Bishop Spong's Articles September 2009

My struggle began with the recognition that the primary titles that we Christians have given to Jesus all carry with them a particular definition of what it means to be human. To call Jesus "savior" implies that human life needs to be saved from something. The same is true about the titles "rescuer," "redeemer" and "reconciler." This negative definition of humanity is why the traditional telling of the Jesus story focuses on Jesus' suffering, which was the price that Jesus had to pay for our salvation. The traditional Protestant mantra, "Jesus died for my sins," and the Catholic definition of the Eucharist as "the sacrifice of the Mass," both reinforce the assumption of human depravity that is a major theme filling Christian theology and history.

These distorting images began in a mythology that assumed that human life was a special creation, made in the image of God, and suggesting that human life originally shared in the perfection of God's finished creation. Falling from that status into what came to be called "original sin," however, quickly became the major focus of Christian theology. Starting with Paul, it has been the "fall" and its resulting distortion of God's creation that has been the bedrock of the way we have told the Jesus story. It was our sinful status that mandated God's divine rescue operation "for us and for our salvation." The heart of Christian theology, including such core doctrines as the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the Atonement and even the concept of God as a Holy Trinity, were all attempts to spell out the Jesus story in terms of this definition of what it means to be sinful. Human beings were those creatures who in an act of disobedience had destroyed the beauty of God's origi nal creation and had plunged the whole world into sin. Charles Darwin's understanding of human origins ran directly counter to these assumptions. If Darwin was correct then this whole theological system, which featured the account of Jesus' sacrificial death to save us from our sins, was doomed to become inoperative.

If human life, as Darwin suggested and as modern science keeps verifying, is the product of millions of years of evolutionary history, then none of these theological formulas remain valid. Without an original, perfect and complete creation, there could never have been a fall from perfection, not even metaphorically. Original sin has thus got to go. Without that fall from perfection there was no need for God's rescue and no reason for Jesus to come to our aid. The idea of God as the punishing parent organizes religious life on the basis of the childlike and primitive motifs of reward and punishment. The cross understood as the place where Jesus paid our debt to this vengeful God becomes not just nonsensical, but it also serves to twist human life with guilt in order to make this system of thought believable. That is why Christian worship seems to require the constant denigration of human life. Christian liturgies constantly beg God "to have mercy." Our hymns sing of God' s amazing grace, but the only reason God's grace is amazing is that it "saved a wretch like me." This theology assumes that God is an external being, living somewhere above the sky, whose chief occupations are two: first to keep the record books up to date on our behavior, thus serving as the basis on which we will be judged; and second to be ready to come to our aid in miraculous ways either to establish the divine order or in answer to our prayers. Darwin was only one part of the explosion of knowledge that rendered these ideas not only irrelevant, but unbelievable. Copernicus and Galileo had destroyed God's dwelling place above the sky by introducing us to the vastness of space, suddenly but not coincidentally rendering this God homeless. Then Isaac Newton discovered the mathematically precise and immutable laws by which the universe is governed, leaving little room in it for either miracle or magic, which rendered the miracle-working deity unemployed. One well-known En glish theologian, when he finally embraced these realities in the early 1980's, abandoned his Christian faith, pronouncing himself "a non-aggressive atheist." When asked why he was no longer a believer, he replied quite simply "because God no longer had any work to do."

It was Darwin, however, who applied the coup de grâce both to religion and to the belief in life after death, at least as traditional Christianity had proclaimed these things. To Darwin human beings were merely a work in progress. Far from being created perfect we had evolved into our present form like every other creature by "natural selection" over more than three billion years. Salvation built on the three premises of a perfect creation, a fall into sin and a rescue from above that was achieved on the cross became an exercise in fantasyland. Indeed the story of the sacrificial death of Jesus by crucifixion began to look bizarre. This theology made God appear to be a deity who required a blood offering and a human sacrifice in order to forgive. Jesus began to look like a perpetual victim, perhaps even a masochistic person who willingly endured, even welcomed, suffering and death on the cross. Human beings looked like guilt-ridden creatures whose sinfulness made th e death of Jesus necessary. Finally, Christianity became a religion of guilt, which was encouraged liturgically. There was nothing about this scenario that could be called good news or "gospel," yet it persisted for centuries. These distortions in the Jesus message began to wobble under the impact of Galileo and Newton, but it was Darwin who made it clear that the Christian world could no longer go on pretending that nothing had changed. The foundations on which the Christian message had been erected had collapsed.

When I embraced what this meant existentially I came to the conclusion that if Christianity was to have a future, then I must find a new point of entry and a new way to hear and to believe the Jesus story. That was the challenge I had to meet before I could ever address the possibility of life after death. I began that reconstruction task in my book Jesus for the Non-Religious and now I had to complete this task by spelling out a new way to view eternal life.

I was delighted to discover that the greatest of the New Testament scholars in the 20th century, Rudolf Bultmann, regularly spoke of Jesus not as the "savior," but as the "revealer." That shift was not subtle. Bultmann was suggesting the Jesus "revealed" a new dimension of what it means to be human and in the process opened a new window into what it is to experience the presence of God. Suddenly I had found a whole new way to look at what divinity is in human life. Underneath the focus on sacrifice revealed in the gospels I began to view Jesus as one who was so deeply and fully human that whatever it is that we experience God to be could be seen in him and experienced through him. A new way to view the cross next began to come into view. The cross was not a sacrifice to placate an angry God, but a living portrait of a human life that was no longer controlled by the innate drive to survive. Here was a life free to give itself away, a life with no need to build itself up at an other's expense. This was a new dimension of what it means to be human, what it means to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that life was meant to be. When I got beneath the level of later explanation, which dominates the gospel narratives, and began to ask what was the Jesus experience that compelled his followers to stretch the words available to them to an infinite degree to enable those words to be big enough to capture their Jesus experience, I heard them saying we have met and encountered in the life of this Jesus everything that we mean by the word "God." It was that word "inflation" that gives us virgin births, wandering stars, miracles, parables, physical resuscitations and ascensions into heaven. They were trying to say that in his humanity, which seemed to break all human barriers, they had found a doorway into the meaning of transcendence, the reality of God. The way into divinity became for me the pathway of becoming fully human. It was to affirm th at we are still evolving into we know not what. Jesus was a new dimension of life for which we may all be headed.

So I had to begin my quest for life after death by going into the depths of the mystery of life itself. Just as we now know that life evolved out of lifeless matter, that consciousness emerged out of life and finally that self-conscious life has emerged out of mere consciousness, so perhaps the day is now arriving when we will experience the possibility of entering a universal consciousness that is beginning to emerge out of self-consciousness. We are thus part of the oneness of life, bound together by a common DNA and that oneness makes us part of God. It also suggests that we are linked to eternity since God is found at the depth of the human.

These words can only scratch the surface of the thought I try to develop in my book on eternal life, but they do presage the path I walk. Charles Darwin, who for me made a new Christianity necessary, turns out to offer the clue to that new direction. This vision now stands before me. I invite you to join me in entering it.

Is there any purpose in staying a member of a traditional Christian Church if you no longer believe the things the church regards as its core beliefs? Why have you stayed with your church, given your criticisms of many of the basic aspects of Christianity?

Dear Karen,

Before answering that question, we need to identify what it is you are calling "core beliefs" or the "basic aspects of Christianity." I believe that what most people call orthodoxy in religious beliefs is little more than the imposed authority of some part of the Christian faith. The claim to be orthodox in one's belief is not to acknowledge a point of view that is true, but only the point of view that has prevailed. My studies lead me to believe that there never was a single consistent set of Christian beliefs. There were many Christianities from the dawn of Christianity itself. Various groups have tried to define true Christianity, but when they do they almost always define their own institutional, authoritarian system.

Some people, for example, assert that the historic creeds defined primitive Christianity. The Apostles' Creed, however, began as a series of baptismal formulas in local churches in the third century and these formulas differed widely until they evolved into a single form somewhere between 250 and 290 CE. I doubt if the actual apostles would have recognized much of it.

The Nicene Creed, adopted at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, was designed primarily to close the loopholes in the Apostles' Creed. The Athanasian Creed, a product of the late fourth century, was designed to close loopholes in the Nicene Creed. The earliest creed of the Church was only three words, Jesus is Messiah. The word "messiah" meant a variety of things to the Jews, so even the three-word creed had wide flexibility.

Others assert that believing in the Virgin Birth is a "core doctrine" of Christianity, but scholars can now demonstrate quite conclusively that both Paul and Mark seem never to have heard of it; and John, who was among the last writers in the New Testament, appears to have specifically rejected it since he refers to Jesus on two occasions as the "son of Joseph."

Still others suggest that the physical resurrection of Jesus is the essential core belief of Christianity, but I think I can demonstrate that Paul did not believe the resurrection was physical, and neither did Mark. Matthew is ambivalent. It is Luke and John, the last two gospels to be written, that interpret the resurrection as a physical resuscitation of a deceased body. So determining what the "core beliefs" of Christianity are is not as easy as people seem to think.

Some, usually in evangelical or in the conservative Catholic traditions, argue that doctrines like the Incarnation, the Atonement and the Trinity set the boundaries around essential Christianity, but once again these doctrines were not fully developed until the third and fourth centuries and it would be difficult to demonstrate that either Paul or Mark were Trinitarians.

My point is that Christianity has always been a movement and that most churches have simply frozen Christianity at fairly primitive levels. It is not to oppose basic Christianity that is the agenda of Christian scholars; it is to seek truth through the Christian story or through the Christian lens. That is what keeps me active in church life. Christianity is not static or doctrinal. It is a pathway we walk into the mystery of God. I grant that it is easier to walk the Christ path in some churches than in others, but true Christianity is always evolving into what it can be; its purpose is not to protect what it has been. So I would suggest that for you to see your role in your church to be that of a change agent, you are in fact being a true worshiper of Christ.

I hope this helps. I think institutional Christianity needs people like you and me in it.

In order to set this discussion into a context of history, recall that the primary theme in America's 2008 presidential campaign was "change." Mr. Obama not only ran on that theme, but he also embodied it. He was an African-American candidate. Never before in the history of the world has a nation chosen as its highest leader a member of a racial minority that had once been enslaved and then segregated by the majority. This was an amazing accomplishment. One obvious sign of that election was that racism, so deep in our national character, was now in a steep decline. If that change was not significant enough, this 47-year-old Illinois Senator represented a new, post-baby-boomer generation. The torch of leadership that had moved from the World War II generation to the Vietnam generation with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and in 1996 had now passed rather swiftly beyond Vietnam to a generation skeptical of all wars of aggression and especially the failed wars of Ir aq and Afghanistan. Mr. Obama further epitomized change in his outspoken defense of equality for women in all areas of life and in his clear opposition to any law or practice that calls into question the full rights of America's gay and lesbian population. His actions and subsequent appointments made these convictions clear and operative. In this election our nation had voted by large majorities to surge forward to embrace a new world. Such a surge, however, inevitably carries many people whose ability to adapt to change is limited into the backwaters of debilitating fear and gives birth to the rhetoric of paranoia that we are now seeing.

Prior to this election much of this latent and irrational anger in our body politic had been focused on homophobia, the popular wedge issue during the years of George W. Bush's administration. That prejudice had, however, run its course and had been largely relegated to the uninformed and increasingly irrelevant religious voices that typically represent the past. There was Pope Benedict XVI, well into his 80s, articulating a long since abandoned theory that homosexuality was an abnormality, a sickness or at least a deviation from the norm that should be changed if possible and repressed if not. There was evangelist Pat Robertson, also an octogenarian, who loses credibility on issue after issue by quoting a literal Bible and by suggesting that God will send hurricanes to punish gay-friendly communities. Finally, there was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, younger but still dated, trying to preserve the last vestige of the British Empire, known as the Anglican Communion, by sacrificing women, gay people and modern knowledge on the altar of Christian unity. These voices of yesterday have no real credibility except among those who inhabit America's religious ghettoes and among the populations of the third world that have not yet achieved access to the modern world. Few people today buy yesterday's rhetoric that "the institution of marriage is being undermined by gay lobbyists" or that "acceptance of homosexuality will lead to generalized moral degeneracy." The day of playing the "homosexual card" to create a winning political strategy has clearly passed. All of the movement is now in the other direction. Vermont has changed civil unions to equal marriage for gay and lesbian couples. Iowa has enacted laws making gay marriage legal. The national assemblies of both the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America have passed resolutions by large majorities opening the process of ordination of deacons, priests and bishops to qualified candidates irrespective of their sexual orientation and asserting that those who live in faithful, monogamous homosexual partnerships are completely acceptable for election and confirmation in any position the church has to offer. These two church bodies are also preparing liturgies suitable for gay marriages to be ready soon.

If one looks at the history of fear and paranoia in the body politic of this nation, it is clear that homosexual people simply replaced black people as "legitimate" targets for those ever-present wells of hostility that had nowhere to go when racism began to die. Now it has become equally inappropriate to treat gay and lesbians as outcasts, so the anger, fear and paranoia of those who cannot adjust to a new world had to find another target. The health care debate offered that in spades. Those afraid of change fastened onto this subject with stunning swiftness.

The depth of people's anxiety over change, augmented by the insecurity brought on by the economic turndown and fueled by the powerful industries making fortunes on health care now coalesced to create an epidemic of fear in the debate over the reform of our health care system. So sudden, so hostile and irrational was the depth of the public response that even the Obama administration appeared to be caught off guard. When they recovered their political moorings they revealed a lack of understanding by attacking the absurdities rather than addressing the substance of people's fears. Now, recognizing that mistake, they have attempted to recapture the initiative by having the president address a joint session of the Congress and to use that opportunity to refocus the debate. The work of reform will now have a chance to move on. To do so at least four principles will need to be faced and addressed.

1. There is at present enormous waste in American health care. We spend 17% of our gross national product on health care, which is 40% to 50% higher than in any other developed nation, almost all of which have nationalized health care programs. Despite this cost, a significant portion of our population is without heath insurance and even more stand to lose it if they become unemployed. There is no evidence to suggest that this greater cost makes better health care possible and indeed much evidence that it does not. In fragmented "private" systems, tests are regularly duplicated by doctors who do not have access to previous test results.
2. People need to recognize that they are already paying an enormous premium to cover those who have no insurance. If health care were universal, then the premiums for all people would go down. Hospitals across this land are required by law to care for those who come to them in need of help. This is so regardless of whether they have insurance or whether they are citizens, legal aliens or illegal aliens. The charge that the proposed health reform bill will cover health care for illegal aliens is nothing more than a smokescreen scare tactic. The real issue is that emergency room medical care, which the uninsured are now using, is the most expensive care possible and emergency room doctors have no ability to practice wellness or preventive care. It would thus be far cheaper to offer medical care to all people than to continue the present system. Health care reform must not be held hostage to xenophobic immigration fears.
3. Reality must be faced in that if no reform of our present system is forthcoming, health care as presently practiced in America will not be sustainable for anyone. Businesses will continue to cut back benefits and will look for reasons to dismiss those with pre-existing conditions that are costly. Health care will become a luxury for the rich and the stability of our entire way of life will be called into question.
4. Finally the time has come for this nation and our elected leaders to face the fact that universal health care is a moral issue. This administration must claim and defend this high ground if this debate is to be successfully won. Nothing dissipates fear as quickly as successful leadership. Nothing feeds fear more than weak and ineffective waffling. Failure at this moment would be a national catastrophe, an act of surrender to the most irrational voices in the land, the voices of fear, anger and paranoia in the face of change.

A note from history may be helpful: when Social Security was passed in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, a similar rhetoric of government takeover, socialism, and communism rang throughout the land. The media voice of that day was not Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity but a Catholic priest named Father Charles Coughlin, but the misinformation was the same. That administration took the heat, passed the program and the rest is history. I pass on to our President the words of a very wise man: "When you do an audacious thing, you do not then tremble at your own audacity."

Dear Shirley,

Since my whole belief system is deeply interrelated that is not an easy question to answer. I like the story told about an elderly bishop who remarked, "The older I get, the more deeply I believe but the less beliefs I have." That is exactly what I feel.

To answer your question more specifically, however, I believe it would be the way I think about God. God is no longer a person, a being or an entity to me. God is rather a presence in whom, to use words attributed to St. Paul, "I live and move and have my being." The "old man in the sky" was the first image to go, then the heavenly judge who kept record books and finally the father figure who desired praise and whose mercy I implored. The invasive, external heavenly deity faded and new images began to intrude themselves into my consciousness.

The interesting thing to me was that while these old images were fading, the God intensity within me remained steady and steadfast. Today I am a God-intoxicated person, but my definition of God is anything but crisp and well defined. I struggle to find words big enough to use when I try to talk about God. God to me is now more of an experience of transcendence, or perhaps the source of life, the source of love and the ground of all being. An experience to me is vastly different from a being who might be described externally. People hear these concepts sometimes as simply words. I hear them, however as a call to transcend all human limits and all human boundaries. God to me is a call to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that I can be.

A redefined Jesus still stands at the center of my God experience. He is not the one sent to be my savior, redeemer or rescuer. Jesus is not to God what Clark Kent is to Superman, a deity masquerading as a human being. He is rather a God presence through whom I am empowered to be open to the life, love and being that flows through me.

I now call myself a mystic because in my understanding of God I have gone beyond words into a kind of wordless wonder, awe and mystery. This is not where I was a decade ago. I doubt if it will be where I am a decade from now, but it is where I am today and it represents the evolving, growing frontier of where I was ten years ago.

Thanks for asking.

The purpose of this unfolding series is to take you, my readers, deeply into those books that constitute the New Testament. There are twenty-seven in number and together they form the volume that arguably has been the most influential and shaping piece of narrative writing in the history of the world. The earliest book of the New Testament is probably I Thessalonians, generally dated around the year 51 CE, while the latest is probably II Peter, generally dated around the year 135 CE. The influence of this book, while always powerful, has been both positive and negative. On the positive side it is clear that the institution called the Christian Church, which grew out of these twenty-seven books, has inspired quite literally millions of people in many ways. Most of the great universities of the world were begun as part of the Christian Church's commitment to knowledge and, in particular, to impart to people the saving knowledge of the sacred scriptures. Most of our healin g institutions, from hospitals to hospice, arose out of that Christian sense that every human life is of infinite worth, which carried with it the compelling need to alleviate suffering insofar as it is possible. Most of the great art of the ages, at least up until the 17th century, has as its content scenes from these twenty-seven books. These art treasures are of such immense value today that for the most part they are stored in the world's greatest museums as a constant source of enrichment for the people. Most of the great music of the ages, at least up until the dawn of modernity, was an attempt to put the primary themes of the New Testament into the indelible sounds that we today still recognize and sing. One thinks of the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach and of the Christmas Oratorio, "Messiah" by George Frederick Handel as familiar and much loved cultural treasures. One cannot understand the history of the Western world or exp lore these cultural artifacts without becoming deeply aware of the impact the New Testament has had on the life of our civilization.

There is, however, also a dark side of the New Testament that must be faced and lifted beyond the stained glass accents of antiquity into full consciousness. The New Testament has had victims whose lives have been diminished at best and destroyed at worst by the direct impact of reading from this "sacred" source. I think of the Jewish people who have suffered throughout Christian history because of this book. The words attributed to the Jewish crowd by Matthew in his narrative of the crucifixion, "his blood be upon us and upon our children," have caused much Jewish blood to flow in everything from the Crusades to the Holocaust. The Fourth Gospel's use of the phrase "The Jews," spoken so often through clenched teeth, has not infrequently been used to legitimize anti-Semitism. The portrayal of a man called Judas, a name that is nothing but the Greek spelling of the name for the entire Jewish nation, as the anti-hero of the Jesus story, served to give permission to Christia ns through the ages to justify their feeling of revenge against this ethnic group of people. Lost in this hostile passion is the truth that Jesus was a Jew, the disciples were all Jews and the writers of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were also Jews. The only possible exception to this statement is Luke, thought to be the author of both the gospel that bears his name and the book of Acts, who is believed to have been born a Gentile, but to have converted to Judaism and thus to have come through the Synagogue into the Church. This means that when we read the New Testament, we are reading only the words of Jewish writers, interpreting the experience and impact of the Jewish Jesus primarily in the light of the Jewish Scriptures and under the ongoing influence of the Synagogue traditions of the Jews. Yet these books have fueled over the centuries a killing frenzy of anti-Semitism. The single greatest carrier of this hostility has been nothing less than our Sund ay school curricula and materials. Jewish people thus have a hard time seeing these twenty-seven books as "sacred scriptures."

The institution of slavery was affirmed throughout history from words in the New Testament. Slavery was practiced in the west by God-fearing, Bible-reading Christians. The popes at various times owned slaves. The section of the United States that fought fiercely to preserve this evil institution was also known as the Bible Belt. It was the Bible-reading people of the South who made lynching legal, who replaced slavery with segregation and who resisted every effort to keep racial justice from being achieved. Much of their justification for this behavior came from quoting St. Paul, who in his letter to Philemon urged the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his master, while simultaneously urging Philemon, his master, to be forgiving to his slave. In the Epistle to the Colossians, Paul, or one of his disciples, instructed slaves to be obedient and masters to be kind. Perhaps it could be said that a kinder and gentler slavery is better than a cruel and harsh one, but it i s to be noted that Paul clearly accepted the legitimacy of this cruel institution, making no effort to abolish it and thus legitimizing it in the minds of others for centuries. One wonders how those who were enslaved and their descendents might view the New Testament from which texts were cited to justify both slavery and second-class citizenship. These scriptures were not sources of life to these victims of our prejudice.

Women have also not fared well at the hands of these male written, male read and male interpreted books of the New Testament. They have rather fed the deep-seated cultural misogyny of the ages with such admonitions as those found in Ephesians for wives to obey their husbands, or in Corinthians for women to keep quiet in church, or in Timothy where women are forbidden to exercise authority over men. Under the influence of the New Testament women in the Christian world were denied higher education for centuries. As a result they were denied entrance into the professions, denied the right to vote, denied the ability to own property in their own name and denied leadership roles in the Christian world until well into the 20th century. When progress did come for women it was driven by the secular spirit while organized religion as expressed in the Christian Church resisted these changes with scripture-quoting vehemence. In major sections of the world this anti-feminist Bible-la ced rhetoric continues to be articulated both officially through ecclesiastical bodies and by individual believers. One wonders how women would ever be drawn to the texts of this book.

The same could also be said for the victimization of the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender segments of our population. They too have lived throughout history with Bible-fueled hostility that manifested itself in gay bashing and in actual murder. Texts were quoted from Romans that called homosexuality "unnatural" and condemned it, to references in other epistles that mistranslated the Greek word arcenokoitus, which refers to a passive male, as deviant, sodomite or pervert, even though its original meaning appears to have been male prostitutes. There is no doubt that the center of homophobia in the western world today remains the Christian Church, now ghettoized from the mainstream of society, and is regularly articulated by Christian voices from the Pope to Pat Robertson. One wonders how homosexual people could ever appreciate the message of the New Testament.

In my experience, I do not find it possible to overestimate the levels of biblical ignorance present today inside the Christian population. Most of these just-cited abuses rise out of that ignorance. Much preaching that emanates from both Catholic and Protestant pulpits not only reflects that ignorance, but also continues to spread it.

In this series of columns I will, therefore, attempt to counter this biblical ignorance and to break the grip that it has on much of our population. While seeking to avoid the technicalities of biblical scholarship that seem to amuse so many in the academy, I will try to state clearly how these books came to be written and so endeavor to oppose the rampant literal misunderstanding that embraces so much of our culture today in regard to the Bible. I will go into both the meaning and the key points of each book in the New Testament, as I have done in past years with the books of the Old Testament. I will try to show the differences among the four gospels that reveal more contradictions than most people believe to be possible. I hope you will enjoy the journey. I know I will.

One final note. A number of small churches across the English-speaking world now use this column for their Sunday morning adult education classes. These essays are subscribed to by the members of the various classes with extra copies reproduced for visitors so that the class and the discussion can have a common basis for discussion. The leader of the class simply convenes the group and introduces the topic. That leadership role can be constant or rotated so long as the purpose is accomplished to allow people to discuss issues openly, to raise any questions they wish and to engage in any debate that arises. When the group gets too large for discussion, it subdivides into two groups. I am gratified to learn this and rejoice that this column might be an instrument in the New Reformation for which many of us yearn. At the very least I hope people find a richness in this book that small ecclesiastical minds have tried for centuries to hide from the average pew sitter. Have fun!

Dear Deb,

A very good question. The intellectual revolution that started with Copernicus and traveled through Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and many others has had an enormous impact on the religious tradition of the west in both Judaism and Christianity. We have also in both traditions been dealing with critical biblical scholarship for about 200 years. That scholarship, while welcomed by many, has also served to create a fundamentalist backlash in parts of Christianity and Judaism. We have certainly seen evidence of this in the political arena, where the religious right has been very vocal in America in the fight to restore prayer to the classrooms of public schools, to resist the teaching of evolution, to oppose sex education and to keep people like Terri Schiavo alive well after anything resembling real life had long departed.

In the less developed and less well educated parts of the world, religion serves a variety of purposes. It gives hope to the hopelessness of the poor and downtrodden. It links people with their ancestral past. It helps them deal with the radical insecurity of human existence. When threatened by challenging insights into the origins of these faith traditions, many religious people who are unable to embrace or to process new religious ideas turn defensive and become both rejecting and fundamentalist. There is not as yet a tradition of radical religious scholarship in Islam that would call into question the way fundamentalist Muslims today use the Koran to justify violence. In the world of Buddhism and Hinduism I find today that the intellectually elite simply walk out of religion into secularism. Religion therefore becomes more and more the activity of the unlearned. It is therefore more and more likely to resist change, which makes modernizing that religious system al l but impossible.

I am convinced that my religious heritage points me to truth that no religion in and of itself can envision. I do not believe that secular non-belief is the only alternative to being religious, but it takes hard work, deep understanding, rich dialogue and a willingness to embrace vast amounts of fear and insecurity to reach this conclusion. I can testify, however, that to me it has been well worthwhile. As a witness to this truth let me quote a retired bishop who said, "The older I get the more deeply I believe, but the fewer beliefs I have." I think that is where I am and I believe that is where all religious systems will have to go if they want to live in our 21st century world.

Change must come, however, from within the religious system itself. It can never be imposed from outside. So you and I, Deb, must work within the faith of our fathers and mothers. I have found my journey into the depths of Christianity to be the most exciting adventure and the most affirming experience of my life. I invite others to journey with me into the unfathomable mystery of God and life and being.

First, we seek to fix the dates around the life of Jesus. That is accomplished by an appeal to both the remembered story of his life and to secular records that we can locate, which date other people who appear in his story. It is not an exact science but it is a trustworthy guide.

Accounts of Jesus' birth are recorded in only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, and both link his birth to the reign of King Herod, who was known as "Herod the Great." Matthew, the earliest of these two sources, weaves his story of the Wise Men around references to the reign of Herod and the anticipation recorded in the prophet Micah that the messiah will come out of King David's line and be born in King David's birthplace, Bethlehem. He also casts Herod in the familiar Jewish role of the wicked king who, like the Pharaoh of old in Egypt, sought to destroy God's promised deliverer. Matthew, in effect, retells the story of Moses' being miraculously saved from death by divine intervention, but this time it is about Jesus. This attempt to wrap Moses' stories around the memory of Jesus is illustrative of the Jewish interpretive tradition we call "Midrash." While these stories are messianic interpretations and not remembered history, there is still no reason to suggest t hat this means that the anchoring of the birth of Jesus to the reign of Herod was itself fanciful. Matthew is even more specific, suggesting that the birth of Jesus took place near the end of Herod's reign, just prior to his death. Secular records tell us that Herod reigned in this Jewish nation from 37 BCE to 4 BCE.

We also know from historical records that, with Herod's death, the Jewish nation was subdivided into three provinces, each ruled first by the sons of Herod and later by Roman procurators. That is the situation when the adult story of Jesus is brought to its conclusion. From both of these angles, the dating of Jesus' birth fits with what we know of secular history.

Luke confirms this tradition when he dates the births of both John the Baptist and Jesus as occurring when Herod was king of Judea. Luke adds that this was also when Caesar Augustus was on the throne of the Roman Empire and Quirinius was governor of Syria. Secular records reveal that only Quirinius, who did not come to power until 6-7CE, does not fit this historic reconstruction. Luke appears to have inserted Quirinius into his story to support his idea that a general taxation or enrollment was ordered in which people had to return to their family's ancestral home, a device Luke used to explain how this birth happened to occur in Bethlehem. Once again, we observe how the historical facts in the birth story are blended into later messianic interpretations. The association of the birth of Jesus with the last year or years of Herod's reign is, however, fairly clear in the memory of the Christian community. It is for these reasons that most scholars today date the birth of Jesus no later than 4 BCE, the date of the death of King Herod, and probably no earlier than 6 BCE. I tend to share in that bit of historic reconstruction and have adopted as "my best guess" the year 4 BCE as the time when Jesus was born. I am fairly certain, however, that his birth took place in Nazareth, as the first gospel of Mark assumes, and that the Bethlehem birth tradition is a later messianic development. It was Paul, writing to the Romans around the year 58 CE, who first claimed that Jesus was in the Davidic line and thus heir to his throne. This was the reference that ultimately gave rise to a Bethlehem birth story.

So, with the birth date fairly accurately set, we search for a way to determine the date on which the end of the life of Jesus occurred. Once again we discover that the gospel tradition is clear in associating the crucifixion of Jesus with the procuratorship of a Roman official known as Pontius Pilate. Although Pilate is not mentioned in Paul, the first gospel of Mark, written in the early years of the 8th decade of the Common Era, anchors the Passion of Jesus in the reign of Pilate so deeply that it would be hard to suggest that these two things were not deeply linked.

Pilate enters Mark's gospel when the arrested Jesus, having been interrogated by the Jewish authorities, is delivered to Pilate early in the morning of the day of the crucifixion. Pilate receives ten other mentions in Mark's gospel, all associated with the passion story, the last one occurring when Pilate allowed the body, now confirmed to be dead, to be delivered to Joseph of Arimathea for burial. While the historicity of this burial narrative in the newly hewn tomb in the garden of this Joseph is largely doubted, the connection between the crucifixion and Pilate is not. Matthew links Pilate with the crucifixion in nine references. Luke has twelve in number, including two pre-crucifixion mentions, one to date the beginning of Jesus' public ministry and the other to chronicle Pilate's role in a previous Galilean uprising. John raises the number of Pilate references to twenty-one. It is also worth noting that, in these two later gospels of Luke and John, Pilate grows in to a more and more sympathetic figure, while Judas and the Jewish leadership grow more and more negative. We thus can see in the texts themselves traditions and memories changing and developing. To complete the biblical record, Pilate is mentioned three times in the Book of Acts, which is really volume two of Luke, and always in speeches attributed to the apostles Peter and Paul. There is only one reference to Pilate in the epistle I Timothy, an epistle whose Pauline authorship is universally denied and is dated in a much later period of Christian history. So, once again, without claiming more than history can validate, it seems clear that the crucifixion of Jesus was connected to the reign of a man named Pontius Pilate as Roman procurator. That being settled, we can then go to Roman records to learn that Pilate served in this post in Judea from 26-36 CE, which gives us the limits within which to locate the crucifixion. Through other means, too lengthy to go into here b ut leaning on narratives about his removal recorded by Josephus, a Jewish historian, we can narrow down that eleven-year span and state the high probability that the crucifixion happened around the year 30 CE. This guess could be off by some two years on either side, but it still remains the closest we can come to certainty. So our conclusion is that Jesus lived between 6 BCE and 32 CE at the outside and probably 4 BCE to 30 CE would be our best guess. His life span would thus have been 34 to 38 years.

I have no doubt that Jesus was a figure of history and am completely unimpressed by those recent writers who have tried to prove that he was a mythological figure of Jewish or early Christian fantasy based on Egyptian sources. I think the biographical notes recorded in one of Paul's early and authentic epistles (Galatians 1:18-24) are determinative. Paul relates a conversation that he had with Peter and James, whom he identified as "the Lord's brother," some three years after his conversion. The early 20th century church historian, Adolf Harnack, has stated that Paul's conversion had to have occurred within "one to six years" after the crucifixion, so this conversation to which Paul refers had to have occurred no less than four and no more than nine years after the death of Jesus. That is far too short a span of time for mythology to develop. This means that while all the details of the Jesus story are clearly not historical, Jesus himself is. So we locate Jesus in huma n history as having lived between roughly 4 BCE and 30 CE.

Two things become obvious immediately from this dating exercise. First, Jesus' entire life was lived as a Jew under the domination of the Roman Empire. He was a part of a conquered and oppressed people. Rome first took over the rule of this land in 65 BCE in an alliance with the successors of the Maccabees and ruled it with an iron hand until the fall of the Roman Empire. That included a war against a Jewish rebellion that occurred between 66-73 CE which totally destroyed the Jewish nation, including Jerusalem and the Temple. While that destruction happened well after the life of Jesus, it did occur before any of the gospels were written. Scholars now believe that this later destruction of Jerusalem has shaped the memory of Jesus in the gospels far more than was once was recognized. We will look at this assertion later.

The second conclusion that this dating exercise makes obvious is that the earliest records we have of anyone writing anything about Jesus is in the works of Paul, who did his writing between 51 and 64 CE, or 21 to 34 years after the death of Jesus. That means there is a total absence and thus a total silence for at least 20 years before any single detail about the life of Jesus was written down. Even then, we need to note that Paul tells us very little about the life of Jesus and that Paul died before any gospel had been written. The gospels from which we get most of our image of Jesus were written between the early 70's and the late 90's, or some 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus. This means that the gospels are not eyewitness accounts, but are rather the product of the second, third and even fourth generation of Christians. The gospels were also written in Greek, a language that neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke or wrote. We need to dispense with the idea t hat these books are either history or biography.

That should be enough to disestablish many of the assumptions that faithful, but not necessarily learned, people have made over the centuries about the New Testament. It also sets the stage for us to begin to examine these Christian Scriptures with fresh eyes and open minds. That is what I hope to do as this series unfolds.

Dear Bruce,

Thank God for your dog!

Maybe you should see your inability to picture God as a Santa Claus above the sky as a step into maturity and wholeness. Now you need to look at the immaturity of your prayers. The last thing most of us can surrender in our spiritual journeys is the parent figure God who hears our petitions and who loves us unconditionally. However, there are other ways to conceptualize God.

Alfred North Whitehead conceived of God as a Process. Paul Tillich experienced God as the Ground of Being. The problem is that we use the language of time and space to give form to an experience and a reality that is not bound by or within time and space. When I use the word "God" I am not talking about a being. I am describing that sense of transcendence that I believe I have encountered within time and space. I believe I experience God as life fully lived, as love wastefully given, as being completely realized. I cannot tell you or anyone else who or what God is. I can only describe my experience. I may be delusional. Lots of religious people are, but I don't think so.

I join the mystics in saying that I think I am part of what God is. God lives in me, loves through me and empowers me to escape that drive to survive that is in every living thing in order to give my life away. That is the Christ role and I think it is also the role that his disciples are called to model.

So I am drawn by God beyond my boundaries and I perceive that God becomes real when I enter into the task of living and loving and being. This means that it doesn't occur to me that I am alone with no one to whom to pray. This makes me rather a deeply infused, God-intoxicated human being who no longer has the words to describe the God in who I live and move and have my being, but it does not even occur to me to doubt the reality of that which I experience, but can never define. I hope this helps. Hug your dog for me.