The Cosmos

THE COSMOS

Buddhism developed initially in India as a reaction against Hinduism in the fifth century bce. It drew many of its beliefs from that religious context. Two key Hindu concepts that Buddhism uses are samsara and karma. Like Hinduism, Buddhism holds that life is a series of rebirths and “redeaths” in a continuous cycle and that a person’s actions during a life produce karma that determines the place and form of the next life (and sometimes even succeeding lives). In Buddhism, samsara is often symbolized by the Wheel of Life.
Samsara’s Realm and the Possible Forms of Life.

In all forms of Buddhism, the realm of samsara is divided into three main levels: heaven, earth and hell. Both heaven and hell have a number of levels. Inhabiting these realms are creatures in six different “states of existence” (or, six types of creatures). These are: gods, humans, asura (=ogres or titans), animals, hungry ghost and demons. Beings in one of the first three states are there because of their store of good karma.

Beings in one of the last three states are there because of their store of bad karma. Gods exist in the higher heavens, asuras in the lower heavens and humans on earth. Animals dwell on earth, the hungry ghosts (so-called because they have large stomachs but tiny mouths) live between earth and hell, and the demons of course reside in hell.

One aspect of the Hindu world that Buddhism rejected was the caste system; in Buddhism all humans are essentially equal. Samsara therefore rotates souls through the different states of being rather than through different levels of the caste system.
The Human Problem and the Solution
The Buddha discussed the human problem and its solution together. The short statement that lays out these out—The Four Noble Truths—forms the main foundation of Buddhism that differentiates it from all other religions.

The first two Truths describe the problem:

• Truth #1. All is suffering (dukkha).
• Truth #2. Suffering comes from desire.

All life is suffering and suffering comes from desire, because desire is so rarely fulfilled. It is important to understand these two statements together. By itself, “suffering” could refer to all kinds of suffering, such as suffering inflicted upon us by circumstances or by other people.

The former could include suffering of sickness, age, accidents, while the latter could include malicious injury of a physical or emotional nature. But the Buddha makes it clear that although these are obvious forms of suffering, the most insidious forms of suffering are caused by desire, specifially, unfulfilled desire. Thus, although illness is suffering in-and-of-itself, it is suffering even more so because one desires to be …

Jesus for the Non-Religious

John Shelby Spong, Chapter 20

Between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand years ago, a mere nanosecond on the clock of the earth’s existence, three things entered life that announced the arrival of human beings, as we now define them. The first was that consciousness grew into self-consciousness and awareness into self-awareness. The second was that the medium of time was expanded so that these human creatures could, in a conscious way, remember the past and recall it, and anticipate the future and plan for it. The third was that these creatures began to identify human sounds with both objects and actions, and in this way language, which is the essence of abstract thinking, came into being. At some specific moment, perhaps not at the same time, or in the same place, and certainly not in one solitary individual who might be called the mythological Adam/Eve, the first of the species that we identify as Homo sapiens came into being. This planet earth now possessed an inhabitant who was self-conscious, was time-aware and had the ability to communicate with words. Something new and wondrous had emerged out of the evolutionary soup—something that was destined to transform natural history into human history.

I try to imagine that mythical moment in which consciousness became self-consciousness and awareness became self-awareness. What was it like in the creatures in whom this new reality was dawning over whatever number of years it took to become the norm? All we know is that these human creatures evolved to the place where they saw themselves not as part of nature, but as separate from nature, even as standing over against the natural world. These human creatures had evolved to the place where they could look out on the world from a new center as separate, self-aware and self-conscious beings. It was probably both a startling wonder and a traumatic moment of fear and enormous anxiety. What does it mean to see yourself suddenly as one who is alone, fragile, self-consciously living in fear in the midst of powerful natural forces that you can identify, but over which you have no control? I suspect these first of our human ancestors shook in their skins at the new vision of what life had become and all that it now entailed. While they could experience these powerful changes, they could not possibly understand them except in the most primitive of ways.

Accompanying this self-awareness was the sense that their lives were lived inside an ever-flowing dimension called time. These human creatures recognized that there was a time before they existed as conscious creatures and there would be a time after that conscious existence ended. That is, they came to see themselves as bounded on each end by a sense of being transitory. Embracing their own finiteness, they began the inevitable contemplation of their own mortality. Finally these creatures developed the ability to articulate in symbolic sounds their fears and at the same time to embrace their limitations, their powerlessness and their sense of meaninglessness with the power of words.

Look at what this meant. It is one thing to die; life in many forms does that in vast numbers daily. It is quite another to know that you are going to die, to plan for it and to accept its inevitability. That was the human situation. It is one thing to be unaware that your existence has no meaning, as is the case for the billions of insects that are devoured each day as food for other living things; it is quite another to deal with that reality consciously and to battle against it. It is one thing to be part of the routines of life and death in the world of nature; it is quite another to be aware and self-conscious of the fact that you are a link in the food chain.

Human beings, as the centers of consciousness, now know that they will die and are aware that they will disappear. This is the knowledge that raised (and still raises) the questions of meaning and meaninglessness in them. Because that knowledge is now inherent, every human being is forced to inquire as to whether or not humanity’s self-conscious life has any ultimate significance. To be human is, therefore, to endure the trauma of self-consciousness. It is to be aware of the existential shock of the threat of nonbeing. No other living thing before us has ever been required to embrace this level of anxiety. Part of what it means to be human is to know ourselves to be chronically anxious creatures. It means seeing ourselves as those who must embrace our own mortality. It means that if life has no ultimate meaning, we alone of all other creatures embrace the threat of meaninglessness. In response to that threat, human life is driven to create meaning. It was and is the human experience to tremble before these realizations. It is, however, also the acknowledged human destiny not to win the struggle for meaning, for survival or for life. The fate of all living creatures is to lose, but only the human life knows this self-consciously. It is thus not easy to be human. We will be felled, destroyed and eaten by natural enemies—that is what germs and viruses are, after all—and our flesh and bones will in our turn feed other forms of life.

If the anxiety initially arising out of this knowledge had not been banked by our ancient forebears, I don’t think that self-consciousness could have survived. It would have been a step in the evolutionary process that could not be sustained, because what was required to sustain it was more than our human coping mechanisms could manage. That is the moment in which I believe this emerging human being asked the question for which the concept of God, understood theistically, was the answer. Theism is, I believe, a direct result of the trauma of self-consciousness. Theism is not God; it is rather a human coping mechanism.

Human beings began to ask questions like these: Is there someone or some presence in the universe like me, self-conscious and aware, but possessing more power than I possess, and able thereby to cope with the anxieties of existence that I now face? Where does this presence abide? Will this being or this presence be my ally or my enemy in the struggle to survive? Will this being or this presence use the power I imagine it must have to come to my aid? How can I win the favor of this being? How can I accommodate this “other’s” presence? How can I secure the blessing of this power?

At first this thinking process took a very basic form. The lonely self-conscious human beings observed that there were living things, plants and animals, that existed quite independently of human life and so our ancient ancestors wondered where these living things came from, just as they wondered about their own origin. They observed vital natural forces in the world, like the flowing of a river, the tides of the ocean, the power of the wind, the warmth of the sun and the light of the moon. Some power must animate these things and make them able to do the things they do, they reasoned. Could that power protect and defend them also? To these things human beings began to assign a force that they called spirit. Spirit was unseen, mysterious, yet its power could be readily observed. Could they relate to this world of spirit, win its favor and enjoy its protection? the human creatures wondered. Out of the sky, they observed, came thunder, lightning, wind, rain, warmth, cold. Was there a spirit beyond the sky who controlled these forces? Was that spirit benevolent or malevolent? Could they do anything to make that spirit more friendly? What was it that might please the source of these apparently living things?  

In time these individual spirits, thought to inhabit both creatures and vital forces in the natural world, provided the content for human beings’ earliest religion, called animism—that is, the belief that something called spirit animated all that lived. The religious task was not to anger these spirits, but to please them so that they would serve our needs. God as something external to our life, supernatural in power, was born. Theism had appeared.

As life evolved and changed, so did theism, but it never transcended its original definition. When the human shift from hunters and gatherers toward more settled agricultural activities occurred, theism took on the form of the earth mother who brought life out of her womb to sustain the human struggle for survival. In that transition, theism began to display feminine characteristics. Later these supernatural spirits came to be thought of as something like a family of gods or spirits living in a polytheistic universe. Still later these divine powers, sometimes called gods, seemed to organize according to earthly standards of tribal life, with varieties of powers and functions, but with a supreme deity ruling over lesser spirits. This was when the human imagination conceived of a heavenly court under the leadership of a Jupiter and Juno or a Zeus and Hera. Still later, patriarchy drove the feminine out and theism moved from the world of many spirits to the form of one solitary deity who, like a tribal chief, ran the world as a kind of expanded tribal god who watched over and protected only the tribe that served this particular deity as its chosen people, and later who, as the universal God, ruled over all of life as a kind of king of the universe.

Yet in each of these images the theistic definition of God remained steadfast, ever saluted, and always intact. God was, as I see that definition emerging, “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and able to invade the world in miraculous ways to bless, to punish, to accomplish the divine will, to answer prayers and to come to the aid of frail, powerless human beings.” As soon as this theistic idea of a deity was established, anxiety lessened, since anxiety was the primary reason for the human creation of this theistic deity in the first place. Now, these human beings reasoned, there is a being beyond us, more powerful than we and capable of defending and protecting us, the self-conscious ones. All that was needed to turn this theistic coping device into a religious system was to discern what it was that pleased this deity. What would it take to gain divine favor or to avoid divine wrath in order to enlist the help of this supernatural being in the struggle to survive? The moment that question was asked, religious systems, all of which are consciously devised to accomplish exactly those goals, came into being. Human life was now generically defined as “religious human life.” 

Analyze any religious system 

and you will discover that it contains two specific divisions. 

The first is: What is the proper way to worship so that God’s favor will be gained? 

The second is: What is the proper way to behave or to live in order to gain God’s approval? Later, in more formal religious settings, this would be called our duty toward God 

and our duty toward our neighbor and would be enshrined in the Hebrew tradition 

on two tablets of stone as the Ten Commandments.

Security, however, is not finally achieved until the religious system successfully claims to possess ultimate truth by some form of divine revelation. This claim of authority normally comes in one of two forms. Either this truth has been revealed to some human entity who stands near to God—a high priest, for example—or the absolute will of God has been spelled out in some inspired writing which God’s representative alone can interpret properly. 

• It is this claim to possess absolute truth that keeps anxiety in check. 
• Relativity in religious claims must be repressed, because it always allows our original debilitating anxiety to return. 
• Under this system the idea that we have genuine security requires that we do not doubt the meaning of our own created security system. 

So the idea of God as the Almighty One, who watches over us and protects us, came into being. We win this God’s favor with proper divine worship. We please this God with lives marked by proper behavior. When in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity, we pray to this God for intervening help and we expect answers. When tragedies strike, we wonder what we have done to incur the divine wrath. 

This is the meaning and the legacy of theism and it became the dominant content of all religion that is theistic in its self-understanding. 

What we need to embrace from this insight is that human religious systems have never been primarily a search for truth; they have always been first and foremost a search for security.

Because theism was the primary way human beings conceptualized God, it was inevitable that when a group of first-century people believed that they had encountered God in the story of Jesus, they saw theism as the content of Jesus. The Jesus story was thus turned into an account of a theistic God coming to our rescue, invading the human world from above. Theism was the fully operative definition of the God we claimed we had met in Jesus. A literalized concept of incarnation was and is the theological language used to convey this idea. The doctrine of the trinity, which purports to define the reality of God, brings Jesus and the theistic concept of God into oneness.

The invading God from above needed a way to get into the human arena to engage the human situation, so a landing field was created capable of receiving the deity. Christians identified that landing field as the virgin birth. Through this miracle the theistic God put on human flesh and came among us. While he was on this earth, this Jesus (as he was described) could do all the things that people assumed God could do, for he was God in human form. So stories were told in which Jesus stilled the storm, walked on water, expanded the food supply, healed the sick and even raised the dead. If people pleased the God that they claimed to have met in Jesus, this God, still theistic in nature, would bless them by answering their prayers, intervening in their history and finally by accepting them into eternal life at the moment of their death, overcoming once and for all the human anxiety about our finitude.

The ancient human anxiety met by the development of the theistic understanding of God is still today operative in most of the traditional forms of Christianity. Religious systems are very slow to change. Theism still seeks to give meaning to life, to answer our questions about our self-conscious existence with authority and to calm our anxiety about mortality with promises of eternal life. 

The fires of anxiety, born in self-consciousness, are thus banked by religion and we are 

content, if not grateful, to live inside the theistic definition of God that we created. 

Theism, therefore, is not who God is. Theism is a human definition of who God is. 

There is a vast difference.

So our questions about Jesus must shift in a revolutionary new direction. What was the experience that his disciples were trying to articulate when they declared in a thousand different ways that in the human Jesus, the theistic God had been revealed? Is a dying theism the only way to make sense out of the God experience? Can we remove the theistic concept of God from our understanding of God and still be worshippers? Can we lift the theistic God overlay from the life of Jesus and still be Christians? I believe we can. Indeed, I believe there is no other alternative if we want to live as Christians in this twenty-first century. That is why we had to go through the exercise, in earlier chapters, of separating the myth of Jesus from the Jesus of history. That is why we needed to examine the primitive images by which he was understood. That is why we now must separate God understood theistically from the experience of God that we claim for Jesus. That is the insight I want to pursue.

The next step in discovering who Jesus is, is to allow the irrelevant theistic language with which we have surrounded him to be shattered until it lies in a million pieces at his feet. Then, as we look again, Jesus for the non-religious begins to come into view. So does a new sense of what it means to be human. That is when we ask whether or not theism was ever an asset to humanity. Is survival the same thing as living? We look at that question next as the journey goes on.

God as Sacred Presence

Marcus Borg

Encompassing Sacred Reality all around us and within us, everywhere.
The reality that is more than the Universe, even as God includes the Universe. The reality in whom we and everything exist, wondrous and glorious, sacred, stupendous, a reality that is right here.

God is transcendent, more than the Universe. God is immanent, a presence pervading the Universe.

God’s involvement in the world does not disappear, rather than speaking about divine intervention, this way of thinking about God speaks as:

Divine Presence
God is not absent but everywhere present.

Divine Intention
According to the Bible, God, the sacred, has a purpose.

Divine Interaction
Our relationship to the sacred, our openness to the sacred, our participation in the sacred makes possible things that otherwise might not be possible.

There can be cooperation - interaction - between divine purpose and human action.

Personifying God

The Bible and post-biblical Christian language often speak of God as a person like being, as in the Lord’s Prayer. God is personified not only as a father, but also as a king, shepherd, judge, lover, mother, and so forth.

Does realizing that God does not refer to a separate person mean personification should be avoided? No. There is nothing wrong with personifying God. It is the natural language of worship, devotion, and relationship. Problems occur when personifications of God are understood literally or semi literally. When this happens, the result is supernatural theism, with the limitations inherent in that view.

God refers to a reality that is more than personal, not less than personal.
This reality is sometimes known, experienced, as a presence - as having more the quality of a “you” than the quality of an “it”. Thus personal language for God is appropriate, so long as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being” is not reduced to “a person”, a supernatural person about whose existence one can argue.

God’s Justice is Social Justice

The opposite of Justice is not Mercy, but Injustice.

God’s Justice is Social Justice, equitable distribution of God’s earth.

Justice and Compassion are not opposites or different things, Justice is the social form of Compassion.Following Jesus Means Compassion

The first focal point of a life that takes Jesus seriously [is] that radical centering in the Spirit of God that is at the very center of the Christian life. Now, this radical centering in God does not leave us unchanged. It transforms us, and this leads us to the second focal point of what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to take Jesus seriously.

In a single sentence, it means compassion in the world of the every day. Slightly more fully, it means a life of compassion and a passion for justice. I need both of these words, compassion and justice, for compassion without justice easily gets individualized or sentimentalized, and justice without compassion easily sounds like politics.

Compassion is utterly central to the teaching of Jesus. As those of you who have read one or more of my books on Jesus know, I see it as the core value, the ethical paradigm of the life of faithfulness to God, as we see it in Jesus. Jesus sums up theology and ethics in a very short saying (six words in English). It is found in Luke 6:36 with a parallel in Matthew 5:48. “Therefore [very early Q material for those of you who like to know things like that], be compassionate as God is compassionate.” The word for compassionate in both Hebrew and Aramaic is related to the word for womb. Thus, to be compassionate is to be womb-like, to be like a womb. God is womb-like, Jesus says, therefore, you be womb-like.

What does it mean to be womb-like? Well, it means to be life-giving, nourishing. It means to feel what a mother feels for the children of her womb: tenderness, willing their well-being, finding her children precious and beautiful. It can also mean a fierceness, for a mother can be fierce when she sees the children of her womb being threatened or treated destructively. Compassion is not just a soft, woozy virtue. It can have passion and fierceness to it as well.

To speak of compassion as the core value of the Christian life may seem like old hat to us, like ho-hum. But, contrasted for a moment to what some Christians have thought the Christian life is most centrally about, that it is really about righteousness—keeping your moral shirt-tails clean, avoiding being stained by the world—in that sense, the Christian life is profoundly different from compassion. In many ways, compassion is virtually the opposite of righteousness in that sense. Jesus, as a person, was filled with compassion, and he calls us to compassion.

Jesus was also filled with a passion for justice. This is probably the least understood part of the teaching of Jesus in the modern American church, and maybe throughout most of the church’s history. It’s because we often misunderstand what the word justice means or we understand it poorly. We sometimes think that justice has to do with punishment, with people getting what is coming to them for what they have done wrong. When we think that way, then we think that the opposite of justice is mercy. But in the Bible, the opposite of justice is not mercy; the opposite of justice is injustice.

Justice and injustice have to do with the way societies are structured, with the way political and economic systems are put together. Like the Hebrew social prophets before him, Jesus’ passion for justice set him against the domination system of his world and his time. It set him against a politically oppressive and economically exploitative system that had been designed by wealthy and powerful elites, legitimated by religion, and designed by them in their own narrow self-interests. And the domination system of his time, like the domination systems of all time, had devastating effects on the lives of peasants.

Also, like the Hebrew social prophets, Jesus was a God-intoxicated voice of peasant-religious-social protests, not just protests against the domination system, but an advocate of God’s justice. God’s justice is about social justice. God’s justice is about the equitable distribution of God’s earth, and a passion for God’s justice sets you against all of those systems designed by people in their own narrow self-interests to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Indeed, it was Jesus’ passion for justice that got him killed. That is why the authorities, the powers that be, executed him. The journey of Lent reminds us of that, too: that Jesus was killed; he didn’t simply die.

In the 13th chapter of Luke, some Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him that Herod is planning to kill him. Jesus replies, “Go and tell that fox Herod [fox in the world of the Jewish homeland in the first century did not mean a sly, cunning, wily creature; it had more the connotation of skunk, go and tell that skunk Herod], that it cannot be that a prophet should perish outside of Jerusalem.” Then he speaks of Jerusalem. “Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to you.”

It is Jerusalem, of course, not as the center of Judaism, but Jerusalem as the center of the native domination system, of that economically exploitative and politically oppressive system that radically impoverished peasants and drove them to an existence of destitution and even desperation. Jesus is killed because of his passionate criticism of that system and his advocacy of the Kingdom of God.

What life would be like on Earth if God were King and the domination systems
of this world were not. This is the political meaning of Good Friday.

To connect this back to compassion, justice is the social form of compassion. Justice and compassion are not opposites or different things, but justice is the social and political form of caring for the least of these. If we take Jesus seriously, we are called to both compassion and justice.

To move to my conclusion, following Jesus—the journey of Lent—means a radical centering in God in which our own well-being resides, re-connecting to a center of meaning and purpose and energy in our lives. It means a passion for compassion and justice in the world of the every day. The Gospel of Jesus is ultimately very simple. There is nothing complicated about this at all. It’s taking seriously your relationship to God and taking seriously caring what God cares about in the world.

The Gospel invites us to stand up for Jesus, to take Jesus seriously, even to jump up and down for Jesus. If we are not there yet, if the moving of the Spirit in our hearts is but yet a faint stirring, then we are invited to sing along in silence. Even the songs that we sing in silence shape our lives.

What is God by Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

In your post this morning, “Why an atheist converts,” you wrote:

But this is God. It is certainly what I understand as God. Nonbelievers need to let go of anthropocentric, grey-bearded beings in the sky for God itself, the highest consciousness of all, and the force that gives this staggering beauty, available to us all, love.

1. The fact is, the majority of believers believe in an “anthropocentric, grey-bearded being.” They believe in heaven, hell, angels, demons, and all the other clap-trap that goes along with these bronze-age era beliefs. You can’t simply dismiss these trappings with a wave of the verbal hand. What you’re doing here is just inventing your own religion. “Andrew Sullivanism” if you will. You’re doing the same thing Joseph Smith did. Hell, you’re doing the same thing early Christians did when they took Judaism and made it more palatable for Jews who were perhaps a bit less orthodox-minded. You like the idea of religion, you just don’t like the choices you’ve been given. And so you invent your own.

2. Attributing complexity and beauty to a God, in whatever form you care to give it, is still simple wishful thinking. We don’t need a God to explain beauty; we have science for that. It does a better job than God ever did. And to me at least, that’s a comforting thought. And for those who would say that science is simply the implement that God chooses to implement creation, I would say please: show me your evidence. There is none, it is (again) just wishful thinking.

The idea that science can explain beauty is a non-sequitur. They belong to different categories of thought. Science can no more explain the wonder of a Van Gogh masterpiece than Van Gogh could have explained the chemical composition of the paint, or need to. As for the notion that it is heresy that God is not a grey-bearded figure in the sky, I beg to differ. It is in fact heretical to conceive of God in such an anthropocentric manner. Jesus referred to God as his Father and ours. But that is obviously a metaphor - Jesus’ human father was Joseph. In fact, Jesus really called God dad, an intimacy that, to me, reflects exactly the tone of voice that has at times entered my life to remind me I am loved and cared for.

I am not inventing a new religion, like Joseph Smith. I am explaining what I see as the truths of Christianity in language that is not encrusted with myth and irrational literalism, a Christianity that incorporates the unprecedented amount of knowledge that mankind has now acquired about the universe, history, science and indeed the flawed human origins of the Scriptures themselves. To say that God is everywhere, as orthodox Christians believe, is precisely to say he is not some grey-bearded man in the sky. God is neither male nor female. God is hidden. God cannot be grasped by our human minds. But God is the force behind everything, and good. What my reader expressed was this:

If the Universe is anything, it is proof that meaning can be found in the smallest of existence, from atoms to neutrinos and down beneath it.

But this is a religious move, a decision to attach meaning to the Universe, where science can find no meaning only fact and theory. For me, and those who are more mystically-inclined Christians, contemplation of this universe is contemplation of God, and Jesus was one human being who glimpsed this overwhelming truth - and its boundless miracle of love - more powerfully than anyone else in the West. That gave him a composure unlike any human being, a composure saturated with Godness. This is Incarnation.

Another reader:

This dodge is not worthy of you. As I understand it, you believe in a God who was incarnated as a man, who died, and who miraculously rose from the dead in order to purge mankind of its tragic flaw. That’s not really the same thing as recognizing that there’s such a thing as awe, or wonder, or love.

Not a God, God. And, yes, incarnated in the manner I describe above. My heresy - and I concede it - is in rejecting the traditional view of the atonement issue. For me, Jesus’s death was not the downpayment on our salvation. He was the way, the truth and the life. His horrifying crucifixion was not some unique necessary sacrifice. It was a commonplace punishment in his time. What singled him out was the manner of his death, his refusal to stop it, his calm in embracing it, his forgiveness even of those who nailed him there, with that astonishing sentence, “Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.”

I don’t read that as an affronted “they don’t know they are executing the Godhead himself”. I read it as “they are so consumed with fear and the world and violence and power that they require forgiveness and mercy, not condemnation”. It is this very composure, this sadness born of indescribable empathy, this inner calm and stillness, that convinces me of Jesus’ saturation with the Godhead. He was not the human equivalent of an animal sacrifice; he was the light of the world, showing us by his example how we can be happy and at peace and in love with one another and God itself. Another:

If that is your god, why does such a god need a Church? And why does your Church say something quite different about the nature of its god? It’s not atheists who describe a god that creates the universe, and heaven and hell, and sends his son to die and descend to hell and be resurrected, to then judge all men after their deaths. That’s your Church. And its creed. And that story has nothing to do with the “this” you deify above. Atheists didn’t invent the god who parted the seas for Moses, who saved Daniel from the furnace, who commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, who incarnated himself into Jesus, who raised Lazarus from the dead, and who was himself resurrected. Do you hold it all is just metaphor? ALL? If so, what makes you more Christian than pagan? Odin coming down as a blind beggar is pretty good metaphor, also.

There’s a conflation here between the often mythical stories told in the Old Testament and the parables and journeys and Passion of the New. I believe that everything I have said is in the Gospels and in the Creed. But what “heaven” and “hell” actually are; what the resurrection truly was (was Jesus physically restored as in life? disguised in others, as at Emaeus? a phantasm? all these versions are in the Gospels and the Acts); what miracles were … these are mysteries. If you want to call that a dodge, go ahead. But if you believe, as I do, that the human mind is inherently incapable of grasping the reality of the highest consciousness except through acceptance of mystery, then it is not a dodge. Yet another:

First, when you say “this is God,” that’s fine as a personal statement of belief, but not fine for Roman Catholic like yourself. Catholics recite the Nicene Creed at each mass. There is simply no way to reconcile the words of that ancient statement of belief with your essentially pantheist/panentheist understanding of some Great Organizing Principle (God, if you prefer).

Really? Go read the Nicene Creed. Then try to understand it. You can do so with a nineteenth century literalism; or you can do so in manifold ways that have varied throughout the centuries. They are flawed human words trying to express the inexpressible; language to convey the ineffable. And I have no pantheism here. I believe in one God, in three forms. As a modern person, I also have available truths and insights that others before me did not. It is my duty as a Christian not to parrot old cliches or fear-ridden orthodoxies but to try and make it all make spiritual sense and not violate logic or what my eyes and mind and soul experience. And it is not an argument to say that most Christians don’t think this way, therefore it is wrong. Throughout the ages, Christians have challenged their own hierarchy in trying to understand mysteries that are subject to various interpretations. The argument against my position must be: what is there in these texts and these traditions that contradicts Tillich’s God as the “ground of all being”? A final reader is less harsh:

So, in asking us to get over the “anthropocentric, grey-bearded beings in the sky”, you seem to postulate that we can all agree that the wonders of the cosmos, the miracles of humanity and of love, and the fundamental connection of all living things is “God”. Presumably, then, this God can be accessed in any number of ways — either through the revelations/stories/belief structures of organized religion of every kind, or through a fundamental appreciation for the revelations of science in the secular mindset. You seem to further imply that regardless of how we access it, we are speaking about the same fundamental thing, a shared experience of the mystery at the center of existence.

If so, then the primary argument is not over spirituality or “whether there is a God”, but between religions of various flavors and between religion in general vs. science. In other words, we are squabbling over details (the filters through which each individual uniquely chooses to access and interpret the central mystery) and missing the central point that we are all really after the same fundamental truths. This is wonderful — I couldn’t agree more. With that said, I can’t help but comment that the “spiritual relativism” described above is basically the atheistic worldview.

No it isn’t. Because what Christians believe is that this force is caritas. That the universe loves us. That move is Jesus’. That move requires revelation in the face of all the arguments of theodicy. And that is my faith: Deus Caritas Est. And that is so heretical for a Catholic that it was the title of this Pope’s first encyclical.

Awakening

I. Everything is spirit. Interior domains are real and neglecting them impoverishes yourself, others, and the world. There is no dichotomy between secular and sacred. See blessed beauty everywhere in everything. What appears to be profane is holiness in disguise.

Non-Religious

Jesus for the Non-Religious
John Shelby Spong, Chapter 20

Between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand years ago, a mere nanosecond on the clock of the earth’s existence, three things entered life that announced the arrival of human beings, as we now define them. The first was that consciousness grew into self-consciousness and awareness into self-awareness. The second was that the medium of time was expanded so that these human creatures could, in a conscious way, remember the past and recall it, and anticipate the future and plan for it. The third was that these creatures began to identify human sounds with both objects and actions, and in this way language, which is the essence of abstract thinking, came into being. At some specific moment, perhaps not at the same time, or in the same place, and certainly not in one solitary individual who might be called the mythological Adam/Eve, the first of the species that we identify as Homo sapiens came into being. This planet earth now possessed an inhabitant who was self-conscious, was time-aware and had the ability to communicate with words. Something new and wondrous had emerged out of the evolutionary soup—something that was destined to transform natural history into human history.

I try to imagine that mythical moment in which consciousness became self-consciousness and awareness became self-awareness. What was it like in the creatures in whom this new reality was dawning over whatever number of years it took to become the norm? All we know is that these human creatures evolved to the place where they saw themselves not as part of nature, but as separate from nature, even as standing over against the natural world. These human creatures had evolved to the place where they could look out on the world from a new center as separate, self-aware and self-conscious beings. It was probably both a startling wonder and a traumatic moment of fear and enormous anxiety. What does it mean to see yourself suddenly as one who is alone, fragile, self-consciously living in fear in the midst of powerful natural forces that you can identify, but over which you have no control? I suspect these first of our human ancestors shook in their skins at the new vision of what life had become and all that it now entailed. While they could experience these powerful changes, they could not possibly understand them except in the most primitive of ways.

Accompanying this self-awareness was the sense that their lives were lived inside an ever-flowing dimension called time. These human creatures recognized that there was a time before they existed as conscious creatures and there would be a time after that conscious existence ended. That is, they came to see themselves as bounded on each end by a sense of being transitory. Embracing their own finiteness, they began the inevitable contemplation of their own mortality. Finally these creatures developed the ability to articulate in symbolic sounds their fears and at the same time to embrace their limitations, their powerlessness and their sense of meaninglessness with the power of words.

Look at what this meant. It is one thing to die; life in many forms does that in vast numbers daily. It is quite another to know that you are going to die, to plan for it and to accept its inevitability. That was the human situation. It is one thing to be unaware that your existence has no meaning, as is the case for the billions of insects that are devoured each day as food for other living things; it is quite another to deal with that reality consciously and to battle against it. It is one thing to be part of the routines of life and death in the world of nature; it is quite another to be aware and self-conscious of the fact that you are a link in the food chain.

Human beings, as the centers of consciousness, now know that they will die and are aware that they will disappear. This is the knowledge that raised (and still raises) the questions of meaning and meaninglessness in them. Because that knowledge is now inherent, every human being is forced to inquire as to whether or not humanity’s self-conscious life has any ultimate significance. To be human is, therefore, to endure the trauma of self-consciousness. It is to be aware of the existential shock of the threat of nonbeing. No other living thing before us has ever been required to embrace this level of anxiety. Part of what it means to be human is to know ourselves to be chronically anxious creatures. It means seeing ourselves as those who must embrace our own mortality. It means that if life has no ultimate meaning, we alone of all other creatures embrace the threat of meaninglessness. In response to that threat, human life is driven to create meaning. It was and is the human experience to tremble before these realizations. It is, however, also the acknowledged human destiny not to win the struggle for meaning, for survival or for life. The fate of all living creatures is to lose, but only the human life knows this self-consciously. It is thus not easy to be human. We will be felled, destroyed and eaten by natural enemies—that is what germs and viruses are, after all—and our flesh and bones will in our turn feed other forms of life.

If the anxiety initially arising out of this knowledge had not been banked by our ancient forebears, I don’t think that self-consciousness could have survived. It would have been a step in the evolutionary process that could not be sustained, because what was required to sustain it was more than our human coping mechanisms could manage. That is the moment in which I believe this emerging human being asked the question for which the concept of God, understood theistically, was the answer. Theism is, I believe, a direct result of the trauma of self-consciousness. Theism is not God; it is rather a human coping mechanism.

Human beings began to ask questions like these: Is there someone or some presence in the universe like me, self-conscious and aware, but possessing more power than I possess, and able thereby to cope with the anxieties of existence that I now face? Where does this presence abide? Will this being or this presence be my ally or my enemy in the struggle to survive? Will this being or this presence use the power I imagine it must have to come to my aid? How can I win the favor of this being? How can I accommodate this “other’s” presence? How can I secure the blessing of this power?

At first this thinking process took a very basic form. The lonely self-conscious human beings observed that there were living things, plants and animals, that existed quite independently of human life and so our ancient ancestors wondered where these living things came from, just as they wondered about their own origin. They observed vital natural forces in the world, like the flowing of a river, the tides of the ocean, the power of the wind, the warmth of the sun and the light of the moon. Some power must animate these things and make them able to do the things they do, they reasoned. Could that power protect and defend them also? To these things human beings began to assign a force that they called spirit. Spirit was unseen, mysterious, yet its power could be readily observed. Could they relate to this world of spirit, win its favor and enjoy its protection? the human creatures wondered. Out of the sky, they observed, came thunder, lightning, wind, rain, warmth, cold. Was there a spirit beyond the sky who controlled these forces? Was that spirit benevolent or malevolent? Could they do anything to make that spirit more friendly? What was it that might please the source of these apparently living things?

In time these individual spirits, thought to inhabit both creatures and vital forces in the natural world, provided the content for human beings’ earliest religion, called animism—that is, the belief that something called spirit animated all that lived. The religious task was not to anger these spirits, but to please them so that they would serve our needs. God as something external to our life, supernatural in power, was born. Theism had appeared.

As life evolved and changed, so did theism, but it never transcended its original definition. When the human shift from hunters and gatherers toward more settled agricultural activities occurred, theism took on the form of the earth mother who brought life out of her womb to sustain the human struggle for survival. In that transition, theism began to display feminine characteristics. Later these supernatural spirits came to be thought of as something like a family of gods or spirits living in a polytheistic universe. Still later these divine powers, sometimes called gods, seemed to organize according to earthly standards of tribal life, with varieties of powers and functions, but with a supreme deity ruling over lesser spirits. This was when the human imagination conceived of a heavenly court under the leadership of a Jupiter and Juno or a Zeus and Hera. Still later, patriarchy drove the feminine out and theism moved from the world of many spirits to the form of one solitary deity who, like a tribal chief, ran the world as a kind of expanded tribal god who watched over and protected only the tribe that served this particular deity as its chosen people, and later who, as the universal God, ruled over all of life as a kind of king of the universe.

Yet in each of these images the theistic definition of God remained steadfast, ever saluted, and always intact. God was, as I see that definition emerging, “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and able to invade the world in miraculous ways to bless, to punish, to accomplish the divine will, to answer prayers and to come to the aid of frail, powerless human beings.” As soon as this theistic idea of a deity was established, anxiety lessened, since anxiety was the primary reason for the human creation of this theistic deity in the first place. Now, these human beings reasoned, there is a being beyond us, more powerful than we and capable of defending and protecting us, the self-conscious ones. All that was needed to turn this theistic coping device into a religious system was to discern what it was that pleased this deity. What would it take to gain divine favor or to avoid divine wrath in order to enlist the help of this supernatural being in the struggle to survive? The moment that question was asked, religious systems, all of which are consciously devised to accomplish exactly those goals, came into being. Human life was now generically defined as “religious human life.”

Analyze any religious system
and you will discover that it contains two specific divisions.
The first is: What is the proper way to worship so that God’s favor will be gained?
The second is: What is the proper way to behave or to live in order to gain God’s approval? Later, in more formal religious settings, this would be called our duty toward God
and our duty toward our neighbor and would be enshrined in the Hebrew tradition
on two tablets of stone as the Ten Commandments.

Security, however, is not finally achieved until the religious system successfully claims to possess ultimate truth by some form of divine revelation. This claim of authority normally comes in one of two forms. Either this truth has been revealed to some human entity who stands near to God—a high priest, for example—or the absolute will of God has been spelled out in some inspired writing which God’s representative alone can interpret properly.

It is this claim to possess absolute truth that keeps anxiety in check.
Relativity in religious claims must be repressed, because it always allows our original debilitating anxiety to return.
Under this system the idea that we have genuine security requires that we do not doubt the meaning of our own created security system.

So the idea of God as the Almighty One, who watches over us and protects us, came into being. We win this God’s favor with proper divine worship. We please this God with lives marked by proper behavior. When in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity, we pray to this God for intervening help and we expect answers. When tragedies strike, we wonder what we have done to incur the divine wrath.

This is the meaning and the legacy of theism and it became the dominant content of all religion that is theistic in its self-understanding.

What we need to embrace from this insight is that human religious systems have never been primarily a search for truth; they have always been first and foremost a search for security.

Because theism was the primary way human beings conceptualized God, it was inevitable that when a group of first-century people believed that they had encountered God in the story of Jesus, they saw theism as the content of Jesus. The Jesus story was thus turned into an account of a theistic God coming to our rescue, invading the human world from above. Theism was the fully operative definition of the God we claimed we had met in Jesus. A literalized concept of incarnation was and is the theological language used to convey this idea. The doctrine of the trinity, which purports to define the reality of God, brings Jesus and the theistic concept of God into oneness.

The invading God from above needed a way to get into the human arena to engage the human situation, so a landing field was created capable of receiving the deity. Christians identified that landing field as the virgin birth. Through this miracle the theistic God put on human flesh and came among us. While he was on this earth, this Jesus (as he was described) could do all the things that people assumed God could do, for he was God in human form. So stories were told in which Jesus stilled the storm, walked on water, expanded the food supply, healed the sick and even raised the dead. If people pleased the God that they claimed to have met in Jesus, this God, still theistic in nature, would bless them by answering their prayers, intervening in their history and finally by accepting them into eternal life at the moment of their death, overcoming once and for all the human anxiety about our finitude.

The ancient human anxiety met by the development of the theistic understanding of God is still today operative in most of the traditional forms of Christianity. Religious systems are very slow to change. Theism still seeks to give meaning to life, to answer our questions about our self-conscious existence with authority and to calm our anxiety about mortality with promises of eternal life.

The fires of anxiety, born in self-consciousness, are thus banked by religion and we are
content, if not grateful, to live inside the theistic definition of God that we created.
Theism, therefore, is not who God is. Theism is a human definition of who God is.
There is a vast difference.

So our questions about Jesus must shift in a revolutionary new direction. What was the experience that his disciples were trying to articulate when they declared in a thousand different ways that in the human Jesus, the theistic God had been revealed? Is a dying theism the only way to make sense out of the God experience? Can we remove the theistic concept of God from our understanding of God and still be worshippers? Can we lift the theistic God overlay from the life of Jesus and still be Christians? I believe we can. Indeed, I believe there is no other alternative if we want to live as Christians in this twenty-first century. That is why we had to go through the exercise, in earlier chapters, of separating the myth of Jesus from the Jesus of history. That is why we needed to examine the primitive images by which he was understood. That is why we now must separate God understood theistically from the experience of God that we claim for Jesus. That is the insight I want to pursue.

The next step in discovering who Jesus is, is to allow the irrelevant theistic language with which we have surrounded him to be shattered until it lies in a million pieces at his feet. Then, as we look again, Jesus for the non-religious begins to come into view. So does a new sense of what it means to be human. That is when we ask whether or not theism was ever an asset to humanity. Is survival the same thing as living? We look at that question next as the journey goes on.