August 2013 - Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

"Journey Reflection" August 2013 Top-viewed Blogs
by Lynda Cock 31 Aug '13

31 Aug '13

Dear colleagues, Following are the top-viewed blog posts during August <http://rejourney.blogspot.com/2013/08/journey-reflection-blog-review-august .html> 2013. As always, we appreciate your quote suggestions, comments, and sharing blog posts with others. Happy Holiday and Namaste. Lynda and John >Blog: "Journey Reflection" at 4 links ... Google: <http://www.rejourney.blogspot.com/> www.reJourney.blogspot.com Google Plus: <https://plus.google.com/u/0/114307312715975337692/posts> Journey Reflection/Google Plus Facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/transcribebooks> https://www.facebook.com/transcribebooks Twitter: <https://twitter.com/transcribebooks> https://twitter.com/transcribebooks >Web Page: <http://www.transcribebooks.com/> www.transcribebooks.com >Books: <https://www.amazon.com/author/johnpcock> https://www.amazon.com/author/johnpcock

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8/29/13, Spong: On the importance of being ordinary
by Ellie Stock 30 Aug '13

30 Aug '13

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR On the Importance of Being Ordinary Over the past few years, while working on my recent book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I became fascinated with how the author of John’s gospel develops the characters in his narrative. There are more memorable characters in the Fourth Gospel than anywhere else in the New Testament. The disciple Thomas is simply a name on a list in the other gospels, but in John, he becomes a doubter, placing the term “Doubting Thomas” into our language. John also includes a whole series of other crucial characters about whom none of the other gospels seem to have heard. Among them are Nathaniel, the “Beloved Disciple,” Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman by the well and Lazarus. These characters are so beautifully drawn that they not only become indelible, but their uniqueness raises the possibility that they are more symbolic figures than they are actual people of history. In this gospel, they also appear to represent different kinds of responses to Jesus. When one reads John deeply enough, each character seems to become a personality type whose diversity is sufficient that everyone can identify with one of them. Today I want to lift one of the Johannine characters out of the text and present him to you, my readers, as a possible role model, at least for some of us. His name is Andrew and I call him “The Patron Saint of Ordinary People.” Before the Fourth Gospel appeared, the only thing the New Testament tells us about Andrew is that he was the brother of Simon Peter, who everywhere in the New Testament, is portrayed as a leader. Andrew was thus one with only reflected status, primarily known by his relationship to another. Quite often in our still patriarchal world, women are known only as the wives of their husbands, and children are sometimes identified only as the son or daughter of a famous parent. This was the role of Andrew. Those whose primary identity is derived from a more famous person are not necessarily the stars, they are rather the ordinary people. While we continue to live in a culture of heroes, the world actually turns, I believe, on those who are ordinary people. Reading a history of World War II one might get the impression that America fought and won that war with only three soldiers: Eisenhower, MacArthur and Patton. Yet everyone knows that wars are won or lost not by the generals, but by the fighting, bleeding and dying of the foot soldiers, who are normally nameless. Before John’s gospel was written Andrew was a foot soldier, an ordinary person, identified only by his relationship with another. The Fourth Gospel then adds to that scant biography three short but telling stories. In the first chapter of John we are told that Andrew, the ordinary man, brought his brother to Jesus, thus making possible Peter, the extraordinary man. It was Peter, not Andrew, who was destined to become the first leader of the Christian community. In the sixth chapter of John’s gospel Andrew is the one who brings to Jesus the lad with five loaves and two fish. Given the dimensions of the crowd of thousands that needed to be fed, this gift was hardly a drop in the proverbial bucket. Andrew, however, was one who understood that no person’s gift was so small or insignificant that it could not be used and thus felt that it must be appreciated. The story says that Jesus took this gift and used it to feed the multitude. In the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel we are told that a group of Greek foreigners come seeking Jesus. This would make them, by Jewish standards, Gentiles, who were unclean, uncircumcised, non-Kosher and non-Torah observing people. It is Andrew, we are told, who becomes their guide, for no task is too insignificant for him to undertake. So through the dark streets of Jerusalem Andrew led them to the place where Jesus was. At that moment John has Jesus announce “My hour has come.” He then says: “Now the Son of Man will be glorified.” When I am lifted up on the cross, Jesus continues, “I will draw all people to me” and then the world will know “I AM,” then the world will know the meaning of God. Once again Andrew is the expeditor. He is always an ordinary person, but because he did the ordinary thing, great things seemed to happen all around him. No one is unqualified for this kind of role. Take a moment to recall a critical turning point in your own journey and remember who it was who stood with you at that moment, the one who might have said just the right word causing you to choose one path over another and you now recognize that your whole life was determined by that decision. Was that critical person not just an ordinary man or woman? At the risk of being an exhibitionist allow me to relate an intensely personal story that illustrates for me the role of the ordinary person. My father died when I was 12. My mother had not finished the 9th grade in school and thus had little ability to replace my father as our family’s bread winner. We soon fell into rather precarious poverty. For about two years, I was little more than a radically lost, insecure adolescent. Then someone came into my life through no action on my part. My church in Charlotte, North Carolina, chose a new rector. The year was 1946, World War II had come to an end, and the man chosen had just come out of the navy, where he had served as a chaplain on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. I do not know the process that enabled him to be chosen, but I do know that this choice determined the course of my life. This man was different from any minister or priest that I had ever known. First, he was only 32 years of age. That fact alone broke my priestly stereotype, for I had never known a priest who wasn’t old. I thought one probably had to be at least 80 to be ordained. Second, he wore white buck shoes. I had never known a priest to wear anything but black. lace-up oxfords. Third, he drove a Ford convertible. I thought priests only drove hearses. Finally, he had a stunningly beautiful wife. I thought clergy wives were dour, wearing only dark brown and navy blue with their hair in a bun at the back of their heads. This woman, however, was dashing and bejeweled. She even smoked cigarettes in a long golden cigarette holder. She was the most sophisticated woman I think I had ever met. I was so deeply drawn to this couple that I volunteered to do anything that enabled me to get closer to them, so I became the only acolyte in my church willing to serve at the 8:00 a.m. communion service. I was not a good acolyte– faithful, but not necessarily competent. My new rector was on the more catholic side of the Episcopal Church and he believed that no one should receive communion without fasting from midnight on. He worried that a bit of undigested toast might corrupt the body of Christ received at the Eucharist. So I came to that service fasting. At that time in my life, however, I was delivering the Charlotte Observer to about 150 houses each morning. This meant I would rise at 4:30 a.m., go to the corner where my papers were dropped off, fold them so that I could throw them on to the lawns of my subscribers, and, then, with my bicycle basket filled, I would set out to deliver them. I arrived home about 6:45 a.m. in sufficient time to shower, dress and catch a bus to my downtown church to do my acolyte duty at 8:00 a.m. By this hour of the morning, however, I was absolutely famished, but still committed to that fast. In the 1928 Prayer Book liturgy, my church used at that time, there was something called the “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church.” It was two pages long and reminded me of the mercy of God in that it seemed to me to endure forever! Inevitably, before we got through that prayer I began to feel strange, light-headed and very warm. Then I would either faint dead away and have to be carried bodily out of the sanctuary or else I would turn green and throw up leaving my offering at the foot of the altar. I never made it through that prayer. One of the reasons I championed Prayer Book revision in my adult career was to get rid of the “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church.” Despite this weakness in both my flesh and performance as an acolyte, my rector continued to want me to serve and when that 8:00 a.m. worship was over and I had recovered my equilibrium, this man and I would go half a block up the main street of Charlotte to a restaurant, have breakfast together and talk. I do not recall what we talked about, but I do know that in all my adolescent life, this was the only time an adult talked with me. I had many adults who talked to me or at me, but he talked with me. He even listened to my immature ideas; he asked questions to help me clarify my thinking. It was such a simple thing to do, such an ordinary thing, but to this lonely and lost fifteen year old boy, it was powerfully important and life-giving. I adored that man and wanted to be as much like him as I could be. He became the model for my life and I found my vocation to be a priest in my relationship with him. Was the man a great person? Was he even a great priest? Well, he was to me, but that was not how he was judged by the world. The world saw and judged him to be an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses. After I left Charlotte to begin my university education he left our church in Charlotte to become the rector of a church in Louisiana. There he fell into an addiction to alcohol. It got so bad that he was finally removed from the priesthood. He died thinking of himself professionally as a failure, but he was a vital person, a change agent to me. The truth is that he was just an ordinary man who simply took the time to talk with a lost teenager. It was something that anybody could have done, but he did it. He was an Andrew. Most of us will not be generals who win battles or elected officials who will rise to political power. We may not become the chief executive of either a small business or of a great corporation, but we can make a difference, a profound difference in the lives of those around us in ordinary ways just by being sensitive, just by being a friend, just by saying the right word at the right time in the right circumstance. We can all be Andrews, the Patron Saint of ordinary people. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Jack from Oklahoma writes: Question: I have heard you support the Unity Church for many reasons. One popular belief, held by Unity, is reincarnation. Do you believe it is possible for persons to be reincarnated? Answer: Dear Jack, Unity appeals to me because of that church’s positive view of human potential and because they do not wallow in guilt and sin as so many Christians seem to do. I have met people in Unity who are inquisitive about reincarnation, though this is clearly not a core teaching of the Unity movement. Prior to writing my book on Eternal Life (Eternal Life: A New Vision-Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell), I made an intensive study of reincarnation. I came out of that study completely agnostic about that question. It seems to me that reincarnation plays the same role in Eastern religious thought that heaven and hell play in Western religious thought. I feel its primary function is to control life here and now. Instead of reward and punishment being meted out in some place after life like heaven and hell, it is meted out in the next incarnation. Sinful people come back as lower caste people or sometimes even as animals. I am not interested in playing the game of judgment. I found no evidence that supports the idea of reincarnation and most of the evidence cited is anecdotal and, to my mind, bogus. It is more a human hope than a human reality. So put me down in the negative column or at least the unconvinced column. I would rather try to master the meaning of the life I have than to speculate about some future or past reincarnation. My best, John Shelby Spong Announcements Common Dreams 3 Conference Midwives of Change:Progressives Shaping Religious Communities From: September 19, 2013 to September 22, 2013 Manning Clark Centre, Australian National University Canberra, AUSTRALIA Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org.au Click here for more information Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support(a)johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545. Copyright © 2013 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at johnshelbyspong.com. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 708 Broadway Suite 105 Tacoma, WA 98402 Add us to your address book .

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question about the 4 C's
by Sunny Walker 29 Aug '13

29 Aug '13

Okay, this old brain is foggy. I recall we used to speak of four C's. It seems Courage and Care were two of them. The other two please? Then I'll share a different (though somewhat similar) set of 4 C's I've just run across (thanks to ICA Board member Cheryl Kartes). Sunny Sunny Walker SunWalker Enterprises 303-587-3017 (cell); 303-671-0704 (office) sunwalker(a)comcast.net Aurora, Colorado "What is it that you want to do with the one, wild, precious thing called your life?" ~Mary Oliver

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50 years
by Mary D'Souza 28 Aug '13

28 Aug '13

Salutations to those of you who have participated directly or indirectly with Martin Luther King and his effort to bring equality and justice. With gratitude, The D'Souzas

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ICAI Winds & Waves Magazine August 2013
by John & Robyn Hutchinson 26 Aug '13

26 Aug '13

The Institute of Cultural Affairs International - Advancing Human DevelopmentDear colleagues and friends, Please feel free to send on to your networks. We look forward to continued contributions for future editions. best wishes Robyn, for W&W team ----- Original Message ----- From: ICA International To: rjhutchinson(a)optusnet.com.au Sent: Saturday, August 24, 2013 12:00 AM Subject: ICAI Winds & Waves Magazine August 2013 Any problem reading this message please click or paste this URL in your browser's address bar http://icai-members.org/windswaves-mag/2013-august/vol-3-august-2013.htm Greetings, ICA International is delighted to present the August 2013 edition of the ICA global magazine, 'Winds and Waves,' published 3 times a year and now in its third year. This is a growing and organic global project, and is making many connections. You will find that this month's magazine is equally as informative and stimulating with it's main theme of 'Edge Thinking in Human Development,' and again being filled with reports and stories from the many ICAs around the world. With a growing number of other interested organisations and individuals, we now have a readership of well over 1000 folk... Winds and Waves is available through the ICA International website in several formats to download or to read on line, also a high resolution PDF to download for printing. We are now sending the magazine to the two ICA listserves, OE and dialogue, and hope that members of both ICA listserves will enjoy receiving and reading this and future editions of Wind and Waves. We do apologise for any double postings. We encourage you to send Wind and Waves on to your networks. Please follow this link: Winds and Waves Volumes 3 No.2 August 2013 saludos, ICA Internacional se complace en presentar la edición de agosto 2013 de la revista ICA global, "Vientos y Olas", la cual se difunde 3 veces al año, cumpliendo ya su tercer año de ser publicada. Se trata de un proyecto global creciente y orgánico, que está logrando muchas nuevas conexiones. Usted encontrará que la revista de este mes es igualmente informativa y estimulante: cuyo tema es el "Pensamiento Innovador en el Desarrollo Humano", nuevamente Ud puede encontrar informes e historias de muchos de los ICA en todo el mundo y un número cada vez mayor de otras organizaciones e individuos. Por ahora estamos llegando a un público de más de 1.000 personas. Todas las publicaciones de la revista "Vientos y Olas" se encuentran disponibles en la página web de ICA Internacional en varios formatos para descargar o leer en línea, también en una alta resolución para descargar un PDF e imprimir. Ahora estamos enviando la revista a través de las listas disponibles de ICA, y esperamos que los miembros inscritos en las listas ICA podrán disfrutar de la recepción y la lectura de esta y futuras ediciones de "Vientos y Olas". Nos disculpamos por si recibe la información dos veces. Por favor, siga este enlace: vientos y olas, agosto de 2013. Bonjour, ICA International est heureux de pouvoir vous présenter l'édition du magazine global de l'ICA pour le mois d'août 2013, 'Winds and Waves,' qui est publié trois fois par an, et qui est maintenant dans sa troisième année.Il s'agit là d'un projet organique à croissance rapide, qui accomplit de nombreuses voies de communication. Vous constaterez que l'édition de ce mois est tout aussi informative et stimulante: 'Les concepts d'avant-garde du développement humain' continuent à présenter de nombreux rapports et d' histoires qui proviennent de grand nombre d' ICAs autour du monde et d'un nombre croissant d'autres organisations et individus. A l'époque nous avons un lectorat de plus de 1000 personnes... "Winds and Waves" est accessible par l'intermédiaire du site web de l'ICA International et est disponible en différents formats: Vous pouvez le télécharger ou lire en ligne; vous pouvez aussi télécharger un PDF à haute résolution en vue d'une éventuelle impression. A l'heure actuelle nous envoyons le magazine aux deux services de liste de l'ICA en espérant que les membres des deux services de liste de l'ICA pourront profiter de la réception et de la lecture de la présente et de futures éditions de "Winds and Waves". Nous nous excusons de tout message dupliqué. Veuillez suivre ce lien: WINDS AND WAVES, Août 2013 http://icai-members.org/windswaves-mag/2013-august/vol-3-august-2013.htm Published by The Institute of Cultural Affairs International, 655 Queen Street East, Toronto, Ontario M4M 1G4, Canada. All rights reserved. For more information or to unsubscribe, email: subscriptions(a)icai-members.org

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What Happens If You Give the God Lecture Today?
by Gordon Harper 25 Aug '13

25 Aug '13

Well -- In this case, the poor soul here in Seattle who tried it (no, twas not I) got roundly booed andsome people in his sizable audience tried hard to shut him downbefore he was through it. I'd heard about David Guterson's experience delivering the commencement address this year at his former Seattle high school. Only recently, however, did a friend send me a copy of it to read myself. (You may recognize Guterson's name as the author of the novel, /Snow Falling on Cedars/.) Ifound his talk so deliciously outrageous as a graduation speech that I have to share it. Those who were most outraged and expressed it so vocally were in the parentsand family memberssection; it seems the graduates were at least polite and attentive during it. Its ending is weak (IMHO), and of course there was no following Christ lecture the next morning. Still, if one ever wanted a current rendering of our Friday night event, this might come close -- Gordon

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8/22/13, Spong: The Need for the Christian to Journey Beyond Scripture, Creed and Church
by Ellie Stock 22 Aug '13

22 Aug '13

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR The Need for the Christian to Journey Beyond Scripture, Creed and Church Theology is a rational, deeply human, attempt to explain our experience with God. Theology is, therefore, never primary; it is always secondary to experience. Theological explanations can thus never be eternal. All explanations not only will change, but must change when knowledge grows and by so doing will always invalidate previous conclusions. Theology can never be infallible, unchanging or ultimately real. This, however, is a reality that quite frequently cannot be embraced by religious institutions and religious leaders. This means that there never has been an “inerrant Bible” or an “infallible pope.” The books of the Bible are always human attempts to explain a primary life experience, while every church hierarchy, including the papacy, is engaged in the task of trying to determine ultimate truth in a subjective, culturally relativized world. All scriptures and all theological pronouncements are inevitably time-bound and time-warped. A couple of illustrations might help us to see that no human explanation of any experience can ever be inerrant or infallible. Since the dawn of self-conscious life, we human beings have had the experience of watching the sun rise in the east and set in the west That is a phenomenon well documented all over the world, an objective reality. Look, however, at the various ways that this experience has been explained throughout history. The explanations range from the ancient Egyptians, who interpreted this pattern of the sun to be caused by the Sun God riding a chariot across the sky each day surveying the world, all the way to the modern scientist, who asserts that the phenomenon of the sun’s rising and setting is the result of the planet earth turning on its axis every 24 hours, as it makes its elliptical journey around the sun. These explanations obviously vary widely, but note that the experience itself is identical. In a similar fashion an epileptic seizure is another human phenomenon that has been observed from the dawn of time. In the New Testament an epileptic seizure was explained as having been caused by an invisible, demonic spirit suddenly taking over its victim, shaking him or her violently, hurling the victim to the ground and forcing the victim into an unconscious, trembling state until the spirit finally departed as suddenly as it arrived. Modern medicine, however, explains this same experience as a malfunction of the brain, resulting in a cascade of misfiring electrical impulses, which jump the track, so to speak, and thus create the resulting sense of seizure. The explanations are widely divergent, but once again the experience is identical. It is the constant temptation and the regular pitfall of religious institutions and religious spokespersons to confuse their explanations with the experience itself. The gospels, we need to state clearly, are not the dictated word or words of God, but are rather the time-bound and time-warped explanations of the Jesus experience, couched in the language and understandings of the first century. At the time the New Testament was written, no one knew that women had an egg cell, so the story of Jesus’ birth to a virgin could be used to explain the experience, which was that in Jesus they believed they had encountered something, which human life by itself was not capable of producing. In that time, we need to understand that no one quite understood what happens to the body at death. They could, therefore, reasonably assume that the death process could be reversed, if the reversal occurred within three days, after which the decaying of the body became obvious. When the New Testament was written, no one knew about germs, viruses, tumors or cardiovascular disease and so sickness was interpreted as divine punishment for sins committed. That was why it made sense to treat sickness by offering prayers and sacrifices. If we assume, as fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics still seem to do, that the gospel narratives are in fact literal renditions of what actually happened in time or in history, then religion has become idolatrous. It has invested the perfection of God in something that is in fact a human creation. By literalizing the Bible, religious people have also unknowingly literalized the world view of the first century that assumed that anything that could not be understood by first century minds must be a miracle, explained only by an appeal to the presence of a supernatural power. So the presumably “inerrant” Bible of Protestant fundamentalism and the presumably “infallible” theological doctrines of Roman Catholicism, become nonsensical in the 21st century. A Christianity based on those outdated ideas can never be compelling to 21st century people unless they are willing and able to close their minds to modern knowledge. Biblical inerrancy is therefore not just ignorance, it is a distortion of both truth and humanity. To quote the Bible to oppose equality for women or justice and dignity for homosexual people is to confuse the cultural fears of yesterday with ultimate truth. It is also to be pathetically and profoundly uninformed. What then about the creeds? They are fourth century attempts to codify religious beliefs that had been drawn primarily from the Bible. To insist that creeds are unchanging truth or to make creedal faith the hallmark of Orthodoxy is to state something that is absurd. It is to pretend that a quite limited fourth century, Greek-oriented world view is the same as “the mind of God.” So, when we learn that there is no all-seeing God, who lives above the sky of a three-tiered universe, who is always looking down to record our deeds in the record book of life, by which our eternal destiny will be determined, is not to say that there is no God, but it is to say that truth is always relative. Heaven as a place of reward and hell as a place of punishment have become nonsensical dated ideas. So is a Bible that contains the story of the Tower of Babel, the raining of heavenly bread, called manna, from the sky to feed the starving Hebrew people and the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven. If the story of Jesus’ ascension literally means that he went up into the sky then we need to embrace the modern reality that Jesus did not get to heaven, he got into orbit or else he escaped the force of gravity and wandered into the infinity of space. Yet, on the basis of those limited, time bound fourth century creeds religious wars have been fought, religious persecution has been carried out, “heretics” have been burned at the stake and “witches” have been hanged to keep alive the myth that human words can capture, in some unchanging form, eternal truth. So often the business of religion has ceased to be the search for truth and has become the activity of mind control. Christians who claim inerrancy for the first century words of the gospels or infallibility for their doctrinal understanding of the fourth century words of the creeds are quite simply delusional people, and in the name of both God and truth, they need to be resisted mightily. Yet the facts of history reveal that Galileo was condemned by the church for suggesting that first century cosmology was inaccurate and Darwin is still being roundly criticized and politically resisted for suggesting that pre-modern biology is simply incorrect. I was both startled and amazed when I read recently a widely reported poll taken in Georgia, which revealed that 73% of the registered Republicans and 53% of registered Democrats in that state still believe literally the creation story in the Bible. This is not a commentary on faith, it is a commentary on how an uninformed faith can impede and distort the educational system of one of the states of this union. To think that an electorate this deeply uninformed can still choose political leaders, who will make laws for this entire nation is frightening! Yet, having now said all of these things, and quite clearly I hope, I still want to tell the world that there is a difference between an experience and the culturally bound explanation of that experience. I still plumb the meaning of the Bible on a daily basis. I still gather in my parish church every Sunday and recite the creed. I do these things joyfully and self-consciously. Am I simply schizophrenic, living simultaneously in two different worlds? Am I being delusional by intention and pretending to participate in rituals in which I do not really believe? No, neither is the case. I am rather a believer, not in a literal Bible, but in the experience to which the words of that Bible point. I am a believer, not in the literal creeds, but in the reality to which those creedal words point. I view the creeds as a love song that my ancestors in faith created to help them process their God experience. I do not mind joining in the singing of their love song. I recognize my kinship with them in the history of my faith’s development over the centuries. The creeds are not for me an imposed girdle into which I have to force my flabby faith. They are not a straitjacket designed to force me to live within the theological boundaries and understandings of fourth century people. They are the dated explanations of an experience that I still believe and acknowledge as real. Yes, let there be no mistake, I am convinced that there is a reality to the experience of God, but I do not interpret this reality as if God is a supernatural being who does miracles. I rather see this reality as a transcendent presence that is beyond human boundaries and that calls me and compels me not to allow those boundaries to bind my humanity into less than it is capable of being. I view God as the Source of life and love, and as the Ground of Being calling me to live, to love and to be. My Christian life is thus a journey for which there is no literal roadmap. I am convinced that if I walk this journey deeply enough and faithfully enough, I will be led beyond all religious forms – beyond scripture, creeds, doctrine and dogma and into the wordless wonder of the true meaning of worship. The Christian Church exists, I believe, to point all of us beyond the boundaries of our own humanity. It is a pity that institutional religion in all its forms does not understand its own message! ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Ken Austin from Maroubra, Australia, writes: Question: I heard Bishop Spong speaking recently on Radio Australia about his book on the Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. The Bishop said he was a Christian, but he also said that he did not believe in the historical interpretation of scripture. He pointed out how “Christians” in history were not acting as God would have it. He said he would like to meet with people of other religions who had “experienced God” in their own faiths and to explain to them his experience of God from the Christian perspective and then to listen to their explanations of their religious experience with a view to getting a dialogue going and not saying “my version of God is right and yours is not.” He said that this is in the interest of having a peaceful world. But how can “religions” or “faiths,” if you like, agree on the nature of God when their doctrines are so opposite (actually Christianity is not a religion, it is about having a relationship with God, through the Savior Jesus, the Christ). Jews, Muslims and Buddhists don’t have this aspect going on at all. But he did not say in this interview that Jesus has said that the only way to the Father (God) is through him, I am the gate, etc. The Bishop also didn’t mention that Jesus came to take away the penalty for sin (which all humans have as part of their natures) and that the thing that separates humankind from God is sin. (God cannot be related to sin in any way and Jesus removes that barrier – other religions don’t do this at all.) Bishop Spong is clearly an intellectual type, who apparently ignores some of the most important parts of scripture in order to promote his own version of God. For what reason or purpose he does this is not clear to me. I hope I can have these questions put to him for an answer. I don’t see how Jesus’ words agree with his, especially about having a holy relationship, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, with the true and living God. Answer: Dear Ken, Thank you for your letter even though it reveals a deeply fundamentalist version of Christianity that lives only in those communities that have not engaged the intellectual revolution of the last 500 years. I associate your viewpoint with that which I encountered constantly when I was in Sydney, which religiously, at least, seems to me to be little more than a hotbed of pre-modern thinking. Perhaps that is why Sydney is known primarily as a secular non-religious city. This was especially true of those who called themselves “Sydney Anglicans,” who were among the most uninformed, the most imperialistic, the most deeply prejudiced and the most ungracious people I have ever met who still call themselves Christians. This was true from the Archbishop on down, excluding only that tiny minority in that archdiocese who secretly communicated to me their embarrassment over what has happened to their church in that beautiful city. If by your question you want to be in dialogue with a different perspective then I am happy to respond. What you call the “historical interpretation of scripture” is shorthand for evangelical fundamentalism. For the past 200 years in the Christian academies of the developed world the literal view of the Bible that you espouse has been shattered. Moses did not write the Torah. It was the product of about 500 years and the merging together of traditions from at least four schools of thought arising in the circumstances of four different periods of Jewish History. Not a word of what are called the “Books of Moses” or the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was actually written until about 300 years after Moses’ death. Moses thus did not write it down while God dictated the Ten Commandments. There are in fact three versions of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and they do not agree with each other. From your perspective we would have to believe that God was confused or perhaps that God did not quite get the commandments right the first time so God kept trying. You appear not to be aware that miracles do not come into the story of Jesus until the 8th decade of the Common Era. The Virgin Birth does not enter the gospel tradition until the 9th decade; neither does the understanding of resurrection as the physical resuscitation of a deceased body. The story of Jesus’ ascension is a 10th decade addition to a growing and developing tradition. The Christian movement did not separate itself completely from the Synagogue and Judaism until 55-60 years after the crucifixion, so the imperialistic idea that only Christians have the truth was a late developing idea when Christians finally achieved institutional and political power. Can you imagine a God so limited that this God would only welcome into the divine presence those who agree with you or other fundamentalists? If Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Christians all worship the one True God as I believe we do, since there is ultimately only one God, then no one’s understanding of God can ever be identified with absolute truth. As the apostle Paul once wrote: “We see through a glass darkly.” The claim that no one comes to God but by Jesus is a saying attributed to Jesus only in the Fourth Gospel, a book that did not appear in Christian history until the latter years of the 10th decade, or some 65 – 70 years after the end of Jesus’ earthly life. The earlier gospels portray Jesus as saying those who are not against him are for him and inviting all who are weary and heavily laden to come unto him. The only standard of divine judgment according to Matthew said nothing about proper believing, but spoke only of the ability to see the presence of God in every person including those he called “the least of those who are our brothers and sisters.” The idea that human nature is fallen and that Jesus had to die for our sins is a result, not of some divine revelation, but of literalizing the ancient Jewish creation stories that stressed an original and perfect creation, followed by a fall into sin created by human disobedience, which in turn necessitated a rescue operation that portrays Jesus as being punished for our sins on the cross. This is a 4th century misreading of the ancient Jewish folktales and, if literalized, turn God into a vindictive, punitive monster. They would also turn Jesus into being the prime victim of divine abuse and would turn you and me into guilt-laden Christ killers. Besides that, we now know that these ancient stories are simply not literally true. Modern studies of the origin of our universe tell us that there never was a perfect creation, just an evolving process that went from physical matter, to life, to consciousness and finally to self-consciousness over a period of about 13.8 billion years. Evolution is an established scientific understanding of the origins of life that renders “original sin” as nonsense. If there was no fall into sin, there is no need for a savior, so that way of telling the Christ story is simply a product of an uninformed mentality. All versions of God are the ideas of someone. The idea of God changes dramatically in the Bible itself. It is a long journey from the God who sent plagues into Egypt, ordered the murder of the first born male in every Egyptian household on the night of the Passover and who drowned the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, to the God who enjoins us to love our enemies. I guess what I really want to communicate to you is that true Christianity is vastly different from any one’s idea of Christianity and is certainly different from the type of Christianity that you seem to have experienced and unless you can step away from the narrow and even punitive understanding that you reflect, you will never be able to grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ Jesus, which Paul says is in each of us. I have been all over Australia on many occasions. I assure you there is more to Christianity in that wonderful country than what you appear to know about. My books actually sell on a per capita basis there better than they sell anywhere else in the world. That would not happen unless someone is listening and someone is reading. As a matter of fact in September in Canberra an international gathering of progressive Christians will come together in a conference known as “Common Dreams III.” I commend it to all Australians who want to try to build what I have called “A New Christianity for a New World.” I wish you well. John Shelby Spong Announcements Common Dreams 3 Conference Midwives of Change:Progressives Shaping Religious Communities From: September 19, 2013 to September 22, 2013 Manning Clark Centre, Australian National University Canberra, AUSTRALIA Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org.au Click here for more information Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support(a)johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545. Copyright © 2013 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at johnshelbyspong.com. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 708 Broadway Suite 105 Tacoma, WA 98402 Add us to your address book

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An invitation in parting from the Dialogue listserv
by Herman Greene 19 Aug '13

19 Aug '13

All, I am not trying to solve the "human predicament" related to the two listservs. I would love to stay in touch with everyone, but I think there is a virtue in focus, so I will only be on the OE listserv going forward. The reason I am writing it to invite those of you on the Dialogue listserv who are not on the OE listserv to join that listserv so I can stay in touch with you that way. Here's the email I sent to the OE listserv this morning. If you are interested in this ongoing "dialogue," don't leave the Dialogue listserv, but if you are not on it, join the OE listserv. A conversation with John and Lynda Cock and the Progress on my proposals Dear all, I had nice dinner with John and Lynda Cock last night. There's no doubt about it, but those of us who were in the Order share a deep common bond that goes on just like family bonds. Our shared history enabled deep sharing. I presented the idea that the period 1965-75 was the deeply creative period of Order/EI life, that the important ideas and concepts came from that period. John divided it into knowing, doing and being, and said the knowing and being were developed in that period and doing was the focus after that continuing through today. It seems clear to me that our "methods" meaning our facilitation methods are in history. It also seems clear that the doing whether as you all did it after I left in 1975 or as others may do it in the future will carry on. There will be people working on human development and some will use our methods. What remains important to me is our being and knowing. This is what I feel may not carry on. It's something we recognize and feel in the presence of each other and don't recognize and feel in the presence of others, or at least we feel it in a very different way. It's a shared interior space. Those of us in the Order in 1965-75 (and perhaps after though I have no first hand experience of it) know that we were part of something fantastic. A mighty flame of spirit and vision burned within us. We had within us a "motivity" that will never go away. And we had all those sayings and concepts we sometime hammered each other with that were critical to our being. And we had the Christian story, heritage and symbols which were very much a part of our interior reality. I don't think that can be captured with archives or numbers. The interior part can only be captured through stories. This is why I have called on people to write stories on "the way we were" or "who we were". They can be anecdotes that capture just one memorable moment, like the excitement felt at preparing for a doing the grand ball or in a moment in Fifth City Pre-School or the night of the MLK riots. The response, to say the least has been underwhelming, but I'm not going to let this die. Our second generation is already reaching retirement in some cases and what about the third generation and others? These are stories that need to be told. I thought I had Betty Pesek's book on *The Circle of Life*. Maybe this covers this, I need to get a copy . . . but intuitively I don't think so. We have a grand story and grand stories to tell. We were a part of something fantastic despite its faults. I don't want to justify it, I just want the story(ies) to be told. On the knowing side, I'm not that interested in the content that may be time bound. What I am interested in is the principles that formed us--the ones that related to out being, our power and our motivity--ideas of corporateness, being under assignment, living missional lives, etc. This is what I want to pass on to my children, grandchildren and others. Again the response has been underwhelming to say the least, but I'm not giving up. And the book called "RS-1" that I proposed? Gene Marshall I gather is working to put a version of RS-1 back in to the stream of things. Here I'm thinking about something else. I'm thinking about how did we come to understand God, Christ. Holy Spirit and Church in both its contentless and contentful (being related to the Christian tradition) aspects. I want to tell the story of RS-1, though this one might involve more concepts than the first two. So folks, you aren't dead yet, but you're close. Let's tell the story of this amazing body of people and reality of which we were a part. -- __________________________________________________ Herman F. Greene 2516 Winningham Road Chapel Hill, NC 27516 919-942-4358 (ph & fax) hfgreenenc(a)gmail.com

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8/15/13, Spong: On Building a Christianity without Security or Creeds
by Ellie Stock 15 Aug '13

15 Aug '13

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR On Building a Christianity without Security or Creeds One of my readers, Henry Gael Michaels, has shared with me an anonymous story on the meaning of God with which I open this column. It also reveals, I believe, what is wrong with all theology. I am grateful for this gift. This is his story. The mystic was back from the desert. “Tell us,” the people said, “What is God like?” The mystic wondered just how he could ever tell them what he had experienced in his heart while in the desert. Can God ever be put into words? He finally decided that in response he would give them a formula that was so convoluted and literally impossible, so inaccurate and so inadequate that their only choice would be to do as he had done and go into the desert to experience God for themselves. Alas, however, that is not what his hearers did. Instead they seized upon his formula, turning it into a sacred text or an infallible doctrine. Then they imposed it onto others as a creed or a set of holy beliefs. They even proclaimed that it was necessary to hold it, if one wants to be saved. They began to persecute and to kill those who would not consent to this formula. They went to enormous efforts and great costs to spread this formula to foreign lands. Some even gave their lives for this cause. The mystic was sad. “It might have been better,” he said, “if I had said nothing!” “Perhaps,” Henry Gael Michaels concluded in his letter to me, “This is why Jesus never wrote anything down.” It seems to me that this story articulates the problem that modern religious men and women have with organized religion and theology. Religion has adopted theological formulas based on two things: First, there is an experience of God, which people come to believe is both real and authentic, which makes them aware of transcendence. This experience is life changing, seemingly unrepeatable and certainly stretching to those having the experience. It leads to new dimensions of life and to new understandings. All religion, along with all theology, is born in such a primary experience. The second thing involved in religion and theology is, however, the compelling need to explain that experience to another. That is the moment when the experience is inevitably put into human words. The experience and the wordy explanation are never the same. If the experience is true, it is timeless, external and transformative! The explanation, however, is always time bound, time warped and finite. Every explanation freezes the experience in the vocabulary of the explainer. The explanation reflects the world view of the explainer, the explainer’s level of knowledge and the explainer’s time in history. There is no such thing as an eternal explanation. As time moves on, the destiny of every explanation is to become increasingly foreign to its audience, increasingly irrelevant to its time and finally to be dismissed or ignored as no longer appropriate to its world. If people begin to identify the experience with its explanation, the experience will die when the explanation dies. That is the law “of the Medes and the Persians,” and that is also the reality of human history. Now look at modern Christianity. Jesus was a first century experience in which people came to believe that they had encountered the transcendent reality that they called God. The New Testament was a first century attempt to explain that experience. There is no doubt that in the Jesus experience, lives were transformed. People, who at the time of Jesus’ arrest, had forsaken him and fled in fear, somehow came back together after his death and were empowered with a new courage. Previously fearful ones were now ready to die for the reality of an experience they could no longer deny. Even though these people had been raised inside a strict Jewish code, their “Jesus” experience forced them to expand that code so dramatically that the singularity of God was compromised and they could no longer see God apart from Jesus, nor could they see Jesus apart from God. Their understanding of God was thus modified and changed for ever. In time, this new understanding forced them to adopt a new holy day on which to celebrate this experience. That was when the first day of the week began to be observed and a new form of worship, based on the Passover meal, but expanded into something new that they called “The Eucharist,” came into being. That sacramental meal was said to mark the fact that Jesus “was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” The New Testament was thus the written attempt by the followers of Jesus to capture the power of their Jesus experience in words. Inevitably, they were the words of the first century. Can we keep our hold on their experiences by literalizing their words today? Of course not! We cannot twist our minds into first century pretzels and think of God in the same way that they did. God cannot be to a post-Galilean, post-Newtonian world a being who lives above the sky, and who once entered the earth by causing a baby to be conceived in the womb of a virgin. Our minds and hearts are not drawn to the picture of a miracle-worker, who possessed such supernatural power that he could expand the food supply, heal the sick, banish the demons of epilepsy and mental illnesses, and even transcend the limits of death before he returned to God’s heavenly home by ascending into the sky of a three-tiered universe to a realm from whence this Jesus supposedly had originally come. That explanation may have fit the world of the first century quite well. Today, however, that understanding of Jesus sounds strange, foreign, dated, and mythological. Space age people cannot imagine such a heavenly being. The explanation of the New Testament may well point to truth, but the first century words they had at their disposal, can never capture the reality of that experience for all time. Explanations no matter how ancient, revered or sacred always die. No explanation is timeless, not even the explanations contained in the gospels. None can, therefore, be eternal. By the time the fourth century arrived in Christian history, Christians began to turn their first century New Testament explanations into creeds that were couched in the words that reflected the common assumptions of fourth century Greek-speaking people. That world thought in terms of dualism. By this I mean that they saw a strict division between heaven and earth, between the human and the divine, between the body and the soul and even between the flesh and the spirit. Dualistic concepts therefore permeated the language of the fourth century creeds and began to shape Christian understanding. The word “Incarnation,” for example, which literally means “to enter the flesh of,” became a doctrine designed to explain the way Jesus was to be understood. Next, Jesus was transformed into being the second person of the Holy Trinity. The human Jesus began to fade from view and a religious system that neither Paul nor the gospel writers would have ever recognized came into being. It was this theological system that poured anti-Semitism into the blood stream of the Christian West, producing such things as the expulsion from or the ghettoization of the Jews in every Christian nation of Europe. That killing violence finally exploded in the genocidal horror of the Holocaust in which 6,000,000 people died as the victims of religion gone mad. It was this system that also expressed itself in the Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries that sought to kill the infidel Muslims. These fourth century creeds also gave birth to heresy hunts, religious wars and the Inquisition. It takes enormous energy to keep dying explanations viable. By the time the 13th century arrived, we turned these dated theological explanations into liturgies and repeated them in worship. Far more than most people recognize, the worship services in all Christian churches were born in 13th century understandings and practices. In that era, human life was denigrated and devalued. So Christian worship began to proclaim that we were “born in sin,” that we were “miserable offenders” and that we were not worthy to “gather up the crumbs under the divine table.” In our hymns we began to call ourselves “wretches” and “worms.” Life became something to be escaped, not something to be lived. We proclaimed a God who was all-seeing, one “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid” and thus a God before whom we quaked in fear and were compelled constantly to beg for mercy. Perhaps that is why worship seems so strange, so unpleasant, so boring to people in the 21st century. That is not our understanding of life. Can we Christians escape, or at least relativize, our explanations from the past without losing in the process the power of the experiences which caused the explanations in the first place? That is the perennial question that both religion and theology asks. The clear answer is that if one literalizes any explanation of an experience, that experience becomes mortal and it is doomed to die. Truth is thus never served by static religious or theological explanations. This means that the Bible cannot be taken literally unless one wants the Bible to die. That means that orthodoxy can never be defined in creeds or doctrines unless one wants orthodoxy to die. This means that liturgical forms must always be changing, they can never be set in stone unless one wants all liturgies to become irrelevant. So religion as we now know and practice it is doomed. Once it is literalized, its destiny is only to create fundamentalists who will exact enormous energy from us in order to protect the religious formulas of the past and when they fail at this task, as they are destined to, they will produce secular humanists who can no longer live with integrity in those religious definitions of antiquity and so they will abandon all religion. The Church Alumni Association will be the fastest growing organization in the heretofore Christian world. That is where we are. What can we do about it? That will be my topic next week. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Zolika Heath from Ocala, Florida, writes: Question: The Trinity: How did this doctrine evolve? Is it polytheistic? Father, Son and Spirit are in scripture but is "Trinity?" Answer: Dear Zolika, Your question is a very good one. I doubt that Jesus was a Trinitarian; I am quite certain that Paul was not. The Trinity is a human definition of God, and since the human mind could never fully embrace the mystery and wonder of God, to literalize a human definition of God borders on the absurd. For human beings to worship their own creation is the essence of idolatry. The Trinity is a definition not of God, but of the human experience of the divine and is, therefore, an attempt to make rational sense out of that human experience. We experience God as other, beyond anything that our minds can grasp. This is what we mean when we say God is Father – the Ground of all being. We experience God as an inward presence, so deep within us that we cannot name the reality we know is there. That is what we mean when we say God is Spirit, ineffable, life-giving, inward and real. We experience God in the life of others. Sometimes to lesser degrees, sometimes to what seems like a total degree. This is what we mean when we call Jesus “the son,” and why we frame doctrines like “the Incarnation.” Our experience was and is that in Jesus we saw the presence of God flowing through his human life. Is that who God is? No, but that is what our experience of God is and so we claim it. The Trinity is not a definition of God; it is an experience into which we live. Thanks for asking, ~John Shelby Spong Announcements We are pleased to announce the new Bishop Spong Website in Spanish! Click Here for a bulletin with all the links and information. Please share this with your Spanish speaking friends! Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support(a)johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545. Copyright © 2013 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at johnshelbyspong.com. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 708 Broadway Suite 105 Tacoma, WA 98402 Add us to your address book

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Resolving OE and Dialogue listservs and two proposals
by Herman Greene 15 Aug '13

15 Aug '13

Thanks for all the good comments on the purposes of the two listserves. I am going to opt for OE only. I like OE because I like to say in touch of my old colleagues, which Shelley Hahn correctly stated are more like family than colleagues. I also like to reflect on our common memory and experiences from OE days. I feel somewhat at a loss on all that went on through ICA since I left the Order in 1975 (after 8 years with the Order), but through these listserves, and various events I have attended since 2000 I have gained familiarity with that great work. In any event, if you want to reach me on the listserves send the message on the OE listserve. I proposed a grand project last time I wrote, and I'd like to pull it off the table. No need to refer back to it, just consider (from my side) these ideas. 1. I am coming to the conclusion that our work as a corporate body, as an Order, is done and cannot be revived. We were what we were and we did a lot and caused some damage. We were who we were. What I believe we can and should do is preserve the mystique and learning of that community for future generations. This has already happened through the archive project and the books that George and John and others have put out. Further there is a collection of stories about our lives and work. And we had the conference in Washington, DC. Jim Wiegel did the videos. Michael May is collecting wisdom stories. What I continue to be interested in is a compilation of essays on the key ideas that guided us. For example, "Comprehensive, intentional and futuric (and archaic)" "the indicative is the imperative" "contextual ethics" and so many more. I can see small essays on a number of concepts put together in collection as a book or books and online. I think some of these essays may have to include a critique of the concepts and some would need to discuss how their meaning might apply today. I suppose the essays would have to begin with what the concepts meant for us "at that time." I can't pass on my order experience to my sons but I would like for them to have the benefit of the understandings that guided us and still guide me in my thinking and work. On reflection though, I would also like for them to have some understanding of who we were as an order. My oldest son who left the order at two simply says, "My parents were in a cult." I can see another collection of essays on "the way we were." Though I think there were many weaknesses in who we were I also think we were a great thing, a great force for good, a creative advance. I would like to have my sons know about that too So I guess ideally I would like two books, one on the operating wisdoms of the Order/EI and the other on our stories of our life in the Order/EI (and if I am not mentioning ICA it is only because I left at that time but would want to include that part of the history as well). Now I can't stop because I had another thought. I would like for my sons to have some understanding of RS1 and how it relates to the Christian symbols. I can see a book titled "RS-1" I would be willing to be part of a team for collecting, editing and publishing these works. If we get these out, the ideas will be available for others to develop in the future. 2. The second proposal is simply an opening to individuals who would be interested in participating in the Ethics and Spirituality Initative for Sustainable Development and possibly developing a curriculum on the changes needed going forward, kind of a CS1 for our day. I'm not longer thinking of those as involving our remnant corporate body, but something that some of you may have an interest in. Here's a 3 minute video that gives you some introduction to this. http://youtu.be/tyh7clso0Kc I can send additional information to those who contact me about this. Now, for completeness, I have another thought. Any of you who have not done so who wish to receive the e-zine of my nonprofit, the Center for Ecozoic Societies, please let me know and I'll put you on the list. Herman -- __________________________________________________ Herman F. Greene 2516 Winningham Road Chapel Hill, NC 27516 919-942-4358 (ph & fax) hfgreenenc(a)gmail.com

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