myths give worldly objectivity to that which is unworldly.

So, myth does not mean false, untrue, naive, or a fairy tale—even though that is how we commonly think about myth in this age of science. Myth means that there is a deeper, esoteric meaning beyond the outer, exoteric meaning. It turns the words into symbols charged with inner meaning and gives them eternal life because the inner meaning is able to speak to all times and not just when the words were written. The problem is that we need to learn how to deal with myth again, recognize the mythological nature of the Bible, and “rework” the myth to fit our world. This does not, as Bultmann says, mean rewriting the Bible or rejecting the Bible. It means applying the symbols of the Bible to our day and age.

More later …

Was Jesus Omniscient?

Published
by
Ken
on November 21, 2007
in alan watts, jesus and rudolf bultmann
. 0 Comments

“Jesus expected”

These two words in Rudolf Bultmann’s Jesus Christ and Mythology stopped me in my tracks and got me thinking about the nature of Jesus.

Bultmann is talking about Jesus’ conception of the Kingdom of God and his thinking that it “would take place soon, in the immediate future.” The fact that “this hope of Jesus … was not fulfilled” only makes the argument stronger: Jesus was not omniscient.

Then I realized that Jesus was not omnipotent, either. He needed sleep, he needed rest, he needed fortitude, he struggled with his purpose. His temptation not only proved his human-ness but it also seems to question his God-ness. The challenge to toss himself off the nearest tall building only makes sense if he could not have saved himself or survived the fall. The challenge was predicated on God doing the rescuing.

Yet Jesus did perform super-human feats: walking on water, feeding the 5000, calming storms, casting out demons, knowing the hearts and minds of others. So, at times, he does appear omniscient and omnipotent (or, at least, more scient and more potent than your average human). But two things strike me about his miracles. First, Jesus’ God-ness seems to be absent for the most part and then appears at opportune times. Second, the miracles which Jesus performs are not very conclusive proof of his God-ness but rather more strongly demonstrate — due to their intermittency — a power working through him in a manner similar to the miracles performed by the prophets and the apostles.

Now, we also have Jesus’ verbal claim that he was the Son of God but Alan Watts, in Myth and Religion, writes:

… that each one of us is what would be called in Arabic, or Hebrew, the Son of God. The phrase “Son of” means “of the nature of,” as when you call someone a “son of a bitch,” So, “Son of God” means a divine person, a human being who is in the nature of God and realizes it.

And what makes Jesus different than the prophets and apostles is that he realized his divine nature while the others were not so sure. That is why Jesus assumed the presence of the power to perform the miracles and the prophets and apostles were less sure and asked for it.

Where does this leave us? For one thing, it brings Jesus down off the pedastal and makes him much more accessible to you and me. The exhortation to “be like Jesus” is no longer a fairy tale but a feasible possibility (it’s still not easy) since being like God is no longer the standard. Rather, we are “simply” being asked to realize our true nature; to see the divine in all of us.

Rely on God for every thing????

Published
by
Ken
on October 10, 2007
in god, jesus, money, quotes and thomas merton
. 0 Comments

Thomas Merton, in Echoing Silence, writes:

Naturally, while sometimes you are very quiet and happy because God is very obviously with you, with a presence & blessedness you never imagined possible, at other times this is not so. Then you try to pray or think of Christ and your mind instead of filling with peace, fills with slogans, He-she jokes, movies so bad you had forgotten them by the self-protective work of your own subconscious mind. You think of million dollar advertising ideas, and this makes you very ashamed, and bored, & disgusted. This is a trial common to our life, & has good effects, one of the principal of which is to make you love God not only for His obvious gifts, but realizing clearly, by His apparent absence, how infinitely preferable He is to everything else. That this absence is only apparent is clear from St. John of the Cross, and all the others, & everybody here knows it perfectly well, and really, you feel bad some days, but it is nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.

This really stopped in my tracks when I read this: “how infinitely preferable He is to everything else.” According to Merton it’s not a tough decision with God coming in at 51%. It’s a hands down victory. God is infinitely preferable to everything else!! How many of us can say that? I can’t. If we saw God as infinitely preferable to a satisfying job, fashion, a new romance, football, financial security, sex, coffee, the latest high-tech gadget, then Jesus’ call to sell our possessions, leave our families, and suffer injury & injustice would be a no-brainer.

Then Merton says that the bad days when God seems absent are “nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.” That’s another tough one. If I think about the worst days of my life, I’m not sure that the days I was pining for God would make the list. Now, I had bad days where God was absent. Believe you me. I remember begging God, pleading with him to make himself known to me. He didn’t and eventually I served him with divorce papers. But were those the worst days I’ve experienced? I don’t think so.

Then Merton continues:

Also, as soon as this is done with, your mind unexpectedly fills up with the presence of God twice as real and twice as holy as before. For another result of these temptations is to make you very docile, very detached from your own opinions and judgments & way of doing things, and then you rely on God for the smallest things, for every thing. And this is peace, because God gives everybody everything, & the only reason each person doesn’t have more is that he gets in God’s way, trying to get things with our own dumb will.

Docile and detached from our own opinions and judgments. Hmmmmm. In how many people do I see this? It seems to me that the greatest self-proclaimed Christians are some of the most opinionated and judgmental people around. And how many of us rely on God for every thing? I know I don’t. Hell, if I relied on God for every thing I’d quit my job and blog 16 hours a day. Instead we got to get up and make the donuts. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The car ain’t gonna fix itself.

But can you imagine relying on God for every thing? Just think about that. That’s got to be like being a kid on summer vacation again. Mom makes your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No job. No school. Dad buys your clothes. You get driven everywhere. All you have to do is play and watch TV. If that’s not peace, I don’t know what is. But the trick is really and truly relying on someone else. For every thing. For most of us, our control-freak nature takes over and tries to do God’s job. Then all we end up doing is worrying and all that ends up doing us giving us heartburn, insomnia, and ulcers.

Oh, to have faith. Life would be so much easier!

Your faith has made you well

Published
by
Ken
on October 6, 2007
in belief, faith, god and jesus
. 1 Comment

Of all the miracles in the gospels, there are only six where Jesus says “Your faith has made you well” (or something like that). What did Jesus mean by this rarely spoken phrase? Something about the people involved in these miracles was special, different from the rest.

I can imagine that the attitude of most of the people whom Jesus healed was similar to my attitude when I take Excedrin for a headache. It worked last time and the time before that and the time before that. It’ll work this time, too. I mean, when you see a man healing person after person of affliction after affliction day after day, how hard is it to believe that if you ask him to heal you he will be able to? Most of the people were in it for the physical healing and that’s it. They simply believed that this man called Jesus was able to heal. Now, that’s not to say that this type of healing is not life-altering. If I had been blind since birth or if I had just died and Jesus healed me, I’d be fairly likely to follow him around town as a convert to whatever he was teaching. Healing can be life changing, no doubt. But of the people whose faith was instrumental in their healing, not one of them is on record as becoming a devoted follower of Jesus.

The one miracle of the six that I find most interesting was also found most interesting by 75% of the gospel writers. (I also find it very interesting that John does not record any of these six miracles nor does he record Jesus ever saying “Your faith has made you well.”) The miracle to which I refer is the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage (Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:24-34, Luke 8:42-48). To paraphrase, a woman who has been afflicted with an incurable hemorrhage for 12 years gets it into her head that if she merely touches Jesus’ clothes that she would be healed. I find this fascinating because this was not Jesus’ regular modus operandi. The laying on of hands was the usual healing method. Furthermore, this woman was not going to ask Jesus if she could touch his clothes — she was just going to do it. Now, the moment she decides to put her plan into action seems a most inopportune time. A crowd is around Jesus, pressing against him, so much so that no could figure out who it was that had touched him. So, imagine a woman who was most likely rather frail from being sick for 12 years pushing her way through a crowd, getting stepped on, elbowed in the ribs, pushed and bumped, all in order to do something she had never seen done before but which she is convinced will heal her. Why did she not just ask Jesus to heal her? Why did she choose that particular time? Who knows. All we know is that it worked!

But let’s look at how it worked. Jesus did not touch her. Jesus did not give his healing power to her. Instead, he felt that his power had gone out of him. Jesus didn’t give — she took — his power. Jesus, in this case, was more of a medium than a source of power. This woman transformed herself with God’s power and used Jesus as the conduit or medium to take that power. I think this particular miracle is the most illustrative of the phrase “your faith has made you well.” This was all her. Jesus was more of a bystander in this one. Yes, of course, it was his power that healed her and it was her touching his clothes that healed her and he knew all along who had touched him. But she did this with no precedent for her method and no sane reason to think it would work.

And so, I think this is what Jesus meant by faith. It’s not believing that something you’ve seen happen before will happen again. It’s not believing that Jesus has the power to heal physical afflictions — of course he does. It’s not believing that Jesus can use that power to heal — of course he can. That’s all belief and not faith — I believe that Excedrin will help my headaches. Faith is knowing that the power Jesus had is available to you for the taking and can transform your life.

This woman was constantly bleeding — her life-force had been ebbing away for 12 years. She needed to be transformed in order regain her life and her vitality and she knew exactly how to effect that transformation. This woman was going to touch Jesus’ clothes, be healed, and leave! She wasn’t planning on sticking around. Jesus, himself, was not what was important to her. The power of Jesus was what she wanted. The faith that made her well was not faith in Jesus but the faith that this transformation was possible; the faith that this mundane, life-force-sucking world is not all there is.

WWJD … today?

Published
by
Ken
on September 2, 2007
in christianity, environment, jesus and money
. 3 Comments

Over at The Fire and the Rose, D.W. Congdon has an excellent and provocative post. “What would Jesus drive? What would Jesus buy?” is the question. I fired off a comment that Jesus wouldn’t drive anything and a couple other people chimed in with agreement. But D.W. raised an excellent counter-point.

It seems to me that you (and other commentators thus far) are essentially saying that one cannot be a Christian in suburbia. And as much as I would like to say that Christians should not drive and should worship where they live, this is simply an impossibility on any kind of large scale.

. . .

But we live an hour away from the city, because of where I go to school. We have one car. I take the school shuttle so she can have the car. She drives an hour each way to her school. This is certainly not ideal, but it’s the best we can do. My wife, Amy, is working in the inner city, but in order to do this work, she needs a car to get there.

What would you say to her? Would you question whether she really needs a car? What do you have to say to the many Americans who actually do need cars to do things that are really worthwhile and need to be done?

The Christian ideal is to emulate Jesus. But the Jesus that is held up before us like the carrot on a stick is a first century Jesus. What are we supposed to do with that? Sure, the easy stuff is still easy — don’t kill, commit adultery, steal, blah, blah, blah. But Jesus doesn’t say anything about, for example, the environmental impact of our daily lives or the globalness of our culture and society. Sure the clothes we buy in WalMart that were made in China are cheaper for us. But what about the cost of transporting that shirt halfway around the world? Does that matter? Of course Jesus didn’t drive. He walked everywhere because his “parish” was small. (Or was his parish small because all he could do was walk?)

As D.W. asks, is it wrong to live in a place where you cannot commute to work by bus or bike or foot? If we all claim that Jesus would not drive, then what does that say about what we should be doing? There are people in the San Fransisco East Bay area who drive an hour or more each way to work. Some of them do this because they simply cannot afford to buy a house close to where they work. But what are they to do? There are not enough jobs in the area where they live.

The real question I’m asking is: “What would Jesus do … Today?” Answering what Jesus would have done 2000 years ago is a moot point. It doesn’t matter. The Old Testament Law is no longer “valid” for us today — we are not stoning homosexuals and adulterers. Things change. No matter how hard we try to keep things as they were, “as they were” was a change from what they were before that! Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek,” but what does that mean today? What does it mean to be meek today? Can you be both meek and a CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, police officer, inner-city school teacher, politician, or mega-church pastor? I’ve posted on this before, but the early church sold all their property and gave to those in need. Why don’t we have to do this today if the early church is the gold standard? “Well, because things are different today,” you’ll no doubt say. “Exactly!” I’ll say. “Things are different but our Jesus hasn’t changed one iota. He’s still wearing sandals and walking everywhere with no money, home, car, savings account, IRA, or job.

How does this help me TODAY??