Why I Remain A Christian

I am finally responding to a comment about why I remain a Christian and affirm the Apostle’s Creed given the things I write concerning the unity of religion, etc. The is a difficult response to formulate because it forces one to address the seemingly incompatible subjects of exoterism and esoterism.

The former has to do with traditional religion and dogma and the latter with universal spiritual truth that in essence cracks the shell of traditional religious dogma. In other words, exoterism is the form of religion while esoterism is its essence. Probably the foremost writer who has written on this subject is Frithjof Schuon in a number of books, starting with The Transcendent Unity of Religion.

The subject presents us with the paradox of different realities, both of which are true yet seemingly they are mutually exclusive. The Apostle’s Creed expresses a true reality. In terms of metaphysics, it is a relative reality because there are other true religious realities. However, the Apostle’s Creed is also universally true in the sense that it provides access to universal truth as it is expressed devotionally in a practice such as liturgy or the Rosary. If the Apostle’s Creed is not expressed–or practiced–devotionally, it becomes nothing more than a dogmatic formulation. Devotion in all religions is one of the means towards mystical experience.

Mystical experience does not have to be anything extraordinary, although it is extraordinary as it is the real experience of that Presence–the I Am–that is somehow beyond both thought and feeling. The reasons for the variety of mystical works throughout history is that the limits of language are quickly exceeded when attempts are made to express the mystical experience. But there have been wonderful attempts, which make up the treasury of mystical literature.

There has always been tension between exoteric and esoteric religion, and not a few times has this tension resulted in heresy trials and executions by burning at the stake, crucifixion, or dismemberment. The exoterist tends not to perceive the reality that the mystic–or esoterist–perceives. What he does perceive is a threat to his religion as he understands it.

The reason why exoteric religion must continue, however, is because–as the Bhagavad-Gita points out–few people are able to perceive God in his Universal aspect. Most esoterists understand this and remain faithful to their own religion after experiencing a foretaste of the Universal Truth. This is to the benefit of others. To the Christian esoterist, however, when Jesus says, “I am the only Way,” he is understood as referring to the Christ rather than the man, and the man Jesus carries out the will of the Father.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 3

In order to absorb evolution theory into evangelical Christian theology, we need to explicate the Genesis creation account with more interpretive freedom than our current assumptions about Scripture allow. I have already stated that it is going to take several generations for evolution theory to be absorbed into the evangelical church. So we need to take a look into the future, if you will, and find out how that will take place.

Here in the future, we find there has been a complete reversal of the old evangelical view about evolution. Instead of being the nemesis on the other shore where science and humanism lay, evolution has been appropriated as the property of the church. How have we accomplished this? By claiming the process of evolution for the glory of the Creator God our Father. Now that we have appropriated evolution for God, we make our contribution to the theory.

That means we help people understand that evolution is a process with a purpose created by God, and which accomplishes His will in salvation history, as the Catholics call it, or the plan of salvation, as evangelical Christians call it.

We do not decry the scientist for doing his or her job. We don’t expect the scientist to prove the existence of God because God cannot become the subject of scientific investigation. God is not in the domain of science. It is our job in the evangelical church to provide a meaning for evolutionary theory by relating it to the sovereignty of God. We no longer refer to “creation vs evolution” but “creation and evolution.”

We assert that the theory of evolution does not discredit the Genesis creation account because we interpret that account in the light of evolution. We assert that the point of the story in terms of man’s creation is that God created man from the earth in a day; the process by which God created man was evolution and that “day” lasted a million years or whatever. We have released the Bible from that ill-placed shackle of “scientific accuracy.”

This is nothing new. As early as the second century, the Church father Origen said that the world could not have been created in six days as we know them because God did not create the sun–the means of measuring days–until the fourth day. Origen produced an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account.

Here in the future we find that an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account is perfectly consistent with evangelical theology. I will provide that interpretation later, but first I must explain the prescientific view of the world at the time that the Genesis creation account was recorded.

As I said earlier, the Bible teaches us about eternal truth concerning God and his relationship to humankind, and humankind’s relationship with his or her fellows. It is the eternal truths that are the unchanging truths of the Bible. It seems very reasonable to me that God would inspire the sacred author of the Genesis creation account to write in accordance with his own understanding.

The earth was believed to rest on giant pillars atop an abyss of waters. Above the abyss of waters the earth was surrounded by the seas. Underneath the earth there existed Shoel, a dark netherworld believed to be the abode of the dead. The sky was covered over by a giant dome.  The sun, moon, and stars traveled along the ceiling of the dome from one horizon to the other. The dome structure had giant gates placed at intervals. There were waters above the dome and it rained whenever the gates opened. God’s abode was believed to be above the waters atop the dome. A reading of the first chapter of Genesis, especially from the New American Bible will reveal how this worldview fits into the creation account.

In the fourth and final segment of this series, I will provide an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account that is consistent with evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Jesus, Christ of the Cosmos

The appearance of Jesus marks the intersection of eternity with time and history. The man Jesus, through his life, death, and resurrection, reveals to humankind the character of God. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

Although Jesus lived in a specific time in history and in the culture of Israel, he is not only the Jewish messiah, nor is he only the Christian savior, he is the Redeemer of all humankind, of every nation and every creed. And he is not only the Redeemer of humankind, but also of all life and the entire universe.

In Ephesians 4:10 St. Paul tells us that, through his ascension, Jesus Christ is the Christ of the Cosmos:

He who descended is the very One who ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe. (NIV)

We see that God’s plan is that everyone and everything in the cosmos is to be reconciled in Christ:

It pleased God to make absolute fullness reside in him and, by means of him to reconcile everything in his person, both on earth and in the heavens, making peace through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:19-20, Liturgy of the Hours)

Through the Christ of the Cosmos, the ultimate destiny of humankind, and for the universe as a whole, is peace and unity; for God has:

A plan to be carried out in Christ, in the fullness of time, to bring all things into unity in him. (Ephesians 1:10, Liturgy of the Hours)

Through his life, teachings, and sacrificial death, Jesus shows us how to live our lives, as Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or whatever our creed. In his resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ has become the Christ of the Cosmos and thus crosses over all religious and cultural boundaries. This is why, as a Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi could put into practice the teachings of Jesus so effectively and become himself an embodiment of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The potential of the Cosmic Christ is all-pervading and fills up the entire universe, including the sun and moon, mountains, oceans, trees, rocks and birds. Jesus is incarnated in the poor, the homeless, the sick and disadvantaged. Jesus Christ is also in every religion that promotes peace and social justice.

Those who follow the teachings of Jesus throughout history–one might call them saints: St. Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Franklin Graham, and many others–remind us of the potential in the teaching of Jesus and of the Christ of the Cosmos which is given to people of all faiths.

Blessings and Peace.

Interspirituality: Seeing With God’s Eyes

There is a Sufi saying that declares, “When I see with the eyes of God, I see God everywhere.” Christian mystic Meister Eckhart proclaims, “The same eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me.” In the religion of Vedanta, God says, “Whoever sees me in all beings hates no one.” Jesus teaches us that seeing with God’s eyes is to see every being, high or low, rich or poor, as a child of a loving Father, wherein we are all brothers and sisters. Like the Buddha, Jesus looks upon all beings with compassion. Compassion is his response to the human condition. When Mohamed first went to Medina, he desired to unite Jews, Christians, and Arabs under a religion of the God of Abraham.

As an interspiritual Christian, it is my mission to recognize truth in whatsoever religion it occurs; and all the while to see with the eyes of Jesus. When I see with the eyes of Jesus, I see Him in every being and in every religion, even those that do not recognize Him in the same manner which I see Him.

This process has taken me more years than I care to say. It is my fervent prayer that younger Christians–and young people of every religion–will take a much shorter time than I did to become interspiritual. For us Christians, this does not mean that we “compromise” on our own faith, as some fundamentalists claim. Nothing could be further from the truth. Studying other religions–looking beneath the surface waters of dogma and deep into the eternal waters of the Spirit–has given me a greater love for Jesus Christ than ever before.

I have discovered that, underneath the differences, every religion–in its highest expression–teaches us to die to self in order to be reborn into the Divine will. The Sufis speak of a drop of rain finding its path to the river and making its way into the ocean. Zen Buddhist master Shunryu Suzuki speaks of an individual drop of water going down a surging waterfall until at last it joins the vastness of the river below.

We Christians can speak of dying into Christ, being resurrected through Him, and ascending with Him into Heaven. While still on this earth and in this very body, we can pray, “May I no longer live so that Christ lives in me and through me.”

The prophet Isaiah spoke of a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb. He prophesied that God’s people will take their intruments of war, forge them into plowshares, and cultivate the earth in peace with all the nations. Every thoughtful person knows that this is what the nations of our globe must learn to do if we are to survive as a race.

As Hans Kung has pointed out in books, speeches to the United Nations, and talks to religious groups around the globe, “There will be no peace between nations until there is peace between religions.” Every religion must refuse to be used as a tool to facilitate war.

All religions must be examples of how nations can coexist peacefully by peacefully coexisting with each other in love and mutual respect. This is, after all, what every religion teaches in its highest expression, and I believe that this vision is to see with the eyes of God.

God bless.

Hindu-Christian Synergy

Between Hinduism and Christianity there exists a certain synergy that has been explored by such pioneers in Hindu-Christian dialog such as Henry Le Saux and Bede Griffiths. For example, the Katha Upanishad says of God, “He is the one light that gives life to all”; whereas, the Gospel of John says of the Word, “In him was life, and that life was the light of the world.” (John 1:4, NIV)

Jesus is what Hinduism calls a divine incarnation–”The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14, NIV) Hinduism can accept that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but the difference between Hinduism and Christianity is that it believes there can be more than one incarnation of God–

“In every age I come back

To deliver the holy,

To destroy the sin of the sinner,

To establish righteousness.” (Bhagavad-Gita)

Although Gandhi spoke of their being more than one son of God, it seems metaphysically more accurate to say that–even if there could be different divine incarnations–there is really only one son of God.

In the 20th century, Henry Le Saux and Bede Griffiths went to India as missionaries to forward the cause of Christ. But they took a different path in doing so, inasmuch as they both took the vow to live as an Indian sannyasa: a person in India who is wholly dedicated to God. Bede Griffiths had a strong experience of the Hindu trinitarian Saccidananda–which is a direct mystical experience of the divine in the form of “Being,” “Consciousness,” and “Bliss.”

In that experience, Griffiths felt that he had discovered a connection between Saccidananda and the Christian Trinity. He began explaining the Christian Trinity in terms of the Hindu experience of Saccidananda. For example, the experience of the Father can be identified with “Being,” the Son–the expression of the Father–can be linked with “Consciousness,” and the agency of the Holy Spirit can be identified with “Bliss.”

It is thus that Bede Griffiths and others felt there is a deep existential relationship between Christian and Hindu mysticism that underlies the differences in doctrine. The Christian mystics, along with the Hindu sages, felt that there is a direct experience of God that can transcend theologies.

God Bless.

Christ and Other Religions

After expressing the view that divine truth occurs in religions other than Christianity, I have received comments that I might characterize as being concerned with the sovereignty of Christ in a pluralistic world. This is a very important matter to the interspiritual Christian because–while learning about and experiencing the truth in other religions–he or she remains faithful to Jesus Christ and His message.

I have quoted Wayne Teasdale’s work on Bede Griffiths before, and I think it merits doing so again, as he sheds light on the way forward, proposing that the grace of Christ has a mysterious agency in other religions.

“In all religions God has been at work since the inception of each; they are related to Christ in the interdependent cosmic scheme. These different revelation systems will eventually converge in Christ, in the spiritual understanding of His place in the cosmic drama.” (Pg.174, Wayne Teasdale: Bede Griffiths: An Introduction to his Interspiritual Thought)

Two points become clear. One is that Christ is sovereign in all religions. The other is that there is work yet to be done on behalf of the future to find meeting points between religions.

In order to do that, we will need to discover the divine ground of being that lies beyond all culture, symbols, and forms. This is called the One, or the Word of God that has existed since before the world began. (John.1:1) After encountering the divine ground of being, we can appreciate the diversity of its expression. “In my Father’s house there are many rooms.” (John.14:2)

For Christians, the Word of God finds its perfect expression in the person of Jesus Christ, who reveals to us the loving nature of the Father. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John.14:6) This is the specific calling of Jesus Christ to us as Christians. While the interspiritual Christian seeks to experience and coexist with other religions, in terms of his/her own path, he/she comes to the Father through Jesus Christ, and thus remains faithful to His message. This is the nature of the sovereignty of Christ in a pluralistic world.

If you will stay tuned, I hope to post an article entitled “Original Forgiveness” soon.

God bless.

About Interspiritual Christian

I have studied religion off and on for many years. I have been involved in several different Christian traditions–Pentecostal, Episcopal, Free Evangelical, Catholic, and Calvary Chapel. I have also studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and more recently the Koran. I am an interspiritual Christian in that I study, experience, and benefit from other religious traditions while remaining faithful to Christianity. I am also an evangelical Christian, although I believe that other religions contain different reflections of divine truth the way a diamond reflects light at different angles.

In order for the human race to survive, Christians need not only to coexist but to cooperate with other religions toward the common goals of peace and social justice. Within Christianity, this is an exciting yet also agonizing time. Many fundamental assumptions of Christianity are being reexamined. It has been called “The Great Emergence” by Phyllis Tickle, and also the “Second Reformation”. Also, many younger evangelical Christians are more concerned about social justice and protecting our planet. It is a hopeful sign; we all want our children’s children to have a world to live in.

Finally, I believe that the book of Revelation was written during a terrible time of persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. The author was addressing that time. John used apocalyptic images and symbols from Old Testament apocalyptic literature in prophesying the end of the Roman Empire, and a new world in which Christians would be free of persecution. He was not talking about a world two thousand years into his future. The first time I realized this was in reading an out-of-print book called, The Message of Revelation by Cady H. Allen. What this means is that, although our world could end in an apocalypse, it doesn’t have to.

For many years I have felt that end-time preaching is a dangerous, inflammatory, and dubious adventure. One need only visit a used book store to see the outdated books about end-time prophesy. The application of prophesy to tense political situations today is a destabilizing influence at best. Religious leaders should work for peace and preach the kingdom of God here and now instead of worldwide destruction. I very much want my granddaughter to inherit the kingdom which Jesus spoke of. It is incumbent upon us all to hear the call of Jesus, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent (change your lives) and believe the good news!” Mark.1:15 (NIV)

A New Paradigm On World Religions

Now that the paradigm of modern and post-modern society has shifted dramatically to the global community, because wars that invoke God are still happening today, and nations cannot agree on saving our planet to preserve our common humanity, it is necessary for Christianity and every other religion to do away with exclusive thinking. At its best, it is the result of too scant a knowledge of world religions; at its worst, it is arrogance or tribal thinking that has now become obsolete. Even more, it is dangerous, as we have seen that making war is still sanctioned by some organized religion.

As abhorrent as the bloody crusades were and doubtless offensive to a Savior who taught peace, tolerance, and love of neighbor and enemy alike, the very survival of the human race was not at stake, as it is now. We seem to be living in a religious emergency that too precious few are responding to, and time is fast running out. To those who would quote Scripture in favor of exclusivity, I would say that Jesus Christ the Word of God reveals himself to different cultures in different ways just as a diamond reflects the light at different angles. I propose that Jesus welcomes everyone who tries to live according to the Sermon on the Mount and who lives a life of faith, whether they are Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or other. The One we worship is the Prince of Peace.

Are we humans evil?

I go to a church that teaches that humans are born evil, and it fits nicely into a formulated plan of salvation for us evangelicals, but I am afraid that since the Reformation we have all inherited different variations of the same lens with which to (now unconsciously) know which Scriptures to emphasize and which to leave out. But the Bible is not a 100% unambiguous legal document the way the constitution might be. It was never intended to be that, as it has been a testimony of man’s experience of God and his revelation, and his response to it.

Teaching that humans are evil has been a long-honored tool to pave the way psychologically for a conversion experience, but my experience of Jesus is that he more often brings a message of healing and forgiveness to the “sinners,”–which he also refers to as the sick who need a physician–than he does a conviction of sin. We can say perhaps that Jesus convicts us of “original forgiveness.”

Here is an example of “original forgiveness”:

“Some men came carrying a paralytic on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.

“When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” (Luke.5:18-20) (NIV)

The more I read the Synoptic Gospels, the more I understand that Jesus was not a theologian like St. John and St. Paul were. No, he cared little for some kind of doctrinal formula. He was busy meeting people from where they were, teaching them and healing them. He said to the woman caught in adultery, “Then neither do I condemn you. Go and leave your life of sin.” (John.8-11)

The trouble with teaching that humans are evil is that Genesis says we were created in the image of God. (Genesis.1:26) Also, when he finished creating everything, “God saw all that he had made and said it was very good.” (Genesis.1:31) (NIV) We have in our souls the divine imprint. We were created good. That good can be obscured, covered up with ego and selfishness, even delusion, but it can never be completely lost.

Our acceptance of the “original forgiveness” of Jesus allows us to recover–or discover–that goodness in our souls that God has given us. It is through Jesus–his life and teaching as well as his death and resurrection–that we recover our original nature.

God bless.

On the Nature of Scripture

Before beginning, I would like to echo and affirm the convictions of Christian pastor and writer Brian McLaren concerning the Bible, so there are no misunderstandings about my own motivation in this conversation:

“I believe it (the Bible) is a gift from God, to benefit us in the most important way possible: equipping us so that we can benefit others, so that we can play our part in the ongoing mission of God. My regard for the Bible is higher than ever.” Pg.177 (McLaren, 2004)

As an evangelical Christian, I have seen for many years what can happen when a doctrine of the head replaces an encounter of the heart with the message of Jesus Christ, when faith is mistaken for intellectual assent rather than the constant awareness that Christ and his infinite love and grace are present in our hearts. The result is a hardhearted kind of moralizing rather than a spiritual transformation, with the chief practice being criticism rather than compassion, with moralism placed as an obstacle to grace. Yet this is the very same characteristic that Jesus set himself against. The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, which was adopted in the late 19^th century, was meant to be a protection of orthodoxy, but it has too often been used to promote exclusiveness and moralism at the expense of the Spirit.

In my own circle of evangelical Christianity, Scripture is often treated as a legal document; much like the US Constitution is in secular government. Evangelical theologians do not admit any ambiguity of interpretation in the Bible and probably consider it a sin to suggest there is. What I have discovered by studying other traditions is that one’s interpretation of Scripture, to some extent, always involves an unconscious emphasis on some verses and a de-emphasis of others in order to support the accepted theology of the tradition which, in the case of evangelical Christianity, often goes back to the doctrines hammered out in the Reformation, such as justification through faith alone, the authority of Scripture alone, a closed canon, and so forth; whereas the Catholic Church, with its belief that tradition is as sacred as Scripture, including the statements made by all of the ecclesiastical councils, has accumulated a theological albatross that hangs around the neck of every Catholic theologian, who must argue in agreement with every statement of doctrine or face excommunication. Hans Kung is one of several great theologians in the 20^th century who were excommunicated by the Catholic Church. Many of the major Catholic doctrines were formulated in the Counter-Reformation councils, most were meant to shore up the authority of the Catholic Church—for example, as the interpreter of the Bible–and rebuke those doctrines put forward by the Reformers. Both sides condemned the other. Today, the relationship is strained, at best.

What may be needed is a different paradigm to apply to the way we view Scripture and the nature of divine inspiration. This is where interreligious dialogue can often be helpful, because it can provide another set of spectacles with which to view the issues. Let’s look at how the Hindu’s view the divine inspiration of their Scriptures.

The Upanishads are the kernel of the Vedas, considered to be the breath of the eternal, divinely inspired. Some of them are written as stories, such as the Katha Upanishad, most others as description, often using metaphors. All are considered to be the result of the direct experience of God. In these scriptures, it is the experience of God that is paramount to any particular statement, so that ambiguity, or even seeming contradiction, is not problematic for the Hindu as it is for the Christian. Quoting from Frederick Manchester’s introduction to the Upanishads,

“They (The Upanishads) are to him (the Hindu), as nearly as any human document can be, the expression of divine truth. At the same time it would be a mistake to suppose that his allegiance to their authority is slavish or blind. If he believes them to be the word of God, it is because he believes their truth to be verifiable immediately, at any moment, in his own experience.” (Prabhavananda S. a., 2002).

While I am not suggesting that we apply this same viewpoint to the Bible, it illustrates that a different paradigm for interpreting Scripture may be possible, a view of the Bible other than a strictly logically coherent document, or a legalistic document, because the mind of God is so much greater and more incomprehensible than the mind of man. (Romans.11:33-34)

In order for evangelical Christians to find the new paradigm for interpreting Scripture, we must do some rather uncomfortable deconstruction of the old. The inerrancy doctrine of Scripture has handed to us a document that has been dictated word for word from the mouth of God. This would have required that God’s agency completely took over the Scripture writers in a way that they had no free will during the times they were writing Scripture, because obviously human beings are not “inerrant”. But this does not seem to correspond with what we know about God’s involvement in human affairs; God seems always to allow the free will agency of human beings to take place. This is the nature of God’s relationship to man. Nevertheless, we are taught to believe that, in the instances of the men writing and selecting Scripture, they were during those times, as it were, perfect, in other words, not human by definition.

Within the evangelical tradition, a person puts oneself under suspicion by examining this belief in the inerrancy of Scriptures because it is one of the five “fundamentals” of fundamentalism. There is not going to be a real conversation with most evangelical leaders about this subject, because acceptance of the inerrancy of Scripture, as it is defined today, is required for admittance into the club.

But it does not seem to have a theological basis, nor does it have a basis in Scripture itself. The inerrancy doctrine is something that was created by men, outside of the Bible; a human declaration about the nature of Scripture. Note what Brian McLaren says:

“Interestingly enough, when Scripture talks about itself, it doesn’t use the language we often use in our explanations of its value. For modern Western Christians, words like authority, inerrancy, infallibility, revelation, objective, absolute, and literal are crucial. Many churches or denominations won’t allow people to become members unless they use these words in their description of Scripture….Hardly anyone notices the irony of resorting to the authority of extra-biblical words and concepts to justify one’s belief in the Bible’s ultimate authority.”Pp.182-183 (McLaren, 2004)

Brian McLaren has suggested a narrative approach to the Bible: “We need to reclaim the Bible as narrative.”Pg.185 (McLaren, 2004)

“It helps turn the Bible back to what it is, not a look-it-up encyclopedia of timeless moral truths, but the unfolding narrative of God at work in a violent and sinful world, calling people, beginning with Abraham, into a new way of life.”Pg.190(McLaren, 2004)

Elsewhere, McLaren points out how at times the teaching of Jesus Christ directly contradicts, or at least replaces, the teachings of the Torah. (see Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan: 2004 Pp.177-191, Chapter 10, “Why I Am Biblical” for a fuller discussion)

A biblical example of Jesus Christ superseding the Old Testament is in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus refers to Deuteronomy 19:21:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”Matthew.5:38-39 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002)

Qualitatively, the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture is the same as that made by the Catholic Church about itself, that its decrees are infallible as a result of being under the agency of God, and it is the same as the argument for papal infallibility.

However, if we do not accept the doctrine that the Bible is a document that comes word for word out of God’s mouth, just as if he himself had penned it, won’t the sky fall down? Will we not see the end of Christianity? Is it not as if our Christian faith is a house of cards, and if you remove the card of the inerrancy of Scripture the entire structure will come falling down?

I don’t believe so. I believe that the Christian Testament, inspired as it is by God, is powerful and compelling as it is written, from which the message of Jesus Christ comes out with such power that it does not need this artifice which others before us believed it needed. I still maintain the belief in the “God-breathed” inspiration of the Bible, though my faith does not stand or fall on whether God created the world in six 24-hour days, nor do I have to deny that James disagreed with Paul regarding justification. (James.2:24)

At the end of John’s Gospel, he says that “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”John21:25 (The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984). What the Hindu can remind us is that the Bible, as holy as it is, is but a pale reflection of the true God to which it is a testament. The Bible cannot accurately describe God because God is indescribable. “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” Romans11:33-34 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002) Our reverence for the Bible is correctly placed, but it must not become idolatry in the sense of substituting the testimony itself for the One who is testified about. Our faith is not in a doctrine but in the living Christ himself.

Doctrine is a second-generation experience, already once-removed from the original encounter with God. This is not to say that doctrine doesn’t have its place, but I believe that in my tradition doctrine has been overemphasized while the Spirit has been neglected. I have long been interested in the dynamic tension between doctrine and Spirit. Their relationship has been compared to that between the skeleton and the body (I don’t remember who to credit for this comparison) The skeleton is needed to give the body its shape, structure, support, and to facilitate movement. But doctrine without Spirit is like a skeleton without flesh and blood. It is dead; because, it is the Spirit that gives life, not doctrine. What needs to be communicated today is the living reality of Jesus Christ expressed through his life and teachings. We need to communicate what he said, what he did, and what we need to do about it.

Certainly it is understandable how important doctrine was to St. Paul, who was trying to understand his encounter with Jesus in the only terms he could, through his Jewish tradition and his training as a Pharisee. And so it is important to understand that, in interpreting Scripture, revelation takes place in a specific culture at a specific time in history. The truth of God is absolute, but cultural values are relative. At some point in history, such as Christ’s incarnation in the world, eternity breaks into the fabric of time and history, and into a specific culture. The finite resources of that time are the only means available with which to try to understand something as profound as the infinite love and grace that was brought by Jesus. Such love and grace was, in fact, scandalous, as was the intimacy of the way Jesus addressed his Heavenly Father, the sovereign Lord, as “Abba”.

Multiple readings of the book of Romans reveal how hard Paul worked to forge his doctrine of salvation and its relationship to the Jews. Paul needed to understand the death and resurrection of Jesus in terms of the Jewish sacrificial system of atonement through blood sacrifice. His testimony is true, but we shall also see other dimensions of Jesus, to be discussed elsewhere.

Yes, the New Testament writers worked very hard to convey their message. Look at the beginning of Luke:

“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theopholis, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”Luke1:1-4 (The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984)

The italics above are mine to point out that there was human effort and human decision involved in the writing of the New Testament. God inspired it, but he did not write it.

Some might take this kind of statement as an attack on the authority of the Bible, but it is simply a proposal about the nature of divine inspiration in the Bible; more specifically, that divine inspiration is not the same as dictation (The Koran is believed to be dictated word for word to Mohamed by an angel of God). The Bible is indeed the word of God in the sense that it is an inspired testimony of man’s experience of God in history.

The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture was a reaction against scientific theories such as evolution and also against Protestant Liberalism. It was adopted in 1895 by the Evangelical Alliance as one of the “five ‘fundamentals’ that could not be denied without falling into the error of liberalism.”Pg.257 (Gonzalez, 1985) A fallout of the inerrancy doctrine, as Justo L. Gonzalez has pointed out, is that, “While fundamentalism declared itself a defender of traditional orthodoxy, it gave rise to new interpretations of the Bible. Its emphasis on biblical inerrancy and its rejection of many of the conclusions of biblical scholars made it possible to juxtapose texts from different books of Scripture, and thus to develop new schemes outlining and explaining God’s actions, past, present, and future.”Pg.257 (Gonzalez, 1985)

However, the words “inerrant” and “infallible” are not even biblical, and I don’t even think that they are relevant to the conversation about the nature of divine inspiration. Moreover, these adjectives are only appropriately applied to God himself. Even Jesus was not comfortable being called “good’, much less “infallible” and “inerrant”. “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’”Mark.10:18 (The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984)

In talking about the Bible, we are not talking about a legal document such as the US Constitution or the vehicle code. And we are not talking about a scientific document. Although the Bible contains much history, we are not even talking about a historical document in the sense that history is judged today. The main emphasis of the Bible is man’s experience of, and relationship to, God, of God’s revelation to man in history and man’s response to God. The Bible, having been inspired by God, is the word of God, while the Word of God is Jesus Christ.

Returning to what we were saying about the difficulty to express infinite grace and love in terms of the history, time, and culture to which it has been broken into, Jesus knew this full well, and he took it into account in the teaching method he used, which was to speak in parables. “Jesus spoke all things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using parables.”Matt.13:34 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002) Jesus was constantly looking for ways to explain the kingdom of heaven so that people could relate it to things in their daily lives. In short, he used similes and metaphors because it is not possible to directly communicate the kingdom of heaven using words. So he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like this or like that…”

Among other things, Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a farmer sowing seed (Matt.13:3-8), weeds in a farmer’s crop (Matt.13:24-30;36-42), a mustard seed (Matt.13:31-32), yeast in a batch of dough (Matt.13:33), a hidden treasure in a field (Matt.13:44), a pearl of great price (Matt.13:45), and a large catch of fish (Matt.13:47-50). Perhaps we need our own modern day parables in order to fire our imaginations. Jesus was trying to create a picture of something real and alive, and today we too often treat the parables as stories. Too often we move on to an epistle of Paul or the Gospel of John without giving enough thought to the teachings of Jesus concerning the kingdom of heaven among men.

In terms of the acknowledgement that the values of culture are conditional and relative, the fear of the evangelical Christian is that any concession to the relative value of culture will breach the dam of morality and let loose a flood of immoral anarchy into society. There is plenty of systemic immorality, such as the exploitation of the weak and corporate inhumanity to man, which has been given a wink and a nod by many evangelical leaders in past decades. It seems that this is an issue of the greatest magnitude in our world today.

One can speak of universal moral values in religion that in fact exist, such as not to lie, murder, steal, be unfaithful, or charge usury, not to make inordinate profits, and to take care of the needy, but I do not by saying this attempt to put all religions into a blender and make them all taste the same. I believe that the peaceful coexistence of religions is one of the most important challenges we face today, and that its biggest obstacle is exclusivism, but I also believe personally in the primacy and Lordship of Christ in all things. (This important discussion, and the paradox involved, is a subject for another discussion).

Moving forward, an essential consideration in the interpretation of Scripture is, above all: do not create any doctrine to harm the well-being of others or “deprive the poor of their rights,” Isaiah 10:2 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002) The most tragic mistake of evangelical Christians since the beginning of the eighties was to allow ourselves to be defined by what we were against and who we opposed. This has damaged our public image and our witness for Jesus Christ. Worse than this, it has damaged the image of Jesus Christ himself, because we have not properly represented who Jesus Christ stood for during his public ministry, which was the poor, the sick, and the needy. The people he associated with the most were “sinners and tax collectors”. Jesus Christ was not a moralist. He opposed the moralists of his day, which were the Pharisees. Similarly, as to the emerging Christian conversations now taking place, such as this one about the nature of Scripture, we must be mindful of how we treat one another. There have already been responses by some leaders that only continue to show Christianity in a poor light as the non-Christian world looks on.

I enjoy the “verse by verse” explication of the Bible in my own church, because it is both bibliocentric and Christocentric. However, due to the fact of my exposure to a variety of Christian traditions – among them being Pentecostal, Episcopal, Lutheran, Evangelical, Catholic, and Calvary – I am very much aware that every church and denomination uses its own pair of glasses in the reading of Scripture, and the less its experiential exposure to other traditions is, the more myopic the lens prescription. According to the ecumenical thinker Bede Griffiths, “The biblical revelation has to be seen in the context of history as a stage in the manifestation of the Word of God.” Pg.111 (Griffiths, 1977) Further, “No religion can now remain in isolation. The revelations of the Vedas, of the Buddhist Sutras, and the Koran, have to be evaluated in the light of the biblical revelation and of one another.”pg.112 (Griffiths, 1977)

This statement is somewhat of a bombshell for most evangelical Christians today, but the Christians of tomorrow are going to have to be conversant about world scripture and religions, not for the purpose of refutation, but for relationship and dialogue. The evangelism of tomorrow is going to be done with dialogue rather than preaching. The dialogue is going to be a conversation rather than a debate, and we are going to learn as much as teach. The foundation of evangelism will be relationship. The relationship is what my friend calls John the Baptist evangelism, preparing the way for the message of the Lord. I maintain that we as Christians can learn about other religions in an experiential way and to respect them without any compromise to our belief in the primacy and Lordship of Jesus Christ.

A complete re-examination of the Bible, a fresh rereading, is well worth it. But we cannot impose upon it our need for logical consistency or insist that there be no ambiguity. Scripture is a testimony that speaks above all to the human heart. In the story of the conversion of Zacchaeus, the tax collector from Jericho, the encounter with the presence of Jesus is the primary encounter. There was not a systematic theology preached by Jesus in the synoptic Gospels other than to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”Mark.12:30 (The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984); and to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”Mark.12:31. (The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984) According to James M. Somerville, “The kind of faith Jesus had was not based on deductive or inductive reason, neither did it consist in a blind acceptance of a set of doctrinal propositions. It was an orientation of the heart, suffused with loving trust in the wisdom and goodness of God, come what may.” (Somerville, 1997)

The doctrine of salvation, as we think of it today, developed after the resurrection of Jesus. However true it is—and I affirm that it is true—Jesus himself spoke of salvation in somewhat different terms in these three Gospels. It is as if he preached a doctrine of original forgiveness rather than original sin. Indeed, he forgave sins without even being asked. “Some men brought to him a paralytic, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.’”Matthew.9:2 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002) This is a paradox we can embrace joyfully. Such grace is scandalous for the very religious who equate salvation with legalism, but it ought not to scandalize us! The God of the religious is a lawyer; our God is a Savior.

In an evangelical Christian Interspirituality, the idea that the major religions are merely false doctrines is a paradigm that is obsolete on a globe where it is imperative that religions coexist peacefully for the sake of all humankind. Having studied other religions, I no longer see rival gods, but only God. A Muslim saying is that there is no God but God. In the book of Sirach of the Catholic Bible, it says, “There is no God but you.” The Svetasvatara Upanishad says, “The source of all scriptures thou art, and the source of all creeds.” Pg.125 (Prabhavananda S. a., 2002) How can this be? Truth comes to different cultures in different manifestations. Ecumenical writer Bede Griffiths says,

“But it is not possible to confine the Spirit to one scripture alone. We have to recognize the voice of the Spirit in every scripture and discover the hidden Source from which all scriptures come….Jesus spoke of it as the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This was the essential content of his message: ‘The kingdom of God is at hand.’ Mark.1:15. But what is the kingdom of God? Let us say that it means the divine life among men. This is the essential message of all religion. The infinite, transcendent, holy Mystery, which is what is signified by ‘God’ or ‘Heaven’, is present in the world, and has its kingdom, its reign, its dwelling among men. Is not this the message of all the scriptures? ‘This Brahman (God), this Self (indwelling Spirit), smaller than the small, greater than the great, is hidden in the heart of every creature.’ Svetasvatara Upanishad….’I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people.’ Leviticus.26:12….We have to meditate on these words in the heart, until the Truth shines out and enlightens us, until we experience the presence of God, the kingdom of heaven, within.” Pp.107-108 (Griffiths, 1977)

But doesn’t this view claim that all religions are the same? Not at all! There is a divine plan, preexistent in the Word: “A plan to be carried out in the fullness of time, to bring all things into one in him (Christ), in the heavens and on the earth.” Ephesians.1:9-10 (John A. Gurrieri, Executive Director, Bishop’s Committee on the Liturgy, 1988) It should be noted that the NIV translation, “to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ”Ephesians.1:10b (The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984) is somewhat misleading. The most correct translation from the Greek, although grammatically redundant, is, “to sum up all things in Christ, the things on (in) the heavens and the things on the earth, in him”Ephesians.1:10b (Brown, 1990) The NIV translation somewhat obscures the cosmic and universal nature of Christ’s salvation expressed in these verses. Jesus Christ the Word of God is the umbrella over all religion. Henri Le Saux wrote in his book, Prayer:

“Christian theology is at times so overwhelmed by the dazzling light of God’s revelation in history, as recorded in the Bible, that it almost forgets the splendor of his manifestation in the Cosmos. Yet Christ is the Lord of the Cosmos; indeed, it is only because he is this, that he is also the Lord of History. In him and through him all things were made (John 1:3); to him all things return, and in him all things subsist. In his image, as he is the image of the Father, all things have been created.

“The cosmic religions, which of course are unaware of Christ as the Lord of History, nevertheless worship him, without knowing his revealed Name, as the Lord of the Cosmos; and perhaps they are intermediaries through whom the Spirit is reminding Christians not to belittle this fundamental aspect of the mystery of Christ.”Pp.69-70 (LeSaux, 1967)

In his sermon in Athens:

“Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.’” Acts 17:22-23 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002)

Even if anonymously, the Christ of the Cosmos is present, to some extent, inasmuch as they contain truth, in other religions. You will recognize him when you meet an undeniable truth in world scripture. God is the source of Truth. He has rained it down variously around the globe in different times in history, culminating in Jesus Christ the Word of God. In some places it sprinkles and in other places it pours down.

“The heavens proclaim the glory of God

And the firmament shows forth the work of his hands.

Day unto day takes up the story

And night unto night makes known the message.”

Pg.132. Psalm.19:1-2. (John A. Gurrieri, Executive Director, Bishop’s Committee on the Liturgy, 1988)

We have said that the argument over the factual inerrancy of Scripture stems from an overly rationalistic reading of the Bible, and is in reality irrelevant to the nature of divine inspiration, and from inappropriately assigning characteristics that ought to be reserved for God alone. I would now propose that a very good paradigm for experiencing Scripture is in reality very old, something akin to the liturgy, experiencing Scripture prayerfully and meditatively more than intellectually.

M. Basil Pennington has pointed out that, “A purely rationalistic approach to the Sacred Scripture will always go astray.”Pg.99 (Pennington, 1998) One can become distracted by a debate about whether God created the world in six days measurable by a 24-hour rotation of the earth around its axis, and miss the point that God indeed create the universe and see how marvelous it is! One can get caught up in a propositional doctrine of salvation, and miss the wonder and awe the apostles felt at the resurrection of the Lord.

We evangelical Christians have become great explicators of Scripture. We use inductive and deductive techniques to study the Bible. What is needed today is for us to experience Scripture with our hearts and even our senses. “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Italics mine)Psalm.34:8 (Zondervan NIV Study Bible, 2002) We need to savor every word of Scripture and appreciate that it truly is the word of God.

Something that I learned about in the Catholic Church and that M. Basil Pennington writes about in LECTIO DIVINA, Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures, is this very concept of praying and meditating on the Scriptures. This practice came out of the monastery movement, in which monks gathered together at specific times of the day to pray and sing a selection of Scriptures, primarily from the Psalms. This developed into a four-week cycle of Scripture selection which came to be known variously as the Breviary, the Prayer of the Church, the Liturgy of the Hours, or the Divine Hours. The first known cycle of the Psalter was recorded by St. Benedict in 550 AD. It is available today by the name of Christian Prayer and Shorter Christian Prayer. This is a great way to experience the Scriptures, and I still use it today in my daily devotions. Non-Catholics may wish to skip some of the specifically Catholic aspects of the Liturgy of the Hours, and still find in it a wonderful source for experiencing the Scriptures prayerfully. Otherwise, non-Catholics might enjoy Phyllis Tickle’s version, called The Divine Hours.

Many of the emerging Christian communities practice a liturgical experience of Scripture. Albert Nolan has noted the success of Taizé, an ecumenical retreat center in France, which attracts thousands of young people a year and employs liturgies without the preaching of doctrines or dogmas. He says, “There are long periods of silence, and the prayers, the songs, and the worship services are simple and quietly repetitive.”Pg.14 (Nolan, 2006)

We have become so accustomed to our analysis and explication of Scripture that it is all too easy to miss the Spirit of God that lives in God’s word. The practice of praying the Scriptures is a way to experience the Spirit of God that is contained in the Scriptures in the absence of—without interference from—intellectual analysis. Liturgy is worship, experience, and relationship rather than intellectual doctrine or theology. It brings the Scriptures down from the head into the heart. We may study the Psalms today, whereas the ancient Hebrews sang them or prayed them, and this is the purpose of liturgy. Liturgy is above all a matter of the heart; because, in the final analysis, we cannot think our way to God. We must come to God through love, by way of the heart.

Works Cited

Brown, R. K. (1990). The New Greek-English Interlinear New Testament. Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Gonzalez, J. L. (1985). The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Griffiths, B. (1977). Return to the Center. Springfield: Templegate Publishers.

John A. Gurrieri, Executive Director, Bishop’s Committee on the Liturgy. (1988). Christian Shorter Prayer. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co.

LeSaux, H. (1967). Prayer. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.

New American Bible, St. Joseph Edition. (1992). New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co.

Nolan, A. (2006). Jesus Today. Maryknoll: Orbis books.

Pennington, M. B. (1998). Lectio Divina, Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co.

Prabhavananda, S. a. (1995). Bhagavad-Gita. Hollywood: Barnes and Noble and Vedanta Society of So. Cal.

Prabhavananda, S. a. (2002). The Upanishads. New York: Signet Classic.

Satprakashananda, S. (1975). Hinduism and Christianity. St. Louis: Vedanta Society of St. Louis.

Somerville, J. M. (1997). The Mystical Sense of the Gospels. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co.

The Holy Bible, New International Version. (1984). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Zondervan NIV Study Bible. (2002). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.