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.yiv7542218491mcnTextContent, #yiv7542218491 .yiv7542218491mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templatePreheader{ display:block;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templatePreheader .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent, #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templatePreheader .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templateHeader .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent, #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templateHeader .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templateBody .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent, #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templateBody .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templateFooter .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent, #yiv7542218491 #yiv7542218491templateFooter .yiv7542218491mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } There is a new paradigm in religious thought — that of the progressive, pluralistic ally of science and lover of truth.
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Religion and The New Paradigm
(A Spiritual Upgrade)
Column by Joran Slane Oppelt
September 20, 2018
There is a new paradigm in religious thought — that of the progressive, pluralistic ally of science and lover of truth. It is the path of those committed to a living integration of art, science, philosophy and spirituality.
This frontier was articulated with clarity and depth in Belonging to the Universe, a dialogue (published in 1991) between Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast and physicist Fritjof Capra. In Belonging, Steindl-Rast and Capra offer similarities between the major shifts in their respective fields — religious and scientific thought.
New paradigm thinking in science, says Capra, means a “shift from the part to the whole.” In theology, according to Steindl-Rast, it means a “shift from God as revealer of truth to reality as God’s self-revelation.”
It means a shift from objective science (“structure”) to “epistemic science” (“the understanding that the process of knowledge is to be included in the description of natural phenomena”). In religion, it means a shift from theology as an “objective science” to theology as a “process of knowing.” In science, a shift from truth to “approximate descriptions” and in religion, a “shift in focus from theological statements to divine mysteries.”
And across both fields, a shift in the fundamental metaphor of knowledge from “building blocks” to “networks” — from fundamentals to process, from discreteness to interconnectedness.
The signposts that signaled this new territory have been numerous, yet some have chosen to ignore them.
>From the pulpit of today’s “modern” Christian churches you will hear messages that sound straight out of the 16th century. You will hear about the cleansing blood of Christ or the blood of Jesus as the way to salvation. You will hear about how Jesus rose from the dead — not spiritually, not figuratively, but literally rose from the grave in the flesh. You will hear these morbid tales of a zombie Jesus because these Christian leaders don’t teach their followers to think beyond the page, like adults, and because — like adolescents fascinated by superheroes and the fountain of youth — we are preoccupied with overcoming pain, suffering and our own bodily death.
According to a recent campaign by the United Church of Christ, “God is still speaking.” Yet, while biblical scripture has largely remained unchanged over time, the language we use to translate and illustrate it has. We are still using the metaphor of “the well” in a time when our cities’ water supplies are poisoned with lead, fluoride and radiation. Who is the woman at the well in Washington, D.C.? Who is the woman at the well in Flint, Michigan?
Illustrating the gospel of Christ with newfound colors, modern language and meaningful stories can only make it more nuanced, more relevant and more sacred.
In Dr. Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels we read not only of the linguistic inaccuracies in the European and Greek translations of the Gospels, but of the clear attempt to destroy the character of Mary Magdalene. Her historical importance, her teachings, and the concept of the Divine Feminine (shekinah, or “divine wisdom”) have been scrubbed from canonized text. She has been incorrectly painted (by a predominantly male clergy) as a manipulator and a prostitute.
And, we continue to suffer from an imbalance of the masculine/feminine forces in society (equal pay, body rights, female objectification, rape, harassment, etc.) and in ourselves (sexuality, gender, power, rage, shame).
We have had countless messages from God — loud and clear — revealing to us through philosophy, science, physics, medicine, archaeology, cosmology — that our vision of the world (and each other) may need to be modified.
Yet, some of us have been told that to listen to these messages is blasphemous, that we risk our very soul by giving our time to the heretical scientific “materialists,” and that we should listen to the words of our priests and chaperones rather than look (“taste and see,” Psalm 34:8) for ourselves.
We have had a million chances as a species to revise and update what we believe about the universe in which we live. Our spiritual inbox is full of these messages on a daily basis. They are reminders that the Cosmos is ever-changing (evolving and increasing in complexity), that we are constantly expanding through our own consciousness (DeChardin’s nöosphere, Aurobindo’s involution), and that our perception of the Divine (our theology) needs to be revisited as our consciousness and cosmology expand to include more depth.
Some of us have been simply marking these messages as spam because they’re not coming to us from “trusted providers.” They’re arriving from institutions that we’ve been told to distrust (philosophy, psychology, astronomy, archaeology). Our spam filters can become so full that it is more work to sort and index and categorize all of this new information than it is to just ignore, trash or recycle everything out of hand.
By doing so, we are making a conscious choice to not install the spiritual upgrade and stick with our limited, antiquated (and sometimes glitchy) operating system.
Sometimes these messages can feel like advertising — well-designed sales pitches crafted to convert us to a new way of thought. They are. They can feel like offers from the company that sold you your last computer, asking you to upgrade your software and hardware with the latest bells and whistles. And it’s easy to refuse them. It’s easy to lump them in with car salesmen and the multi-level marketers. Yet, they are the ones who built, designed, coded and programmed your device.
Or, imagine receiving a postcard from the tailor who hand-crafted and stitched together your very first suit (the original suit you were given as a child). They’ve been trying to reach you for some time. They know you’ve changed and grown a lot since you left the shop, and your suit is now too small. Your arms and legs dangle out of it and you look like an awkward teenager. Sometimes your friends even laugh about it behind your back, but they would never say anything to your face. It’s time to get a new suit.
God — the Creator, the programmer, the tailor — has been trying to contact you. His messages (in the form of collective knowledge, revealed wisdom and answered prayers) have been clear.
Expand your way of living to include more truth and more depth, extend your way of relating to include more goodness and love, upgrade your way of thinking to include more being and more beauty.
Installing a new spiritual operating system also means seeing through new lenses and new eyes. It will require looking at the universe all the way up (and outward) to the edges of the known universe where human life becomes insignificant and all the way down (and inward) to the quantum realm where the laws of mathematics dissolve. It means looking at these dimensions of our world with the same awe, gratitude, joy, humility and sense of sacredness that we would bring to the pews of our local church.
Seeing the world around us as changed (and changing) requires changing ourselves from within. And we have had the capacity (if not the will) to do so all along.
As Jesus said in Luke 17:21, “The Kingdom is not coming in any way that you can observe. The Kingdom of God is already here — within you.”
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The Future of Christianity (Visioning Exercise)
A new Christian movement is on the horizon. It’s there along with a number of alternative futures. Here are a few questions to help facilitate this visioning process:
- What would this progressive, neo-Gnostic, Christianity/spirituality look like?
- Would it be a desirable future? Why — or why not?
- What would it take to make it happen? What would it take to prevent it?
- Would you be willing to do what it takes to realize or prevent this future?
- Who would this future advantage, and who would it oppress? What is the cost, and who pays the price?
~ Joran Slane Oppelt
Click here to read online and to share your thoughtsAbout the Author
Joran Slane Oppelt Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister, life coach and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and founder of Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay committed to “transformative practice, community service and religious literacy.” Joran is the author of Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox), Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He serves as President of Interfaith Tampa Bay and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion.He has presented at South by Southwest in Austin, TX; Building the New World Conference in Radford, VA; Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City; Embrace Festival in Portland, OR and Integral European Conference in Siófok, Hungary. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By a Reader
In Christ or Follow Jesus? If I am a follower of Jesus, can I be in Christ too?
A: By Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Dear Reader,In my next essay I will explore liturgy but let me draw upon a passage from a liturgical text I’ve written for the Season of Creation to provide a context for my response to your question.“May this promised land, the Earth, teach us to discover that from You all blessings do flow. Your Spirit hovers over the deep giving birth to all – creation is Christ incarnate. Your Spirit unites Mary and Joseph giving birth to the prophet from Nazareth – Jesus grows as Christ. Your Spirit suffuses souls giving birth to searching pilgrims – the unfolding body of Christ. Here, upon this fragile sphere within boundless space, You are inviting all things to realize the Christ they are created to be – becoming new, tasting your glory, knowing wholeness in You.”In my experience, each of us is the continual weaving into being, moment-to-moment, of Being. We are unique, beautiful, unrepeatable manifestations of Being which is utterly (which is to say, gracefully) effulgent. What this means is that Being is not only humanity’s true nature but the true nature of all that is. Our essence is “to be.”In my understanding then, “Christ” is the language Christians have for speaking of this universal truth about our true nature. Our spiritual path is to realize our Christic true nature – in other words, to realize for ourselves that we are Being becoming manifest, tangible, creatively expressive as our personal life. To be a follower of the way of Jesus is deeper and more intimate that being “in Christ”; the spiritual path is one of becoming the Christ (or Being) you already are by your very nature.~Kevin G. Thew Forrester
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“. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Jesus for the Non-Religious, Part II
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on March 1, 2006
In the first column in this series (published on February 15, 2006), I sought to establish the fact that the memory of Jesus, including his words, parables and actions were recalled orally and passed on only in the Synagogues. This means that before the written gospel tradition began, the synagogues were the context in which Jesus was remembered. I base that conclusion on the fact that the gospels reveal a deep intertwining between the memory of Jesus and the content of the Jewish Bible. This interweaving could only have occurred in the Synagogue because that was the only place where the Hebrew Scriptures were read and discussed. Few people could read in the first century and books were in the form of very expensive hand-written scrolls belonging, normally, not to individuals but to the whole community. Only the Synagogue, for example, had copies of the sacred scriptures, which were read when the people gathered for worship. In the first of this series, I described the Sabbath liturgy of the first century that called for the reading of the entire Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) in order at public worship on the Sabbaths of a single year. After that long reading each Sabbath came shorter lessons from both the early prophets (Joshua through II Kings) and the later prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve, i.e. Hosea through Malachi). Then members of the congregation were invited to comment on these scriptures. That was when Jesus” disciples recalled his words and deeds. Inevitably, this meant that they interpreted Jesus through the lens of these texts. So stories of those larger than life heroes of the Jewish past became interpretive vehicles through which Jesus began to be thought of as the “New Moses ” or the “New Elijah.” Stories from both heroes were retold as if the events in their lives had been repeated in Jesus” life.Jewish worship was also filled with a yearning for Messiah to come. Messianic ideas thus also became channels through which Jesus was portrayed as the one in whom these various hopes were fulfilled. Phrases like “Son of Man” and “Son of David” and symbols drawn from the anticipation of a coming “New Israel” began to show up in their descriptions of things Jesus said
and did. Classical images of Messiah, like the Suffering Servant from Isaiah (40-55), or the Shepherd King of Israel, from Zechariah (9-14), also shaped the Jesus memory. With the passing years, these stories were told and retold in Sabbath gatherings, until memory blended with interpretation and history was confused with mythology. People today still do not embrace the fact that everything we read in the gospels was written 40 to 70 years after the earthly life of Jesus had come to an end and thus well after this inevitable blending had occurred.Later Christians, not knowing this, incorporated these interpretative symbols into their creeds in the 4th and 5th centuries as if they were history. For example, the story of Jesus” ascension into heaven was a retelling of the Elijah story appropriately magnified. The Virgin Birth was an attempt to adapt the story of Jesus to words found in Isaiah 7:14. Judas Iscariot was a composite of all the traitor stories of the Hebrew tradition. Many miracle stories were adaptations from the Elijah/Elisha cycle. It would not be until the early 19th century that biblical scholarship began to unravel the facts of history from this primitive interpretative process.By that time, these teachings of the church had been set inside liturgies, which reinforced a literal reading of the gospel texts. This meant that when biblical scholars began the inevitable task of unraveling the Jesus of history from the Jesus of interpretation, the fundamentalists saw this biblical scholarship as a direct attack on the veracity of the gospels themselves and even non-fundamentalists began to reel under the impact of new revelations and insights that destroyed their religious confidence. In time this unraveling was so thorough that some people began to suggest that perhaps Jesus never really lived at all, that he was but a fantasy figure composed out of the pagan god stories of Egypt and the Mediterranean. When one claims too much for something about which one actually knows very little, that is almost inevitable.There is no doubt in my mind that Jesus lived. There is also no doubt that many of the familiar details of the traditional Jesus story never happened at all. To separate these two things has been the purpose of my academic concentration over the past two years, as I have sought to probe those formative years from 30 to 70 C.E., that we still call “the oral period.”The first insight I developed in this series was to document the way in which the Hebrew Scriptures had become intertwined with the memory of Jesus long before the gospels were written. The insight I seek to develop this week is to show how the liturgical year of the Synagogue, especially its celebration of the great events in the life of the Jewish people, actually shaped the form in which the first gospel, Mark, was constructed. Because Matthew and Luke both represented expansions of Mark, Matthew in a specifically Jewish direction and Luke in a more open, cosmopolitan and gentile direction, the cumulative weight of these three, called “the synoptic gospels,” set the story of Jesus into the liturgy of the Synagogue far more deeply than Western Christians have ever imagined.Christians have a church year anchored in three great events in Jesus” life: his birth, his death and his gift of the Holy Spirit. Yet, Christians still are not generally aware of the holy days of the Jewish year or of their presence in the background of various Christian observances.The Jewish liturgical year also began at different places in the calendar among various Jewish groups, making the understanding of these connections even more confusing to follow. For some it began at Rosh Hashanah in the early fall, for others at the harvest celebration called Sukkoth in the late fall, and for still others at the time of the Passover in the early spring, which celebrated the birth of the Jewish nation. Christians first tied the Jesus story into the Jewish year by paralleling the crucifixion of Jesus with the slaying of the Paschal Lamb at Passover. With that connection made, the rest of Jesus” life fell quickly into a parallel framework with Jewish observances. Using Mark’s order, and working backwards from the crucifixion to the baptism, let me lay the Jesus story out against the Jewish liturgical practices and see what insights follow.PASSOVER: Mark wrote chapters 14 and 15 of his gospel to juxtapose the crucifixion with the Passover observance. He even divided his passion story into the eight segments of a 24-hour vigil. Jesus became the New Paschal Lamb whose death broke the power of death. This meant that Chapter 16, Mark’s Easter account, would be read on the Sabbath after Passover.DEDICATION (Hanukkah): Moving backward from Passover into the dead of winter, one reaches the next Jewish observance, a festival called Dedication by the Jews. This day celebrated the return of the light of God to the Temple at the time of the Maccabees. Stretching Mark back, the story that would be read at this festival was the account of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop (9:2-8). Here the light of God was said to have transformed not the Temple but Jesus, presenting him as the new Temple where the light of God now resided. I suspect that by the time Mark wrote this story, the Temple had been destroyed by the Romans, which would have made Mark’s claim for Jesus as the new Temple even more poignant. SUKKOTH: In the fall of the year the Jews observed a harvest festival of eight days that would come in our calendars in mid to late October. As we continue to roll Mark’s gospel backwards across the Sabbaths of December, November and into October, we come to a series of harvest and nature stories (Mark 4:1-41) that have a remarkable affinity with Sukkoth. The parable of the sower was actually divided into four kinds of soil that produced four kinds of harvest that fit an eight-day celebration quite well.YOM KIPPUR: Five days before Sukkoth, in early to mid October the Jews celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Still rolling Mark’s gospel backward we discover that right on cue, Mark filled his narrative with cleansing, healing stories appropriate to Yom Kippur, including the story where Jesus entered that which was unclean, the Gentile tax collecting office, and called Levi to follow him. Levi was thus cleansed by association with Jesus (2:13-17).ROSH HASHANAH: The final day in the Jewish year that Mark covered was Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, which comes near the first of October. Rosh Hashanah was observed by blowing the ram’s horn to gather the people to announce the coming of God’s kingdom and to urge upon them preparation. Against that theme Mark opens his gospel with the story of John the Baptist, who utters the Rosh Hashanah liturgical words and proclaims that Jesus is the one for whom Rosh Hashanah yearns (1:1-11).When you put it together, Mark’s gospel appears to be organized with stories about Jesus that carry worshipers from Rosh Hashanah in the early fall to Passover in the early spring. Mark’s gospel is shorter than the other Synoptics because Rosh Hashanah to Passover only covers 6.A whole new doorway into understanding the life of Jesus begins to emerge from the shadows. I will pursue this study in future columns for through this doorway the gospels open to new possibilities and a means is developed to escape today’s killing literalism.~ John Shelby Spong |
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Announcements
An Evening with
Matthew Fox
and Lama Tsomo
October 4, 2018 8:30 PM
Location: Sacred Stream
2149 Byron Street
Berkeley CA
How Mystical Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism
provide answers to the challenges of our times.
Join co-authors Matthew Fox and Lama Tsomo as they discuss how these traditions provide the medicine we need to navigate contemporary life. Following a brief reading from their new book, The Lotus and the Rose: A Conversation Between Tibetan Buddhism & Mystical Christianity the authors will engage in a dialogue and share practices you can use in everyday life.
Click here to register
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