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My First Introduction to the New Testament is for young readers of middle school age who may cherish the presentation Bibles given to them when they were younger but wonder just how to engage with biblical literature. Church school teachers may want to use it for a yearlong class because most chapters can be covered in one session. College students and even graduate students will find this book an easy way to refresh and review.

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.

Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox worked out a theology that makes sense for post-modern, 21st century mystics who want to honor the Christ of John’s Gospel without forcing the text into impossible literalism. Fox’s “Cosmic Christ” evokes responsibility for the condition of all forms of life on Planet Earth, and confers the power to carry out the work that arises from that responsibility.

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 …

I went in search of other ways to understand the atonement. This book is what I found. It’s an easy read, written in a way that anyone can understand. I hope it will be helpful to you, as it has been to me, to understand the power of the crucifixion and resurrection.

Paul is not talking about life after death. Paul is talking about embracing the challenge of distributive justice-compassion –“the great work” – here and now. John’s Jesus assures us that “the spirit of truth will testify on my behalf,” not about the insane claim that he was God, nor about the resuscitation of a corpse.

But, if we want to follow our Savior through Holy Week, if we want to experience Holy Week in a way that reflects our Savior’s own experiences during that first holy week, then we won’t find ourselves in a pew, in a church, in a service. We would find ourselves in the streets. In anger. In protest. In search of justice.

Now I’m not opposed to ideologies and religions. They can inform and inspire. But when beliefs are held dogmatically, they make reasoned discourse nearly impossible. I think we can have beliefs and convictions without considering them to be absolute….We are living in difficult times, and I hope readers will find my essays relevant and thought-provoking both for individual reflection and group discussion…….Let the discussions begin.

In The Authentic Letters of Paul, the scholars define “sin” (Greek: hamartia) as “the corrupting seduction of power,” or the “seductive power of corruption.” Paul is not talking about rotting corpses. He is talking about the kind of corruption that arises between people, and in government or economic empires that leads to systems of injustice.

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.

Recorded Sunday January 8, 2012 at Pilgrim UCC in Carlsbad, CA.
Pilgrim UCC is an Open and Affirming member of the United Church of Christ.

In The Non-Religious Christian, Vern Jones shares his journey growing up as constrained by the strict dogma of an evangelical Baptist church to a renewed faith without the myths and restrictive ideology taught by so many churches.