I tend to go along with Christian tradition in supposing that Jesus of Nazareth was a singular historical person. However, an intellectually honest critical analysis of the pertinent ancient texts calls for admission that there is virtually no direct evidence to support that view. It is entirely possible that the ultimate source of the Jesus traditions was not one singular person, but several, whose teachings and life circumstances may have been concatenated or conflated by re-tellers and later literary compositors, i.e. the Evangelists, the authors of the gospels.
My view, which serves as a framework for understanding and representing the religious-ethical teachings attributed to Jesus, is that the surviving scriptures are ultimately based on oral accounts of the sayings of a remarkable, prophetic Judaic teacher who engaged in a brief but very influential ministry, which was profoundly transformative for most of the people who received his teachings. I do not doubt that Jesus, like multitudes of prophets and religious teachers before and since his time, was divinely inspired, i.e. he was consciously and whole-mindedly in communion with God. His purpose was well described as proclaiming the gospel, or the good tidings, of God.
I have no reason to doubt that Jesus, or an historical personage very like him, was crucified in Jerusalem by Roman occupation authorities in about 30 C.E. It is also plausible that a few of his devotees promulgated a tale that Jesus had gone missing from his crypt on the third day following his death. What actually happened is unknown, but this story, and the fictive denouement of Jesus' bodily resurrection that was added to the first gospel narrative, have had incalculable consequences, affecting the history of religion more than any other dogma has ever done.
Whoever the original instigator of the first-century Jesus movement might have been (if but one), I believe he was no more God incarnate than any human being potentially is. Moreover, he was not Christian. He was, apparently, a Judaic Messianist. For all we know, 'he' may well have actually been 'they' - several 'Jesuses' as it were.
Early Christianity as we know it seems to have been invented almost single-handedly by the apostate, repentant Pharisaic letter-writer Saul of Tarsus, who was called Paul in Greek. The emergent Christian religious tradition was elaborated, following Paul, by a number of evangelistic authors working with textual sources based on oral transmission - and a few scraps of written "sayings" of Jesus. Nothing resembling an established, organized church developed in these traditions until some time in the second century, in circumstances far removed from the original Jerusalem assembly of “The Way,” observant Jews who heralded the coming of the Lord, that is, the advent of the Jewish Messiah, the Son of Man who they believed would inaugurate the reign of God in Israel.
The Greek translation of the Aramaic term, “Meshiach” - Messiah - was "Christos," i.e., Christ. The theological meaning I make of the term, “Christ” is that it signifies that condition of the soul in which the human person is in conscious communion with God. Another way I have put this is “the consciousness of personal being in relationship with being itself.” To be “in Christ” is to be awakened to the reality of one’s sacred identity with God, as Jesus is said to have been. Thus, as I would interpret the evangelistic narrative, upon baptism by John, Jesus became consciously Jesus Christ, Son of God, standing for the potential of sanctification inherent in every person.
I understand the term, “grace” as signifying that spiritually transforming self-realization in which one recognizes the identity of one’s personal being with the ultimate reality of being itself. Grace is the gift of God-consciousness, and it brings about the state of being in Christ. The gift of grace is received through faith, which is precisely that orientation of the whole person prescribed in the Biblical commandment to “love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind.”
Jim Weller is a graduate of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is currently a member of Peace United Church of Christ, formerly called First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Sunday, December 11, 2005
The Parable of True Wealth
A certain wealthy young man owned a mill, which was the most important source of income for the people of his village. This he had inherited from his father, who had taken over the business from his own father, and so on, for several generations. The wealthy man inhabited his estate for all the years of his life, and throughout the years, as he walked proudly through his village, which eventually became a town, and then a small city, he often passed by a man in ragged clothes, the same man year in and year out, who meekly begged for alms each time they met.
The wealthy man was disdainful of the poor, thinking them lazy and idle. He was chiefly concerned with increasing his profit and his property. Yet he was a church-going Christian, and he was not mean or cruel. He remembered the parson quoting Deuteronomy, saying, “There will always be poor people in the land. Give freely to those who are poor and needy in your land. Open your hands to them.” So whenever he could not pass by unnoticed, he would give the poor man a few coins from his purse. Thus it went for many years.
The wealthy man strove industriously all his life, and multiplied his inheritance. Many sought to gain at his expense. People flattered, and wheedled, and cheated, and sued for his advantages. But the beggar just humbly thanked him for his little gifts and blessed him contentedly. The wealthy man and the beggar both grew old, keeping their different ways and means. The wealthy man at last became ill and weary, and was sorely burdened with his worldly concerns. One evening when again they encountered each other in the street, while handing him a coin, he asked the beggar in exasperation, “How can you have endured so long in your wretched alley, yet you seem so thankful and at peace?” The beggar bowed gratefully, and replied, “My friend, true wealth is knowing what is enough.” And so it was.
The wealthy man was disdainful of the poor, thinking them lazy and idle. He was chiefly concerned with increasing his profit and his property. Yet he was a church-going Christian, and he was not mean or cruel. He remembered the parson quoting Deuteronomy, saying, “There will always be poor people in the land. Give freely to those who are poor and needy in your land. Open your hands to them.” So whenever he could not pass by unnoticed, he would give the poor man a few coins from his purse. Thus it went for many years.
The wealthy man strove industriously all his life, and multiplied his inheritance. Many sought to gain at his expense. People flattered, and wheedled, and cheated, and sued for his advantages. But the beggar just humbly thanked him for his little gifts and blessed him contentedly. The wealthy man and the beggar both grew old, keeping their different ways and means. The wealthy man at last became ill and weary, and was sorely burdened with his worldly concerns. One evening when again they encountered each other in the street, while handing him a coin, he asked the beggar in exasperation, “How can you have endured so long in your wretched alley, yet you seem so thankful and at peace?” The beggar bowed gratefully, and replied, “My friend, true wealth is knowing what is enough.” And so it was.
The Parable of the Seekers
Once upon a time, in a strange and faraway place, there lived a species of people who were small, but their numbers were very great, and they populated a land that, to them at least, was vast. Their species was ancient, having occupied the land for uncounted generations. The clans, and communities, and countries of them were numerous, and there were many different languages and traditions among them. They had no writing though, because their fingers were short, and so were their legs, so they rarely ventured very far from their birthplaces.
The landscape where these people lived was ridged and wrinkled, full of hills and dales, and rills and rivulets, and in the middle of it was an enormous rise of peaks, that they called the Mountain of God. Most of the people never knew what lay beyond their own particular crease in the earth, for their lives were as short as their limbs, and they had to work hard every day for a living. They all could see the towering tops of the Mountain of God though, from the higher vantage places, on certain days and moonlit nights, when fog and clouds didn’t hide them.
These people had just one food, which they prepared in many different ways, for variety. This was a sweet, aromatic, seed-like, whitish substance that appeared overnight as if materializing out of thin air, like hoarfrost. It was called “manna.” Some said it resembled a gummy resin exuded by certain trees, and some said it was like a grainy residue left on leaves by aphid-like insects. Legend had it that once, in a wilderness encampment, a great flock of quails had arrived, and then the people had feasted on roast squab, but as long as anyone living remembered, their food was just manna, manna, and manna, nothing but manna.
The people gathered their manna every morning and ate it up that day, because it would not keep overnight. It would spoil and be found crawling with maggots by next morning - except, oddly, on the sixth night. Every seventh day, no manna would be found, but the leftovers from the day before would still, inexplicably, be edible. So on that day, which was called “Shabbat,” no one had to labor gathering food. Everyone said the manna was a gift from God for God’s beloved people.
Another strange fact about this land was that the force of gravity was not the same everywhere. Everything weighed less at higher elevations, and weighed more at lower elevations. For this reason, though it was difficult for people to climb very far uphill on their short little legs and tiny feet, their work was easier, and they felt lighter and more restful, when they had made the effort to reach higher ground. Naturally, hilltop real estate was the most valuable. The big problem, though, for most people, was that the food always collected in the low hollows, and thus only the very rich could afford to pay servants to carry it up the hillsides to them. Consequently, no one lived permanently on the highest ridges, though people sometimes came there on day-trips, and felt their yokes most joyously lightened.
Now, most of these people didn’t think about God very much. They all believed that God could, in principle, be found way up on the tops of the Mountain of God, but almost no one claimed to have ever seen God. They would get together in small or large groups, on Shabbat, to praise and thank God for not having to work that day, and they cherished and enjoyed that tradition, but few were really very concerned about God, as Godself.
There were always a few, though, who were ultimately concerned with God. They loved God with all their hearts, and all their souls, and all their minds, and all their might. They were called “Seekers.” They sought to approach nearer to God by journeying arduously, step by tiny step, over the land, up hill and down, toward the Mountain of God. As they reached the ridge tops, they felt weightless and light-hearted, and they knew in which direction to travel because they could see the peaks of the Mountain of God gleaming beautifully in the light of the sun and the moon, when the air was clear. They were often hungry on their pilgrimages, since their manna did not last overnight during their crossings of the high country, where they could find none. On Shabbat days, the Seekers rested and worshipped God with the people gathered in little brown churches in the dells, who shared their manna with them.
For as long as anyone knew, Seekers had told the gathered people about their visions of the Mountain of God, about their hopeful journeys, their enlightenment in the high places, how they expected one day to see God, and to be in God’s presence. From time immemorial, multitudes of Seekers had come from every direction in the land, and many had reached the Mountain of God. Not only had they done that, but also many had returned to tell of it. They told of many paths worn and cleared by halting, little steps up the mountain, and of age-old signs and monuments left by those who had gone before, showing Seekers the way up, higher and higher.
Some paths ended in sheer stone outcrops, or had been blocked by rockslides. Those ways were hidden with overgrowth, or covered with rubble. But other paths, though steep and impossible to discern from below, had been kept open and free from stumbling blocks. Seekers knew, they said, that some pathways could still be ascended all the way up. Of these, there were known to be quite a few, approaching the peaks of the Mountain of God from every side.
To reach the summits took Seekers many years, even lifetimes. It required of them prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The climbing was easy, even though their short-limbed locomotion was very slow, because they were light as lizards at that high altitude. But how did the Seekers survive on the rocky mountaintops without fresh manna? God provided them with freeze-dried, extended-release, high-protein, carbohydrate-balanced manna substitute with organic preservatives, because God wanted to see the amazement on their sun-burnt faces when they finally arrived. God had a liberating truth to reveal to them, which came in a blinding flash of the obvious - this, of course, you already know.
The Seekers who had made their way to the top, and returned with the good news of God, advised others to do this: Find a well-worn path with well-kept signs; study the signs and understand them, set out on the path you’ve chosen, paying close attention to the ground ahead, and stay on that path. That will be your Way. Do not turn aside from it, looking for a better route. There are many ways to reach the heights, they said, but scrambling across the mountainside, scrabbling and sliding on this path, then that, from one blind curve to another, without learning the meanings of the signs, is definitely not the way.
But did the neophyte Seekers heed the advice their venerable mentors so generously gave them? Actually, most of them did, because they had never seen pulp fiction or television shows, and their undergraduate professors were Dominicans and Jesuits. And what of the unfortunate, sophomoric, heedless ones in a hurry, who couldn’t tell a blunderbuss from a bowling pin? Some of them eventually wandered back down into the valleys, all knot-headed, shin-scraped, and bruised, saying that, as far as they were concerned, there was no God up there after all.
So, ages came and ages passed, and most of the people never did see God’s face. God never spoke, and they couldn’t have read God’s handwriting anyway, but they mostly believed in God nonetheless, and they kept getting their daily manna. Wise and weary Seekers kept coming back from the Mountain of God, radiating God’s glory, and people fed them and listened to their stories, but most people really were content just to scrape up breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and admire the daffodils blooming in the meadows.
God, being just and merciful, and having other worlds to create, continued to love them as long as their short little lives lasted, because they were God’s people, with all their short little fingers and short little legs, and God had promised to deliver them from evil into the land. And so it was, because even though God is invisible and speechless, and no one can decipher God’s handwiting, God is nothing if not one who keeps promises.
The landscape where these people lived was ridged and wrinkled, full of hills and dales, and rills and rivulets, and in the middle of it was an enormous rise of peaks, that they called the Mountain of God. Most of the people never knew what lay beyond their own particular crease in the earth, for their lives were as short as their limbs, and they had to work hard every day for a living. They all could see the towering tops of the Mountain of God though, from the higher vantage places, on certain days and moonlit nights, when fog and clouds didn’t hide them.
These people had just one food, which they prepared in many different ways, for variety. This was a sweet, aromatic, seed-like, whitish substance that appeared overnight as if materializing out of thin air, like hoarfrost. It was called “manna.” Some said it resembled a gummy resin exuded by certain trees, and some said it was like a grainy residue left on leaves by aphid-like insects. Legend had it that once, in a wilderness encampment, a great flock of quails had arrived, and then the people had feasted on roast squab, but as long as anyone living remembered, their food was just manna, manna, and manna, nothing but manna.
The people gathered their manna every morning and ate it up that day, because it would not keep overnight. It would spoil and be found crawling with maggots by next morning - except, oddly, on the sixth night. Every seventh day, no manna would be found, but the leftovers from the day before would still, inexplicably, be edible. So on that day, which was called “Shabbat,” no one had to labor gathering food. Everyone said the manna was a gift from God for God’s beloved people.
Another strange fact about this land was that the force of gravity was not the same everywhere. Everything weighed less at higher elevations, and weighed more at lower elevations. For this reason, though it was difficult for people to climb very far uphill on their short little legs and tiny feet, their work was easier, and they felt lighter and more restful, when they had made the effort to reach higher ground. Naturally, hilltop real estate was the most valuable. The big problem, though, for most people, was that the food always collected in the low hollows, and thus only the very rich could afford to pay servants to carry it up the hillsides to them. Consequently, no one lived permanently on the highest ridges, though people sometimes came there on day-trips, and felt their yokes most joyously lightened.
Now, most of these people didn’t think about God very much. They all believed that God could, in principle, be found way up on the tops of the Mountain of God, but almost no one claimed to have ever seen God. They would get together in small or large groups, on Shabbat, to praise and thank God for not having to work that day, and they cherished and enjoyed that tradition, but few were really very concerned about God, as Godself.
There were always a few, though, who were ultimately concerned with God. They loved God with all their hearts, and all their souls, and all their minds, and all their might. They were called “Seekers.” They sought to approach nearer to God by journeying arduously, step by tiny step, over the land, up hill and down, toward the Mountain of God. As they reached the ridge tops, they felt weightless and light-hearted, and they knew in which direction to travel because they could see the peaks of the Mountain of God gleaming beautifully in the light of the sun and the moon, when the air was clear. They were often hungry on their pilgrimages, since their manna did not last overnight during their crossings of the high country, where they could find none. On Shabbat days, the Seekers rested and worshipped God with the people gathered in little brown churches in the dells, who shared their manna with them.
For as long as anyone knew, Seekers had told the gathered people about their visions of the Mountain of God, about their hopeful journeys, their enlightenment in the high places, how they expected one day to see God, and to be in God’s presence. From time immemorial, multitudes of Seekers had come from every direction in the land, and many had reached the Mountain of God. Not only had they done that, but also many had returned to tell of it. They told of many paths worn and cleared by halting, little steps up the mountain, and of age-old signs and monuments left by those who had gone before, showing Seekers the way up, higher and higher.
Some paths ended in sheer stone outcrops, or had been blocked by rockslides. Those ways were hidden with overgrowth, or covered with rubble. But other paths, though steep and impossible to discern from below, had been kept open and free from stumbling blocks. Seekers knew, they said, that some pathways could still be ascended all the way up. Of these, there were known to be quite a few, approaching the peaks of the Mountain of God from every side.
To reach the summits took Seekers many years, even lifetimes. It required of them prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The climbing was easy, even though their short-limbed locomotion was very slow, because they were light as lizards at that high altitude. But how did the Seekers survive on the rocky mountaintops without fresh manna? God provided them with freeze-dried, extended-release, high-protein, carbohydrate-balanced manna substitute with organic preservatives, because God wanted to see the amazement on their sun-burnt faces when they finally arrived. God had a liberating truth to reveal to them, which came in a blinding flash of the obvious - this, of course, you already know.
The Seekers who had made their way to the top, and returned with the good news of God, advised others to do this: Find a well-worn path with well-kept signs; study the signs and understand them, set out on the path you’ve chosen, paying close attention to the ground ahead, and stay on that path. That will be your Way. Do not turn aside from it, looking for a better route. There are many ways to reach the heights, they said, but scrambling across the mountainside, scrabbling and sliding on this path, then that, from one blind curve to another, without learning the meanings of the signs, is definitely not the way.
But did the neophyte Seekers heed the advice their venerable mentors so generously gave them? Actually, most of them did, because they had never seen pulp fiction or television shows, and their undergraduate professors were Dominicans and Jesuits. And what of the unfortunate, sophomoric, heedless ones in a hurry, who couldn’t tell a blunderbuss from a bowling pin? Some of them eventually wandered back down into the valleys, all knot-headed, shin-scraped, and bruised, saying that, as far as they were concerned, there was no God up there after all.
So, ages came and ages passed, and most of the people never did see God’s face. God never spoke, and they couldn’t have read God’s handwriting anyway, but they mostly believed in God nonetheless, and they kept getting their daily manna. Wise and weary Seekers kept coming back from the Mountain of God, radiating God’s glory, and people fed them and listened to their stories, but most people really were content just to scrape up breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and admire the daffodils blooming in the meadows.
God, being just and merciful, and having other worlds to create, continued to love them as long as their short little lives lasted, because they were God’s people, with all their short little fingers and short little legs, and God had promised to deliver them from evil into the land. And so it was, because even though God is invisible and speechless, and no one can decipher God’s handwiting, God is nothing if not one who keeps promises.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Where is God?
God is not located somewhere up there, or out there; not beyond us, nor beside us. We may say that God is omnipresent, everywhere; and God is transcendent, entirely other; and God is immanent, acting in Creation. Or, maybe not.
The most salient truth is that God is to be found within us, at our hearts’ level. If we feel God’s presence, we feel it within. We may imagine God as a being present with us, but the divine presence is truly to be found within, where felt reality resides. If we feel God with us in corporate worship or prayer, it is truly God’s presence in other persons who are here beside us.
This is what early Christians meant when they referred to the church as the body of Christ. When the ancient people of the Jerusalem temple gathered around the Holy of Holies to be in God’s presence, it was God’s presence within them, and within each other, that they really felt. The ark was actually empty, just as the communion cup is really empty until we fill it with meaning, and the host is only a morsel of complex carbohydrates until we take it into our being where God truly is.
I think the prophets and priests of ancient Judah and Israel understood this, as they elaborated the uses of religious symbols and signs to represent the ineffable reality of God’s presence in the very being of the human person. Jesus certainly knew it, as his words pointed toward God within, although his disciples and some of their followers may have missed the point.
I believe the early proto-orthodox theologians of the Christian church understood that their Trinitarian formulations were symbolic representations of the inward reality of God. Thus, the prismatic diffraction of God into distinctive “persons” (which were originally conceived of as “substances”) were not to be taken by cognoscenti as objective descriptions of reality. They were systematic analogs of subjective religious experience, based in the received mythology of the resurrected Christ. I think the construction of the Christian mythology was conscious and intentional on the part of the apostles, the epistolary authors, and the evangelists of the synoptic gospels.
Each of us is a particular concrete manifestation of ultimate reality, and by the mysterious providence of God, we have been given the miraculous gift of apprehension of the divine presence of which we are images; and more than images, we are avatars. We are the creaturely lenses through which God recognizes Godself in Creation, and the mirrors in which God’s image is reflected.
The most salient truth is that God is to be found within us, at our hearts’ level. If we feel God’s presence, we feel it within. We may imagine God as a being present with us, but the divine presence is truly to be found within, where felt reality resides. If we feel God with us in corporate worship or prayer, it is truly God’s presence in other persons who are here beside us.
This is what early Christians meant when they referred to the church as the body of Christ. When the ancient people of the Jerusalem temple gathered around the Holy of Holies to be in God’s presence, it was God’s presence within them, and within each other, that they really felt. The ark was actually empty, just as the communion cup is really empty until we fill it with meaning, and the host is only a morsel of complex carbohydrates until we take it into our being where God truly is.
I think the prophets and priests of ancient Judah and Israel understood this, as they elaborated the uses of religious symbols and signs to represent the ineffable reality of God’s presence in the very being of the human person. Jesus certainly knew it, as his words pointed toward God within, although his disciples and some of their followers may have missed the point.
I believe the early proto-orthodox theologians of the Christian church understood that their Trinitarian formulations were symbolic representations of the inward reality of God. Thus, the prismatic diffraction of God into distinctive “persons” (which were originally conceived of as “substances”) were not to be taken by cognoscenti as objective descriptions of reality. They were systematic analogs of subjective religious experience, based in the received mythology of the resurrected Christ. I think the construction of the Christian mythology was conscious and intentional on the part of the apostles, the epistolary authors, and the evangelists of the synoptic gospels.
Each of us is a particular concrete manifestation of ultimate reality, and by the mysterious providence of God, we have been given the miraculous gift of apprehension of the divine presence of which we are images; and more than images, we are avatars. We are the creaturely lenses through which God recognizes Godself in Creation, and the mirrors in which God’s image is reflected.
Monday, July 25, 2005
God Is What Love Is
“God” is a word; it is a name for something - not the thing itself. As such, it is a sign, a signifier, and “an outward indication of the existence or presence of something not immediately evident.” Ordinarily, words refer to phenomena, that is, immediately perceived realities, as distinguished from noumena, or realities which are perceived by mediation but cannot be directly known or apprehended. “God,” “Allah,” “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” and all holy names like these, are signs that point toward, or refer to, the limitless noumenon that underlies all phenomena, that is, “being itself.”
Love is the orientation of the soul that arises in the conscious relation of personal being with being itself. This (“the conscious relation of personal being with being itself”) is also how I have described “the presence of God.” Ergo, God is love, as the Johannine scriptures tell us. Now I affirm this as true myself, not because John said so, but because I have discovered it to be true according to my own experience and reflection. This sheds light as well on Paul’s scripture saying, “Faith, hope, love; these three abide.” In other words, faith and hope, too, are orientations of the soul inherent in this conscious relation. But, as the Apostle avers, “love is the greatest of these.” Without love, hope is faint and futile; without love, faith is brittle and desiccated.
It is notable that in these terms, “God” is a relation, not a thing. I used to speak of God as “being itself,” that is, the ultimate reality “behind” or “beneath” all things, until I realized that I have also come to understand that the human personal consciousness of God is necessary for the “presence” of God. As I once wrote, “If there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known.” Just as the human being - or “personal being” - is an aspect of the ultimate reality I describe as “being itself,” personal God-consciousness can be regarded as the “consciousness of being itself,” something I’ve also said repeatedly. Here, then, is the truth of the religious affirmation that humanity is created by the love of God, and in “God’s image.”
I refer here, as I have again and again through the years, to my first articulation of this, which I wrote twelve or thirteen years ago, when my daughters Anna and Maggie were very young:
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?”, asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.
“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”
Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.
“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Being itself recognizes itself in the aspect of personal being. As this relationship becomes conscious, love arises, the subjectivity of which is called “divine love.” It is all together the love of God for the world and humanity, the human person’s responsive love of God, and love of neighbor. Thus we recognize the “subjective self” in each other, each and every one a being created in the image of God. And thus, God is love, and is located in the conscious relation of God with God’s human image.
And for animal lovers, to the extent that other sentient beings are in conscious relationship with God, love is there too. What about atheists? Well, in my view, they’re no exception. They just don’t like to use the term, “God.”
And what about agnostics? Their difficulty is in the mistake of worrying about the existence of God. God does not exist – God is existence itself, the ground of being, or being itself. To use some fancy verbal footwork, theirs is the perplexity of existents questioning the reality of existence itself, in which they consist.
This is, pretty much, the setup for St. Anselm’s “ontological argument” for the existence of God. The agnostic knows explicitly that he or she exists, and implicitly that all things in existence also exist, but doesn’t know that God is not to be understood to exist in the same way, as an existent, but rather as existence itself in relation with its human aspects which consist in it, and by grace and providence become conscious of their relation with it. As soon as a relational description of God is accepted by them, all their worries will fall away, like scales from their eyes.
What is God? God is not a what. God is not an existing being. God is not an object; God is the ultimate subject. God is being itself. God is. Who is God? God only knows. If God is anyone, God is I and Thou; God is the ultimate subject in the subject-subject relation.
To impute attributes of beings to God, as God, is to speak of God as if God were in being, among other beings. You and I and the lamp post are beings. Attributes, or Names of God, are metaphoric when speaking of God as God: God is good; God is just; God is merciful. Or else they are hyperbolic: God is great; God is all-knowing; God is all-powerful. Any words that can be said of God as God can be said of no thing in being: God is infinite; God is eternal; God is unconditional; God is absolute.
God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. Wherever you are, there you jolly well are, aren’t you? And there God is, too; God always was, is now, and ever shall be, forever and ever, Amen. God’s presence is in us and among us here and now; ours is the consciousness of being itself. In our awareness of being, being itself experiences being itself. With each new generation, God’s faith in humanity is renewed; in each regeneration, humanity’s response of faith is renewed.
Through our consciousness, God apprehends Creation, and we, the fully self-conscious parts of Creation, apprehend God the Creator. This state of God-consciousness is what is called “sanctification” or “redemption.” It is a state of reconciliation with God; it is what is meant by being “in Christ.” When we then act out our lives in congruence with the ethics of Christ, we are “saved.” Salvation means we are saved from the effects of our potentialities for doing evil.
What is Satan? Satan is said to be the anti-Christ; as such, it is the antithesis of the human potentiality for redemption. If the Christ is the human capacity for reconciliation with God, the Satan is its converse. Neither the Christ nor the Satan is a supernatural person, or divine being, or real entities of any sort. Their names are symbols of the universal human potentials for salvation and damnation, ultimate good and ultimate evil. In Hebrew, the words ha Satan ("the Satan") appear in the Book of Job. These are usually translated as “the Adversary,” understood allegorically to signify the “shadow” side of the human personality.
Between the Adversary and the moral righteousness of the "blameless and upright" human being, a constant dialectic was thought to be acted out in people’s daily lives. The effect of the embodied and unconstrained Satan is to tempt or traduce the human soul to sin, which denies the Christ potential and alienates the person from God’s grace. Deeply infected with sin, people do evil, causing various kinds of harm and damage to others, usually intentionally.
Remember well that the Christ and the Satan are symbols standing for human mental, ideational, and intentional configurations, or “states of mind,” that can become more or less permanently internalized, and consequently affect a person’s conscience, character formation, moral and ethical faculties, and the entire array of human personality factors, for good or ill.
To be “in Christ” is the converse of being “in sin.” In Christ (remember, this is a sanctified state of the psyche, a holy condition of the soul, not a mystical divine being), the “saved” or “redeemed” person is incapable of sin, that is, of doing willful harm to self or others, or to God’s Creation. The sanctified one is relieved of sinfulness by virtue of a capacity for self “disciple-ing” in which one walks in the way of the internalized Christ. The sanctified one “fears God,” that is, conscientiously avoids doing harm to God’s Creation.
To be in sin, in thrall to the Satan, means that the potential of being reconciled with God, of being “in Christ,” is denied or preempted. The human will to do evil, to not refrain from doing harm, is unleashed. In this state, the human person is free to act out diffidence or malice, and to carry out damage, destruction, aggression, and oppression by whatever means will suit his sinful ends or sinful attributes – Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust, among them.
Who is Jesus? “Is” is the wrong tense. Jesus was an itinerant, indigent Jewish teacher and religious reformer, a Rabbi and a rabble-rouser, a prophet of profound religious and social transformation. He was brutally murdered by crucifixion at the orders of the Roman Provincial Authority, as an enemy of the state. He was not, by any means, the only person to have suffered this fate, for the same reasons.
Jesus was not a Christian. He was, however, “in Christ,” awakened, enlightened, exalted, and sanctified. He was truly a saint. He was also not, by any means, the only saint to have been sanctified “in Christ.” There have been multitudes, before and since Jesus, even now there are. Some of them are Christians; many are not. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, for instance, was “in Christ.” Maybe Augustine of Hippo was, maybe Muhammad of Medina, John Wesley, George Fox, Mahatma Gandhi, and John Freeman, to name but a few.
How does Jesus redeem us from our sins? He doesn’t. He died two thousand years ago. “In Christ,” one day at a time, we are redeemed and sanctified by reconciliation with God through our own human conscientious faculties. We are to promote salvation, by proclaiming this gospel and acting out in beneficence toward others, “in Christ,” until we die and are eventually taken up, body, mind, and soul, into the earthly biosphere from whence we came.
Except in Biblical mythology, no one has ever seen or heard God, and no one ever will. This is because the "Supreme Being" is not a being, as human beings are, as every object of human intentionality or relationality is. We are persons; God is not a person. Yet God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. God cannot be known objectively, because God is not an object. The human person can only know God subjectively, as we know our own experience and ourselves.
All I can say about God, qua God, is that God is. God’s essence is to be; in God alone, essence and existence are one. Of this, I can have the same perfect certainty as that I am. Objectively considered, my personal being is contingent, finite, temporal. I was once not in being, and the time will come when I am no longer, subjectively incomprehensible though that is. God’s being is absolute, infinite, eternal, and necessary to my being. That I am is indubitable, if not necessary.
The miracle that I am a conditional being, who can apprehend the ultimate, unconditional reality of being itself, is the gift and grace of God. In this transcendent apprehension, it may be said truly that I manifest the consciousness of being itself. What people call the presence of God is the self-conscious relation of personal being with being itself; and vice-versa, if you prefer - the relation of being itself with conscious, personal being. One key to this understanding is relatedness, but not just in the usual interpersonal sense. God is self-relatedness; God is relatedness itself. In God-consciousness, the dichotomy of subject and object is both necessary and it is self-transcendent.
The American Buddhist teacher Adyashanti says, “Because of an innocent misunderstanding, you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of Oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.”
As Alan Watts put it, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” (I have put it this way: “We are being itself experiencing itself being experienced.” Experienced by whom? By itself, of course.) Watts explained further, “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do.”
In the ancient Hebrew myth, God’s presence is revealed to Moses, appearing symbolically, in a burning bush that is nevertheless not consumed. It is significant that this realization is made by a human being. It could not be otherwise. It is said we are made in God’s image, because it is in human reflection that God the Creator recognizes himself, or herself, and remembers that the Creation was no accident, after all.
Sometimes this realization occurs to us when we recognize ourselves in other beings, other people. It is in shared awe and in praise of this incomprehensible reality that we worship together. If you would see the face of God, look in the faces of women, men, and children. If you would see the hands with which God works in the world, the feet with which God walks in the world, look at your own hands and feet. If you would hear the voice of God, listen to your own silent voice in prayerful reflection.
As Jesus taught, all the Torah and the Prophets are summed up in this single greatest commandment, “you shall love the LORD your God with all your soul, and all your heart, and all your mind,” because God is ever present within us and among us. Jesus taught another commandment like it, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” because every person – the inner conscience in every person – reflects the image of God, whether we recognize it or not.
This is the good news. The presence of God is reflected, brightly or dimly, in six billion human souls’ mirrors, everywhere in the world. These are God’s images. These are our neighbors. Jesus’ ministry called us to love them, and ourselves, for our brightness and our dimness as well.
Love is the orientation of the soul that arises in the conscious relation of personal being with being itself. This (“the conscious relation of personal being with being itself”) is also how I have described “the presence of God.” Ergo, God is love, as the Johannine scriptures tell us. Now I affirm this as true myself, not because John said so, but because I have discovered it to be true according to my own experience and reflection. This sheds light as well on Paul’s scripture saying, “Faith, hope, love; these three abide.” In other words, faith and hope, too, are orientations of the soul inherent in this conscious relation. But, as the Apostle avers, “love is the greatest of these.” Without love, hope is faint and futile; without love, faith is brittle and desiccated.
It is notable that in these terms, “God” is a relation, not a thing. I used to speak of God as “being itself,” that is, the ultimate reality “behind” or “beneath” all things, until I realized that I have also come to understand that the human personal consciousness of God is necessary for the “presence” of God. As I once wrote, “If there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known.” Just as the human being - or “personal being” - is an aspect of the ultimate reality I describe as “being itself,” personal God-consciousness can be regarded as the “consciousness of being itself,” something I’ve also said repeatedly. Here, then, is the truth of the religious affirmation that humanity is created by the love of God, and in “God’s image.”
I refer here, as I have again and again through the years, to my first articulation of this, which I wrote twelve or thirteen years ago, when my daughters Anna and Maggie were very young:
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?”, asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.
“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”
Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.
“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Being itself recognizes itself in the aspect of personal being. As this relationship becomes conscious, love arises, the subjectivity of which is called “divine love.” It is all together the love of God for the world and humanity, the human person’s responsive love of God, and love of neighbor. Thus we recognize the “subjective self” in each other, each and every one a being created in the image of God. And thus, God is love, and is located in the conscious relation of God with God’s human image.
And for animal lovers, to the extent that other sentient beings are in conscious relationship with God, love is there too. What about atheists? Well, in my view, they’re no exception. They just don’t like to use the term, “God.”
And what about agnostics? Their difficulty is in the mistake of worrying about the existence of God. God does not exist – God is existence itself, the ground of being, or being itself. To use some fancy verbal footwork, theirs is the perplexity of existents questioning the reality of existence itself, in which they consist.
This is, pretty much, the setup for St. Anselm’s “ontological argument” for the existence of God. The agnostic knows explicitly that he or she exists, and implicitly that all things in existence also exist, but doesn’t know that God is not to be understood to exist in the same way, as an existent, but rather as existence itself in relation with its human aspects which consist in it, and by grace and providence become conscious of their relation with it. As soon as a relational description of God is accepted by them, all their worries will fall away, like scales from their eyes.
What is God? God is not a what. God is not an existing being. God is not an object; God is the ultimate subject. God is being itself. God is. Who is God? God only knows. If God is anyone, God is I and Thou; God is the ultimate subject in the subject-subject relation.
To impute attributes of beings to God, as God, is to speak of God as if God were in being, among other beings. You and I and the lamp post are beings. Attributes, or Names of God, are metaphoric when speaking of God as God: God is good; God is just; God is merciful. Or else they are hyperbolic: God is great; God is all-knowing; God is all-powerful. Any words that can be said of God as God can be said of no thing in being: God is infinite; God is eternal; God is unconditional; God is absolute.
God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. Wherever you are, there you jolly well are, aren’t you? And there God is, too; God always was, is now, and ever shall be, forever and ever, Amen. God’s presence is in us and among us here and now; ours is the consciousness of being itself. In our awareness of being, being itself experiences being itself. With each new generation, God’s faith in humanity is renewed; in each regeneration, humanity’s response of faith is renewed.
Through our consciousness, God apprehends Creation, and we, the fully self-conscious parts of Creation, apprehend God the Creator. This state of God-consciousness is what is called “sanctification” or “redemption.” It is a state of reconciliation with God; it is what is meant by being “in Christ.” When we then act out our lives in congruence with the ethics of Christ, we are “saved.” Salvation means we are saved from the effects of our potentialities for doing evil.
What is Satan? Satan is said to be the anti-Christ; as such, it is the antithesis of the human potentiality for redemption. If the Christ is the human capacity for reconciliation with God, the Satan is its converse. Neither the Christ nor the Satan is a supernatural person, or divine being, or real entities of any sort. Their names are symbols of the universal human potentials for salvation and damnation, ultimate good and ultimate evil. In Hebrew, the words ha Satan ("the Satan") appear in the Book of Job. These are usually translated as “the Adversary,” understood allegorically to signify the “shadow” side of the human personality.
Between the Adversary and the moral righteousness of the "blameless and upright" human being, a constant dialectic was thought to be acted out in people’s daily lives. The effect of the embodied and unconstrained Satan is to tempt or traduce the human soul to sin, which denies the Christ potential and alienates the person from God’s grace. Deeply infected with sin, people do evil, causing various kinds of harm and damage to others, usually intentionally.
Remember well that the Christ and the Satan are symbols standing for human mental, ideational, and intentional configurations, or “states of mind,” that can become more or less permanently internalized, and consequently affect a person’s conscience, character formation, moral and ethical faculties, and the entire array of human personality factors, for good or ill.
To be “in Christ” is the converse of being “in sin.” In Christ (remember, this is a sanctified state of the psyche, a holy condition of the soul, not a mystical divine being), the “saved” or “redeemed” person is incapable of sin, that is, of doing willful harm to self or others, or to God’s Creation. The sanctified one is relieved of sinfulness by virtue of a capacity for self “disciple-ing” in which one walks in the way of the internalized Christ. The sanctified one “fears God,” that is, conscientiously avoids doing harm to God’s Creation.
To be in sin, in thrall to the Satan, means that the potential of being reconciled with God, of being “in Christ,” is denied or preempted. The human will to do evil, to not refrain from doing harm, is unleashed. In this state, the human person is free to act out diffidence or malice, and to carry out damage, destruction, aggression, and oppression by whatever means will suit his sinful ends or sinful attributes – Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust, among them.
Who is Jesus? “Is” is the wrong tense. Jesus was an itinerant, indigent Jewish teacher and religious reformer, a Rabbi and a rabble-rouser, a prophet of profound religious and social transformation. He was brutally murdered by crucifixion at the orders of the Roman Provincial Authority, as an enemy of the state. He was not, by any means, the only person to have suffered this fate, for the same reasons.
Jesus was not a Christian. He was, however, “in Christ,” awakened, enlightened, exalted, and sanctified. He was truly a saint. He was also not, by any means, the only saint to have been sanctified “in Christ.” There have been multitudes, before and since Jesus, even now there are. Some of them are Christians; many are not. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, for instance, was “in Christ.” Maybe Augustine of Hippo was, maybe Muhammad of Medina, John Wesley, George Fox, Mahatma Gandhi, and John Freeman, to name but a few.
How does Jesus redeem us from our sins? He doesn’t. He died two thousand years ago. “In Christ,” one day at a time, we are redeemed and sanctified by reconciliation with God through our own human conscientious faculties. We are to promote salvation, by proclaiming this gospel and acting out in beneficence toward others, “in Christ,” until we die and are eventually taken up, body, mind, and soul, into the earthly biosphere from whence we came.
Except in Biblical mythology, no one has ever seen or heard God, and no one ever will. This is because the "Supreme Being" is not a being, as human beings are, as every object of human intentionality or relationality is. We are persons; God is not a person. Yet God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. God cannot be known objectively, because God is not an object. The human person can only know God subjectively, as we know our own experience and ourselves.
All I can say about God, qua God, is that God is. God’s essence is to be; in God alone, essence and existence are one. Of this, I can have the same perfect certainty as that I am. Objectively considered, my personal being is contingent, finite, temporal. I was once not in being, and the time will come when I am no longer, subjectively incomprehensible though that is. God’s being is absolute, infinite, eternal, and necessary to my being. That I am is indubitable, if not necessary.
The miracle that I am a conditional being, who can apprehend the ultimate, unconditional reality of being itself, is the gift and grace of God. In this transcendent apprehension, it may be said truly that I manifest the consciousness of being itself. What people call the presence of God is the self-conscious relation of personal being with being itself; and vice-versa, if you prefer - the relation of being itself with conscious, personal being. One key to this understanding is relatedness, but not just in the usual interpersonal sense. God is self-relatedness; God is relatedness itself. In God-consciousness, the dichotomy of subject and object is both necessary and it is self-transcendent.
The American Buddhist teacher Adyashanti says, “Because of an innocent misunderstanding, you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of Oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.”
As Alan Watts put it, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” (I have put it this way: “We are being itself experiencing itself being experienced.” Experienced by whom? By itself, of course.) Watts explained further, “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do.”
In the ancient Hebrew myth, God’s presence is revealed to Moses, appearing symbolically, in a burning bush that is nevertheless not consumed. It is significant that this realization is made by a human being. It could not be otherwise. It is said we are made in God’s image, because it is in human reflection that God the Creator recognizes himself, or herself, and remembers that the Creation was no accident, after all.
Sometimes this realization occurs to us when we recognize ourselves in other beings, other people. It is in shared awe and in praise of this incomprehensible reality that we worship together. If you would see the face of God, look in the faces of women, men, and children. If you would see the hands with which God works in the world, the feet with which God walks in the world, look at your own hands and feet. If you would hear the voice of God, listen to your own silent voice in prayerful reflection.
As Jesus taught, all the Torah and the Prophets are summed up in this single greatest commandment, “you shall love the LORD your God with all your soul, and all your heart, and all your mind,” because God is ever present within us and among us. Jesus taught another commandment like it, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” because every person – the inner conscience in every person – reflects the image of God, whether we recognize it or not.
This is the good news. The presence of God is reflected, brightly or dimly, in six billion human souls’ mirrors, everywhere in the world. These are God’s images. These are our neighbors. Jesus’ ministry called us to love them, and ourselves, for our brightness and our dimness as well.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Reflections on War and Poverty
I had been thinking that perhaps the two highest-order material evils of our time, and all times, are war and poverty - conventional enough thinking - when I realized how deceptively framed these ideas have become in ordinary public discourse.
Take, for instance, the huge and perennial evil of poverty. It occurs to me that poverty itself is not the primary problem. Poverty has a primary cause, and that is – wealth. Wealth, the obsessive accumulation of it, and the misdistribution of it, are the root causes of endemic poverty in our world.
Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever great excesses of wealth have been amassed, great poverty has existed not far away. This is no mere coincidence. Excessive wealth and extreme poverty are directly correlated by causality, not by accident. Neither social condition can exist without the other. In fact, the existence of one is the definition of the other. Wealth cannot be seen to be excessive except by contrast with a co-existing extreme of poverty. Poverty, by conventional definition, is the deprivation of sufficient wealth for human well-being. Excessive wealth, by my definition , is not only the condition of more than sufficient wealth, but that condition which also entails the objective insufficiency we call poverty.
I have sometimes put it as follows, and as no economist without an ideological axe to grind will ever dispute: At any point in the process of an economy, there is a finite quantity of created wealth in existence. There is a certain distribution of this wealth among its owners. Some have more than others. However “enough” is defined, when some have much more than enough, others will necessarily not have that excess. If there are many who, in fact, do not have enough, then those who have more, have what is needed by others who have less. The “have-mores” have their excesses at the expense of those who have less than they need.
Republicans, libertarians, and apostles of the “prosperity gospel” will take umbrage at this. But their protestations notwithstanding, I am here to tell you that theirs is bad philosophy and bad religion. The Hebrew prophets of the ages, straight on down to Jesus of Nazareth, had it right, distorted though their prophecies have become in popular parlance. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You may worship one or the other, but not both, unless you are a fool or a hypocrite. To parallel Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “You cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war,” I say, “You cannot dispel poverty while accumulating excessive wealth.”
Furthermore, excessive wealth and concomitant poverty are the root causes of war. Let me explain myself: Poverty consists of deprivation. Excessive wealth entails deprivation. What constitutes war? Violence carried out by people against other people. People act violently against others when they have been objectively or subjectively deprived of something which is of worth to them.
A simple instance: An insecure person responds violently to an insult, because in a state of personal insecurity, the insult deprives that person of his or her sense of self-worth. Another instance: A person needing or wanting something takes it from another person to whom it belongs and to whom the thing taken has value. The person deprived of something of worth responds violently against the other. Yet another instance: A person acting violently causes bodily harm or injury to another person, or threatens to do so. Thus the other is deprived of well-being, or the sense of security, and responds violently.
These instances of interpersonal violence can serve as analogues for international violence. Such violent personal acts, acts of deprivation, greatly compounded, are the constituents of war. Every act of war directly or indirectly deprives people of some or all of their lives, liberties, happiness, health, and homes. Thus, the function of war is to impoverish those against whom it is directed. And acts of war are also the ultimate resort of national or subnational groups of people who have been likewise impoverished, or deprived of what they value, by those whom they will regard as their enemies.
Most significantly however, in the modern world, it must be recognized that war engaged in by powerful nation states has another important function. War always enriches those who declare it and direct it, and those who profit by the provision of the economic factors involved in the production of war. Thus, once again, the interests of amassing excessive wealth, in this case for purposes of waging war, are the efficient causes of abject poverty.
While the foregoing are universal economic verities in the modern world, there is one unique special case which ought to be considered. In all of history until September 11, 2001, only the United States among powerful nation states was able indefinitely to wage war and to cause widespread foreign impoverishment (along with its corresponding domestic enrichment) beyond its borders with impunity, except for military casualties. Other than in the case of the U.S.A., acts of war and political and economic exploitation against other peoples have always before long resulted in retaliatory warfare against the enemy population. So war and poverty continued to be reciprocally engendered, and the interests of wealth – Mammon – have been their progenitor. The terrorist attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Center signaled that the specially privileged people of the United States are no longer invulnerable.
Whoever the instigators of the terrorist crimes of 9-11 were (and, despite conventional public wisdom, this has not been established with certainty) their evil was not done because “they hate our values,” as the Bush regime insists. To the extent that the perpetrators were Islamic militants, it is more probably because they hate the desolation and deprivation we have wrought against their values, i.e. the impoverishment of Muslim peoples in the “third world” by the people of the “first world,” preeminently in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In a sign of our times, a 1985 pastoral statement circulated in churches of Johannesburg, South Africa, is as timely as tomorrow for us here and now:
"We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their place leaders who will govern with justice and mercy . . . The present regime, with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful . . . We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice . . . We pledge ourselves to work for that day."
Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that, for the fulfillment of the prophetic imperative, “the support of the community [of saints, the religious community] is essential . . . community life [as in the basic ecclesial communities of Latin America] cultivates receptivity for God’s reign and also proclaims . . . the special call to overcome . . . oppression, injustice . . . and to struggle for the values of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.”
The life work of Gustavo Gutiérrez (and liberation theologians following him) consisted in a synthesis of ethics and theology, politics and religion. Politics and religion meet, if they meet at all, in the personal. If the personal is political, then for the religious person, religion is political. I believe that all persons are both – we are inherently religious and political. A society of persons in which the religious and the political do not meet is in deep trouble, for it is either in error or it is in denial. Recognizing that a society is nothing but a complex of inter-relationships among persons, I think it must be true that in a just society the realms of religious ethics and political ethics would be coterminous.
Even in a religiously pluralistic society, the golden rule necessarily applies as the supreme ethic: I will not do unto others as I would not have done unto me. Don’t pee in my pool, and I won’t pee in yours. What, you may ask, does this rule of social reciprocity have to do with religion? For one thing, it is the first ethic of all religions in all cultures known to have ever existed – that is, the ones which were sustainable for more than a few generations. As Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Religion informs culture. The key to understanding Tillich’s bon mot is that, in his terms, religion is not simply identical with theology and ecclesiology; it includes within its meaning secular religions, the profane as well as the sacred. For, as we know, one person’s sacrament is another’s profanity.
This is not to say, as some young people do, “It’s all good.” Certainly not all that is done is good. Some is absolutely evil, unpalatable though that term may be to moral relativists. What is evil? It is the antithesis of good, and good has consistent objective meaning when considered inter-relationally, as all ethical considerations ought to be. What is considered good for one, or some, ought to be not other than what is good for all. As I suggested with reference to the golden rule, this should be no big news. Among other things, it was the core ethic of Plato’s philosophy concerning the just society. (By the way, there is good reason to suppose a direct connection in the history of social thought between the golden rule of the Hebrew Bible and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.)
As usual, the devil is in the details. I think this is because of the recurrent ethos of what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls selfish individualism, which is what you might call sin. (Or you might not – I do.) Is sin original, inescapable, and inherent in humankind? I don’t think so. Endemic, perhaps, but not incurable. Did Jesus want to redeem us from sin? It certainly appears so, but not by getting crucified. I imagine that was John the Baptist’s objective, too. Unfortunately, he got murdered for his efforts as well.
How could a holy teacher’s words redeem us from sin? You have one big clue already. That’s right – the golden rule. An informed and conscientious application of it in praxis throughout our society would save us. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics would be helpful, too. And Plato before him had a similar take on the subject. Speaking in Socrates’ voice (and identically with the ethic of Jesus) he wrote, “It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice unto others.”
Take, for instance, the huge and perennial evil of poverty. It occurs to me that poverty itself is not the primary problem. Poverty has a primary cause, and that is – wealth. Wealth, the obsessive accumulation of it, and the misdistribution of it, are the root causes of endemic poverty in our world.
Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever great excesses of wealth have been amassed, great poverty has existed not far away. This is no mere coincidence. Excessive wealth and extreme poverty are directly correlated by causality, not by accident. Neither social condition can exist without the other. In fact, the existence of one is the definition of the other. Wealth cannot be seen to be excessive except by contrast with a co-existing extreme of poverty. Poverty, by conventional definition, is the deprivation of sufficient wealth for human well-being. Excessive wealth, by my definition , is not only the condition of more than sufficient wealth, but that condition which also entails the objective insufficiency we call poverty.
I have sometimes put it as follows, and as no economist without an ideological axe to grind will ever dispute: At any point in the process of an economy, there is a finite quantity of created wealth in existence. There is a certain distribution of this wealth among its owners. Some have more than others. However “enough” is defined, when some have much more than enough, others will necessarily not have that excess. If there are many who, in fact, do not have enough, then those who have more, have what is needed by others who have less. The “have-mores” have their excesses at the expense of those who have less than they need.
Republicans, libertarians, and apostles of the “prosperity gospel” will take umbrage at this. But their protestations notwithstanding, I am here to tell you that theirs is bad philosophy and bad religion. The Hebrew prophets of the ages, straight on down to Jesus of Nazareth, had it right, distorted though their prophecies have become in popular parlance. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You may worship one or the other, but not both, unless you are a fool or a hypocrite. To parallel Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “You cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war,” I say, “You cannot dispel poverty while accumulating excessive wealth.”
Furthermore, excessive wealth and concomitant poverty are the root causes of war. Let me explain myself: Poverty consists of deprivation. Excessive wealth entails deprivation. What constitutes war? Violence carried out by people against other people. People act violently against others when they have been objectively or subjectively deprived of something which is of worth to them.
A simple instance: An insecure person responds violently to an insult, because in a state of personal insecurity, the insult deprives that person of his or her sense of self-worth. Another instance: A person needing or wanting something takes it from another person to whom it belongs and to whom the thing taken has value. The person deprived of something of worth responds violently against the other. Yet another instance: A person acting violently causes bodily harm or injury to another person, or threatens to do so. Thus the other is deprived of well-being, or the sense of security, and responds violently.
These instances of interpersonal violence can serve as analogues for international violence. Such violent personal acts, acts of deprivation, greatly compounded, are the constituents of war. Every act of war directly or indirectly deprives people of some or all of their lives, liberties, happiness, health, and homes. Thus, the function of war is to impoverish those against whom it is directed. And acts of war are also the ultimate resort of national or subnational groups of people who have been likewise impoverished, or deprived of what they value, by those whom they will regard as their enemies.
Most significantly however, in the modern world, it must be recognized that war engaged in by powerful nation states has another important function. War always enriches those who declare it and direct it, and those who profit by the provision of the economic factors involved in the production of war. Thus, once again, the interests of amassing excessive wealth, in this case for purposes of waging war, are the efficient causes of abject poverty.
While the foregoing are universal economic verities in the modern world, there is one unique special case which ought to be considered. In all of history until September 11, 2001, only the United States among powerful nation states was able indefinitely to wage war and to cause widespread foreign impoverishment (along with its corresponding domestic enrichment) beyond its borders with impunity, except for military casualties. Other than in the case of the U.S.A., acts of war and political and economic exploitation against other peoples have always before long resulted in retaliatory warfare against the enemy population. So war and poverty continued to be reciprocally engendered, and the interests of wealth – Mammon – have been their progenitor. The terrorist attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Center signaled that the specially privileged people of the United States are no longer invulnerable.
Whoever the instigators of the terrorist crimes of 9-11 were (and, despite conventional public wisdom, this has not been established with certainty) their evil was not done because “they hate our values,” as the Bush regime insists. To the extent that the perpetrators were Islamic militants, it is more probably because they hate the desolation and deprivation we have wrought against their values, i.e. the impoverishment of Muslim peoples in the “third world” by the people of the “first world,” preeminently in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In a sign of our times, a 1985 pastoral statement circulated in churches of Johannesburg, South Africa, is as timely as tomorrow for us here and now:
"We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their place leaders who will govern with justice and mercy . . . The present regime, with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful . . . We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice . . . We pledge ourselves to work for that day."
Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that, for the fulfillment of the prophetic imperative, “the support of the community [of saints, the religious community] is essential . . . community life [as in the basic ecclesial communities of Latin America] cultivates receptivity for God’s reign and also proclaims . . . the special call to overcome . . . oppression, injustice . . . and to struggle for the values of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.”
The life work of Gustavo Gutiérrez (and liberation theologians following him) consisted in a synthesis of ethics and theology, politics and religion. Politics and religion meet, if they meet at all, in the personal. If the personal is political, then for the religious person, religion is political. I believe that all persons are both – we are inherently religious and political. A society of persons in which the religious and the political do not meet is in deep trouble, for it is either in error or it is in denial. Recognizing that a society is nothing but a complex of inter-relationships among persons, I think it must be true that in a just society the realms of religious ethics and political ethics would be coterminous.
Even in a religiously pluralistic society, the golden rule necessarily applies as the supreme ethic: I will not do unto others as I would not have done unto me. Don’t pee in my pool, and I won’t pee in yours. What, you may ask, does this rule of social reciprocity have to do with religion? For one thing, it is the first ethic of all religions in all cultures known to have ever existed – that is, the ones which were sustainable for more than a few generations. As Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Religion informs culture. The key to understanding Tillich’s bon mot is that, in his terms, religion is not simply identical with theology and ecclesiology; it includes within its meaning secular religions, the profane as well as the sacred. For, as we know, one person’s sacrament is another’s profanity.
This is not to say, as some young people do, “It’s all good.” Certainly not all that is done is good. Some is absolutely evil, unpalatable though that term may be to moral relativists. What is evil? It is the antithesis of good, and good has consistent objective meaning when considered inter-relationally, as all ethical considerations ought to be. What is considered good for one, or some, ought to be not other than what is good for all. As I suggested with reference to the golden rule, this should be no big news. Among other things, it was the core ethic of Plato’s philosophy concerning the just society. (By the way, there is good reason to suppose a direct connection in the history of social thought between the golden rule of the Hebrew Bible and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.)
As usual, the devil is in the details. I think this is because of the recurrent ethos of what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls selfish individualism, which is what you might call sin. (Or you might not – I do.) Is sin original, inescapable, and inherent in humankind? I don’t think so. Endemic, perhaps, but not incurable. Did Jesus want to redeem us from sin? It certainly appears so, but not by getting crucified. I imagine that was John the Baptist’s objective, too. Unfortunately, he got murdered for his efforts as well.
How could a holy teacher’s words redeem us from sin? You have one big clue already. That’s right – the golden rule. An informed and conscientious application of it in praxis throughout our society would save us. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics would be helpful, too. And Plato before him had a similar take on the subject. Speaking in Socrates’ voice (and identically with the ethic of Jesus) he wrote, “It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice unto others.”
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