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The first fruits of this scholarly collaboration are gathered together in this excellent anthology, which will be a welcome addition to the libraries of anyone with an interest in Christian origins.

But Easter invites us to a radical new perspective. What has to die? Everything! Our roles, our identities, all of who we believe we are, personally, culturally, socially, even spiritually. It all has to go!

Scientific knowledge has stripped Christianity of the mythical matrix in which the creeds were conceived. The historical study of the Bible and the quest for the historical Jesus have raised the future of the faith to crisis level. At its Once & Future Faith conference in March 2001, four world class thinkers – Don Cupitt, Karen Armstrong, John Shelby Spong, and Lloyd Geering – joined Robert Funk and the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar to sort through the issues and attempt to form an agenda for the reinvention of Christianity. Their suggestions – on questions such as life after death, the meaning of God, apocalypticism, and the significance of Jesus’ death – fill the pages of this book.

How do I believe? (How do I understand faith that seems to conflict with science and pluralism?) What should I do? (How do my actions make a difference in the world?) Whose am I? (How do my relationships shape my self-understanding?)

Who are “the Christians”?

This beguilingly simple question was provoked by a Morning Edition report in which host David Greene referred to an anti-abortion movie, “October Baby”, as a “Christian film.” Many Christians objected. They didn’t identify with the movie or its message.

First Presbyterian Church Elizabethton, Tennessee April 6, 2012 Good Friday Mark 15:1-47 A few years ago a poster advertising Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion, featured an image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. The caption read: Dying …

So what do I mean by God, Spirit, the Higher Self? Two things. First, God is the Ground of Being, the absolute, unqualifiable emptiness-in-form. That’s what the mystics in every religion and culture have told us for thousands of years. I believe this because that’s what the evidence tells me – those independent, cross-cultural reports of mystics, and the few glimpses I’ve experienced myself.

One could say the whole of the biblical tradition is actually a story about the matters of the heart. And at the heart of the gospel message is a tradition that reminds us time and again — with very human stories — what can turn the heart to stone.

Bible stories, including all of the Jesus stories, were written in a particular time and context. Feel into it for a moment-you’re living in a time when there are almost no scientific explanations for anything, and even if there were, virtually everyone you know is illiterate. What you all know is that, most of the time, things happen as they have, but every so often, something unexpected happens (good or bad).

What is Holy Thursday about? Will we be thrown by the fact that Scripture scholars will say to us that maybe there wasn’t a “last supper?”

The kinds of stories the Galilean spirit/sage spins become sacred stories, but not because they have been canonized by any religious authority. Rather, they are extra-ordinarily spiritual tales because they are stories about the sacredness of the ordinary life as revealed to us by the one who taught with a different kind of inner authority. It’s what makes ordinary life so undeniably, unavoidably, deeply, and essentially spiritual. And It is also why ordinary people are as reluctant to relinquish their claim to be “spiritual,” in the most profound sense of the word; just as adamantly as they disavow being “religious,” in the worst sense of that word.

Borg and Crossan describe the Christmas story as “a subversive parable.” Subversive stories help us see differently. They subvert the conventional ways of seeing. Similarly, parables are metaphors.

Bonhoeffer treasured Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  He believed the beleaguered idealist was an apt metaphor for the Confessing Church.

Dr. Mic Hunter has spent years assisting people with diverse backgrounds to identify, develop, and apply their spirituality. In his most recent book he focuses on the original principles taught by Jesus without attention to the miraculous aspects of the stories usually associated with him. 

What has become clear among these liberal and progressive clergy is that although we do not know fully what the movement is or where it will wind up, we know that we are called to be there.

Mary’s song promises that God brings about wondrous reversals in the world: showing favor to the uncredentialed and ignored (“the lowly”); rendering ineffectual the machinations of the arrogant (“scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts”); bringing down those who exploit positions of power; lifting up the poor. 

More than being a “human being” on this earth, John’s gospel calls for a transformed life: water into wine; a temple made of distributive justice-compassion, not gold and stone.