[Dialogue] 11/21/19, Progressing Spirit: Brandan Roberts: How Progressive Christianity Can Save the World; Spong revisited

Thu Nov 21 05:42:01 PST 2019

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateBody .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent, #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateBody .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateFooter .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent, #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateFooter .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }  Christianity is inherently political.   
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How Progressive Christianity Can Save the World 
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|  Essay by Rev. Brandan Robertson
November 21, 2019Christianity is inherently political. The faithful path taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth was arguably just as much a political vision for the future of the Jewish people as much as it was a path to spiritual salvation. After all, the long-expected Messiah of the Hebrew Bible was always seen as a political savior, one who would establish justice and righteousness between the affairs of humans once and for all. One who would cause wars and divisions to cease and would liberate those who had been caught in cycles of oppression. One who would replace every other king and emperor’s failed political systems with a divinely orchestrated government that would lead to the flourishing of the nations.

This is the messianic tradition to which those of us who follow Jesus are laying claim. The declaration “Jesus is Lord” is a declaration of political as well as spiritual allegiance to the one whom we believe is the rightful ruler of humanity.

While we know that this is true, progressive Christians have on a large scale been very resistant to engage in any way that seemed overtly political. We look to the Religious Right and see what is the very worst of Christian political engagement- powerful, privileged men finding ways to leverage their influence as faith leaders to cozy up to political powers and gain even more influence. We see a brand of Christianity that has sold its soul out to the agenda of a political party and its leaders, christening anything and everything that the party stands for as the Christian path. This corruption of Christianity for political ends has caused many progressive people of faith to pause and think twice before engaging as Christians in any political action.

While this hesitance is clearly not unfounded, it has caused progressive Christians to forfeit a great deal of moral ground in our country over the past fifty years. We have refused to use our Christian values to cast a vision for the future of our country and the world that could inspire hope and ignite a deep political revolution that could change the hearts of millions of people. We have separated our spiritual beliefs from our political engagement, and what has emerged is a shallow, undesirable version of both. What is a political revolution for justice and equity if there is not a compelling, ancient spiritual grounding to argue for such a future? What is a faith that dreams for the reign of God to be manifest on earth as it is in heaven if there is no practical call to political action to make that vision a reality?

What made Jesus such a compelling spiritual and social revolutionary was that he engaged both the political and the religious realms of his society without reservation. He spoke clearly about his political positions and his opinions about the political rulers of his day. He connected his spiritual and moral teachings to practical, political realities. When he told parables, such as “The Good Samaritan”, he was offering overt political commentary that was infused with spiritual wisdom. He understood that there was truly no difference between the political and the spiritual- both are dealing with the actions, desires, and possible futures of humans. The message that he taught in the Temple courts was relevant not just to the pious religious elites, but to the most irreligious passerby, because it cast a vision for a future that was for the common good of everyone, not just rewards for the faithful.

One of the reasons I believe that progressive Christian denominations and organization have been facing such hurdles as we’ve moved into a new millennium is because we have allowed our faith to separate from our politics. We’ve overly bought into the extreme atheistic and humanistic positions that religion and politics have no business intermingling- which is not, by the way, what the idea of the separation of Church and State is about at all. And when our spiritual messages were removed from meaningful calls to engagement in the political affairs of our towns, cities, states, and nations, our version of Christian faith really did become irrelevant for a vast majority of people. Progressive Christianity became more about crafting theologies that could adapt to post-modern realities rather than about tangible transformation of lives, neighborhoods, and societies. And a Gospel without tangible transformation is not a Gospel worth believing… so people leave.

As we stand in the midst of one of the most critical moments of human history, where the political future of the United States, and indeed the world, is in such great flux, and where the very survival of humankind over the next fifty years is a complete wild card, I believe that progressive people of faith have just the message that can bring hope and salvation to our world. We have a Gospel that takes into account the real challenges that humanity is facing, that offers real values and real solutions rooted in ancient narratives that have proven truthful for centuries. We have some of the greatest tools for organizing- namely communities of like-minded people who are waiting to take faith-rooted action for the common good, if only they were granted the permission to or had tangible examples of faithful political engagement.

As we approach a new decade, it is going to be essential that progressive Christians begin to engage politically once again. It is essential that our pastors are not afraid to use our pulpits and our positions within our local communities to speak unambiguous truth to the public and to the powers that be. To name evil and injustice when we see it, while also naming potential solutions that are rooted in the wells of wisdom available to us from our faith traditions. It is essential that our local church gatherings transition from being museums of organized religion to community centers that utilize our religion for organizing as an expression of our devotion to Christ and to our neighbor. In this next era, progressive Christians must not be afraid to speak publicly, to engage elected officials, to create networks and organizations that unashamedly promote progressive values from a faith-based perspective.

When we cast aside the weights of fear and complacency that have weighed us down and begin to once again have a sense of mission for why we exist as people and communities of faith, I believe we will regain our relevancy in culture and actually begin to shape the world in a meaningful way. The Gospel that we’ve been entrusted with will become compelling once again, because it will actually bring about the transformation and salvation that people are craving for so deeply. Progressive faith will become less about trying to convince people to join a sinking ship of institutionalized religion, and truly about joining a movement that is actually changing lives and the world. The actually has influence and power to make a difference.

When I think about this kind of Christianity, I feel my heart leap. To be a part of a community that is actually at work to save the world through living out the Gospel of Jesus is why I first gave my heart to Christ so many years ago. And it turns out that this is the very kind of Christianity that, when reclaimed from the right, might just make me stick around the Church for years to come.~ Rev. Brandan Robertson
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By Roy

I’ve read so many books I had to stop because my head hurts. My reading has included the Bible twice from start to finish, Borg, Spong, K. Armstrong, Fox, Miles, Vosper, Felton/Murphy, Rollins, Aslan etc. I am not a scholar but was and am fascinated (Borg’s word) and driven to understand religion and my own spiritual desire. Anyway, I’m not there but have this overarching question before I continue my search.. what is God?

If the traditional theistic notion has been debunked is there one Progressive view? We all use the same word and reference to something sacred but are all of your contributors and authors sharing the same meaning? If so what is it? Are we talking about a Buddhist mental thing or some other force in the world?

A: By Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Dear Roy,Let me begin by saying that there is no “one Progressive view.” Indeed, one of the great gifts of a postmodern milieu is the freedom from a supposedly singular ahistorical perspective that dominates and devalues all others. That said, I believe there are common dimensions to a Progressive view: there is the inclusion of human experience both personally (phenomenology, psychodynamics)  and communally (cultural studies), with all the incredible diversity that it necessarily embraces; there is also the integration of the complexity of various systems in and through which life unfolds. For myself, the existential longing within the Progressive view and what motivates my endless curiosity is the desire to know what is true about our experiences of Reality.

Each author you cite has their own perspective and contribution to make to human spiritual inquiry. Freed from doctrinal blinders, what I find common to many, if not most of them, is the realization that Being is the Ground of what is Really Real. Being is not a mental category but the true nature of all that is. How that is so, well that is our amazing question. In many ways, Heidegger was correct – all roads of inquiry of what makes life possible lead to the exploration of Being.

You speak of being “driven to understand religion and [your] own spiritual desire.” That is your starting place, that is your path. In your desire is your longing to realize your oneness with Being and that longing is your light, and it eschews ready-made answers. For me, no other question stirs the courageous human soul as the search for the true meaning of Being in our life. This is because “soul” is simply a word to describe Being manifesting as you, me, and every other phenomenon we encounter. The mystery is even deeper, because we can come to realize that we are Being. To come to know the true nature of ourself is to come to know Being. One of the gifts of Buddhism is that it always refers us back to the exploration of our own experience, our own sense of fascination, our own desire to understand. It wisely invites us to trust that to search for God is to explore Being, which means to be endlessly curious about your own soul’s journey.~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

Read and share 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. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origin of the Bible, Part VII:
The Final Strand of the Torah, The Priestly Document (A)

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 12, 2008
 Time after time we discover that it was the external events of human history that more than anything else shaped the content of those writings that would someday be called the Holy Scriptures. That should not surprise us since all books have human authors who live in a context of both time and place. Only those who ascribe a supernatural source to these ancient texts find this insight disturbing. There is, however, no rational argument in the world that would assert a divine origin for either the Bible or the Koran. We have already traced this interplay in the first three stages of the development of the Torah. This week we come to the fourth and final stage.

The earliest document in the Bible was a 10th century BCE product of the dominant tribe of Judah, which focused on the power symbols of that part of the Jewish world: the city of Jerusalem, the royal house of David, the Temple and the high priest. It was written probably during the reign of King Solomon, but its ultimate hero was King David. We call it the “J” version for it referred to God by the name JHWH.

The next strand of the Torah was a 9th century product of the Northern Kingdom, written after its successful revolution, which separated it from Judah, creating a second Hebrew state. The Northern Kingdom, which called itself Israel, was, not surprisingly, far more democratic in nature. Power was vested in the people, allowing them to choose and to dismiss their rulers. This version called god Elohim and was known as the “E” document. It also made Joseph, the favorite son of the patriarch Jacob, the hero of its story, not King David, as the “J” document had done.

In 721 B.C. this Northern Kingdom was overrun and destroyed by the Assyrians, their people becoming in the process the “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The conquering Assyrians resettled the citizens of that defeated nation in foreign lands, where they disappeared into the DNA of the Middle East. A survivor of this crushing war, however, did escape to Jerusalem with a copy of the “E” document. In time this material was woven into the “J” document and the Jewish story was now the “JE” version, which remained for a century the scriptures of the Jews.

In 621 BCE a “new book of Moses” was “discovered” hidden in the walls of the Temple during a period of Temple repairs. It was called Deuteronomy from “deutero,” second, and “nomas,” law. Under its influence a massive reform of Temple worship was carried out. We suspect that the prophet Jeremiah was a part of this reforming group that wrote, planted and discovered the book. When Deuteronomy was woven into the JE version, the Deuteronomic writers also edited the entire corpus, placing their stamp onto Israel’s history. This JED account was the Jewish sacred scriptures for only a brief time before Judah’s worst calamity unfolded.

This tragedy began in 609 B.C.E. when Pharaoh Necho of Egypt sent troops to attack his enemy, the Assyrians, on the plains of Megiddo. King Josiah of Judah, the hero of the Deuteronomic reforms and an ally of the Assyrians, intercepted the invading Egyptians. In the ensuing battle, King Josiah, probably the most popular king of the Jews since David, was slain. Despair and fear now set in among the Jews. Assyria was declining and the Babylonians, led by their warrior king, Nebuchadnezzar, proceeded to defeat its army, destroy Nineveh its capital, and to replace it as the dominant power in that region of the world.

In the early years of the sixth century BCE, Nebuchadnezzar consolidated his power sufficiently to begin a war of conquest. Sweeping out of the North, he conquered everything in sight before arriving at the walls of Jerusalem to begin a siege in 598. Jerusalem was eminently defendable, located as it was high on a fortress-like hill and possessing an internal water supply. It had not been conquered by a foreign army in the last 400 years. The Jewish strategy before marauding armies was to retreat into “Fortress Jerusalem,” where they always kept sufficient food supplies to wait out a siege. Normally, the enemy would grow weary and a negotiated settlement would be reached, leaving Judah free but poor. Jerusalem had thus developed an aura of invincibility, causing the Jews to assert that as the earthly dwelling place of God, God would not allow it to be either conquered or destroyed. The Babylonians, however, proved to be more persistent than any previous enemy and the siege lasted for two full years, by which time both the food and the weapons of war were exhausted. Even rocks and spears once hurled were not retrievable. Finally, the walls were breached and the Babylonian army poured in, destroying everything before them. Even God’s house, the Temple, was leveled.

The Babylonians rounded up the captive people and prepared them for deportation to Babylon. Only the elderly and the physically impaired would remain. The period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian Captivity was about to begin. A puppet ruler named Zedekiah, of the house of David but loyal to Judah’s new master, was placed on the throne. All others were forced to march into resettlement in Babylon. This experience would remain the darkest moment in Jewish history until it was superseded by the Holocaust in the 20th century.

These Jewish exiles left everything they knew. They would never again see the sacred soil of Judah. They were removed from their Temple with its sacred feasts and fasts, which had served to give a sense of order and purpose to their lives. They even assumed that to be removed from the Temple was to be removed from God. According to one of the psalms (137), the conquered Jews were taunted by their captors. The words of this psalm are plaintive: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee O Zion. As for our harps we hanged them upon the trees that are therein. For they that led us away captive required of us then a song and melody in our heaviness: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” They were destined to live as slaves or as a perpetual underclass in a land where the name of their God was never to be spoken in public. They did not believe that God could even hear their prayers in this foreign place.

Their spiritual crisis was even deeper than this. In this primitive time the defeat of a nation was understood to be a defeat for their God. This meant that their God had been demonstrated to be impotent in the face of the gods of Babylon. Their God had in effect been destroyed. If they were to continue to be believers, they would have to be, to use a phrase I would coin some 2600 years later, “believers in exile.” They were now separated from everything that under girded their understanding of God. It was a crisis of dire proportions in which their God would either perish or grow. There were no other alternatives.

Most ancient peoples did not survive such an ordeal. This norm had in fact been the fate of the people of the Northern Kingdom. In only two or three generations they had completely lost their identity and were soon absorbed into the general population, becoming what we now call the “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The only hope a conquered people had for survival lay in their ability to remain separate and distinct from their neighbors, thus making it impossible for amalgamation to occur. The Jews now lived with the ultimate hope that someday, in some unknown future their descendants, if still cohesive and recognized as Jews, might just have the opportunity to return to their homeland and rebuild their nation and Jerusalem. This hope became their dream and the ultimate value for which they lived while in captivity.

Included among those who were taken into exile was the man we know as Ezekiel, along with a number of other priests. Almost inevitably they became the new leaders of the exiled people, moving at once to build and to install into the consciousness of these conquered people the virtues of remaining separate from the Babylonians and to guarantee that their descendants would cling to the dream and the tribal duty of returning someday to their homeland.

In the service of that dream these priestly leaders identified three essential marks of Judaism that they set out to stamp so deeply on the psyches of their people that they would serve to keep them separate from the others in Babylon. First, they reintroduced the Sabbath, making it the sign of their national identity. These Jews became known as those strange people who refused to work on the seventh day. This custom disrupted work crews to which they had been assigned as laborers, causing frustration and anger to grow among the Babylonians, but it also served to identify the Jews as “different,” perhaps weird, thus aiding the Jewish desire to remain separate.

Second, these priestly leaders urged upon their people the adoption of kosher dietary laws, mandating that the food that the captive people ate had to be prepared in kosher kitchens. This meant, effectively, that all social discourse with those who were not Jews was cut off. Since Jews could not eat with non-Jews, this meant that there was little chance that close relationships could ever grow, since most human relationships develop in the act of eating together. Third, these priestly leaders revived the practice of circumcision as the distinguishing mark of Judaism, literally cutting that mark into the bodies of every Jewish male at the time of puberty. This made it impossible for a Jewish male to hide his Judaism from the world, which also served to make intermarriage difficult. The plan worked. The Jews became a people separate from all others. All of these practices were seen to be religious mandates. Ezekiel and his priestly leaders then decided that the sacred story of the Jewish people had to be revised to include these mandates as part of Jewish life and practice from the very beginning of their nation’s history. They now undertook a major editorial revision of what had been the Yahwist-Elohist-Deuteronomic story of the Jewish people. This fourth strand of material was to be called the priestly or the “P” document and to its content I will turn next week.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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Announcements
Aquinas @ Orvieto with Matthew Fox
Deepen your own spiritual journey as mystic and prophet 
A 5-Day Retreat, July 5-10, 2020 in Orvieto, Italy with Matthew Fox, Claudia Picardi, Meschi Chavez, and Gianluigi Guglielmetti and  Rupert Sheldrake.

Study the spiritual teachings of one of the greatest minds of Western civilization–Thomas Aquinas– with a preeminent scholar of Christian spirituality, Matthew Fox, in the amazing Italian town of Orvieto, famous for its views and art, where Aquinas himself taught and preached. Orvieto is located two hours from where Aquinas was born in Roccasecca, and where he died at Fossanova Abbey. And 90 minutes from Rome or Assisi!  READ ON...  |

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