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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateBody .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent, #yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateBody .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateFooter .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent, #yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateFooter .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Christianity: The Plain English Version | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Jim Burklo December 2, 2021In Luke 9:58, Jesus said: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” That was Simone Weil: an "insider" by virtue of her deep practice of Christian contemplation, but an "outsider" with no place that felt right to lay her head inside the Christian fold. She lived for only 34 years, through the upheavals of World War II and the tumult that preceded it. She was a Jewish by heritage, a philosophy prodigy at the Sorbonne and a radical leftist who then found herself attracted powerfully by Catholic Christianity. Though she never was baptized, her writings, most of which only came into print after her death, distinguish her as an important theologian of Christianity. What some writers would say in two pages she would strip down to a crystal-clear sentence in plain prose, so dense that it needs to be soaked in water overnight before it can be consumed. Even then, the reader needs to go over it again and again to let it metabolize in the mind and soul. Here I offer but a subset of the many, many passages I highlighted in my copy of a collection of her essays called “Gravity and Grace”. They amount to a P.E.V. – a Plain English Version of Christianity (translated from the French) - with my commentary added: The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it. Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things. Simone Weil’s work was to clear the fog of doctrine and jargon and go to the heart of the Christian message, in word and deed. To be proud is to forget that one is God…. The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. A case of contradictories which are true. God exists. God does not. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. “In the desert of the East..” We have to be in a desert. For he whom we love is absent. Simone Weil saw clearly that Christianity is rooted in paradoxes which are intrinsic to the human condition. Living selfishly seems like it would lead to happiness, but it leads to frustration. Living selflessly sounds like the opposite of fulfillment but is really the only way to get there. We would like to believe in a benevolent, all-powerful God - but it is only by forsaking any such conception or description of God that we can enter into the divine presence which takes the form of an absence. But this divine void is at the same time filled with the whole universe. We want to be seen, but in order for us to see, our egos must disappear. Sitting with these contradictions, accepting their reality, was the heart of faith for Simone Weil. Catholic communion. God did not only make himself flesh for us once, every day he makes himself matter in order to give himself to man and to be consumed by him. Reciprocally, by fatigue, affliction, and death, man is made matter and is consumed by God. How can we refuse this reciprocity? The Eucharist should not then be an object of belief for the part of me which apprehends facts. That is where Protestantism is true. But this presence of Christ in the Host is not a symbol, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image, it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself, it is not supernatural. There the Catholics are right… For Simone Weil, the eucharist was both a sign and that to which the sign referred, a sign of a reciprocal relationship between human beings and Ultimate Reality, and the essence of the relationship itself. She offered a corrective both for Protestants, who in the Reformation began to view the eucharist as merely symbolic, and for Catholics, who see it as the literal body and blood of Christ. I believe it is central to the progressive Christian project to re-embody our faith through the sacrament of communion: to experience directly the real presence of the divine in the bread and in the wine. To make it a body-trip again, and not just a theological head-trip. For Weil, the dialectic in the relationship of humanity with God was demonstrated directly in the mass. Yet she never took the bread and wine herself. We might call her relationship to the eucharist something like Catholic "adoration of the blessed sacrament", in which the consecrated host, enclosed in a "tabernacle" box on the church altar, is contemplated visually and spiritually by the faithful between masses. In another essay, she wrote: The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be... Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat. The cross transfixed Simone Weil’s attention: Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy. A tree, fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging. We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality. God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect – it is for them to choose. The cross as a balance and as a lever. A going down, the condition of rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift. …the intersection of the world and that which is not the world. The cross is this intersection. The point of contact between a circle and a straight line (a tangent). This is the presence of the higher order in the lower under the form of what is infinitely minute. Christ is the point of tangency between humanity and God. Simone Weil's brother was a prodigy in geometry, which shaped her perception of the cross. It was for her a geometry of paradox: a lever bringing heaven to earth and earth to heaven. The intersection of the divine and the earthly. Like progressive Christians today, her focus was not substitutionary sacrifice - Jesus dying for our sins - but rather the cross as the sign and reality of the human and divine experience of suffering. Her interpretation of the cross resonates with that of Carl Jung in his "Answer to Job", a mythical, depth-psychological depiction of the gospel story of the crucifixion as God's restitution for the suffering he inflicted unjustly on Job. "Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous," she wrote. There is no way around suffering. There is only the way through it, beginning with attending to it, as it is. Our consent is necessary in order that he may perceive his own creation through us. God who is no other thing than love has not created anything other than love. I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. We must try to love without imagining. To love the appearance in its nakedness without interpretation. What we love then is truly God. Like progressive Christians today, Simone Weil knew God as love. Not just as warm, fuzzy, romantic, or familial love. Rather as agape love, which embraces all beings and things - and all experiences, including suffering. Communion with the divine was, for her, manifested in attention: Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. By attending to reality, we attend our way to God. Attention = prayer = love = God. And how to live out that love in our lives? Simone Weil's spirituality flowed seamlessly into a mysticism of ethics: We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well-directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do. Her aim was to be so suffused in God that she would have no choice about what actions to take or refrain from taking. This sentence from "Gravity and Grace" might be considered Simone Weil's personal manifesto: I must move toward an abiding conception of the divine mercy, a conception which does not change whatever event destiny may send upon me, and which can be communicated to no matter what human being. She rendered the Christian religion down to its bones, expressing its universal truths in ways "which can be communicated to no matter what human being". And that is the mission of progressive Christianity today: to express and to live out the P.E.V. - the Plain English Version of the faith. ~ Rev. Jim Burklo Read online here About the Author Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021). His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership. He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Cheryl Do progressives believe in the resurrection? Sometimes, without hope in my sins being forgiven, I don't think I could have emotionally coped. A: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Cheryl,Jesus’s physical resurrection from his crucifixion is a narrative framed within both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature as both metaphoric and mystic. I preach about Jesus’s resurrection as a way to examine social injustices confronting marginal and disenfranchised people. For me, social injustices are a sin. For example, it would be an egregious omission to gloss over the unrelenting violence that took place during Jesus’s time, especially in light of the ongoing violence in today’s society toward people of color, women, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people, to name a few. However, the deification of violence as part of a resurrection narrative spun as redemptive suffering has deleterious implications that are not-so-benignly played out today from the playground to the courtroom. In other words, in conservative Christianity, the cross as the locus of God’s atonement for human sin raises a myriad of questions for those of us on the margins of society. As an instrument for execution by Roman officials during Jesus's time, the cross's symbolic nature and its symbolic value can both be seen as the valorization of suffering and abuse, especially in the lives of the oppressed. For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that "Jesus died on the cross for our sins," instead of "Jesus died on the cross because of our sins," not only deifies Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one's sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component makes the powerful insensitive to the suffering of others. Also it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering - therefore, maintaining the status quo. When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other "isms" in our everyday lives. With a new understanding about suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus’s death at Calvary and his resurrection invite a different hermeneutic than its classically held one. Many Christians do not realize that with the classical view of the cross held by many conservatives as the exaltation of Jesus as male, Jesus as white, and Jesus as heterosexual, this view disinvites solidarity among diverse groups of people who do suffer.~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community - join us on Facebook! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | As a non-profit ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit rely heavily on the good will of our donors to help us continue to bring individuals and churches the messages of progressive Christians, Weekly Newsletters, along with the many other resources we provide. For years, the majority of our fundraising came at the end of the year. Looking at various ways to create a more reasonable amount of cash flow we decided rather than having a BIG ask at the end of each year, our more frequent asks give folks a chance to contribute when their funds are more flexible. We think that's a win for everyone. We also want to highlight the opportunity to become a sustaining supporter. If you are looking for the best way to help us continue to provide progressive Christian resources, become a sustaining supporter by choosing Recurring Donation. Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org online and going strong - click here to donate today! * Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary. | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Lecture Tour of Germany, Part III: Marburg Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 11, 2011Our task and the agenda for the third day of our lecture tour of Germany was to go to the city of Marburg where the University of Marburg is located. This was a particularly exciting opportunity for me because Rudolf Bultmann, the man I regard as the greatest New Testament scholar of the 21st century, had spent the bulk of his professional career teaching at the University of Marburg. It was Bultmann who gave to the New Testament world the word “demythologize” which frightened traditional biblical literalists when it was first uttered, since they understood the word “myth” to mean something like a fairy tale and began to accuse Bultmann of saying that the Bible was a book of fairy tales. Nothing could have been farther from Bultmann’s intention. What Bultmann was saying was that every generation inevitably translates its “God” experience in terms of the world view operative at the time. We can do no other. If we assume, for example, that the earth is the center of a three-tiered universe and define God as a being, external to our world, the location of God above the sky then becomes the context of our religious mythology. When we have never heard of germs or viruses, coronary occlusions or cerebral accidents, tumors or leukemia, then we will almost of necessity understand sickness as the “punishment of the external deity, who lives above the sky.” When we know nothing of the shift of tectonic plates beneath the surface of the earth or what happens to low pressure systems moving across warm ocean waters in the northern hemisphere summer, then we will explain earthquakes and hurricanes as the angry response of our external deity. When we know nothing about either mental illnesses or epilepsy, then we explain those phenomena in terms of demon possession. Our “mythology” thus shapes our explanations. When the New Testament was written in the first century those “mythological” understandings were all but universal. If you and I are going to understand that New Testament, then we must “demythologize” it, that is, we must remove the experience from the “mythology” of the first century and recast it in terms of the “mythology” of our time. That was Bultmann’s incredible insight and, for those who had never conceived of any way to read the Bible except literally, he was an enormous challenge. The theological seminary where I did the graduate work leading to my ordination in 1955 had not yet heard of Rudolf Bultmann. Denominational schools are not generally on the academic cutting edge. This institution was still rooted in the post World War I reaction led by Karl Barth to the theological liberalism of the 19th century that did not account for the evil experienced in that world conflict. Barth’s movement became known as “neo-orthodoxy.” Because of this, I did not meet the gigantic figure of Rudolf Bultmann until much later in my career. My seminary did, however, train me in the ground-breaking theological thinking of another German named Paul Tillich, while leaving me with a very dated understanding of the scriptures. The pre-Bultmannian options were to remain a biblical fundamentalist and hope to be clever enough about it to escape notice or to reject all things fundamentalist, while having a vapid and empty liberalism to offer instead. To illustrate those options, I could either believe that Jesus literally multiplied five leaves and two fish into a sufficient volume of food to feed “5,000 men” plus women and children with supplies left over to fill twelve baskets or I could dismiss the miraculous altogether and assume that the lad mentioned in that story, who had offered his lunch of five loaves and two fish, had so shamed the others that they brought out their hidden food supplies to share until there was ample food for all. The former meant that I could still pretend I lived in a pre-Newtonian world in which miracle and magic still abounded, while the latter would be so ordinary as to cause one to wonder why the story was ever recorded. I could either believe that Jesus defied the laws of nature and walked literally “on the water” as the fundamentalists insist or I could observe that the Greek preposition we have translated as “on” can also mean “along the side of” and that this apparently miraculous story really meant that Jesus walked alongside the water, which again is so ordinary that it would not have been noticed. Bultmann provided me and a whole generation of students with a totally new approach and he thus helped me combine biblical scholarship with Tillich’s 20th century theology. My own vocation of trying to recast the Christian faith in the language of the 21st century required both of these perspectives. To repeat a note from the first of my columns on this German lecture tour, it was my friend and mentor, the English bishop, John A. T. Robinson, who first put together for me the biblical scholarship of Bultmann, the theology of Tillich and the courage and vision of Bonhoeffer, Germans all, to form the point of view that I came to represent. He did this in his 1963 book entitled Honest to God. As a perpetual student, I had just this past year devoured Bultmann’s powerful and massive commentary on the Fourth Gospel. For our generation Bultmann has completely recast the biblical debate. Pre-Bultmanian people simply do not understand the post-Bultmanian agenda. So the idea that I would lecture in Marburg, where Bultmann had taught for more than 20 years was a personal thrill for me. To make this Marburg visit even more special, I discovered that Tillich had also begun his career as a teaching assistant at the University of Marburg. This meant that in this citadel of learning I could express my appreciation for these two gigantic professors. Bultmann had died on July 30, 1956. Tillich, who had escaped the Nazi regime to come to America, had a spectacular career at Union Seminary in New York City and Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, died in 1963. To me, however, both have been esteemed colleagues of a lifetime. The subject of the lecture in Marburg was how to develop a non-theistic understanding of God. I am no longer able to make sense out of the traditional theistic definition of God as “a Being,” who exists somewhere external to this world, who is a supernatural power and who can come to our aid in time of need or in answer to our prayers. I am therefore not a “theist” and the English language suggests the only alternative to being a theist is to be an atheist. I am not an atheist either. Indeed I have an overwhelming sense of the wonder and mystery of God, but few if any words with which to convey that conviction. In this lecture I sought to root a non-theistic understanding of God in the universal expression of separation that I believe accompanied the birth of self-consciousness. To be self-conscious is to view life from a center inside the self instead of seeing oneself as an undifferentiated part of nature. Self-consciousness is the experience in which time is known as the medium in which we live; it is thus also the source of the chronic anxiety that grips all human life and in which we are forced to view ourselves as mortals, who are destined to die. No other living creature has to manage this much reality. It is self-consciousness that creates the great divide between human beings and the world of nature, including the merely conscious but not self-conscious parts of nature. Out of the anxiety, or as the Germans would say, out of the angst of self-consciousness we create religious systems designed to please the external deity as a part of our search to find security. Religion is motivated to win divine approval so that God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Thus religion, I now believe, represents a necessary stage in the childhood of our humanity, but one which we must inevitably outgrow when we finally stop playing parent-child games with God. The next step in human development will come, I believe, when we dare to step into human maturity and begin to experience God as the life force, empowering us to live fully, the love force freeing us to love wastefully and the being of God – what Tillich called the Ground of Being – giving us the courage to be all that we can be. It is in terms of this understanding of the God experience that I now understand and seek to communicate the Christ story. I see Jesus not as the divine visitor, but as one who lived fully, who loved wastefully and who dared to be all that he could be and in this process opened us to who God is. Jesus broke the boundaries that still keep us in childlike fear and dependency. The Jesus I now see does not rescue me from a fall that never happened, even mythologically, but he is the one who calls me and empowers me to enter a new dimension of what it means to be human. This God experience in Jesus invites me to step beyond tribe, gender, prejudice and even religion to be part of a universal consciousness. One can only develop the bare outline of this approach in a single public lecture or indeed in a single column, but what I hoped to do in Marburg was to plant the seeds of a radical new theological reformation in the land of Luther, where the Reformation of the 16th century first gained its footing. The German phase of this trip was now over and I headed to Scotland to engage in Glasgow the established Church of Scotland, which is a deeply conservative Presbyterianism. To that story I will turn next week.~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Advent and the Birth of the Word within us In this special Online Advent workshop on December 11th, by School of Contemplative Life, we’ll reflect on the birth of God’s Word as the birth of loving-awareness within us. Read On... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |