Category Archives: Progressive Christianity

Freedom and Politics

Progressive Christianity,

In this third decade of the 21st Century, we find ourselves fighting for democracy and political freedom against a planet-wide authoritarian backlash. At such a time, the mystery of freedom comes up for review. Especially important for our religious thinking is this question: How does the essential freedom of the human spirit differ from political freedom?

Consider this formula: political freedom is something granted by a human government to its citizens. Essential freedom is something granted by an “Eternal Governance” to its human beings. This is a big difference, but the two are closely related in real life.

Political Freedom

Political freedom is created by human beings. Political freedoms are “rights” allocated by human governments to their citizens. Political freedom can include the rights outlined in the U.S. bill of rights. Political freedom can also include the proposals of Franklin D. Roosevelt: the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.

The degree and scope of our political freedoms depends on what we human beings struggle to achieve and institute in the form of laws and their enforcement by governments of our creation. In other words, we do not wait for our existing governments to become more benevolent. We build better forms of governing with our advocasies, protests, voting, and steady work of all sorts. We can and do build governments that grant, maintain, protect, and further improve our political freedoms.

Today we are adding to the older lists of political freedoms: the freedom from corporate wealth ruling our lives, the freedom to vote in a convenient way and have our vote counted, the freedom to have affordable healthcare, the freedom for women to have control over their own bodies, the freedom for everyone to have equality before the law, and the freedom to enjoy a fair share of our common economic wealth. These statements are currently aspirations that are yet to be achieved as the common practices of our society. These aspirations become political freedoms only when they exist as law—offerings articulated and enforced by the power of human government.

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The Soul of Freedom

Progressive Christianity, ,

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

This simple poetic prayer was taught to me as a pre-schooler. I prayed it at bed time. With my 88-year-old memory, I have forgotten many things, but I have not forgotten that prayer. It may be living in me unconsciously even now when I allow myself to sleep, trusting that all will be well.

It was not my college-professor parents who taught me this prayer. When my sister and I were preschoolers, we had a live-in maid. Mrs. Rush was a our caretaker most of the time. She was an avid Nazarene church member. She read us stories from Hurlburt’s Stories of the Bible. It must have been her who taught me that prayer..

In the religious culture of the Nazarene church, as well as the more liberal Methodist church that I attended, this little prayer existed within a master myth about soul and body— a sensory-rich mortal body substance and a ghostly, enigmatic immortal soul substance. As a modern adult, I no longer dwell within that two-substance way of describing my being. Nevertheless, this old prayer hangs around with meanings that do not presuppose that ancient worldview. I need a new view of soul

After much contemplative inquiry, “soul” now mean for me my enigmatic consciousness of awareness and freedom. This awareness is temporal: it is limited and changing, it rests during my sleeping, This freedom to met challenges, choose options, and make history is limited freedom within a limited awareness of an immense cosmos of mystery and surprises. So this soul of awareness and freedom is a temporal reality. that does not survive my death. Nevertheless, this enigmatic awareness and freedom is distinguishable from what I interiorly experience as “mind” or exteriorly experience as “brain” or nervous system. My consciousness or “soul” is an active agent that uses my mind for conducting my thoughtfulness, moving my body, accomplishing my purposes. I am guessing that somewhat less expanded form of consciousness (awareness and freedom) is a factor in the dynamics of aliveness in all animal life.

I am guessing that animal consciousness evolved as a survival benefit. The more conscious life forms became, the more adequately they could anticipate future events, avoid dangers, and engage in alternative outcomes to their benefit. As wondrous as this is, there is no need to believe that the souls of animals or humans are immortal. Consciousness or “living soul” can be viewed as one of the many strange forces in the cosmos—along with gravity, electromagnetic radiation, and others. Aliveness is one of those counter-currents to the massive processes of a cosmic running-down from heat to cold, from organized to disorganized. When death takes over a living body, every aspect of its organization begins to disorganize. Bones can last the longest, but even they will become powder over time.

Humans, with our capacity for art, language, and mathematics, are equipped with an intensity of consciousness that no cat, dog, or horse possesses. These other animals are obviously conscious with layers of consciousness that are similar to layers of my own consciousness. But I also possess in my art, language, and mathematics an enhanced layer of conscious with which no cat is troubled. I face options for living that no horse needs to confront. Not all my behaviors are a result of my aware choices, but these aware choices also take place, alongside all the determined factors in my overall operation. Some of my determined behaviors are also chosen. Some of my determined behaviors are restricted and altered by my choices. Choice-making is an aspect of my consciousness, and this consciousness, this awareness and freedom is my “soul.”

So in my currently operating vocabulary, the word “soul” indicates this ongoing process of being aware with an awareness that is an agent choice making, a freedom that is granted by Eternity, but whose responses to Eternity and all my temporal encounters are initiated by freedom itself. This “soul” of freedom and awareness is not a static substance but an ongoing process of change. “Who I am?” is never set in stone. I am a becoming. I am freedom. Awareness and freedom comprise my soul.

My childhood prayer about laying down my soul to sleep can now be viewed as laying done of my highly enriched human consciousness to rest from its controlling role in my living. Sleep is an out-of-control state similar to death. Sleep can be feared in the ways death can be feared, for we do not know if we shall wake from our sleep. Waking is like a fresh gift of consciousness—a starting over with a new short-time lease on living consciously.

So, in my pre-school existing, I probably used that simple prayer to opt for a trust in the Power that runs the cosmos of events to care for me and to awaken me again from this “little death” of sleep. Such simple trust in the Radical Allness that I confront is a description of a profound sort of living that can apply to child and adult. I need not entirely dismiss this little prayer simply because its surrounding mythology is now out of date for me. Rather, I can translate the existential meanings of this prayer into a fresh set of myth meanings and overall thoughtfulness that can govern my adult life in century 21. Let this be an analogy for dealing with Christian scripture.

Scripture Interpretation

Similar to interpreting this childhood prayer, my method of interpreting Christian scripture and other church traditions requires some translation from old to new form of thinking. The very old religious resources of the Christian Bible were created within a now obsolete mythology, but their existential intent and the capacities for lively meanings are as powerful today as they ever were. There is no recovery, however, of these resources for a viable and vital Christian practice without a mode of thought form translation. The fact that these writings were written by finite, time-bound persons living in a very different cultural settings is not a barrier, but a factor in doing accurate interpretation. Gone is the notions that these writings dropped down from some super-space into the passive temporal minds of the biblical writers. And these humanly created writings require a humanly created means of seeing their truth.

A helpful unraveling of Christian scripture meanings can begin with a translation for our century of these two Old Testament words for God: “Yahweh” and “Elohim.”

“Yahweh” in the vocabulary of biblical writers may date back to at least 950 BCE and oral use of that name for an ultimate devotion may date back to the Exodus happening some claim took place around 1390 BCE. That would for 400 years before Yahweh was written down in book Genesis. When this long enduring community of writing was living in exile in Babylon 400 years after the beginnings of these Genesis texts , the name Yahweh was still in use. The Genesis story-teller we meet in Genesis 2 claims that Yahweh was the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph, and others long before the Exodus. The migrations from the Euphrates river city of Ur that Abraham is symbolizes took place as early as 1800 BCE. So Yahweh is supposed by the biblical writers to be a very enduring object of devotion.

Indeed, the biblical writers view Yahweh as that unchanging Mysteriousness, that Unknown Master Power that is always being met by humans in the past, present, and future. Yahweh is an ever-surprising Awesomeness that is experienced in both horror and glory, as the giver of both birth and death, the source of all gifts for living and their limitations. Yahweh is a symbol for that active Truth and Power that is other than and yet in or behind each and every event that happens to everybody and to every society in every era. Yahweh is the enigmatic All-in-All Oneness that we can also call “Profound Reality” present in all passing temporal realities. Yahweh can be absent from our consciousness, but is never absent from all the realities we experience.

The biblical word “Elohim” has many meanings, but in contrast to “Yahweh” the word “Elohim” had meanings in the direction of “a divine devotion.” We can speak of many Elohim, not just one. All the Canaanite Gods and Goddesses were Elohim—objects of devotion such as the temporal powers that we still worship today in both limited and ultimate ways: love, war, wisdom, sex, procreation, etc. So the statement. “Yahweh is my Elohim,” can mean, “The All-in-All Reality is my core devotion.”

This understanding may have been present in the name that was taken by the prophet Elijah. who was considered the grandfather of the great prophets. “Eli” means “my God” and “jah” is short for “Yahweh.” So it is likely the case that the prophet Elijah took for his name, “My God is Yahweh.”

However that ma be, this singular devotion to Yahweh is clearly present in Psalm 90. I am going to restate this Psalm with a few minor word changes to aid us in seeing more clearly the lasting human meanings that were meant in this old piece of poetry as well as in all the other Psalms:

Yahweh You have been our fortress
from generation to generation.
Before the mountains were raised up
or Earth and cosmos were born in travail,
from everlasting to everlasting You are the One Lasting Power.

You turn humans back into dust.
“Turn back” You command the offspring of Adam;
from Your perspective a thousand years are as yesterday;
a night watch passes and You have cut off each human being,
They are like a dream at daybreak,
they fade like grass that springs up in the morning
but when evening comes is parched and withered.

So we are each brought to an end by Your negating power.
In mid-speech, we are silenced by Your fury.
You lay bare our illusions in the full light of Your Presence.
Each day goes by under the shadow of Your furious realism.
Our years die away like a mummer.
Seventy years is the span of our life,
eighty if our strength holds;
the hurrying years are labor and sorrow,
so quickly they pass and are forgotten.

Who can feel the power of Your negations,
who can feel Your fury like those who are devoted to You?

So teach us to count our days,
that we may enter the gate of wisdom.

This same Yahweh was seen as the overarching historical actor in the events lived by Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and 2nd Isaiah. And this is this same Yahweh is the One Jesus calls “abba” or papa. Jesus announces that papa Yahweh is bringing forth a restored humanity in Jesus’ own living presence, in Jesus’ aggressive ministry, and in lives of those who are responding to the living of his message. This fresh blossoming of our essential humanity is seen as a new Adam and Eve—the kingdom of Yahweh replacing the kingdom of Rome and the then sickened people of Israel.

With these clarifications about Yahweh, the whole Bible begins to come alive with the sort of truth that is still happening to us. Yahweh is still acting in history Exodus-wise, Exile-wise, return from Exile-wise, and Jesus-wise in our lives today, and will do so forevermore. The Bible, a human book, reveals the forevermore. Such a recovery of the Bible is essential for the continuation of a viable and vital next Christian practice.

For more on these topics I want to announce the release of my new book:

The Thinking Christian

Wipf and Stock has placed on Amazon.com the opening chapters of this book.
Simply go to Amazon.com, then books, and then search for:
The Thinking Christian by Gene W. Marshall.

Imprisoned in Personality

Progressive Christianity, ,

When I was in grade school, one of my favorite games was called “Pick-Up-Sticks.” This game was played with a cylinder-shaped container filled with slim 10-inch sticks. These sticks were dumped out into pile, and the game was to pick out one of the sticks without moving any other stick in the rest of the pile. The players took turns until one player made one of those other sticks move. He or she was then out of the game. The game proceeded until only one player remained, the winner.

While reading in one of A.H. Almaas’ books about the psychology of personality, I recalled those piles of Pick-Up-Sticks. According to that psychology, our personality is a complex of “object-relations.” In other words, our personality is a stack of habits, each tiny habit referred to as an “object relation.” Each object-relation is an ongoing dialogue between some object and the “I” of that person.

If I picture each object-relation as like one of those pick-up-sticks, I can view one end of each stick as a memory of another person or thing and the other end as a memory of a unique “I” in dialogue with that person or thing. Each of these sticks represents a habit of operation—one dialogue habit in a pile of habits that form my personality. Such object relations might be: I—nipple, I—mother, I—father, I—sister, I—best friend, and scores of ever-more complicated object relations laid in on the top of the earliest ones forming my unique, complex habit structure that define the meaning of the word “personality.”

So at least for the purpose of this essay, let “personality” mean such a complex pile of habitual thoughts, feelings, memories, default operations and basic dramas built up over a unique life history. Some of these object-relations rehearse powerful dramas that have had big impacts upon the whole personality pile of habits. Perhaps an early relationship with father or mother still stirs up significant drama in the psyche. Perhaps some huge trauma plays this role. Perhaps some especially meaningful time plays a big role. Very early dramas often have a good deal of unconscious influence over more recent dramas.

No one is fully conscious of his or her entire personality pile of habits, but good therapies can help us become more aware of our personality fabric and thus more capable of being more intentional in our relations with our personality. Perhaps we can compensate for it, live somewhat beyond it, or discover a level of freedom we can have that is not simply a robotic acting out of our personality karma. We can discover that personality can be a prison in which we are unconsciously trapped.

Nevertheless, we would not want to be without our personality; it serves as the default pattern for large portions of our living. We would not want to learn all of those useful ways of relating afresh in every moment. Habits can be good. I am content for a lot of my personality to operate without my conscious attention. At the same time, I can become aware that some aspects of my personality produce difficulties that interfere with the optimal living of my current life. My life in this current here/now of conscious living can become more aware of these personality forces and, with that awareness, be more decisive in adding or subtracting from these largely automatic personality operations. With awareness comes more freedom.

Personality and Freedom

How does our grasp of such personality wisdom inform our spirit journey into our ever-deeper awareness and thereby into the full depths of our essential freedom? A personality can act as both an enabler of living and as a prison that restrains our essential freedom. A personality operates somewhat like a container in which I live. Like a prison cell, our personality container provides room within its boundaries for our essential freedom to move around. At the same time, the cell of personality has walls that restrain our freedom. And we may not even know that we are restrained until some challenge we are unable to handle brings our personality traps into awareness.

So how is it that I become free to move into that wider “space” of awareness and freedom that is my essential nature and my deeper potential? To move into wider spaces, we need to become aware of our traps. Here is the basic structure of a trap. You have come to think you know who you are. This view is built from your past experiences, but it is just a view that you have built. Perhaps you have heard yourself say, “Oh, I could never do that.” But then one day, you actually do what you said you could never do. Such moments let you see that you cling very strongly to who you think you are.

It may be deeply frightening to learn that you do not know who you are, and that you never will know who your are. You are always more than you think, and different than you think you are. You are a vast mystery, even to yourself. Your essential freedom means that you are not anything solid or stationary, but alway in process. In its full essence, freedom is raw creation—rendering acts that are caused by nothing other than freedom itself. Freedom is not an identity you can put to thought, but a process of choosing. We might say that freedom is a nothingness—a nothingness that creates somethings.

And while our personality was built of the genetic and social materials provided, our specific personality was built by our own mysterious radical freedom. Our genetic and social materials are just materials, not causes that explain this “living being” we are calling “personality.” My choices from infancy onward built this prison of habits that form my personality. I did not build my personality to be a prison; I built it to survive. And I did survive. I don’t want to be without my personality: it is my default pattern of operation. Yet as I become more aware of my freedom, I become aware that my personality is also functioning as a prison, a prison from which I can want to escape and from which I can move into a wider being of my being.

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Liberating Proclamation

Progressive Christianity, ,

The deep truth of forgiveness revealed in the prodigal son myth can be proclaimed to people in many other ways than reflections on this particular myth. The way such truth comes to us and is spread widely among humanity, I am going to call “proclamation.”
Proclamation is a religious practice. Proclamation is not only sermons and teachings, it is also poetry and songs, dramas and sacraments, like the eucharist.

The Proclamations of Jesus

Jesus was remembered as a proclaimer of good news, a teacher of healing truth, a new kind of rabbi with a new kind of authority. The core of Jesus’ proclamation ministry centered around the proclamation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God.

In his time and place, what did this proclamation of the coming Kingdom mean? It was a happening in the lives of real people, but we are missing much of the meaning of this happening if we view this Kingdom only with our psychological imagery. This was a sociological happening, first of all. This Kingdom of God was understood to be an alternative to the Kingdom of Rome. It was also understood to be an alternative to the first century state of the captive nation of Israel. It was understood as a restoration of the essence of being the “People of God”—a calling that had been lost during the period in which these people were so harshly enslaved within the Roman “Peace.”

“The People of God” was understood at that time as both a specific peoplehood already in history and also as a coming peoplehood in which not only Israel reaches its perfection, but also the entire world of nations are called to manifest this Kingdom. This passionate hope for a positive future was grounded in the understanding that this new sociological reign is being established by an all-powerful Profound Reality. Any revolts against this all-powerful “Reign of Reality” cannot last, because Reality always wins in the end. That is what Reality IS—what wins in the end, because Reality is Power without limit. Any losing to humanity on the part of Reality is being allowed by Reality.

The revolt from Reality by “Satan’s Reign” includes not just persons, but organizations of whole human kingdoms of estrangements from Reality—constructions that are doomed to collapse. This is so because that is what Profound Reality is—the undoing of all unreality, the defeat of Satan, the burning to ash of all estrangements from the Real.

Jesus’ proclamation was that this end-of-time expectation of rightness was now arriving in human life on Earth. Jesus was asking humans to look and see what is happening to the hearers of his proclamation. The sick of spirit are being healed, the poor are being lifted up from their despised status, the hypocrites are being put down, those who were blind to realism are seeing, the hungry for meaning are being fed, the outcasts are included, the crippled souls are walking their lives, and people with dead lives are living again.

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Truth and Freedom

Progressive Christianity, ,

You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.    John 8:32 New English Bible

The meaning of “freedom” and the meaning of “truth” are closely related symbols in the Christian heritage. The “Truth” we are talking about here is “Truth” that yields the “freedom” we are also talking about here. And the “freedom” we are talking about here is a freedom that follows from taking on, for the living of our lives, the “Truth” that we are talking about here.

The Truth

The “Truth” indicated in the above scripture is a deeper sort of truth than the approximate truths we learn through our ever-moving scientific approach to truth. Yet, these approximate truths of science are probes into the same Mysterious Encounter with Truth of which our text are speaking. The truth we know through our contemplative approach to truth is also an approximate sort of truth. We can see truth with our own consciousness looking into our own subjectivity, but we see with a finite consciousness, and we tell about it with a finite mind. Truth is being approached by our contemplative inquiries, but the Eternal Truth of Mysterious Reality is never reached, only approximated in our contemplative inquiries. Furthermore, we approach truth through our interpersonal, I-Thou experiences—truth that we can never learn through the scientific and contemplative approaches to truth. And we all also participate, whether we know it or not, in a fourth approach to approximate truthfulness—an approach that arises through living within our sociological fabrics and changing those economic, political, and cultural manifestations of social workability.

All four of these approximations of Truth are valid guides for our living and none needs to be seen as inconsistent with the Eternal Truth. Yet they are only partial truths—truths that we change as life goes along, truths that get transformed through and through, truths that become obsolete or subsumed into more expanded truths. The Truth indicated in above scripture points to an Eternal quality of Truth, the Whole Truth of which these other approaches to truth are approximations.

Human consciousness can encounter Eternal Truth in the everyday experiences of our lives, but we cannot hold this quality of Truth in words, language, art, or mathematics. It takes paradox or parable—myths, icons, rituals, and other cryptic expressions—expressions that require shifts in our core consciousness in order to see the meanings that such religious tools were invented to help us to become aware of and to speak about to one another. We cannot hold Eternal Truth rationally with a finite human mind. We can only speak the secret of Eternal Truth to one another with religious symbols.

 

Freedom

I will illustrate the “freedom” that this Eternal Truth sets free with a story. I could use a story out of my own life, a fragment from a novel or movie, a story made up by me, or something else. I have decided to retell in my own words the story of Moses. I believe that there was in that dim past a person named “Moses,” but his story has become legend, myth, parable retold for centuries—retold because this story was about a dialogue with Eternity—a dance with Final Wholeness of Reality.

 

Moses

Moses, in my story, was a member of a slave community in one of the world’s most well developed multi-city civilizations in the 14th century before Christ. The life being lived by Moses and his companions was harsh. This immigrant population had come to Egypt during a famine and got stuck there as part of the bottom layer of that strict hierarchy. Moses was an unusually talented boy who benefited from both Hebraic and Egyptian brands of culture. In my story he worked as a slave during record keeping alongside the more severe hardships of brick-making. He knew the people of his culture and he knew the state of those people.

One day, Moses witnessed an Egyptian soldier mistreating one of Moses’ fellow Hebrew slaves to the horrific extent that Moses lost his cool and killed that soldier. This being a capital offense for a person of his standing, Moses fled to the outback to live with an uncle, married his daughter, made a life there, and was never found.

Being an unusually aware person, he kept up with the horror stories of the hierarchy. He and his Hebrew family had absorbed a religious history that remembered stories (perhaps similar to the later stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). Moses also participated in dialogues of prayer with the “God” of those realism-loving ancestors.

One day while herding sheep out in the bush, a particular bush caught his attention. He reported to his fellow Hebrews that this bush burned without being consumed. Actually, we can surmise that Moses was seeing in his experience of this bush his own massive interior burning. His whole self was being burned away, yet the given particulars of his life were not being consumed. Everything about him was the same except that his entire selfhood was being burned away; nevertheless, nothing was lost. He was not being turning to ash, only an unreality was being consumed.

On this place that he called “holy ground,” he saw himself encountering the Profound Realty that was revered by his ancestors. And the message forming in his being within that “holy encounter” was, “Let my people go.” A number of other groups of slaves had attempted to escape to the wilderness. Most of them had been run down by the Egyptian chariots. Nothing was ever heard from those who made it into the wilderness. The whole idea of feeling called to do this sort of thing not only seemed preposterous and super dangerous to Moses, but doubts of all sorts rose in his mind about his own ability to lead such an extreme enterprise.

First of all, would other members of his culture even follow “meager me?” Yet here he was face-to-face in give-and-take relation with the Realty of Realities as perceived and adored by his sub-culture. His old images of himself were being burned up, and an unfamiliar Moses was being exposed to his consciousness.

His first response to this horrific calling was making excuses of all kinds. He tried to claim that his brother was a better speaker. But the answer that clarified for him about that excuse was, “Take your brother along, but you are the one being called here. You have to tell him what to say, when to say it, what to do, and when to do it. This whole adventure has to be your initiative.”

This was one hell of a jiggle in Moses’ inner being, and what was getting to him was the prospect of this jig, this dance that Moses would be volunteering to dance with the rest of his life. The adjective “awesome” only begins to describe the feel of this. The inner life forms of the previous Moses were evaporating, and the only symbol he found to tell his story was “a burning bush that was not consumed.”

As Moses begins to respond to this awesome calling contained in this history-making moment of his life, he is amazed with the results. People considered him charismatic. Some thought him crazy. But more found him and his story a sign of hope coming from their God. When the course of events opened up an opportunity to flee this slavery, hundreds of men, women, and children were ready to go. They picked up their belongings and babies and followed this dangerous call.

The actual escape before the onrushing chariots was seen as miraculous. When those chariots got stuck in the mud, the fleeing slaves were convinced that the Almighty Reality of all historical outcomes was able to offer openings for success to such bold intentionality. Moses was then determined to build upon the energy of this revelation of Almighty friendliness a culture of disciplines for these escapees—rules, religious practices, and laws based on a continuing trust in the friendliness of that Almighty Mysteriousness met in the outcomes of history. Within this hopeful set of convictions and communal disciplines, a spirit intensity was generated to follow Moses in solidifying a cultural revolution—working their Egyptian enculturation out of their lives and creating in its place a freedom-loving set of bold norms for living within this forbidding desert environment for another 40 years until Moses’ death. Other spirit leadership by then had emerged and they continued the core elements of this innovative heritage.

Later descendants of the Mosaic spirit clarified that not only had a temporal freedom from Egyptian slavery come about, but freedom of spirit itself had been discovered on behalf of the entire human race. They came to see that the freedom to risk death in order to break chains made of iron was the same freedom it took to risk security and selfhood in order to break cultural, institutional, and psychological chains. Indeed, if we in our time can be aware within our being of the raw freedom to use whatever power we have to bend the course of events, we can thank Moses for his assistance with this revelation.

The Truth of how Eternity deals with human beings was opened-wide through the Exodus experience. Finding the Final Reality we all meet in every moment of our lives trustworthy is a Truth that sets us free. Moses and his company enacted that trust and experienced that freedom.

 

A New Exodus

The crucifixion/resurrection revelation also awakened the Truth about the friendliness of Eternal Reality—theTruth that sets us free, the Truth that includes freedom. A New Exodus was made on behalf of humanity from the many estrangements of our species by this New Exodus community. But that is another story—another cryptic story exposing the Eternal Truth.

Here, once again, is how the writer of the Fourth Gospel put it:

You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.    John 8:32 New English Bible

Commitment to Freedom

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity

If you cannot commit to freedom, you cannot commit to anything, for freedom is that part of your being that commits. In this assertion, “freedom” means a choice based on no reason or impulse except choice itself. If you cannot commit to freedom, you cannot commit to a mate. You cannot commit to a religion. You cannot commit to a cause. You are just a bystander. You may stand close by many good causes, people, or insights, but if you do not leap into doing free actions that intend to bend the course of time, you are not committed to freedom. Rather, you are merely standing by, waiting for some messiah of certainty to lead you by the hand or perhaps kick your butt.

The “you” in the above paragraph is a universal “you.” This “you” also means a universal “we” that includes every “me.” We humans are all tempted to deny our freedom, to flee from our ability to respond to our encounters. In many ways, we typically flee our ability to make free choices of response. We are all already guilty of such flight from freedom.

This freedom of which I speak is not license; it is an obedience to the way life truly is. Yet freedom is not an accomplishment. It is a gift of Profound Reality. To embrace this gift is primal sort of obedience to take on the gift of freedom. And living in obedience to this radical freedom is in its own way more demanding than obedience to any law, norm, or custom.

Lack of freedom is our accomplishment. It is we who have used our freedom to sell our own freedom into slavery, into some addiction, into some fight with our encounters with Reality—that is, we flee from our response-ability to freely respond. To the extent we have fled freedom, we are trapped in a form of slavery to that unreality. We no longer have the freedom to be free. Whenever we stand aside from making serious commitments, we may also be standing aside from accepting our freedom to do so.

Embracing our freedom means risking uncertain commitments. No mate is perfect. No religion is the last word. No cause is more important that many other causes. Any finite value requires a leap of choice. As the baseball philosopher Yogi Berra once put it, “If you came to a Y in the road, take it.” We are always at some Y in the road, some set of roads, all of which cannot be taken. I had enough mathematical talent to be a mathematician, but I did not take that road. I may of had enough musical sensibility to be a professional musician, but I did not take that road. I will never know for sure if those intuitions are true, for I did not risk those roads. I took other roads.

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The Choices of Horses

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity,

Thomas Berry suggested to me that pre-horses became horses through the choices by many generations of pre-horses for the love of galloping. Pre-bison meanwhile became bison through the choices by many generations of pre-bison for the love of butting.
These two types of species evolved from similar gene pools in similar grasslands. Both set of choices worked in handling adequate survival probabilities of escaping extinction from the work of large predators.

Evolution is more complicated than cause or chance explanations can fathom. Choice is another human explanation that must take its place alongside cause and chance explanations. The myth that cause and effect can be the whole explanation for the doings of nature is incomplete. The myth that probability explanations can completely fill the gaps that cause explanations cannot handle is also incomplete. The human explanation called “choice” is also required to handle our experience of this ever-more mysterious actuality we call “nature,” or perhaps “Final Reality.”

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God and Nature

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

I will start this meditation with a slight rephrasing of the New English translation of part of Psalm 139—verses 13-18.

It was You who fashioned my inward parts;
You knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise You, because You fill me with Awe.
You are wonder-full, and so are Your works.
You know me, through and through;
my body is no mystery to You,
or how I was secretly kneaded into shape
and patterned in the depths of the Earth.
You saw my limbs yet unformed in the womb
and in Your records they were all recorded,
day-by-day they were fashioned,
not one limb was late in growing.
How deep I find Your thoughtfulness, O my God!
How inexhaustible are Your topics!
Can I count them? They outnumber the grains of sand!
To finish the count my years would have to equal Yours!

This poem gives us a sense of how it is can be true that our relation with the nature of our own bodies can also be a relation with the Unconditional Reality that conditions all things that have conditions, such as our bodies. The Unconditional can only be spoken of in poetry or religions symbols. “You” (we sometimes say “Thou”) in the above poem is such a religious symbol. This symbol includes the meaning that we can relate to the Unconditional in a personal manner, as we might relate to parents, friends, lovers, spouses, children, and yes to our own body.

I recently noticed an often ignored feature of my own body. I found myself saying, “How fortunate that is. How glad I am to have it that way. I wonder how many million years of animal lives and deaths it took to evolve that.” Such awareness of our bodily nature, according to this Psalm, is also an awareness of God.

So is nature God?
Or is our God nature?

Unraveling such questions depends upon how we understand the word “nature” and how we understand the word “God.” Here are two ways that “God” is commonly misunderstood.
God is an object or process within nature.
God is a process or a being in some non-temporal realm, implying a minimizing of the temporal/material realm of nature.

Continue reading God and Nature →

Yes or No

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

Jesus said, “Let your speech be Yes or No.” Matthew 5:37

Saying “Yes” without resentment, and saying “No” without regret is what Christian freedom looks like. Such freedom is beyond the law, as Paul and Luther so clearly point out. In other words, when we are acting from love, there is no law we must feel regret for breaking. And when we are acting from love, there is no law we need to feel resentment for obeying. In truth we need not moderate our “Yes” or “No” in order to fit in or not fit in—or in order to play it safe or not play it safe. All real options are permitted to Christian freedom.

Of course the laws are guidelines, often reflecting centuries of wisdom, but for your or my personal responses in each moment of our 21st century living, we have no absolute obligation to obey any law. We need to feel no resentment for obeying any law, or have regret in not obeying any law. We can be open to our essential freedom.

Continue reading Yes or No →

Response-Able

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

When we flub up, do something odd, make a serious duff, or perhaps find ourselves being uncharacteristically mean, we somethings excuse such behavior with this familiar explanation, “Shit happens.” But shit never just happens. There was always some degree of Response-Ability involved in our behavior.

It is always true that our access of our Response-Ability is capable of much improvement—that is, much expansion in our ability to respond. Nevertheless, until we are dead, there is always some degree of Response Ability in play.

Simply paying closer attention to our shit is an improvement in Response-Ability. Yes, it is true that the personality patterns we constructed for our lives by age five, are still doing its original survival patterns. But we can now as adults pay closer attention to our personality’s actions. We also have a degree of power to moderate that old tool for our survival. Our personality is a friend as well as an enemy. Our personality got us here. We did survive. Our personality still has some survival potentials. But times have changed since age five. Our personality is ill adapted for many, if not most, of our contemporary challenges. And fortunately, we still have some ability to respond beyond the boundaries of our very own personality.

Continue reading Response-Able →