A homily preached on Sunday May 28, 2006 at New Spirit Community Church, in Berkeley, California.
Good morning! My name is Jim Weller. I’m your student intern pastor, and this is the last day of my official internship. I’ll bet you thought you were going to get away without having to hear me preach to you!
Perhaps I should explain the schema for our chapel arrangements this morning. White and red are the prescribed liturgical colors for the six Sundays after Easter, of which today is the last. I thought we would hang our United Church of Christ “God Is Still Speaking” identity banner, since we are now a full-fledged UCC church, and it matches the color scheme. And I just got back last Sunday from the UCC Northern California Nevada Conference Annual Meeting weekend at Asilomar, full of denominational identity!
I am, after all, a theological student, as I will continue to be until I become august and venerable, so I thought it good today to give you a brief survey of the key meanings of Christian theology, as I understand them. The core message is that love is what redeems us, but a few other theology words will make appearances, too. Don’t let them distract you!
Anyhow, I have my white and red on; my head is polished, so let’s go!
Let those with ears to hear listen:
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, the firstborn and the more pensive of my two preschool-aged daughters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with me on the front porch.
“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 happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.
And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, first and final cause of being. Creator and creation completely interpenetrated.
Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love. There is no way by works of penitence to attain to the love of God. Love is the way.
Let me tell another story here. A Unitarian Universalist minister I know was preaching the good news of God’s love one day, and afterward an older man approached her with a question. Now this man, Bill, like most Unitarians, had an advanced education, and he was a perfectly rational thinker. He really was a rocket scientist. He and his colleagues knew how to put a man on the moon, and bring him back to tell about it – and they actually had.
So Bill asked, “Pastor, I know you believe in your experience of God’s presence, but how do you know that’s what you’re experiencing? How do you know it’s not just your imagination? Rachel could have launched into an intricate philosophical proof of the existence of God, and Bill could have followed it.
But instead, she asked him another question. “Bill,” she asked, “Have you ever been in love? I mean, really in love, so that everything was brighter, and more beautiful than before?” Bill smiled, remembering. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Well, how do you know?” she rejoined. “How do you know you didn’t just imagine it?
There you go.
Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells us that that is how God, in the burning bush, told Moses God’s name – “I am!”
Centuries later, because he knew he was of God too, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote an early Christian, Irenaeus.
As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”
Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod! "Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One!"
"You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."
We are here to love one another, for that is the way to love God as we are beloved. These are the greatest commandments.
The relationship between God and human persons really is one of unending, unconditional love and acceptance. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God, now and forever. God’s acceptance does not end.
That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance!
The way Jesus put the saving message was this: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news."
What this meant was that God's time is always fulfilled. The love and acceptance of God are immediately available for you, right here, right now.
To re-pent is to turn the soul round right. It means, "Think again!" It is to respond rightly to the good news of God. We take our turned-inward spirits and turn them inside out, turning the light of love toward God and other people.
Jesus taught us to believe that in this way only, we will be redeemed from sin.
Sin is not a popular topic in churches like ours, where the gospel of love is emphasized. We all know that mistaken ideas about sin have been used, or misused, in church as weapons to shame us in our expressions of love and the joy of living, and to separate us from the love of God.
No one is untouched by sin. William Sloane Coffin said that sin is the abuse of our God-given free will. I say that it almost always involves pridefulness and abuses of power. In any case, it erects barricades that keep love out.
Sin forms in the shadow of the isolated self that stands between the human soul and the light of God’s love.
To sin is to do the opposite of the Great Commandment to love God, and love others as oneself. It is to be alienated by self will from God's will to love unconditionally. It is to will harm, and to act harmfully, instead of for good. It is to abide in diffidence, ignoring and disguising the harm others and we do in our alienation. And, it builds up permanency in our social structures and inherited cultural traditions.
Sin and salvation could be explored at length in many other sermons. Understanding them is at the core of understanding the meaning of the gospel. But today’s topic is simply about love and acceptance.
The glad tiding of God is the good news that you are accepted! Sinners and saints alike. You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.
All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: "Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly in the presence of God."
Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.
One morning last weekend during the UCC Conference Annual Meeting, I took a walk by myself among the flowering dunes, back of Pebble Beach on Monterey Bay. The sky was full of sailing clouds and sunlight, and the wind tore wildly at my shirt. It would have whipped the hat off my head if it hadn’t been tied on. For weeks, I had been full of self-doubt, and despaired of the authenticity of my vocation, feeling alone and ill equipped to accept God’s calling – if it even was that, and not just my wishful imagination.
Then I rounded a bend in the path, coming into the lee of a sand dune under a sheltering growth of cypresses. And the wind ceased its howling. The hollow where I stood was bright and quiet. I reflected that this walk was a metaphor for these days of my arrival in the company of saints, so to speak. For I was a part of a gathering of members of the body of Christ, young and old, clergy and laity, ordinary human persons who were accepting their acceptance – and I was accepted among them, imperfect as I am.
[solo singing accompanied by choir, humming the melody] “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”
Salvation is never done once and for all. We need periodic renewal treatments, makeovers, or tune-ups. We salve each other. That’s why we pray and worship together. Salvation is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s people. All people are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, if only we will accept God’s choice.
The Deuteronomist of ancient Israel discerned God’s message of salvation this way: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – so that you and your children may live" – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.
Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.
Let us choose accordingly, and love one another as God loves us.
May it be so. Amen.
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.
Monday, May 29, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Anselm said it way back
More than a thousand years ago, way back in the early eleventh century, the Christian philosopher and logician Anselm of Canterbury used words to the following effect to express the meaning of the word, God:
“God is that reality than which nothing greater can be imagined.” This has stood as the generally accepted meaning of God among people of discernment and wisdom ever since. Than which nothing greater can be imagined.
Apparently alone among earthly beings, we humans are creatures of awesome imaginative powers. We are, beyond doubt, perfectly real ourselves, and we can imagine, as though real, things and configurations far beyond our personal realities, some of them so fantastic they could never be made real – but some can be, and sometimes actually are.
You are real. Your personal reality is indubitable. It is deeply rooted in the ground of being itself. But you are a finite reality. Your physical being is contained within the boundaries of a relatively small envelope of space and time. You were born a few years ago, and before then, you were not. You will die some time hence, and again you will be not.
While you live, you have mental capacities that enable you to perceive, in limited ways, areas of reality beyond your personal envelope. And you have high-order mental capacities by virtue of which you may imagine incomprehensibly vast, but still finite, extensions of space-time. Of the unknowably great, but not infinite, number of intelligible realities that can, in principle, be imagined, you can even imagine the totality of reality – sort of.
But there, you reach your personal limit. You cannot imagine that ultimate reality than which nothing greater can be imagined. That would be God. In contemporary theology, God is ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being. Or, in ancient Greek thought, the unmoved mover, first cause and final cause, the uncreated creator.
Any word-concepts that may be attributed to God as God are ones that may not be said of anything in being, or even all of everything ever in being. God is infinite. God is eternal. God is absolute, unchanging, indivisible, and ever present. To some minds, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good.
None of these terms can be truthfully said of a person, any person. Therefore, obviously, God as God is not a person. God as God is not even a being, the popular term Supreme Being notwithstanding. Because God as a Supreme Being, exalted above and all-powerful over all other beings, can be imagined, just barely.
That cannot be a description of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. The only reality, the only being greater than which nothing can be imagined is ultimate reality, reality itself, being itself.
And, since you are a temporal, finite but fully real being, embedded, as it were, in the infinite eternal reality of being itself, and since you are (by now) conscious of your curious position (this should blow your mind), you are a personal being in conscious relationship with being itself, that ultimate reality in which you exist, out of which you came, and into which you will return. You are in direct and intimate relationship with God. You are of God. Your very being is a manifestation of God. God is closer to you than you are to yourself.
And since you are a being who, finite and temporal creature though you are, is capable of reflecting consciously on all the multifarious aspects of reality of which you are a part, and even on reality itself, it can be well said that you are the consciousness of being itself.
Now if you speak of God using the language proper to persons, which God is not, but most people routinely do anyway, you could say that yours are the eyes through which God looks upon God’s Creation. Yours is the mind by which God perceives, and feels, and knows, and apprehends those proximate aspects of reality that are accessible to you, including the reality and presence of Godself.
This amazing way of understanding the basics of theology is not new, as I have mentioned. I believe it was the core insight of ancient Israelite monotheism, and hence, of all religious traditions which followed after it. Only the most elite priests, monks, and scholars understood it, of course. Listen to what Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish saint, said about all this:
“Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world, ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good, ours are the hands with which he blesses his people.”
Now, by the time Teresa wrote that, the Christian church had developed an elaborate Christology, a subdivision of theology, in which Jesus Christ was understood to have been fully human – meaning finite, temporal, and historically contingent, in his lifetime, and that he was nonetheless fully God, and merged with God, especially after his crucifixion and resurrection, being or becoming one of three divine persons, or substances, which together comprise God. Christ was the aspect of God with whom human persons could most easily and directly relate.
Because of the way most people think – other than erudite theologians and philosophers –people’s ways of relating to God, and having discourse about God, are personalized. This is to be expected, since we are persons, and those other beings with whom we are most significantly related are persons. (In my person-ology, higher vertebrates are kinds of persons, too, since human persons have psychologically significant affective and cognitive relationships with them, and we have the same lower brain architecture.)
Each one of us, whether we recognize it or not, is in profound relationship with God, a relationship more ultimate, and ultimately more meaningful, than any other human relationship can be. God is not a person, but, given the ultimate concern (to use Paul Tillich’s term) of human persons in their relationship with God, and their need to express themselves about that relation to others, God is necessarily spoken of, depicted, and thought of as a personified being.
Thus, God is given names, and prayers are directed to God as though God were a person capable of receiving them and answering. All of this kind of God-talk is metaphoric, because it has to be. Nothing pertinent to persons, or beings of any sort whatsoever can be said of, or thought of, or attributed to God as God.
However, I am a man of charity and mercy, and I understand that, even though metaphoric, we tend to relate to God by names and social identities which are proper to the most significant other persons with whom we are related. Thus we have LORD God the Father, God the Son, Lord Jesus Christ, Mary Virgin Mother of God, and so forth.
If this is the way that most folks put their spirituality into words, who am I to disabuse them? It takes little or no effort for me to convert such metaphoric terms to simple signs pointing, for me, to the reality they signify, as I understand it. Anyway, I sort of enjoy the sweet quaintness of these artifacts of folk religion.
When I am in the company of cognoscenti who insist on political correctness achieved through use of inclusive language for talking about God, I usually go along with their shortcomings of tolerance, and avoid pronouncing any God names or pronouns smacking of patriarchy, racism, or androcentrism. Even though the Bible is, in fact, shot through with all of those unwelcome characters, there are always ways the text can be revised to clean it up.
The most important thing to remember about God and your relationship with God is that God is love; you are a beloved child of God, created by God in God’s own image. Metaphorically speaking, of course. God’s love – a metaphoric construction signifying an ineffable reality – is not the same as human persons’ love, though it is fair to say that our love for each other and God is inspired by and responds to God’s love for us.
The nature and meaning of the relationship between God and human persons really is unending, unconditional love and acceptance. Though it is a metaphor, it is an accessible one. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God. No matter who you are, what you have done, or intended, or said, or thought, or believed.
That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance. The way Jesus put it was this:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”
What this meant was that God’s time is always fulfilled; the power, love, and acceptance of God is always immediately available – here and now, for you; take your gnarly turned-inward spirit-mind and turn it inside out, toward God and other people; and believe that in this way, you will be redeemed from sin.
When you have made that spiritual conversion, that repentance, that metanoia, you will be able to live in the way recommended by Jesus and stated in the Torah centuries earlier:
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your spirit; and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”
And the prophet Micah, also long before Jesus’ time, summed up the Torah this way:
“What does the LORD your God require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, is it? All you have to do to get right with God is to love with all your heart, all your soul, and your entire mind. Love God, as you are beloved of God. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love your enemies. (That pretty much covers everyone.)
Do justly. (That means avoid doing harm, and do good whenever possible.) Love mercy. (That implies loving kindness, care for the sick and suffering, nonviolence in action and intention.) Walk humbly with God. (God is always with you; stay in right relationship with God.)
Of course, there is no guarantee you won’t get into trouble in the world, especially if you go around doing evil – but then you might get away with it after all, particularly if you’re very powerful. In the end, of course, you will die and be not, just as all creatures do.
Remember that you are just one finite, temporal human soul in exquisitely interconnected interdependence with all other people, and all life on Earth. Take from the abundance of the world only what you need to live simply, that others may simply live. (If you wind up with a little more than you need, don’t worry – you can give some away!)
“God is that reality than which nothing greater can be imagined.” This has stood as the generally accepted meaning of God among people of discernment and wisdom ever since. Than which nothing greater can be imagined.
Apparently alone among earthly beings, we humans are creatures of awesome imaginative powers. We are, beyond doubt, perfectly real ourselves, and we can imagine, as though real, things and configurations far beyond our personal realities, some of them so fantastic they could never be made real – but some can be, and sometimes actually are.
You are real. Your personal reality is indubitable. It is deeply rooted in the ground of being itself. But you are a finite reality. Your physical being is contained within the boundaries of a relatively small envelope of space and time. You were born a few years ago, and before then, you were not. You will die some time hence, and again you will be not.
While you live, you have mental capacities that enable you to perceive, in limited ways, areas of reality beyond your personal envelope. And you have high-order mental capacities by virtue of which you may imagine incomprehensibly vast, but still finite, extensions of space-time. Of the unknowably great, but not infinite, number of intelligible realities that can, in principle, be imagined, you can even imagine the totality of reality – sort of.
But there, you reach your personal limit. You cannot imagine that ultimate reality than which nothing greater can be imagined. That would be God. In contemporary theology, God is ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being. Or, in ancient Greek thought, the unmoved mover, first cause and final cause, the uncreated creator.
Any word-concepts that may be attributed to God as God are ones that may not be said of anything in being, or even all of everything ever in being. God is infinite. God is eternal. God is absolute, unchanging, indivisible, and ever present. To some minds, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good.
None of these terms can be truthfully said of a person, any person. Therefore, obviously, God as God is not a person. God as God is not even a being, the popular term Supreme Being notwithstanding. Because God as a Supreme Being, exalted above and all-powerful over all other beings, can be imagined, just barely.
That cannot be a description of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. The only reality, the only being greater than which nothing can be imagined is ultimate reality, reality itself, being itself.
And, since you are a temporal, finite but fully real being, embedded, as it were, in the infinite eternal reality of being itself, and since you are (by now) conscious of your curious position (this should blow your mind), you are a personal being in conscious relationship with being itself, that ultimate reality in which you exist, out of which you came, and into which you will return. You are in direct and intimate relationship with God. You are of God. Your very being is a manifestation of God. God is closer to you than you are to yourself.
And since you are a being who, finite and temporal creature though you are, is capable of reflecting consciously on all the multifarious aspects of reality of which you are a part, and even on reality itself, it can be well said that you are the consciousness of being itself.
Now if you speak of God using the language proper to persons, which God is not, but most people routinely do anyway, you could say that yours are the eyes through which God looks upon God’s Creation. Yours is the mind by which God perceives, and feels, and knows, and apprehends those proximate aspects of reality that are accessible to you, including the reality and presence of Godself.
This amazing way of understanding the basics of theology is not new, as I have mentioned. I believe it was the core insight of ancient Israelite monotheism, and hence, of all religious traditions which followed after it. Only the most elite priests, monks, and scholars understood it, of course. Listen to what Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish saint, said about all this:
“Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world, ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good, ours are the hands with which he blesses his people.”
Now, by the time Teresa wrote that, the Christian church had developed an elaborate Christology, a subdivision of theology, in which Jesus Christ was understood to have been fully human – meaning finite, temporal, and historically contingent, in his lifetime, and that he was nonetheless fully God, and merged with God, especially after his crucifixion and resurrection, being or becoming one of three divine persons, or substances, which together comprise God. Christ was the aspect of God with whom human persons could most easily and directly relate.
Because of the way most people think – other than erudite theologians and philosophers –people’s ways of relating to God, and having discourse about God, are personalized. This is to be expected, since we are persons, and those other beings with whom we are most significantly related are persons. (In my person-ology, higher vertebrates are kinds of persons, too, since human persons have psychologically significant affective and cognitive relationships with them, and we have the same lower brain architecture.)
Each one of us, whether we recognize it or not, is in profound relationship with God, a relationship more ultimate, and ultimately more meaningful, than any other human relationship can be. God is not a person, but, given the ultimate concern (to use Paul Tillich’s term) of human persons in their relationship with God, and their need to express themselves about that relation to others, God is necessarily spoken of, depicted, and thought of as a personified being.
Thus, God is given names, and prayers are directed to God as though God were a person capable of receiving them and answering. All of this kind of God-talk is metaphoric, because it has to be. Nothing pertinent to persons, or beings of any sort whatsoever can be said of, or thought of, or attributed to God as God.
However, I am a man of charity and mercy, and I understand that, even though metaphoric, we tend to relate to God by names and social identities which are proper to the most significant other persons with whom we are related. Thus we have LORD God the Father, God the Son, Lord Jesus Christ, Mary Virgin Mother of God, and so forth.
If this is the way that most folks put their spirituality into words, who am I to disabuse them? It takes little or no effort for me to convert such metaphoric terms to simple signs pointing, for me, to the reality they signify, as I understand it. Anyway, I sort of enjoy the sweet quaintness of these artifacts of folk religion.
When I am in the company of cognoscenti who insist on political correctness achieved through use of inclusive language for talking about God, I usually go along with their shortcomings of tolerance, and avoid pronouncing any God names or pronouns smacking of patriarchy, racism, or androcentrism. Even though the Bible is, in fact, shot through with all of those unwelcome characters, there are always ways the text can be revised to clean it up.
The most important thing to remember about God and your relationship with God is that God is love; you are a beloved child of God, created by God in God’s own image. Metaphorically speaking, of course. God’s love – a metaphoric construction signifying an ineffable reality – is not the same as human persons’ love, though it is fair to say that our love for each other and God is inspired by and responds to God’s love for us.
The nature and meaning of the relationship between God and human persons really is unending, unconditional love and acceptance. Though it is a metaphor, it is an accessible one. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God. No matter who you are, what you have done, or intended, or said, or thought, or believed.
That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance. The way Jesus put it was this:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”
What this meant was that God’s time is always fulfilled; the power, love, and acceptance of God is always immediately available – here and now, for you; take your gnarly turned-inward spirit-mind and turn it inside out, toward God and other people; and believe that in this way, you will be redeemed from sin.
When you have made that spiritual conversion, that repentance, that metanoia, you will be able to live in the way recommended by Jesus and stated in the Torah centuries earlier:
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your spirit; and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”
And the prophet Micah, also long before Jesus’ time, summed up the Torah this way:
“What does the LORD your God require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, is it? All you have to do to get right with God is to love with all your heart, all your soul, and your entire mind. Love God, as you are beloved of God. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love your enemies. (That pretty much covers everyone.)
Do justly. (That means avoid doing harm, and do good whenever possible.) Love mercy. (That implies loving kindness, care for the sick and suffering, nonviolence in action and intention.) Walk humbly with God. (God is always with you; stay in right relationship with God.)
Of course, there is no guarantee you won’t get into trouble in the world, especially if you go around doing evil – but then you might get away with it after all, particularly if you’re very powerful. In the end, of course, you will die and be not, just as all creatures do.
Remember that you are just one finite, temporal human soul in exquisitely interconnected interdependence with all other people, and all life on Earth. Take from the abundance of the world only what you need to live simply, that others may simply live. (If you wind up with a little more than you need, don’t worry – you can give some away!)
Holy Trinity?
God Almighty, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these are different aspects of the One God. Though understood metaphorically as distinctive divine persons, the differences among these aspects are occasioned only by human sensibility. God is triune only in traditional Christian understanding, not in essential reality. While it may be useful to conceptually differentiate the aspects of God’s ultimate unity, and it certainly is traditional in Christian orthodoxy, it is not religiously necessary.
Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.
In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.
“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.
Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.
As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.
God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.
This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)
Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)
To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.
The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)
The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.
Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.
For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)
In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.
I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.
Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.
In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.
“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.
Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.
As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.
God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.
This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)
Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)
To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.
The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)
The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.
Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.
For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)
In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.
I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.
Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
Word of God?
Yes, my friends, the Bible has great social, cultural, and religious importance. It is an incomparable, paradigmatic artifact of the human spirit. It is best understood religiously as a metaphoric record of the deeds of God and the piety of the people of God. But it is not literally the Word of God. It is a collection of the words of many ancient authors about God, among other things.
The Bible should not always be interpreted literally. In fact, it is most often not to be. It consists of the religious expressions of ancient people who spoke languages now long forgotten, and who were not of our world time, our culture, or our society. It is foolish to believe that their holy scriptures must apply directly to us in our contemporary context.
God gave us minds, and hearts, and consciences in order for us to work things out ethically and theologically for ourselves, not for us to rely, near-sighted, wearing shades and blinders, on literal readings in translation of archaic and unchangeable textual artifacts.
For liturgical purposes, sincere believers may name The Bible, metaphorically, as the Word of God. But God does not actually speak in words. God does not speak at all, actually. God needs people for that, and people have done their job to the best of their abilities. God needs people, reading the signs of their times, to create new symbols, metaphors, parables, psalms, and sermons, informed by the Biblical tradition, but reinterpreted and recontextualized, so as to bring the kerygma of the early Christian Jesus movement, and the good news of God home to our diverse, sectarian, secularized twenty-first century people.
If the Bible, then, is a merely human testament to an ancient era of religious experience, why do I continue to read, study, interpret, quote, and preach it? A one word answer is sufficient – Tradition! Tradition is the way that human societies accumulate, appreciate, and assimilate the wisdom and experience of their forebears. I place high value in the venerable religious traditions, and persistent philosophies of humankind.
Like all persons who have lived before us, we do not apply our human faculties to contemporary realities in isolation from our cultural precursors. We are swimmers in a great and ever-flowing stream of tradition that has largely formed us, to which we belong, and which belongs to us. The Bible’s recollections are the primary sources of our religious traditions.
Along with more than one-third of the world’s people, I stand in the vast and interflowing delta of the broad river of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Truly indeed we are, historically and culturally, people of the Book. But that is not all we are. We are children of the living God, and, as my confreres in the United Church of Christ love to say, in rich metaphor, God is still speaking.
The Bible should not always be interpreted literally. In fact, it is most often not to be. It consists of the religious expressions of ancient people who spoke languages now long forgotten, and who were not of our world time, our culture, or our society. It is foolish to believe that their holy scriptures must apply directly to us in our contemporary context.
God gave us minds, and hearts, and consciences in order for us to work things out ethically and theologically for ourselves, not for us to rely, near-sighted, wearing shades and blinders, on literal readings in translation of archaic and unchangeable textual artifacts.
For liturgical purposes, sincere believers may name The Bible, metaphorically, as the Word of God. But God does not actually speak in words. God does not speak at all, actually. God needs people for that, and people have done their job to the best of their abilities. God needs people, reading the signs of their times, to create new symbols, metaphors, parables, psalms, and sermons, informed by the Biblical tradition, but reinterpreted and recontextualized, so as to bring the kerygma of the early Christian Jesus movement, and the good news of God home to our diverse, sectarian, secularized twenty-first century people.
If the Bible, then, is a merely human testament to an ancient era of religious experience, why do I continue to read, study, interpret, quote, and preach it? A one word answer is sufficient – Tradition! Tradition is the way that human societies accumulate, appreciate, and assimilate the wisdom and experience of their forebears. I place high value in the venerable religious traditions, and persistent philosophies of humankind.
Like all persons who have lived before us, we do not apply our human faculties to contemporary realities in isolation from our cultural precursors. We are swimmers in a great and ever-flowing stream of tradition that has largely formed us, to which we belong, and which belongs to us. The Bible’s recollections are the primary sources of our religious traditions.
Along with more than one-third of the world’s people, I stand in the vast and interflowing delta of the broad river of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Truly indeed we are, historically and culturally, people of the Book. But that is not all we are. We are children of the living God, and, as my confreres in the United Church of Christ love to say, in rich metaphor, God is still speaking.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
My Calling
My calling, to use Judaic terms beyond a Judaic context, is toward a prophetic and rabbinic ministry. I am called to pedagogy, to teaching the meanings, interpretations, implications, and applications of religious wisdom and truth, in the manner of a rabbi. I am called to proclaim the glad tidings of God, as Jesus did, and to a saving or healing ministry, as Jesus’ own ministry was, salving the wounds of sin and pointing the way to salvation in the embrace of eternal life.
My vocation is to reinterpret the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for the hermeneutical edification of my Christian and non-Christian contemporaries. I feel I am in an apt position to do this, as a member of a post-Christian religious movement, descended from Jewish and Christian traditions. If we have largely outlived the usefulness of the old modes of meaning making, we have not transcended them. We still live in the world our forebears have made. In our own lives, following in the living tradition we have received, we are making a world of meaning our progeny will inherit.
My vocation is to serve the people of God, that is, all people, and to serve God’s purpose, which is the well-being of all people, because we are all children of God made in God’s image, and God’s will is for justice and mercy.
The glad tidings of God are that you are accepted! You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.
All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in the presence of God. This is easier said than done, though, because sin abounds. It is as perennial as grass. Sin, as well as hope, springs eternal. Where there is life, there is sin –and hope.
Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. This is the ultimate meaning of forgiveness. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.
“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole,
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.” (Trad.)
Salvation is never done once and for all. It is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s chosen people, that is, ones who live in faith. All are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, but not all will ultimately accept God’s choice.
“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – if you and your offspring would live – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.” (Dt 30:19-20)
How shall we learn what God requires of us? By the insights of Holy Scripture and through prayer.
My vocation is to reinterpret the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for the hermeneutical edification of my Christian and non-Christian contemporaries. I feel I am in an apt position to do this, as a member of a post-Christian religious movement, descended from Jewish and Christian traditions. If we have largely outlived the usefulness of the old modes of meaning making, we have not transcended them. We still live in the world our forebears have made. In our own lives, following in the living tradition we have received, we are making a world of meaning our progeny will inherit.
My vocation is to serve the people of God, that is, all people, and to serve God’s purpose, which is the well-being of all people, because we are all children of God made in God’s image, and God’s will is for justice and mercy.
The glad tidings of God are that you are accepted! You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.
All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in the presence of God. This is easier said than done, though, because sin abounds. It is as perennial as grass. Sin, as well as hope, springs eternal. Where there is life, there is sin –and hope.
Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. This is the ultimate meaning of forgiveness. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.
“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole,
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.” (Trad.)
Salvation is never done once and for all. It is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s chosen people, that is, ones who live in faith. All are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, but not all will ultimately accept God’s choice.
“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – if you and your offspring would live – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.” (Dt 30:19-20)
How shall we learn what God requires of us? By the insights of Holy Scripture and through prayer.
Friday, February 24, 2006
Homily on the Theology of Love
Let those with ears to hear listen:
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, firstborn and the more pensive of two sisters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with their father on the front porch railing, after their preschool day.
“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” he 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 happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.
Truths of God, that God is eternal, absolute, infinite, unconditional, are true of no person or thing in being. God is ultimately beyond reason, unreachable to finite human understanding.
And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, ultimate reality, first and final cause of being.
Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One! You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. These are the greatest commandments. Love your enemies, and bless those who revile you. This is the Way of Christ.
We hear and we believe we are beloved of God, and God is love.
Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible awesome reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells that that is how God answered Moses, asking God’s name – “I am!”
Because he knew he was of God, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”
As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, firstborn and the more pensive of two sisters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with their father on the front porch railing, after their preschool day.
“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” he 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 happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.
Truths of God, that God is eternal, absolute, infinite, unconditional, are true of no person or thing in being. God is ultimately beyond reason, unreachable to finite human understanding.
And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, ultimate reality, first and final cause of being.
Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One! You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. These are the greatest commandments. Love your enemies, and bless those who revile you. This is the Way of Christ.
We hear and we believe we are beloved of God, and God is love.
Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible awesome reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells that that is how God answered Moses, asking God’s name – “I am!”
Because he knew he was of God, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”
As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Response to "Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P."
Now, Joe, I’m all for free speech, and I practice the Christian charity I preach, but I do think it would be more seemly of you, as a public intellectual, to know your story before you publish your opinion. (“Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P.” by Joseph Loconte. The New York Times Op-Ed, January 2, 2006.)
You decry “attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda” by House Democrats and progressive religious leaders like Jim Wallis. Perhaps you ought to read The Book first. The Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish Prophet of the New Covenant, Jesus himself, did little else but point toward a political agenda. That’s why they were assassinated by the ruling powers. The Roman prefects in Judea didn’t bother to crucify just anybody. Nailing prophets to the cross was a dramatic kind of political execution reserved for those who seriously threatened the imperial status quo.
Jesus, Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al were no friends of the imperial governments that usurped the just prerogatives of their nation, and oppressed the people of Israel. No more are today’s rising voices of the religious left willing to countenance moral outrages perpetrated by the right-wing cabal in our White House and Congress, and their collaborators, the false prophets of the religious right.
“Linking faith with public policy” is the soul of political discourse in a democratic society. Faith without works is dead. Contrary to your disingenuous statement, this is exactly what American politics does need. The political “misdeeds” of so-called Christian conservatives are not being “replicated” by spiritual progressives – indeed, they are being repudiated. You claim there is no difference between anti-homosexual bigots quoting Leviticus, and Jim Wallis proclaiming the prophetic witness of Jesus on behalf of the poor. Excuse me, but I beg to differ.
You say the ethics of Jesus and the Prophets are “no substitute for a coherent political philosophy.” I think most Americans would differ with you on this. In my opinion, Judeo-Christian ethics are the sine qua non of political justice in Western society. I suppose you’d prefer the moral relativism of Hume, or Machiavelli – or Kissinger or Wolfowitz.
In defense of what you call the “war against Islamic terrorism,” you ridicule the supposed “chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.” Methinks you protest too much. I cannot help but note that it is you who frame the discourse in those terms – and there would be none of it, after all, if there were not meaningful comparisons to be made.
You mention with disdain an “event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July,” as though it were somehow linked with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Party leadership. I was there, and it was not. It was a convocation of some 1300 religious leaders of many faiths, and some “not religious, but spiritual” community leaders, most of whom are no more sympathetic with the Democratic party than with the G.O.P. – which is to say, not at all.
I was a participant in the Spiritual Activism Conference, organized mostly by energetic members of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, not by Rev. Jim Wallis, although we welcomed him, among many others, as a featured speaker. Our common concerns are grounded in spirituality and religion, and they are very much political, but certainly not partisan. As Rev. Wallis says, our religion is deeply personal, but it is not private. We must be very public about it. We deplore the hypocrisy and depravity with which the G.O.P. has co-opted Biblical religion in America, and the moral diffidence with which the Democratic Party has, until recently, abandoned it.
You decry “attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda” by House Democrats and progressive religious leaders like Jim Wallis. Perhaps you ought to read The Book first. The Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish Prophet of the New Covenant, Jesus himself, did little else but point toward a political agenda. That’s why they were assassinated by the ruling powers. The Roman prefects in Judea didn’t bother to crucify just anybody. Nailing prophets to the cross was a dramatic kind of political execution reserved for those who seriously threatened the imperial status quo.
Jesus, Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al were no friends of the imperial governments that usurped the just prerogatives of their nation, and oppressed the people of Israel. No more are today’s rising voices of the religious left willing to countenance moral outrages perpetrated by the right-wing cabal in our White House and Congress, and their collaborators, the false prophets of the religious right.
“Linking faith with public policy” is the soul of political discourse in a democratic society. Faith without works is dead. Contrary to your disingenuous statement, this is exactly what American politics does need. The political “misdeeds” of so-called Christian conservatives are not being “replicated” by spiritual progressives – indeed, they are being repudiated. You claim there is no difference between anti-homosexual bigots quoting Leviticus, and Jim Wallis proclaiming the prophetic witness of Jesus on behalf of the poor. Excuse me, but I beg to differ.
You say the ethics of Jesus and the Prophets are “no substitute for a coherent political philosophy.” I think most Americans would differ with you on this. In my opinion, Judeo-Christian ethics are the sine qua non of political justice in Western society. I suppose you’d prefer the moral relativism of Hume, or Machiavelli – or Kissinger or Wolfowitz.
In defense of what you call the “war against Islamic terrorism,” you ridicule the supposed “chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.” Methinks you protest too much. I cannot help but note that it is you who frame the discourse in those terms – and there would be none of it, after all, if there were not meaningful comparisons to be made.
You mention with disdain an “event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July,” as though it were somehow linked with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Party leadership. I was there, and it was not. It was a convocation of some 1300 religious leaders of many faiths, and some “not religious, but spiritual” community leaders, most of whom are no more sympathetic with the Democratic party than with the G.O.P. – which is to say, not at all.
I was a participant in the Spiritual Activism Conference, organized mostly by energetic members of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, not by Rev. Jim Wallis, although we welcomed him, among many others, as a featured speaker. Our common concerns are grounded in spirituality and religion, and they are very much political, but certainly not partisan. As Rev. Wallis says, our religion is deeply personal, but it is not private. We must be very public about it. We deplore the hypocrisy and depravity with which the G.O.P. has co-opted Biblical religion in America, and the moral diffidence with which the Democratic Party has, until recently, abandoned it.
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