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Who is Christ in our day? This question was first framed for me by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell in Flossenburg, Germany, in 1945. This seminal Lutheran thinker had turned that cell into a worldwide pulpit as he awaited his execution at the hands of the Nazis. His question was not, Who is Christ? but rather, Who is Christ for us, in our day? Bonhoeffer recognized, as so many religious people fail to do, that anything we say about Christ is subjective. We do not capture Christ. Our minds do not embrace Christ. Our words point to Christ. Our images interact with Christ. But our words and our images are products of our world, our cultural realities. They are not objective They will not endure forever. What is true of our words and images is also true of the words and images of every previous era, including the words and images of that century which experienced Christ in history. That century was not universal. The early Christians were not universal men and women. They thought in the frame of reference peculiar to the first century. Their minds were formed by the way first-century people comprehended reality. They were bound by the limits and subjectivity of their own language, their own history, and their own way of life. When they came to put their experience of Christ into words, they had to us the only language available to them. The Christ experience was captured and distorted and frozen in the subjectivity of that era. The Christian revelation was thus forever stamped with a first-century bias. It was a powerful and controlling bias, and it continues to be operative in our day in religious circles. One Episcopal seminary dean in a letter to me claimed for his rather strange and antiquated point of view the authority of such words as "biblical" and "apostolic." The more he could bend his mind into a first-century form, the more authentically Christian he could consider himself to be. More important, the more he could banish from his religious world the sounds of modernity, which challenged so deeply his view of both God and reality, the happier he would be. It was the first century that gave the verbal form to the Christian experience. Into the words of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John the Christ event was placed. By these words the universality of that experience was instantly compromised. The words of the first century became the normative and defining words for Christianity itself. So powerful was the experience of Christ that to the words that told of the experience itself, the treasure of the experience was confused with the earthen vessel that articulated the experience. The essence of Christ was confused with the form in which that essence was communicated. The experience of Christ was proclaimed by men and women who bore their witness and shared their faith. First there were leaders like Peter and Paul, who in the light of their meeting with Christ addressed the issues that concerned the first Christians in the form of letters to the churches. In this way the Epistles were born. Later the memory of Jesus, his sayings, his parables, and stories about him achieved the status of treasured, remembered, repeated words. Finally they were gathered by authors and editors and placed into written form. In this way the Gospel narratives entered history. In turn these books that slowly but surely obtained the status of Scripture began to define the only legitimate ways to talk about the Christ event, and as such they helped to create the words and phrases of the Christian creeds. Despite assumptions that were made and efforts that were exerted, these creeds did nonetheless change the biblical images dramatically. The question is never, Who is Christ? as if there were some pure objective human capacity to capture truth for all time. The question is, Who is Christ for us? How do we as subjects carried along in the stream of history, whether we are conscious of it or not, apprehend the reality of Jesus and appropriate that reality for out time? The framers of the creeds, like us, were removed from the original Jewish context that marked most of the biblical narrative. They were answering the question. Who is Christ for us? In their own way as Hebrew roots faded and Greek philosophical thinking became dominant. They admitted, for example, a dualism that would never have been natural to the Hebrew mind with its understanding of creation. they dealt with words that the original Jewish Christians could not have fathomed. Far more than the church fathers recognized, they were moving the Christ experience far beyond its original vocabulary. Contrary to the unhistorical view of creedal fundamentalists and biblical literalists, there never was a moment when the Christ experience was captured to be normative for all time. So many of our classical theological understandings are distinctly nonbiblical. But we have fused them so deeply into Christian tradition that we do not separate creedal concept from biblical formed Greek and Western eyes. Yet Mark would never have understood a word like incarnation. Paul quite obviously was not a Trinitarian. Each generation spoke of the way they saw Christ in their day. Mark saw a cosmic struggle in the supernatural realm between demonic forces and that intervening God. Matthew saw a new and greater Moses fulfilling the expectations of the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke saw a new and greater Elijah reaching toward a universalism that would embrace gentiles as well as Jews. John saw Christ in terms of the preexistent deity who was Being itself, the great I Am. Each of these images participated in the truth of Christ. None of the them bound Christ forever inside their images. This process has continued for two thousand years. Each generation stands in the midst of its concepts and values and uses a vocabulary tainted by the tribal experience of those people who developed that particular language. The knowledge available to Christians in any age was and is nothing more or less than the common knowledge of that era. Christ and the divine power that is met in that figure continues to erupt as the years flow by. Christ is indeed "the hero of a thousand faces." He was the divine judge and the helpless infant. He was the life-denying monastic and political revolutionary. He was the soft Jesus who sat on a hillside and invited the children to come to him and the liberationist and radical organizer who drove money changers from the temple. Christ has been and still is many things to many people. All of them are Christ and none of them is Christ. Freeze any image and idolatry is the sure result. Allow no concrete images to emerge and the Christ will disappear from our consciousness. Who is Christ for our day? What images can we employ that will enable us to be the body of Christ with integrity while remaining women and men of relevance in our generation? A Christianity that is not changing is a Christianity that is dying. A Christianity that cannot restate in a radical and new way the essence of its truth is a Christianity destined to live only on our library shelves or in the museums of antiquity. Is there truth in Christ to which our words can point, into which our world can enter, and by which this generation can live? These are the issues and concerns to which we no turn.
The clue to this pursuit of the truth of Christ for us does not lie in words and images. They are always limited by the age that produced them. We must journey beyond words and images into the experience that produced those words. In this endeavor it is helpful to employ an active imagination. Let us assume for a moment that the Christ was not a first-century event. To be more specific, let us assume that the Jesus in whom God was experienced as uniquely present was born in the last decade of the twentieth century. Since God is an ultimate truth and reality, my assumption is that that God is an ultimate truth and reality, my assumption is that the God experience in the first century would not be different from the God experience in the last decade of the twentieth century. But when the experience is put into words and concepts, an astonishing variation would appear. The variation would be so wide that many would argue that experience could not have been even similar, much less identical. To freeze the interpretation of the experience in the words of any era, including our own, would be to guarantee the eventual loss of the truth of the experience. One generation cannot finally get inside the words and the concepts of another time. It would be like the refreshing biblical story of the young lad David, who volunteered to fight the giant Goliath (1 Sam. 17:31ff). The men of war of that era insisted that David be clothed in the familiar armor of soldiers, in the style of the previous generation. David, weighted down and immobile under the burden of that style of battle, declined to go forward until he could do it his way. So much of Christian theology today is not unlike the armor of the past that the elders wanted to place upon David as he journeyed to engage the realities of his world. This is not to denigrate that armor or that theology, for it may have served well in another era where it was appropriate to the circumstances that existed at that time. But that does not mean that it is appropriate to us or our time. We read it to understand how our ancestors in faith dealt with the issues of their day, how they interpreted truth in categories that were alive for them. We do not make their understanding of truth a straitjacket into which our minds must be placed. I am not interested in preserving the doctrine of the incarnation. I am interested in understanding the truth to which the doctrine of the incarnation points. I am eager to enter the experience out of which the doctrine of the incarnation emerged so that my generation can, with different words and different images, begin to appropriate the truth that is present in this historic doctrinal affirmation. Similarly, I am not interested in preserving the doctrine of the Trinity. I do not believe that the ultimate truth of God has been captured in the Trinitarian formula. I am passionately interested in understanding why the doctrine of the Trinity was a life-and-death issue during the early centuries of Christian history. I am eager to embrace the experience out of which the doctrine of the Trinity was forged and the truth to which this doctrine points. There is, however, nothing sacred or eternal for me about the words previous generations chose to be the bears of their truth. Ecclesiastical claims to possess infallibility in any formulated version of Scripture and creed or in the articulations of any council, synod, or hierarchical figure are to me manifestations of idolatry. Such claims do not serve the truth. They serve only the power and control needs of the ecclesiastical institution. The church must embrace the subjective and relative character of everything it says and does. If the church provides security, it cannot provide truth. This is the choice that faces Christians today. I vote for insecurity and the pursuit of truth. The alternative, I believe, is security and the creation of a doomed idolatry The seminary in which I was trained had as its motto "Seek the truth-come whence it may, cost what it will." For me those words are a call to walk into the truth of Christ. Alas, even that seminary seems today to be more interested in propaganda than in education, more concerned about orthodoxy than truth, more afraid of the future than welcoming of it, and more defensive for its version of Christianity than it is open to the leading of the Holy Spirit that the Bible suggests is the way into future truth. Like every institution, its primary concern is its own survival and viability. This is the inevitable result of institutional religion. Yet having issued that criticism, let me also state that the institutionalization of our religious heritage makes the heritage available to us today.. We Christians would long ago have perished from the earth if there had been no Bible in which to ground our experience, no creeds through which to articulate our common heritage. My quarrel is not with Bible and creeds but with the freezing of these instruments in time or with the assumption that somehow the Bible or the creeds escaped the subjectivity of the ear that created them. The Bible and the creeds are windows into truth. They are not themselves the truth. They are valued documents in the faith journey of the people of God. They set parameters and call us to take those parameters seriously, but neither Bible nor creeds are to be taken literally or treated as if somehow objective truth has been captured in human words. Until that barrier of understanding has been crossed, the Bible and the creeds of Christianity have no chance to be live options or respected sources of truth as the twenty-first century dawns. My quarrel with fundamentalist and conservative Christians is not their right to believe as literally as they wish to believe. It is rather with their attempt to define Christianity so narrowly that only fundamentalists or conservatives can be included within the definition. It is their need to impose their truth on all Christians as the only truth that I resent. At this point biblical fundamentalism and the official position of the Roman Catholic church with its defined orthodoxy and papal claims to infallibility are remarkably similar, if not in form at least in intention. Both are, in my opinion, remarkably wrong and remarkably destructive to Christian truth and to a Christian future. But who is Christ for us? How would we tell the Christ story if Jesus had been a reality of this contemporary period of human history? Surely it would not be in terms of the anthropomorphism of the first century. We do not envision God as a superhuman man who dwells beyond the sky. To talk of a Father God who has a divine-human son by a virgin woman is a mythology that our generation would never have created. and obviously, could not use. To speak of a Father God so enraged by human evil that he requires propitiation for our sins that we cannot pay and thus demands the death of the divine human son as a guilt offering is a ludicrous idea to our century. The sacrificial concept that focuses on the saving blood of Jesus that somehow washes me clean, so popular in evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is by and large repugnant to us today. This understanding of the divine-human relationship violates both our understanding of God and our knowledge of human life. To see human life as fallen from a pristine and good creation necessitating a divine rescue by the God-man is not to understand the most elementary aspect of our evolutionary history. To view human life as depraved or victimized by original sin is to literalize a premodern anthropology and premodern psychology. Yet historic Christianity has traditionally been understood in terms of these categories. Baptism to wash way the stain of Adam's sin in the newborn child is just one practice that emerges out of that understanding. To frighten parents into baptism by suggesting that their unbaptized infants might be damned to an eternity apart from God is insulting primarily to God. Who among us could worship such a deity? To traffic in guilt as the church has done, to take the beauty and life-giving quality of sexual love and distort it with layer after layer of sexual guilt is simply no longer defensible, if it ever was. Surely the experience of the Christ in this moment of history would not result in a use of these words and concepts to give rational form to the reality of that experience. If we saw an epileptic person being healed, we would not assume that the demons had gone out of the victim. If we saw a herd of swine stampeding to their deaths in a lake, we would not interpret it as the result of demonic spirits having entered the herd. If we wanted to assert that human life could not have produced the presence of God that is met in Jesus, we would not do so by telling a virgin birth story. We do not believe, as the first century seemed to believe, that the entire genetic makeup of the new life was carried in the spermatozoon of the male. A virgin birth story that deletes the male would not result for us in the divine human life of Jesus. If we wanted to assert that in Jesus all barriers, including the barrier of death, have been set aside, we would not do so by turning the parable of Lazarus and Dives, recorded only in Luke, into a historic account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, as the Fourth Gospel seems to do. In Luke's parable the narrative concludes as Abraham denies the rich man's request that Lazarus return from the dead to warn his brothers. "If they do not hear Moses and the prophets," says Abraham, "neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead" (Luke 16:20ff). that is exactly what happened, argued the Fourth Gospel. Lazarus was called back into life and still no one believed. Indeed, the raising of Lazarus resulted, according to this Gospel, in the crucifixion itself (John 11:1ff). We could not retell the story of God providing manna in the wilderness by suggesting that the divine nature of Jesus allowed him to expand loaves and fish in a supernatural way, as the stories of Jesus feeding the multitude suggested. We could not talk of resurrection as if it were physical resuscitation, as some parts of the resurrection narratives suggest. We would not turn the proclamation "death cannot contain him" into empty-tomb stories of Easter, complete with angels, earthquakes, soldiers falling over the dead men, and temple veils that kept human beings separated from the holy of holies being ripped open. We would not transform the ecstatic Easter cry of "He has risen," "we have seen the Lord" into a series of ghostlike appearance stories that fight with each other as to whether or not this risen Christ is physical or spiritual. Did this risen Lord ask for and eat food and invite the inspection of his wounds-suggesting a real physicality that can chew, swallow, digest, and feel? Or did he appear and disappear at will and enter rooms where the doors and windows were locked and barred-behavior that would suggest a nonphysical spirit. We would never in our day of space travel and knowledge of the vastness of the universe try to assert that the God experienced in Jesus has been reunited with the God who was presumed to dwell just beyond the sky by telling the story of the cosmic ascension. We do not assume either the flatness of the earth or the centrality of this planet that the ascension story assumed. Our task is neither to dismiss these narratives as prescientific and therefore to be without truth, nor to seek to wrap our twentieth-century brains around a first-century cosmology. Rather, we probe the story, go beneath the words, and seek to enter the experience that produced the words. There is a consistency to the experience of God in every age. The inconsistency, indeed the fallacy, is in the words used to articulate the experience, for words are both limited and dated. Literalized words always distort experience, and if these words are frozen so firmly they cannot change with the times, then finally literal words will render inaccessible in another time the meaning they once conveyed. We today do not think in natural / supernatural categories. God is not for us a human parent figure. We do not see human life as created good and then as fallen into sin. Human life is evolving, not always in a straight line, but evolving nonetheless into higher and higher levels of consciousness. We do not need the divine rescuer who battles the demonic forces of a fallen world in the name of the creator God. We are not likely to turn the Christ story into the mythological tale that begins with a virgin birth and ends in the cosmic victory over death. None of these elements of our faith story is wrong, but all of them are sorely limited by the worldview of the first century. That worldview has passed away. It no longer lives. Unless the experience of our faith story can be separated from the words and concepts of a dead worldview, it will be a dead faith story. Those who literalize the ancient biblical text guarantee this fate to the very religious system they think they are fighting to save. When they try to impose their literalized version of the truth on the whole church, they violate the integrity of the gospel and the meaning of Scripture. They render the experience out of which our faith story rises to be nonsensical. they thus unwittingly become the enemies of Christ. But if Christ is to be real for us, we must find words through which that reality can be articulated. This is not to suggest that our words will endure forever. Like the words of every age, our words will in time prove to be limited by age, our ability to apprehend reality, and our time-orientated language. The German New Testament theologian Rudolf Bultmann, writing in the 1920's, was wrong, I believe, when he suggested the word demythologize as the tool for bringing Christian truth out of the past and into the present. Bultmann seemed to assume that the present is free of "mythology." This reflects, I believe, the arrogance of modernity. What we need to do is to demythologize in order that we might remythologize. We must seek the truth that lies beneath the mythology of the distant past so that we might experience that truth. But when we put that experience into words in our day, we will not escape the use of the subjective, inadequate words in our modern mythological understanding of reality, for we have no objective words. We will have succeeded only in remythologizing the truth of the Christ event. Our efforts will serve us but for a time. Our remythologizing process will capture truth no more eternally than did the creators of Scripture of the framers of creeds. Yet we must do this or we stand to lose forever what we Christians believe to be an ultimate truth-namely, that somehow in and through the person of Jesus of Nazareth the reality of God has become an experience in human history that is universally available.
The experience of Jesus was an experience of love. This love was a powerful life affirming reality. It was love that broke every human barrier and that swept over every human prejudice. It was love that would not be confined by the Jewish limits in which it was born. It embraced the Syro-Phoenician woman and the Samaritan. It was love that put human life before religious rules (The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath). It was love that transcended the religious definitions of what was thought to be clean and unclean. Not only gentiles but lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, and thieves were transformed with the power of that love. No barriers could be erected around that love of God that was seen in the life of Jesus. It was a terrifying, barrier-free love that rendered our religious security systems no longer operative. Such a love called for profound changes in the human psyche. Such love called for openness, for the death of prejudice, for the radical insecurity of a fully accessible humanity, for the end of any human isolation. Such love could not be tolerated, rather, it had to be eliminated. The cross was a necessity of human life that was unwilling to be opened this widely, and human life was, in the first century, quite unwilling to be made so vulnerable. Human life still is unwilling to be so vulnerable. Every assault on human or religious prejudice today elicits anew that incredible human anger of an insecure creature. We clutch our defining limitations to our breasts like sweet sicknesses from which we dare not be purged. For years we convinced ourselves of the subhuman status of black people, women, left-handed people, and homosexual people. We reacted to those persons with AIDS as our spiritual ancestors had reacted to the lepers. We built churches to house the righteous while relegating the sinners to the ranks of the rejected as our pharisaic forbears did so many years ago. We cannot, however, escape the power of the fact that Jesus means love-divine, penetrating, opening, life-giving, ecstatic love. Such love is the very essence of what we mean by God. God is love. Jesus is love. God was in Christ. This was the experience that sought to find verbal forms in such creedal concepts as the holy trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth. It is not the creedal words that are sacred but the reality of the experience that lies behind the words, that is where holiness is met. The God who is love cannot be approached in worship except through the experience of living out that unconditional quality of love. That is why the church must be broken open and freed of its noninclusive prejudices. That is why slavery segregation, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia tear at the very soul of the church. A church that calls itself the body of Christ cannot reject or oppress or define pejoratively one who is the recipient of the overwhelming love of God. To do so is to deny Christ. It is to play church. When that occurs, the marks of death are seen in that institution. Those marks are present when the refusal to upset the religious folk becomes a higher priority for the church than the search for truth or the demand for justice. Those marks are present when the church bends to accommodate the racists without hearing the cries of the rejected victims of racism. They are present when the church compromises its in order to accommodate those whose sexism refuses to allow women access to ecclesiastical positions of power wither hearing the pain in the generations of women who have been defined as auxiliary to the church. The marks of death are present when the church rejects lesbian and gay persons because they do not fit the narrow homophobic definition of "normal" humanity and do not hear the pain of the oppressed and rejected homosexual community. These are the signs that death awaits the Christ experience. When the love of God is contained inside human barriers it dies. It ceases to be demanding, searing, opening love of God. It has become instead the perfume of human respectability, sprinkled on the cesspools of human negativity. Perfume will never last into another generation. A contained, curtailed, domesticated, tamed love of God will never lead to the cross of Calvary. Jesus is the love of God that opens us and makes us vulnerable. The power of this Jesus can be met and known in every age. I have experienced this Christ when I've walked the edges of the ecclesiastical world and opened myself to the victims of the rejection of those who claim to be the church of God. On those edges Jesus is still present. He is powerful, alive, loving, probing, embracing. There is an eternal reality about the love of God that is present in the historic crucified life of Jesus of Nazareth. Behind the words of Scripture that love is seen. The experience of Jesus was also an experience of life, by which I mean whole
life. Jesus was alive. Jesus was present with those whom he engaged. There was, in the words of Paul Tillich, an
Behind the words, the parables, the stories of Jesus in Scripture, there is a life that is appealing, transcendent, open, full, and free. It is the portrait of a life that is in touch with a reality so powerful that is has escaped all human limits. It is a picture of life so deeply loved that it has expanded to the point where it presses against every human limitation. It is this life, said the experience of the first Christians, that tested the human barrier of finitude and broke it open. Death could not and cannot contain the divine life-giving love. That was the reality behind the resurrection narratives. It does not reduce the resurrection to subjectivity, as the literalists claim; it rather invites us into the timeless Christ experience where resurrection is not so much an event of history as it is an experience of transcendence, ever available to those whose ability to live reflects the presence of the love that is God. Jesus was alive, totally alive, and to that vibrant, vital life God was experienced. This God was perceived in Scripture and creed as a human form who lived just beyond the sky, who manipulated life by entering it and by withdrawing from it. That limited view has faded. This God is now perceived as the presence of life that animates the universe, that reaches self consciousness in Homo Sapiens, and that breaks open to the essence of transcendence in Jesus of Nazareth. In the fullness of this life we enter the same experience of God that marked the life of Jesus. We worship this God and acknowledge the saving power of this Jesus when we dare to live openly, fully completely-affirming the life of God that is within us, the God whom Paul asserted was in Christ is also in those of us who acknowledge that presence with a commitment to live. Finally, the experience of Jesus was an experience of Being. It was the Greek world that self-consciously used the philosophical concepts of ontology, or being, to talk about God. Yet its echoes are found, as we have noted, in the ancient Hebraic name of God, recorded in the book of Exodus. YHWH was a word that derived its meaning and its power from the verb "to be." God and being somehow were bound up together in every human language and in every religious system. When Paul Tillich used the phrase "the ground of all Being" as his favorite name for God, he was in fact reflecting the religious sensitivities of the ages. If God is the Ground of Being, how does that which is relate to the ground of all? This is the ultimate religious question. How does one worship the God who is Being? What was the experience that led the people of the first century to see Jesus as a human and yet complete expression of the Being of God? Once more we need to travel behind and beneath the words of both Scripture and creeds and to seek entry into the experience that created the words contained in both. Words are always but a human vehicle through which ultimate meaning seeks to find expression. The words cannot be identified with the ultimate meaning. How did Jesus reflect this ground of being, which caused people to see in this life the very Being of God? The biblical record reveals a Jesus who had the courage to be himself. It is the portrait of one who did not need flattery. He could endure the ultimate abuse of having his life taken from him, but his "being" remained intact. his being did not seem to waver, regardless of the external circumstances. Somehow in a unique way Jesus was what God created him to be. In Jesus the full meaning of creation seemed to break forth. He both lived out the meaning of the Ground of Being in his own life and through his love gave to others the capacity to enter their own being at deeper and deeper levels. He still does this, for the Christpower we meet in Jesus is an eternal presence of the Holy God. To be a Christian, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his letters from prison, is not to be religious-it is just "to be." Religion is but one more mask that insecure people put on to cover their sense of personal inadequacy. The call to Christ is an eternal call to the affirmation of that which is. In the words of the popular commercial, it is a call to be all that one can be. To have the courage to be oneself, to claim the ability to define oneself, to live one's life in freedom and with power is the essence of the human experience. "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly," said the Christ of the Fourth Gospel (John 10:10). True Christianity ultimately issues in a deeper humanism. That is why any attitude that kills the being of another person is an affront to the meaning of Christ. To be a humanist is to affirm the sacredness of life. Jesus touched the depth of being, and the Christ experience is nothing less than our call to be who we are, inside the love of God. I worship this Jesus when I claim my own being and live it out courageously and in the process call others to have the courage to be themselves. It is scary to be a follower of Jesus. It even elicits great anger form the religious establishment. It loosens the power of religious institutions to control behavior. It opens one to the immensity of human life, to new dimensions of consciousness and transcendence. To follow Jesus is to be called to walk into the very being of God. Who is Christ for our day? I cannot answer this question for everyone. No one can do that. I can only bear witness to what I believe the Christ event is. Jesus is the point in the human enterprise where, for me, the divine and the human flow together perfectly, revealing God as the Source of love, the Source of life, and the Ground of Being. Jesus is human being where the essence of the divine life breaks forth with a peculiar intensity. Jesus reveals God in loving totally, living fully, and being all that he can be. I worship the God I meet in Jesus by risking love, by daring to live, and by having the courage to be myself-my best, deepest, and holiest self. As I walk to the edges of life and bump into the meaning of transcendence, I find God over, under, around, and through all that I know and all that I am. So the call of Christ to me is an eternal call to love, to live, and to be. It is an invitation to work for those things that create life and to oppose those people, those attitudes, and those systems that distort life. It is to become aware of the freeing, exhilarating, consciousness raising experience of the Holy God. That God calls me into every-new possibilities. I have never met God by retreating form life. I seem to meet God only when I enter deeply into life. That is the God that I confront when I look deeply at Jesus of Nazareth. When I enter this experience, I turn to the words of Scripture and to the phrases of the creeds and I no longer find the sterile choice between literalism and nothing. I find rather an expression in dated words and time warped symbols of the same reality that I am in touch with today at the edges of my human limits and in the dawning moments of a transcendent awareness. Then suddenly the ancient biblical story becomes my story, and its ancient symbols interpret my life. I know then that I have touched divinity, a divinity that is the same yesterday, today, and forever I breathe that divinity in and I worship its source and I commit myself anew to live "in Christ," as Paul would say, by living, loving, and being, as one who has been transformed by the infinite and eternal presence of God. Christianity becomes for me not an empty and outdated set of scriptural and creedal concepts but a new adventure in living as I walk side by side with the Christians of the ages who, with me, have journeyed into the meaning of God. I will speak of Christ as I have experienced Christ, and thus I will add to the words of the ongoing story. My words will not last any more than I will last, but they will form a link or, even better perhaps, a chapter in an eternal narrative. Beneath my words is an eternal truth. I will express that truth for my time. Those who come after me will have to express that truth for their time. All of us will be glad that men and women in every age gave rational form to their experience with Christ so that we can be enriched and inspired by the witness of the ages that includes both Scripture and creeds. Enriched and inspired becomes our experience and our reality when the Scriptures are opened in this way. Bound and straitened by the words of yesterday becomes our terror when the Scriptures are literalized. The former gives life and keeps the tradition alive. The latter gives death and guarantees a religious idolatry that will finally be overthrown. As the words of the Book of Joshua suggested long ago, there is set before us today life and death. In the name of the living Christ, I choose life. |
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Jesus. It also needs to be clearly stated that, despite the homophobic caterwauling
that goes on inside the The biblical portrait drawn of Jesus even calls and empowers his followers to walk beyond our religious differences - differences which we have consistently and falsely invested something of the ultimacy of God. Beyond these differences we are challenged to cease thinking of people as ritualistically clean or unclean, baptized or unbaptized, right or wrong, orthodox or heterodox, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. Jesus' life is portrayed as reaching out again and again to those whom his own religious system rejected. He embraced the lepers whose rotting flesh was condemned as untouchable by his religious tradition. He allowed the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual discharge who, by the religious laws of this tradition, was declared to be both corrupting and unclean. He se aside the Sabbath-day regimen when it conflicted with human need. He called Levi Matthew, a Jew who worked for the Romans as a tax-collector and was therefore unclean according to Jewish ritual law, to be one of his intimate Twelve. He refused to condemn the woman taken in adultery, as the Torah dictated. All people seek the path of wholeness into a new humanity. That was the message of Jesus. To empower people to enter into and to grasp that wholeness and to become that new humanity was his apparent purpose. Jesus understood, as all of us must sooner of later, that God cannot be bound by the limits of our religious systems. When we claim an ultimate truth for our version of God, our revelation, our church, our source of authority, or even our ecclesiastical leaders, we have in fact built another defensive wall around our insecurity. The God beyond theism cannot be bound by human creeds. That realization will enable us to walk into an ecumenical future that will be so dramatically different as to be breathtaking. We will be enable to see the Ground of Being in Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, and Krishna, as well as Jesus. This will not be a new version of Baha'i, as noble as that attempt to get beyond religious boundaries is. It will rather be a step beyond every religious symbol. Jesus will become the doorway into the holy for those of us who have been privileged to know his name, but there will be other doorways for other people. The God who is the Ground of Being cannot be bound, not even by our religious claims. Once that is understood, then it becomes apparent that none of us should denigrate the doorways through which others journey in their quest to enter the holy God. Jesus was and is a God-presence through whom we enter the realm of the divine, a realm that transcends every religious boundary. Jesus understood that the call of every human being is not just to survive but to journey into both the fullness of one's own humanity and into the mystery of God. What most of us do not seem to embrace is that these two journeys are simultaneous, even identical journeys. When, I wonder, will we learn that it is not the road we individually travel, but the destination we seek, that is crucial? To suggest otherwise is to continue to play outdated religious games. So look with me for just a moment at this Jesus who stands at the center of my faith-tradition. But look with eyes no longer blinded by the theistic patterns of the past - and glimpse a new vision, beyond the theistic patterns we once used to describe him but not beyond a new understanding of divinity. This human Jesus seems to possess his life so totally that he can give it away without fear. The freedom that marks this man becomes so frightening to those who are not free - that they rise up in anger to destroy the life-giver. The cross, to me, stands for this destruction, which still goes on in religious disputes. The cross does not represent a sacrifice required by a blood-seeking deity; it rather reveals the ultimate portrait of the threatening power of love that is present in the life of this victim. Even when Jesus walked what later came to be called "the way of the cross," and even when the threat of death became the reality of death, still the bearer of the gift of life discovered that nothing could finally destroy the life he possessed. As this Jesus succumbed to the power of those who could not abide his call to enter "the new being," to grasp a new and radical sense of freedom, he still was able to give his life away. The gospel picture drawn of Jesus portrays him as giving life to others even as he died. Life cannot be given away until life has been possessed. Yet when life is given away freely and totally, the one who does the giving is not diminished. Indeed, the giving, as depicted in the portrait of Jesus, actually resulted in the explosion of a new and radically different humanity in a world that was still tied to the survival mentality of our evolutionary past. We perceive something new in this Jesus-story, something profoundly moving. As this power touches us, creating new life in us, we are driven to say, "God was in that life," and we stare at this source, this revelation, this God-presence, this Jesus, with a kind of joy and wonder. Jesus thus first reveals the source of life, and then he empowers us to enter it. Next we observe that there is something expansive and creative about the presence of the boundary-breaking love that we meet in the life of Jesus. When we human beings know love, we seem to grow. Love is present in embryonic forms in all aspects of life of their young, when the tongue of the adult feline creature washes the fur of the kitten, when the bird flies forth to gather food for the helpless occupants of the nest, or when two turtledoves couple in lifelong union. But this kind of life-giving love can be entered self-consciously, chosen freely, and appropriated fully. The absence of love in the infancy of the human offspring is as lethal as the presence of a fatal disease. the presence of love is the source of both life and growth. Love is manifested in the human willingness to venture beyond the boundaries of safety, to risk losing ourselves, and even in the desire to explore the crevices of the unknown. Love creatures stability, but not stagnation. Love calls us into being; it expands our lives as it flows through us. If love is ever blocked, it dies. Love has to be shared, or it ceases to be love. Love binds us into larger and larger communities. Love frees us from the pejorative definitions that result in exclusion. Love transcends barriers, unites, and calls. Love enhances life. So when a human being appears in history with a greater ability to love than we have ever knowingly witnessed before, when this life calls us into a new human unity and refused to be bound by the rules that rise out of our incompleteness and our fear, then we inevitable look at that life with awe, perhaps even with worship. Love is a presence and power that calls us out tribal fears for it embraces Jew and Gentile, and out of prejudice spawning fears for it embraces whoever is our Samaritan. Love has no chosen people, for that implies that some are unchosen. Love bears no malice, weeks no revenge, guards no doorway. A life defined by love will not seek to protect itself or to justify itself. It will be content simply to be itself and to give itself away with abandon. If denied, love embraces the denier. If betrayed, love embraces the betrayer. If forsaken, love embraces the forsaker. If tortured, love embraces the torturer. If crucified, love embraces the killers. Love never judges. Love simply announces that neither the person you are nor the deeds you have done have erected a barrier which the power of this invincible presence cannot overcome. If life is holy and if love creates and enhances life, then love is also holy. So I am led to suggest that love and God cannot be separated and that to share love is nothing less than sharing God. For one to abide in love is to abide in God, for one to give love away is to give God away. That is why when one sees a life that loves wastefully, it is said of that person, "God was in that life." That is part of what a nontheistic but still God-centered Jesus means to me. Love touches something external. When we enter love, we find ourselves caught up in its power. Love lifts us beyond our quests for survival. Love enables us to transcend out limits. Love frees us to give ourselves away. What human life needs is not a divine rescue. What we need is rather a life so open, so free, so whole, and so loving that when we experience that life, we are called into the reality of love. We are opened to the source of love and enter the empowering presence of love. Such a life then becomes our doorway into the infinite and inexhaustible power of love. I call that love God. I see it in Jesus of Nazareth, and I find myself called into a new being, a boundary free humanity, and made whole in its presence. So God was in Christ. I way, Jesus thus reveals the source of love, and then he calls us to enter it. Next, I am forced to recognize that life and love are both manifestations of something that I can only call by that Tillichian word, being. Neither life not love exists apart from being. Being is a strange concept to grasp, so our vocabulary struggles. We talk about a person who has "presence." We cannot define that concept precisely, but we know that it is the opposite of "absence" yet we never say that a person has "absence." We respond positively to the recruiting advertisement of the United States Army because it touches something deep within us "Be all that you can be. Join the Army." We have immortalized Shakespeare's phrase in which Hamlet conducts his inner debate: "To be or not to be." Being is a quality we recognize when we experience it. We speak about the need for political figures to "define themselves," to project their essential being. When one possesses his or her "being," that person has freedom. A person who had "the courage to be" is neither enhanced by praise nor diminished by criticism. Being is not something one does. Being is something one is. So when the human life that we call Jesus enters history - one who appears to possess Being itself - that person is first thought of as memorable. That person, we say, possesses something of great power. When the being of that person is so real that he enhances the being of those around him, then that person is seen as an enabler of life, a source of being for others. Being is always beyond the person who manifests it. It does not originate in any of us, it simply flows through us. It is a gift that comes from beyond ourselves; it is not our possession. Like life, it is found in all the created order. We are rooted in it, grounded in it, recipients of it, bearers of it to other. It relates us beyond ourselves to that which philosophers and theologians through the ages have called the Ground of Being. Following Tillich's lead I sue that phrase as another name for God, a God thought of not as a person, but as the source of personhood, the God defined in the book of Acts, in question attributed to the apostle Paul, as that presence or power in which "we live and move, and have our being." (17:28). Just as I have come to see life and love in Jesus of Nazareth, so now I also see this being in him. I see it when the crowds shouted their hosannas an threw down leafy branches to welcome him to Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-11). there was enormous adulation in that scene; and human praise is a seductive power, a sweet narcotic, almost irresistible to most human beings, including most public figures. But Jesus knew himself. Jesus possessed his being so deeply that his head was not turned and his being was not compromised, even by the praise of the people I also see this being in Jesus of Nazareth when he was the victim of crucifixion. When people are unfairly treated, when their lives are being taken away form them brutally and unjustly, the need to survive almost always overwhelms everything else. The typical human response in those circumstances is to pleaded, to beg, to fight, to weep, to whine, or to curse - whichever response seems to offer some chance of survival. But look once again as the picture of Jesus that greets us in the gospel narratives. There is no clinging to life in that portrait. Instead, we are presented with one whose being is so deeply affirmed that he can give it away freely. He can submit to his outrageous fortune. He can expend his energy in the act of affirming the being of others. To those who perpetrated the crime upon this Jesus, he is said to have given the gift of forgiveness (Luke 23:24). To those who hared his fate, he is said to have given the fit of assurance (Luke 23:39-43). To those who grieved for themselves at his loss, he is said to have given the gift of comfort (Luke 23:28-31). To his enemies, those who rejoiced in his demise, he is said to have given the gift not of resistance, but of quite resignation. (Luke 23:46). Does it matter whether these are literally accurate photographs of exactly what occurred on those days between what we later named Palm Sunday and Good Friday? I do not think so. Indeed, I argued in an earlier book that even the story of Jesus' passion from Palm Sunday to the cross was not literal history, but a midrashic attempt to narrate the drama of Jesus' crucifixion against the background of such texts in Zechariah 9-14, Psalm 22, and Isaiah 53. These holy week stories are interpretive history and liturgical retelling, not eyewitness memories. The gospel writers are painting a portrait, not using a camera. They are seeking to capture in their interpretive stories the essence of the being of this Jesus. The being in Jesus called those around him into a new and deeper selfhood. Those who denied him were called into leadership. Cowards who forsook him and fled were called into heroism. Jews, trapped in their clannishness, were called into inclusiveness. Women were called into full humanity and full discipleship. Fearful people were called into courageous living. Outcasts were called into human dignity. Jesus thus reveals the Ground of Being, and then he calls us to enter it. I come, therefore, to a new way to speak of this Christ. Please read carefully and attend closely. Religious words are often misunderstood, because they elicit powerful emotions. I want to walk a fine line of theological distinction - perhaps even more important, a fine line of perception and truth. It is proper to identify the human Jesus with the Ground of Being? No. That is not the way I would say it. But one does, I believe, perceive the Ground of Being through this Jesus. Can Jesus be called the Source of Life? No. I would never make that identification either. But one does, I believe, touch the very depths of life through this Jesus. Is Jesus the ultimate source of Love? No. I cannot make that claim. But one does, I believe, experience the unconditional quality of love though him. Is the medium, then, the message? No. That, I believe, is to assert more than we should. But the medium is the channel through which the message is received. Jesus is the word of God, not God. That is the argument of the Fourth Gospel's writer, thought to be the evangelist who most powerfully makes the divine claim for Jesus. But experientially, please let it be noted, there is no essential difference between God and God's word, or between the Ground of Being and Jesus' being, the Source of Love and Jesus' love, the Source of Life and Jesus' life. So in the ecstasy of the Christ experience, in the transformation and expansion of our humanity, in the moment when love calls us beyond every barrier that has been designed to protect and therefore to thwart our humanity, we first listen to the question posed so long ago, "Who do you say I am?" Then we respond with new understanding even using the words of antiquity: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (Matt. 16:18). Then we can assert with the Fourth Gospel that those of us who have seen Jesus have also seen God (John 7:9). Finally we can assert that the one we call God, defined theistically in ages past and understood in our patriarchal tradition and prejudices as the creating Father, and the ultimate meaning found in this Jesus are one and the same reality. So we can listen anew as Jesus is heard to say, "I and the Father are One" (John 10:30). May I suggest that this conclusion, if properly understood, is powerfully orthodox in its essence through it is a long way from the old mythology. It no longer defines God as an external supernatural being who was incarnated into the human Jesus through a miraculous birth. It no longer portrays Jesus as one who did extraordinary things that only God was thought able to do, including walking physically out of his tomb alive three days after death and defying gravity to return to his celestial home in a cosmic ascension after his work was complete. We can set aside once and for all this dying theistic framework without having to abandon the experience that created it. Our hope for reformation and new life lies in that simple distinction. God is the Source of Life who is worshiped when we live fully. God is the Source of Love who is worshiped when we love wastefully. God is the Ground of Being who is worshiped when we have the courage to be. Jesus is a God-presence, a doorway, an open channel. The fullness of his life reveals the Source of life, the wastefulness of his love reveals the Source of Love, and the being of his life reveals the Ground of All Being. That is why Jesus continues to stand at the heart of my religious life. That is also why I continue to call him "my Lord" and to call myself a Christian. But I am a Christian who can no longer live inside the exclusive claims of my traditional theistic past. Let me stretch the boundaries once more. To the extent that the Buddha, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Krishna, Mohammed, Confucius, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, Hildengard of Bingen, Rosa Parks, Florence Nightingale, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Buber, Thich Nhat Hahn, Dag Hammarskjold, or any other holy person brings life, love, and being to another, then to that degree that person is to me the word of God incarnate. No fence can be placed around the Being of God. The suggestion that Jesus is of a different kind of substance and therefore different from every other human being in kind instead of in degree will ultimately have to be abandoned. Then the realization will surely begin to dawn that to perceive Jesus as different form others only in degree is to open all people to the divine potential found in the Christ figure. It is to invite all people to step into the power of living fully, loving wastefully, and having the courage to be all that any one of can be - a self whole, free, real, and expanding, a participant in a humanity without boundaries. Then religious people will have a way, even a means to honor the holy lives in every tradition, for in those lives life is seen, love is experienced, and being is enhanced. Therefore, the presence of God as the source of life, the source of love, and the ground of being can be seen, noted, and honored in them, though we will have to expand that symbol beyond the limits that we now recognized in our own religious tradition. We will then learn to welcome and even to celebrate those differences without allowing them to become ultimate or seeing them as boundaries. Jesus will always be for me the standard by which I measure the God-presence of any other. I can view him in no other way. In that sense, and in that sense only, he remains for me the way, the truth, and the life, the doorway through which I enter the holiness of God. The God I worship will be, however, available from many doorways. For me to claim otherwise is to remain a victim to theism. The God who is life, love, and being itself cannot be bounded by the limits of my tradition. God is beyond Jesus, but Jesus participated in the Being of God, and Jesus is my way into God. These are the claims that will be part of the Christianity of tomorrow. I am hopeful that such a Christianity can be born and that with it an invitation can be offered to all people to step into their own humanity so deeply that they will find it a doorway into God. For that is what the church of the future must proclaim if it wants to live and, I believe, if it wants to be true to the God me in the person of Jesus. |
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