****YOU HAVE REACHED THIS WEBSITE IN ERROR
-THIS WEBSITE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE****
PLEASE OPEN A NEW WINDOW
AND GO TO OUR NEW WEBSITE AT

WWW.PROGRESSIVECHRISTIANITY.ORG 
THANK YOU!

Question & Answer   Q: By A Reader I recently read that a team of astrophysicists have concluded that there are over a trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Given what we know and given the photos of …

The fact of the matter is that although Luther turned to the Bible in order to attack church doctrine, he turned to it as he interpreted it. He never believed it to be inerrant.

Last week was about as intense as it gets. Caught between a merciless virus and the cessation of social activity, beneath the surface calm lies a persistent tension ready to erupt. The anxiety was underscored by the two main religious mythologies that drive segments of our culture, the Passover and the Crucifixion/Resurrection of Jesus.

Andrew Cuomo today is a phenomenon. He speaks every day about the coronavirus and his press conferences have become must-see tv. Why? Many reasons, but at heart he speaks to spiritual yearning in all people, a yearning that focuses not on religion and/or God, but on the truth and depth of our common humanity. 

We often refer to the Bible as if it were a book. It is not. It is a composite of many books, most of which are agreed upon by the various church bodies, but not all.

When I was at Union Theological Seminary in NYC back in the mid 60s there were two courses on the history of ancient Israel, one based on a book by William Albright, the other on a text by a German scholar, Martin Noth. The interesting thing was that they presented two quite different histories of Israel.

Despite the colloquialism about the “patience of Job”, in the majority of the biblical book, Job was not patient. In fact, he was angry with God, shaking his fist at the heavens, and demanding an answer from the Almighty to a most troubling question: Why, O God, is there innocent suffering in this world?? 

The words apocalypse and eschaton have been resurrected from the dustbin of theological jargon, and they both refer to what happens at the end of time. More specifically, they point to the end of life as we know it, and today that prophecy comes in two forms.

Thanksgiving is a holiday filled not only with the joy of sharing, but also with contradiction and irony.

It is commonly assumed that Jesus had 12 male disciples, the number being fashioned after the 12 tribes of Israel. Whether or not there were 12 tribes named after 12 men is a question for next week. The question for today is: did Jesus have women disciples, and who were they?

Most of us did not know what was happening, but we do now. The industrial age offered to humanity comforts and conveniences never before imagined, but what we are now discovering is that the bedrock of this modern civilization is a resource that we have unwittingly and precipitously transformed into what could be the cause of our own destruction.

Part One of our answer to the question of who Jesus was, was basically presented on a secular plane. That changes now, as much of what follows is presented as a statement of belief rather than history.

The poor of the planet stare us in the face. Disparity of wealth, in our country and elsewhere, is an outrage that cannot be endured. The numbers are literally unbelievable. The earth provides, but greed monopolizes the table, a select few taking it all while the many stare and starve.

The question about Jesus is not a simple question. In search of the answer, wars have been fought, laws passed and broken, kingdoms gained and lost, and heretics burned at the stake.

This simple combination of “the Bible is the word of God” and “Jesus died for your sins” is what the public thinks lie at the core of Christian faith. I remember being told at Union Theological Seminary in 1963 that what we were learning would take 50 years to trickle down to the church membership.

Every human being has the same story. We come into the world with some genes, a particular environment, and an unfolding sense of being an individual person.

Just as anthropocentrism is untenable, so also is absolutism. No species across the extent of the universe can claim that they alone have access to abiding truth. Visions of truth are not monocular.

When Jesus was born in Nazareth, nobody took notice. There were no wise men, no shepherds in the field. It wasn’t until about 30 years later that some people did take notice, his disciples, because they were drawn, and Pilate, who as crucifier-in-chief crucified all trouble-makers. When Pilate gave the order, the disciples, all 25, women and men, hid in the shadows for fear of their lives. The hiding, however, did not last long. As they comforted one another in both their loss and their fear, they felt the spirit of their lost one alive in their midst, and they knew that the cruelty of the Empire against the One who loved was not the final word. They knew, not that a body had been resuscitated, but that the ultimate power in the universe was not death, but life. And not just life, but life in love.

Since the rise of neuroscience, various studies have sought the connection, if any, between the brain and spiritual experience. Sometimes the news headline reads “God spot found in brain”, and sometimes “Whoops, no God spot”. Sometimes it is located in right hemisphere, sometimes the left, sometimes nowhere in particular. The conclusion seems to be that studies are inconclusive and that we need more studies.

The news headlines paint a consistent picture, and it’s frightening. From only the last few days: A mob at a Trump/Cruz rally chants “Lock him up, lock him up”, referring to Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat running for a senate seat from TX. A man on an airplane grabs a women’s body, “because President Trump said it was ok”. A Republican congressman says that George Soros is paying members of the Central American caravan heading north, and someone plants a bomb at Soros’ house. Other bombs are sent to CNN, Holder, Biden, Hillary, Obama, and more being discovered even as I write. Meanwhile the billionaires are buying land in New Zealand, preparing for the demise of the very system that created their wealth, blindly believing that the south Pacific will be exempt from the apocalypse.

The belief that humankind, created in the image of god, is the center and purpose of the universe, has been smacked down over the last 500 years by three revolutions in human self-awareness. The first was the Copernican discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. Prior to Copernicus publishing his theory in 1543, the medieval worldview imagined that all the heavenly bodies revolved around earth and humanity, while god pushed them in their orbits through the sky. Today, thanks to Hubble, we gaze in fascination at photos of galaxies in outer space. We are not the center of the universe.

Jesus was a man born in the usual way. Mary and Joseph were his parents, and he had some brothers and sisters. His home town, Nazareth, was a small hamlet occupied mostly by poor peasants who eked out a living on small plots of land that were increasingly appropriated by the wealthy. Four miles away, the city of Sepphoris was a bustling scene of government projects that provided day labor for the peasantry, and often Joseph took Jesus with him to the city as they sought to support the family.

Within the last few days, Attorney General Sessions and Press Secretary Sarah Sanders each invoked biblical authority to justify the separation of parents and children seeking entry into the country. The reference was to Paul’s letter to the Jewish Christians in Rome to whom he advised “be subject to the governing authorities”, who are put there by God. Through the ages, this phrase has been used by slave owners to justify slavery, by Nazis to justify extermination, by Royalists in pre-revolution America to insist on loyalty to the king, and by just about anyone who wanted to promote dictatorship.

Tearing apart families at the border has touched a raw nerve in the American psyche, finally. We have protested somewhat when cops shot young black men. We have responded with increasing acceptance as our children are murdered in their schools. We have done nothing as millions of our fellow Americans suffer infrastructure collapse in Puerto Rico. Each of these crises alone should have forced us into the streets to demand what human decency requires. But then the moment passes, and America continues its slow but increasing decline into incivility. The same decline may be happening world wide, but this is our country, our problem.

It’s not that we think we know everything. It’s that we think we’re right about everything we believe. In our highly polarized society, almost everyone believes that they have the facts, know what truth is, and anyone thinking otherwise is wrong. Political parties have their “base”, a segment of the population who are similarly aligned on the issues and who are definitely opposed to the base of the other party. So certain are they of their rightness that they are tone deaf to facts that challenge their belief system, just as they are equally susceptible to the ploys of those who would lead that self-certainty into deeper blindness and even violence.

Christian fundamentalists believe that the most important event in the New Testament is that Jesus died for your sins. Those to whom this makes no sense believe that what matters most is the teaching of Jesus, epitomized, I suppose, in the Golden Rule- “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I would like to argue that neither the “sacrificial death” nor the “teaching” is what Jesus was really about.

“Then let them eat cake.” Whether or not Marie Antionette actually spoke these words is doubtful, but there is no doubt that these five words accurately represented the attitude of the French court towards the nation’s starving millions. Of 23 million Frenchmen prior to the revolution, 10 million subsisted on charity while 3 million begged for a morsel of bread, even as the nobility feasted sumptuously and danced gayly about Versailles. They were totally and willfully oblivious to the plight of the people.

How does one define social justice or social injustice in a situation such as this? There seems no question that the injustice side would include the slave trade itself, the impoverishment of a free nation by greedy boycott, crippling interest rates, and the invasion of a free state by an army basically doing the will of the foreign wealthy. Beyond that, the issue is more complicated. Given the difficulties of a poor nation absorbing refugees, a problem endemic in many parts of the world, the reaction of the Bahamas seems to be a balancing act of treating others justly while also treating one’s own citizens fairly. There are no simple answers. Defining social justice is no easy matter.

Part one of this endeavor to find a language that progressive Christians and secular humanists can share spoke of replacing the word god with the word love. Part two involved replacing the word sin with the word egotism, a human trait that is inevitable and inescapable. We each create a reality unique to us, and we believe it to be Reality with a capital R. That’s the human problem: our reality is always distorted.

Now we ask: what’s the cure?

the second concept for which we might find common ground pertains to the actual difficulty we encounter when we try to love. How easy is it to act lovingly in an unconditional way? Are we capable, or does something stand in our way? And if there is a blockage, what might that be? The traditional Christian answer is, yes, there is a blockage, and it goes by the name of sin.

We started by asking if we could replace the word god with the word love. We have seen that both words are not easily defined or understood. And yet, given the importance of finding common ground, I think that at least for the time being, we should give it a try and replace the word god with the word love in the context of humanist/Christian dialogue. Christians can talk about god all they want when talking among themselves, just as humanists can deny god all they want when talking among themselves. But when talking to each other, using the word love, as exemplified by the Samaritan, would be a helpful way to begin the dialogue. If we can agree on love, then will follow the awareness that indeed we have much more in common.

Everyone in this room shares 99% of their DNA with everyone else. And 98.8% with chimps. And 50% with bananas. How can that be? Well, most of our DNA contains instruction on cell reproduction, a process that all living things share. But it’s that 1% that differentiates us- blue eyes and brown, a big nose, a little nose, 5’6” and 6’5”. And 4% of that one per cent is from our Neanderthal cousins. Homo Sapiens who stayed in Africa never met Neanderthal and so have none of that DNA. The rest of us do.

Given these facts, certain questions arise. The first question is: who are we?? What are we??

It’s that old approach that St Anselm wrote about in the 11th c, fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. It’s important to distinguish faith and belief. Faith is an attitude of trust, and belief is trying to make sense of that attitude. What you believe is serious, but not too serious. Karl Barth, who wrote many, many books, including his voluminous Church Dogmatics, once commented that the angels would have a good laugh when they saw him pushing a wheelbarrow full of his books through the pearly gate. That we all agree in our belief is not the point. Each of us is seeking understanding. Agreement is not the point. Openness and respect is.

A few months ago, I watched two movies on consecutive days, The Big Short and Spotlight. The first was about the so-called great recession and how the big banks knew about- indeed, caused -the bust, the second about the Catholic scandal of priests molesting young boys, as it unfolded in Boston under persistent investigation by Globe reporters. The common theme is that in each case the truth was so contrary to popular belief that, at first, nobody could believe it. The big banks knew- and told no one. The archbishop knew, and told no one. And both succeeded at first because the truth was so shocking and so undermining of the public trust that it simply could not be true. But true it was. That which challenges public perception is ultimately accepted only with the greatest persistence and effort.

One need not be a political analyst to understand that Trump’s first three weeks in office have been a bit of an erratic roller-coaster ride, not only for Americans but for all the world. There are many who believe that it might be a secret plot to throw the resistance off balance and create a fascist order, and this has yet to be proven false. It also is possible that there is no “method to the madness”, and that the erraticism is a result of confusion and inexperience, or worse.

Tall. Long, light brown hair. Blue eyes. A calming gaze with an outstretched teaching arm. More likely than not, this is how westerners imagine Jesus. Contrast that with the reality. Jesus, like most men of his time, probably weighed about 110 pounds, stood little over 5 feet tall, and would not have lived much past 40. Popular Mechanics recently offered us an image of a swarthy Jesus with curly Afro type hair and a facial appearance that to me seems much like a Neanderthal. Google it and have a look. That, most likely, is the real Jesus. Whatever doctrinal belief you may hold about the man, he was a man, and that’s what he looked like. Personally, it brings a smile to my face to understand that when I talk to or about Jesus, it’s this little Jewish guy that I have in mind.