[Dialogue] 1/25/18, Forrester/Spong: Dawning of Christ-Consciousness: From Separation to Union; Spong revisited

Thu Jan 25 08:51:59 PST 2018

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Dawning of Christ-Consciousness: From Separation to Union
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

........
........John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, 
........proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the 
........forgiveness of sins…. And a voice came from 
........heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with 
........you I am well pleased. (Mk. 1:4, 1:11)

What is happening in the human soul when someone, such as the President of the United Sates, refers to the predominately black countries of Africa and that of Haiti with dehumanizing racist rhetoric? What is happening in the human soul when political leaders seek simplistic solutions to cultural shifts in the erection of walls? What is happening in the human soul when the U.S. President fails to condemn neo-Nazi violent demonstrations?
Unacknowledged fear withdraws the soul from intimate contact in the hope that survival is secured through separation. The soul, over time, develops a schizoid structure wherein it unconsciously pulls back from the feared “other” as the source of danger and destruction. The walls within the soul cast long, dark, shadows, dispelling the living daylight of truth.
I would like to return to a well-known story for perhaps an unlikely source of wise guidance. Familiar tales, such as the baptism of Jesus narrated in the opening verses of the Markan community’s gospel, tend to foster a fogging of consciousness. We’ve heard the words so many times there seems to be little, if any, poignancy left. What possible meaning could an encounter of two Jewish men in Palestine have for those of us involved on the spiritual journey today, where fear constructs walls casting long shadows? I believe the key lies in the realization that fear-based separation is the blindness that taunts and haunts and seduces the human heart. I understand this realization as the dawning of Christ-consciousness in the soul of Jesus.
Separation
We know very little about the early years of Jesus. But archeological and textual studies, among many other disciplines, are making it possible to develop reasonable theories. The work of biblical scholar Bruce Chilton, as mentioned in a previous column, is representative. If I understand Chilton’s thesis correctly, Jesus is not a typical Jew. This is because his paternity would have been in question: Mary is an unwed mother who has been intimate with Joseph – a legendary figure of whom we know nothing. Sexual intimacy outside of marriage is not necessarily scandalous in 1st century Judaism, but being with child without clear knowledge of who the father is threatens blood lines and the purity of the tribe. Ignorance births fear. Such a child would have been categorized as a mamzer, and removed from typical or customary forms of religious socialization, such as gathering with the other boys and men for religious instruction. In keeping with the regulations laid down in Leviticus, fear for religious purity – and the status it was believed to have secured in society and before Adonai – would have led to the separation of the tainted child. Fear motivated the withdrawal from the company of the perceived impure Jesus.
A number of scholars also propose that Jesus, at some point in his early teen years, very well could have made his way to the Essenes at Qumran, which is where he would have come to have known another somewhat legendary and enigmatic figure, John the Baptist. The Essenes were Jewish ascetics. When they surveyed early 1st century Jewish culture they perceived collusion and compromise of the faith at all of the critical fulcrums: the priestly Sadducees ran temple worship thru cooperation with the Roman authorities; Jewish daily life was a series of compromises with Greco-Roman culture; Jewish faith was rapidly deteriorating with the chosen people living less and less like serious adherents of the covenant. Survival, the Essenes believed, depended upon separation. The hills were their walls behind which they withdrew for survival.
Jesus was thus a marginal Jew – which is to say someone on the edges of dominant cultural life. He also likely came to find himself in the company of men who had chosen to be marginalized due to the spiritual corruption of the very people who had judged Jesus to be impure. (The ironies of fear-based separation never cease to abound; walls would seem to beget more walls.)
And so, the Essenes moved themselves away from quotidian Jewish life and congregated in the hills of Qumran. Here they purified themselves through ritual baths (or baptisms). Here they ate little and wore little, exposing themselves to the harsh elements so as to tame the beastly sexual and social instincts. This was a community for men only, thereby lessening the possibility of contamination and temptation. The end days were coming that would usher in the final battle, and if they were to be ready, separation from all distraction and purification of the wandering and desiring heart was absolutely necessary.
The souls of John and Jesus imbibed this Essene ascetical spirituality, perhaps for a number of years – fear-driven withdrawal in the hope of salvation through separation.
Waters of Separation or Union?
We don’t know exactly when, but at some point, both John and Jesus departed Qumran. John, however, seems to have only left the community in a geographic sense. If the biblical accounts are to be believed, he continued life as an ascetic – he ate and wore little, and he preached his baptism of repentance. John was not only not of the world, we might say, he was barely in the world. And for good reason, for according to his heart the world was a place of temptation and corruption. Essene spirituality still shaped his soul. He perceived the river Jordan as waters separating pure from impure. He proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the sin had to do with continued collusion and cooperation with the wayward world. Sin, in other words, was failure to remain separate.
Only because of what is to ensue can we say that Jesus’ decision to receive John’s baptism of repentance comes as a stunner. Contrary to the dominant teaching of Christianity, Jesus clearly accepts John’s invitation to understand himself as a sinner with the need to repent of his sins and enter the waters of the Jordan. But, as I understand it, Jesus repents of a very different sin than that governing the religious imagination of John. John understands sin as failure to remain separate. Jesus knows sin as the false perception of ourselves as separate not only from God, but from one another and even from our own true heart. From within the womb of Judaism, Jesus inverts the spirituality of John and births a new spiritual path of union; a path generated from trust, not driven by fear.
Dawning of Christ-Consciousness
Along the way of leaving Qumran and receiving baptism from John, Jesus begins to realize that he and the Holy Source are not separate. He begins to experience that there is nothing of impurity distancing his being from Being. This dawning realization of his true nature will come to fruition in the spirituality of the Johannine community, when this gospel speaks of Jesus and the Source as being One. A complementary fruition, I believe, is found in the community of Thomas, wherein the followers of Jesus understand that each of us is to realize the same truth as Jesus, and thereby be his twin in Christ-consciousness.
The sin, or better said, blindness, is not realizing that union is the truth of the human condition. Not only the human condition, but the condition of creation. The Holy Source is the essential nature of all that is. And more, Love, Boundless Love, is the fabric of our true and essential nature.
We can describe the rest of Jesus’ life as the gradual discovery of what it is to be a human being who lives from the truth that Love is his essence. The baptism of Jesus is a story of the dawning of Christ-consciousness: all of reality is always already One. Not One in a numerical sense, but One as being a unified whole without boundaries. Like Jesus, we are on the spiritual path of realizing how to live a life with this truth as its core: a life of emerging Christ-consciousness.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Read the essay online here.

About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“.

Question & Answer
JP from the Internet, asks:

Question:
I don't understand why, for centuries the BIBLE has been and IS the inspired word of GOD. Now, for some reason, a few (and not chosen few) think it is just a storybook. It is their fault that the United Methodist church is breaking up. The BIBLE is clear on what GOD thinks of homosexuality. If you notice, the churches that are growing are not mainline liberal churches but fundamental Bible-believing churches. I was raised a Protestant Methodist.

Answer: Rev. David M. Felten

Dear JP,
Wow, growing up in the Methodist Protestant Church makes you a member of a unique and particularly tenacious group of Southerners! I understand this is a group that walked out of the 1939 Methodist merger bringing together denominations that had split over slavery 100 years prior. Your MPC ancestors were (and I believe still are) convinced that the Bible is infallible and inerrant (which is demonstrably NOT the case). It did, however, help them make a Biblical case for slavery (and the “attacks of the Abolitionists,” who “would disturb the settled order of Providence, and dissolve the connection between master and slave, that has been recognized by the great Governor of the Universe).
My guess is that the MPC probably doesn't support slavery any more (at least publicly), but back in the day, they made the same argument for slavery that I think you’re making for opposing basic civil rights for non-heterosexuals: the “settled order” “recognized by the great Governor of the Universe." I hope we can agree that God's "settled order" was wrong about slavery. According to the Bible, God's "settled order" also included the advocacy of genocide, women as property, and rampant xenophobia. I’d like to be able to say that these ideas are no longer considered acceptable, but like zombies, they don’t want to die. Sadly the've been given new credence by President Trump (who doesn’t understand why, “if we’ve got the nukes, why we can’t use them”, brags about grabbing women by the genitals, and dismisses whole countries as “shitholes.”) So, far from being embarrassing chapters we’d rather forget, we’ve still got to contend with people who think genocide, misogyny, and xenophobia are OK, but homosexuality is bad.
It begs the question: What is it about the issue of homosexuality that makes people so upset? What is it about basic civil rights for all Americans that causes people to resort to getting God involved in opposition? That's a strategy that hasn't worked out too well for God over the years. Breaking news: "God is against basic human rights." Yikes.
Look, I don’t have an answer – and neither do the poor sots who’ve been tasked with trying to keep the United Methodist denomination from breaking up over the next year or so. It goes right back to the slaveholder vs. abolitionist playbook: anti-LGBTQ advocates clinging to disreputable Bible-passages vs. those convinced that all human beings are of sacred worth (despite what a few passages in the Bible say).
You may not believe it, but I have deep respect for the Bible. I've spent my entire adult life studying it. And I'm here to tell you (as evidently one of the "not chosen") that it is indeed a storybook -- but not "just" a storybook. It contains the stories of people who have spent their whole lives wrestling with and interpreting the meaning of life. It is not inerrant. It is not historical. Its books contain stories -- stories with way more meaning than mere history. Our job is to interpret those stories for a new generation, not simply try to conform to old ways of thinking.
One of the books I recommend to people who are wrestling with some of the things it sounds like you're wrestling with is Bishop John Shelby Spong's "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." He, too, grew up in a Southern fundamentalist denomination and has since come to a different understanding of the Bible and his faith. If you get it and read it, I'd love to correspond with you about any questions you have.
Wrestling with new ideas is never easy – especially when they seem to threaten a comfortable, established way of looking at the world. To paraphrase Harry Emerson Fosdick (a Baptist, BTW), “The enemy of Christianity isn’t change, but stagnation.” To celebrate and encourage the cessation of change will continue to drive young and old alike out of what’s left of the church.
But, if we embrace the core values of justice and compassion expressed in the Bible, we are compelled to stand with the oppressed and voiceless, accommodating the reality that the Spirit is flexing with our evolving humanity. For me, clinging to values that exclude and disrespect others is made even worse when they’re justified by out-of-context Biblical proof texting. It’s theological malpractice.

Read Jack’s book. Go sit in a quiet place and ask yourself, will God really love me more because I hate the right people? I’ll leave it to you.
Committed to Progress,
David
PS: Just to be clear, I doubt the MPC is growing (I think there are only a few dozen MPCs left, scattered across the Confederacy). And as a matter of fact, it's a myth that "fundamental Bible believing churches" are growing like crazy. Everybody's losing members -- even those wildly liberal Southern Baptists have lost a million members in the last 10 years. If you want more statistics, you can find them on the web.
Read and Share online here
About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.
A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.
David and his wife Laura, an administrator for a large Arizona public school district, live in Phoenix with their three often adorable children.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Connection between the Crucifixion and the Passover, Part I 

The symbols of Christmas have been stored away. In Christian churches we are in the poorly defined season of Epiphany, waiting for Lent to appear on the horizon. Supermarket advertisements of seafood dishes for the Lenten diet announce Lent's arrival, but little attention is paid to it until its last week when the climax of the Christian story is relived. Holy Week includes the celebrations of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Psychologically, we are moving from the cheering crowds of Palm Sunday to the jeering crowds of Good Friday.
In the biblical narrative these final events in Jesus' life are set against the background of the Jewish observance of the Passover, which provides a clue into how the earliest Christians came to understand the meaning of Jesus' death. Whether that placement is a matter of history or is instead an interpretive liturgy is the place I want to begin this week in a series of columns that will attempt to re-interpret the founding moments in the Christian story.
Both the Passover and Holy Week celebrate death and the birth of new life and in the process, call those observing these rites to new beginnings. Both the Passover and the Passion Narrative speak of a deliverance from bondage. Passover's bondage was slavery in Egypt. Holy Week's bondage was the 'bondage of sin.' Passover related a death and resurrection experience of a nation at the Red Sea; Holy Week a death and resurrection experience of an individual. In later Christian practice, the waters of baptism, in which we are said to enter Christ's death become, when we are raised from those waters in a symbolic resurrection, the gateway to eternal life. In this manner the liturgies of Passover, Eucharist and Baptism came to be united. From as far back as our written Christian sources go the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus were set in the context of the Jewish Passover. The Passover was located in the calendar at that moment of early spring when, at least in the northern hemisphere, tiny shoots of green living things are breaking through the crust of an apparently dead 'Mother earth.' When the passion narrative of Jesus was linked to Passover this time became attached to the story of his death and resurrection.
In an earlier book, "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?" I assumed the historicity of that connection, but further study through the years has challenged this. I am now convinced that liturgical pressure and not remembered history forced the two events together. I also now believe that it was the difficulty in making sense of the death of Jesus that caused the early Christians to identify the cross with the Passover and that this in turn provided the theological lynchpin needed to understand Jesus' death as being related to salvation. This insight has caused me to rearrange in a radical way the time line of the gospels. The first step is to separate the cross from the Passover. The second step, and perhaps far more important one, is to recognize that the experience of resurrection has to be separated from the day of crucifixion not by three days, but by perhaps as long as six months to a year. That time frame would put an end to that late developing tendency to think that the resurrection has anything to do with a resuscitated body. If I can demonstrate the truth of these two possibilities then I can show that there is a different way to look at the story of the cross and to explore anew the meaning of Easter.
To open the first timeline it is essential to know exactly what the Bible says. Mark, the first written gospel (70-75 C.E.), assumes that the meal on the night before the crucifixion is the Passover meal. He portrays Jesus (14:13ff) as sending disciples in search of a man who will lead them to a large furnished upper room, where they can prepare for the celebration. Mark then chronicles in intimate detail the final twenty-four hours in Jesus' earthly life.
This stylized narrative begins in Mark 14:17 when the evangelist notes that "when it was evening," that is around 6:00 pm, the disciples gathered with Jesus for the Passover meal. That meal usually lasted for three hours or until 9:00 pm when it ended with the singing of a hymn and departure. Mark then describes seven other episodes, each of which is another three-hour segment as that fateful night unfolded. We are told that Jesus and his disciples go to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Peter, James and John could not watch with him one, two or three hours. It was now midnight. The act of betrayal is thus set at the darkest point of the night. The arrested Jesus is then dragged before the Chief priests for a trial that presumably lasted until 3:00 a. m. One quickly doubts the historicity of this episode since the Torah forbade Jewish authorities from sitting in judgment at night. Liturgy, however, can ignore that historical detail.
In the watch of the night between 3:00 and 6:00 a. m., known as "cockcrow," Mark tells us the story of Peter's threefold denial, one for each hour I would suggest. At the crowing of the cock it is now 6:00 am and Mark's text tells us right on cue (15:1) that "as soon as it was morning" the Council of the Jews led Jesus away to Pilate. This new three-hour segment includes the stories of Barabbas, the lashing of Jesus and the crown of thorns. Mark then informs us (15:25) that it was the "third hour" or 9:00 am when they crucified him. When the sixth hour came (15:33) Mark said that darkness covered the earth until the ninth hour or 3:00 p.m., when Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and breathed his last. From 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. Mark suggests that they have time to remove his body from the cross and to bury him fittingly in Joseph's tomb. It is thus obvious that the earliest version of the crucifixion story is liturgically shaped to be a twenty-four vigil, divided into eight segments and was constructed not to tell believers what actually happened but to lead them into a remembrance of who Jesus was and the role he played in the drama of their salvation.
That conclusion is heightened by the realization that almost all of the content that Mark uses to develop his story of how Jesus died, comes not from eyewitnesses but from two primary sources in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures: Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. From Psalm 22, Mark draws the words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." He described the crowd at the cross using the words of this Psalm (v.7,8). Next he tells the story of Jesus' thirst again using the words of this Psalm (v. 14,15). Then he relates the account of the soldiers dividing his garments based on this Psalm (v.18). This is clearly not remembered history. In Isaiah 53 a portrait is drawn of one called the Servant or the Suffering Servant of the Lord. Isaiah says this Servant figure "was numbered with the transgressors" (v. 12). From that line, Mark created the story of the two thieves crucified one on each side of him. Isaiah says that the Servant figure was "with a rich man in his death" (v.9), so Mark created the story of a ruler of the Jews, Joseph of Arimathea, who made his new tomb in a garden available to receive the body of Jesus. Isaiah notes that the Servant made intercession for the transgressors (v. 12), so the stage is set for Luke to expand Mark's narrative by supplying the words of Jesus' intercession for the soldiers, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Mark has noted earlier (15:50) that when Jesus was arrested, "all of his disciples forsook him and fled," which means that we must embrace the fact that Jesus died alone. There were no eyewitnesses to record the details of Jesus' final hours so Mark's biblical account cannot be history. It is interpretive material, highly stylized and presented in a liturgical format. This clearly acknowledged data destabilizes all the claims for the historicity of the final events in Jesus' life other than the fact that the Romans executed him. Once we open this door, the possibility that the entire story of the Jesus' Passion is interpretive material, not historical memory, demands new attention.
Before moving to additional data supporting this conclusion, I need to note that in Mark, Matthew and Luke we do not have three separate accounts of the death of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke have Mark's gospel in front of them as they write. While they both edit Mark and add to his narrative here and there, they accepted Mark's basic framework and time line. The Last Supper in all three of these gospels is the Passover meal, suggesting that the crucifixion occurred on the day following the Passover. Matthew adds an earthquake at the time of the crucifixion, and puts a temple guard around the tomb. Luke adds the story of one of the thieves being penitent (Lk 23:39-43) and gives the women, watching from afar, a bigger role. However, these are not independent corroborations of the Passover connection. Matthew copied into his gospel about 90% of Mark's content while Luke copied about 50%. Mark was the one who put the crucifixion and the Passover together. Matthew and Luke accepted that placement.
Finally, we note that the Fourth Gospel, John, is an independent source. John refers to a final meal that is characterized by a foot-washing ceremony but it is clearly not the Passover meal. John then is free to connect the crucifixion itself with the moment the Paschal Lamb is slaughtered. This meant that for John the Passover celebration would have occurred after sundown on the day Jesus was crucified. The timing is different but the connection between the death of Jesus and the Passover is no less real. In all four Gospels the story of the crucifixion is shaped by images from the Passover.
Does it make any real difference if the Passover observance was not the historical context during which the crucifixion occurred? I think it does for it breaks open the literalism of the past and drives us to explain how the two came to be related. That in turn provides a doorway into the primitive understanding of the Christ experience. We have only just begun, so stay tuned.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally published February 2, 2005

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