[Oe List ...] 1/17/19, Progressing Spirit: Toni Reynolds: Salvation and Responsibility; Spong revisited

Thu Jan 17 06:59:29 PST 2019

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Salvation and Responsibility

Column by Toni Reynolds
January 17, 2019When I first called myself a Christian I was in 7th grade. On my first visit to a small church I accepted Christ as my savior. I’m sure I had no idea what that meant, but it felt like the right thing to do in my 13 year old mind and heart. I spent the rest of middle school and high school so devoted to Jesus that I was at church almost as often as I was at school. I went to learn how to trust my new savior. I went to learn how to surrender successfully. I went to relinquish all sin, back sliding, laziness – parts of the genuine human experience I wanted to lay at the foot of the cross, walk away, and never have to pick them up again.Things seem a bit confusing in retrospect. I distinctly remember participating in a ritual of nailing things to a cross as a promise to give up the hindrances that kept me from accessing the love and power of Jesus in my life. I also distinctly remember having to confront those nailed up hindrances more than once after that ritual. As I confronted them away from the cross, time and again I felt like a failure. I felt irredeemable.How could I fail at having someone else do the heavy lifting for me?I moved to the Dominican Republic in 2016. I arrived there thinking I knew enough to get by day-to-day; enough Spanish, enough about international phone plans, enough about conversion rates, enough about how to do basic tasks. But then it came time to do laundry. The landlord showed me the washer and dryer when I first moved in. I noted the location and continued to settle in not thinking about the laundry machines until I needed clean clothes a few weeks later. Around that time, when I was running out of socks and nearing the need to wash a load of laundry, a colleague happened to ask me if I had washed my clothes yet. What a gift I didn’t know I received! I told her that I hadn’t done laundry yet. She told me I would need her help so I should let her know when I was ready to wash and she could help me. I must’ve made a face indicating that I was well versed in using a laundry machine because she rolled her eyes at me and said, “I’m taking you home right now to show you. Our machines aren’t like your machines.” I was annoyed. She was right.With Sabrina’s help I learned that I had to draw water from a certain bin of water, soak my clothes in a combo of detergent and solid soap, fill the washing machine with more water by hand, add soap to that and let it mix, add my clothes after they’d pre-soaked, let the machine run, find another bucket and fill it with fresh water, remove the clothes from the washer and soak them in clean water, refill the clean water when needed, then add them to what I thought was the dryer so that the excess water could be shaken from them, and then I could hang my clothes on the line to dry in the sun and air. A full day chore I actually knew close to nothing about, except that water and soap can clean clothes and the sun can dry them.What’s better is that a few weeks later I did my laundry all by myself. I was so proud, a little too proud. And I did something wrong with the water because my clothes ended up smelling dingy. So dingy and awful that Yuma, another colleague, asked me why I stunk. I told her I had no idea and she began to inquire about my laundering process. She realized I didn’t know what I was doing and decided she needed to show me how to properly wash my clothes…two more times. I had to be taught three times total how to wash my laundry. Where to draw the water from, how to fill up that tank again, which soap to use at which point in the process, which water could be reused for another load.Years later as I consider what it means to be free and responsible I wonder about this idea of having a savior. Despite being at least a world away from the beliefs I held in high school, I’m becoming aware of how the idea of a savior has the potential to push me towards laziness and complacency. I wonder if I truly want someone to do all of the heavy and not so heavy spiritual work for me. I wonder if it’s healthy to think that someone else can and should do my spiritual work on my behalf while I sit back and wait for the bliss without washing any of my own dirty laundry. I wonder what danger lies under the surface of using someone else’s spilled blood as the bleach that will clean my soul and make me feel good enough to sleep at night, despite the ways I may have acted against others, Creation, and myself.Delores Williams is a Womanist Theologian who expanded Christian theology to consider the lived realities of black women in the United States. In her seminal work, Sisters in the Wilderness, Williams highlights the danger of operating on a substitutionary theology-one that requires someone else to suffer so that I can be saved. In her example, Williams uses the surrogate role of Hagar in her relationship to Sarah to further explain what’s at stake when we rely on scapegoating dynamics.I love many things about Williams’s offering to us. It is a classic theological exposition that continues to challenge us to think about whose backs we step on in order to climb closer to freedom and righteousness. When we don’t need to know how to do anything for ourselves we can easily rely on the grunt work of others to move us closer to “happiness”. The only thing we must know how to do is search the Internet for someone who knows how to do the thing that we need done.What does our faith have to say to that? How is our culture contributing to an idea of surrogacy that makes us more human than the people doing our work for us?The things I nailed to the cross when I was 13 are things I wanted someone to fix for me. But if someone had only told me that the nailed imperfections were like the stink that stuck to my clothes after I washed them without Sabrina’s help, I would’ve carried much less shame and had much more compassion for others on their own journey. I only needed to be taught how to handle them better. Some of the things nailed up had to be shown to other teachers so that I could be guided to new perspectives and methods on how to deal with the stinky stuff. It took me all of these years to learn that if the crucified Jesus has any power to change us it is because that symbol points to the vortex of decision-making. A place where the power of choice can be harnessed and used by us mere mortals to inch ever closer to the balance and harmony we long for.I appreciate Jesus mostly because of his teaching pedagogy. I want to take seriously what he taught because I am not convinced that simply using his blood to excuse my shortcomings makes me a better person to be in relationship with. There’s work I have to do that only I can do. Spiritual teachers like Jesus can help me to do them, but I don’t get to use him as a surrogate while I misbehave. If Jesus is crucified and raised every three days while I wake up daily and refuse to take responsibility for my actions, for what reason has a savior truly died?~ Toni Reynolds

Click here to read online and to share your thoughtsAbout the Author
Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By Nicolaas

How and why did the word 'holy' get in front of the word 'bible'?  I ask this because in my church the Bible is given immense authority with the word 'holy' and is then used by our church leaders to tell is us what to do and how to be saved.  Would Progressive Christianity want to remove this word 'holy' away from these writings so that our hierarchical church structure can no longer rest on its traditional doctrines and practices?

A: By Kevin G. Thew-Forrester, Ph.D.
 Dear Nicolaas,The words, holy bible, are simply a translation from the Latin, sacra scriptura, which literally means sacred (or holy) writings. For many, these writings are considered holy because people believe a god “out there” dictated them or inspired the authors (and for most of the books we have no idea who the authors are – for we simply have copies of copies of copies) such that they wrote exactly what god prompted them to write. In sum, the writings are viewed as “holy” because god is taken as the author, not human beings.

When this dualistic paradigm guides religious authorities they can then tell you “what to do and how to be saved.” The result is that the word “holy” becomes a rationalization used by religious authorities to terminate discussion, prohibit questioning, all with the supposition that a biblical answer is at hand that has originated directly from a god who dictated the answer.I find the word “holy” thus understood and used to be misleading and unhelpful. A Progressive Christian response recognizes that these texts have their original power because of their capacity to speak meaningfully to the spiritual journeys of individuals and communities across the ages. As such, they have the potential to function as texts for prayer and liturgy. But – and this is critically important – it is the human community that makes the claim that the various books of the bible have the capacity to inspire based upon their actual impact in peoples’ lives – do they help us to become more whole, more free, more loving? It would be better to say that among the books of the Bible are writings, some of which have the capacity to inspire us and some do not.The plumb line for any text, within or outside the Bible, is this: is a particular text a Wisdom text? A Wisdom text has the capacity to foster the soul’s growth or unfolding, helping her to realize that she is an utterly unique expression of Being that is present as boundless love. I suggest you check out A New New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-first Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts, Hal Taussig. It can help you see the Bible in a whole new light.

~ Kevin G. Thew-Forrester, Ph.D.

Click here to read and share onlineAbout 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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|  This Rabbi On That Rabbi A modern Portland, Oregon rabbi explains Jesus’s messages in a 6-Part Video Series. View this exclusive video content below.
 Part 4 - The Bible

 The Bible
What is it?
And why does it matter? What is the Bible? It is not just one thing.
The simplest definition I have for the Bible is this: the Bible is a collection of written documents  by a group of people from two different faith traditions in the ancient Near East to explain their interactions and understanding of the divine.

To understand the Bible, we must see that it is not one document written at one time but rather it is a continued recording of two groups of people over hundreds and hundreds of years..

Let me clarify this evolution of the Bible by going into it in a bit more detail about an idea that I presented earlier – about our perception of  God changing throughout the Bible.

Much of the idea of God evolving throughout the Bible is based on the work of Erich Fromm in a book called In You Shall Be As Gods.

The people of the ancient Near East lived in times of patriarchies, kings, and oral traditions. It makes sense, then,  that their notion of who God was  would also  surpass their notion of who was ruling their world at the time.. This God, recorded at the start of Genesis, is a super-sized, larger-than-life= version of an earthbound tyrant, much like the kings with whom the people were familiar.

As their society changed, the way they presented their views of God also changed. And, as the Bible was the “recorder” of their theology, we can see these changes revealed on the pages of the Bible.

Society went from a world where jealous totalitarian rulers did anything they wanted to in a world where rules became more rigid than the rulers of the past might have been. When we get to the times of Abraham, the idea of God becomes God as a constitutional monarch. God makes a pact with Abraham saying “if you do this, then I’ll do that.”

.....Genesis 17:7
.....I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your
.....descendants after you throughout their generations for an
.....everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants
.....after you. I will give to you and to your descendants after you,
.....the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an
.....everlasting possession; and I will be their God…

After the idea of God as a constitutional monarch, in the time of Moses at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, God stopped being corporeal and became the nameless deity of history.  God refers to himself as the God who had connections with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, and Rachel.

A note from Rabbi Brian
I breathe great relief knowing that God’s character changes. It means that my understanding of God needn’t be monolithic or static  either.

Take the bible literally
True/Truth

I do not take the Bible literally. But I take it seriously.

To take it literally would mean that I believe that every word, as it is written, was spoken by God.

I cannot  do that.

But I can and do take it seriously.

To take the Bible seriously means to examine it in its time and for the culture in which it was written.

I want to offer up a very handy distinction that can help in our understanding of the Bible. That distinction   I would like to make is revealed in the two words: true and truth.

True is if it actually happened.  It is a fact of history.  ; Truth is the moral.  It is the actual essence of things.

I do not believe that most of the  biblical stories are true stories.
But I sure do believe that they are truth stories.

It doesn’t matter to me if the Red Sea parted or if Noah had an ark. I don’t care if Jonah was swallowed by a whale or if that’s not necessarily factually so.

To me, the great meaning of these stories has nothing to do with whether they’re historically accurate or not.

Whether Jonah slept or didn’t sleep for three nights in the proverbial halibut hotel does not take away from the moral of the story – that it is human nature to run away from the things that we don’t want to do.

I don’t believe this historically  happened. I don’t believe Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and brought to the bottom of the sea-world after not doing what he knew he had to do. This is a truth story. Not a true story.   This is a story about humanity, about me, about the troubles we get into when we don’t do what we should do and about how it will bring us down to the very  bottom of our existence.

It’s a truth story, not a true story.

And if we look at the miracles in the Bible as truth stories, what we learn from these stories will be liberative for us.  In this important way the Bible can be a very liberating force in our lives.
If we read the Bible in this way we will probably fight less  with what we read in the Bible.

Moreover, seeking the “truth” of the stories can allow us to have meaningful conversations with people who might read the stories to be true stories rather than truth ones.  The truth aspect of the story offers a place of connection between myself and those who read the words literally.

Bible

The Bible is a sacred book.
The Bible represents our highest values and what we deem to be holy.  The Bible is a localized document.  It always relates to the particular people and place from which those values are derived.

You have to know that this book is important as we capitalize the word itself  as though it were a person – moreover, often the definite article “the” preceding it is also capitalized, as in, “In The Bible, we find...”

This book is important in and to  our culture.  That is what I meant when I just said that it is localized.

We have people swear on the Bible not because we think they believe every word in it, but it is our societal way of saying this is of great importance to us. In a sense, we are asking the person on the witness stand to say: “Do you agree? Do you agree that what is to follow is important? Do you agree that what you are doing is important and that it matters?” And by so swearing, the person with his or her hand on the Bible says, “Yes, I agree.”

Books

These are my favorite books on the Bible.

John Dominic Crossan, Who is Jesus?
This Catholic priest wrote this very-easy-to-read, question-and-answer-style book that leads to trying to understand Jesus in a historical context.

Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity
Rodney Stark is a sociologist, and he approaches his book from that perspective. He was focused on determining how the obscure marginal Jesus movement became the dominant force in the western world in a few centuries. which became the subtitle of the book.

Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
John Shelby Spong, Liberating the Gospel: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes
Both of these books, one from more of an academic point of view and one from more of a liturgical point of view, help to show that the gospel writers were Jews writing to Jews in a Jewish context. These works blew my mind, and they’re why I’m doing this series discovery with you. With the exception of Luke, the gospel writers wrote in a Jewish style – like all of the Mishnah and Midrash that I studied, because it was all contemporaneous literature. The stories are deep with metaphorical language and in the context of the time. And, when you understand it with the Jewish understanding, as Spong and Borg help us do, you can see again the point of Jesus.

Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus: an Intimate Biography
Professor Chilton goes through the Jesus story to provide the historical context that helps us picture Jesus as a revolutionary, continually on the move, outside of the law, to preach his rebellion against Rome.

Reading in, taking out
Eisegesis and exegesis
Eisegesis is looking at one’s own point of view and reading that into the text.
Exegesis means taking what is in a text and finding out what it means.

I’m a firm believer that there really isn’t such a thing as exegesis. I believe that we all come at a text with our own point of view and bring that point of view to the text. Reading into the Genesis story a notion of original sin is eisegesis. Reading into the Genesis story that the devil was the one tempting Adam and Eve is eisegesis. These elements are not written into the text. They are ideas that are brought into the text. I have had many discussions with people who told me that the serpent in the garden was the devil, but I know that the concept of an external tempter does not enter into the scriptures until the book of Job at the earliest.

There was a phrase I heard in rabbinical school: “a donkey reading the Bible would find all the passages about donkeys in the Bible.”

In Bruce Chilton’s book, on page 172, he explains that disparate groups all point to the same book to prove their own certainty.

........the apocalyptic fervor of the Branch Davidians; the mystical
.....disciplines of Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen;
.....the insistence upon full immersion in water and in Spirit
.....among the Baptists; the charismatic healing of revivalists,
.....whether under tents or on television; the political activism
.....of Liberation theology; the ethics of Albert Schweitzer and
.....the compassion of Mother Teresa; the compulsive socializing
.....over meals, whether in the formal liturgy of the Mass or in
.....covered-dish suppers in churches all over the world.

There’s a difference between eisegesis (bringing our views into the text) and exegesis (finding out the “true” meaning of the words).

Most eisegesists (people who do eisegesis) claim that they’re doing exegesis, that this is what the text says.

I will be as honest as I can be and tell you that this is exactly what I am doing, as well.

And I firmly believe that when you take the context of the times into account, the text shows God being eternal, open, and non-particularistic.

Of course, the other folk are equally certain.

And being certain only means that you are certain, not that you are right.

One more book
I want to bring one other book to your attention.

Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer, My Fun Theology Workbook: How to find out what (the) God (of your understanding) wants from you. I wrote it based on my work doing spiritual direction with people. I think of it as spiritual direction in convenient book form. In it, I give exercises and things to think about. I don’t tell you what it is that God wants from you, instead, I give you free range to find out for yourself.

--
Rabbi Brian is the C.E.O. of Religion-Outside-The-Box, an internet-based, non-denominational congregation nourishing spiritual hunger. Find out more about newsletter, podcasts, videos, and other good ROTB.org is doing for thousands every week.

This Rabbi on That Rabbi is a co-production of Religion-Outside-The-Box and Progressing Spirit.
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Westar Spring 2019 National Meeting
March 20-23, 2019
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