Belief and Eternal Life: A Passage from Liberating the Bible

I have been editing the manuscript of my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor's Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, because a reissuing of that book is in the works to have it come out again at a lower price. I came across these lines in the stop at the Gospel of John. I find the thoughts I expressed here to be immensely important. They do nothing less than redefine what Christianity is, and they do that in a way that makes it so much more powerful, so much more life giving, for us today. So I'm posting them here. I hope you find them as meaningful as I do.

(c)Thomas C. Sorenson 2018. All rights reserved.

Believe and Eternal Life: An Exercise in Biblical Language 

Incarnation is the major theme of John, but there are at least two other themes that we must consider in order to understand just what the Gospel of John is all about. The first is the concept “believe.” The second is the concept “eternal life.” Both concepts are widely misunderstood. It turns out that they don’t mean what we generally take them to mean. Both are good examples of the importance of understanding the original Greek for understanding some of the central themes, phrases, and concepts of the New Testament. 

Believe 

In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ mission is to get people to believe in him. We see this aspect of the Gospel of John in the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16 There Jesus says that God sent him to earth “so that everyone who believes in him” might have eternal life. To understand what the fourth Gospel is all about we have to understand what the Greek word or word root in words that get translated as various forms of the noun belief or the verb to believe meant at the end of the first century when the Gospel of John was written. It was of course written in the common Greek of the time, so understanding the original Greek is obviously rather important in our attempts to understand John. Believe didn’t mean what people today usually take it to mean. That difference of meaning has led to a wide-spread misunderstanding of what the Gospel of John is all about, indeed what Christianity is all about.

What does the word believe mean to you? In common parlance today to believe usually means something like to accept the truth of some proposition without conclusive proof that the proposition is true. We believe what we take to be true but cannot firmly establish to be true. To believe means to hold the opinion that something is true. Today to believe is mostly a mental, cognitive activity. It is an action of the mind in accepting something as true.

It was not always so. Theologians today have done much work to discover the origins of today’s understanding of the concept “believe” and to compare that understanding to older definitions of believe and to the original meaning in Greek of the word that gets translated in the New Testament as believe. That work has revealed that believe as it is used in the New Testament actually meant something quite different from what it means today, quite different from giving intellectual assent to the truth of some proposition.

All of the nouns and verbs in John that are translated as some form of belief or believe have as their root the Greek word “pistis.” In New Testament Greek pistis doesn’t mean give intellectual assent to or accept as true without conclusive proof or hold the opinion that something is true as believe mostly does to us today. It isn’t about cognitive activity at all, or at least it isn’t only or primarily about cognitive activity. “Pistis” doesn’t mean to accept as true. It means to trust, to be loyal to, to give one’s heart to. It isn’t a matter of cognition. It is a matter of commitment.

It may be helpful in understanding what pistis meant and what believe means in our translations of John if we trace the translation history of pistis as it came into English as believe. The first step was the translation of the Greek pistis into Latin. In the creeds it was translated as “credo.” You may be familiar with the first line of the Nicene Creed in Latin (many of us are). It goes “ Credo in unum deum,” always rendered in English are “I believe in one God.” The Latin word credo has as its root the Latin word cor, which means heart. Credo, in its original meaning, preserves the original meaning of pistis as to give one’s heart to. It is a good translation of pistis into Latin.

Jump ahead several centuries, and people began to translate the creeds and the Bible into English. They translated them into English from the Latin, which was the language of the western Church at the time. They translated the Latin credo into English as believe. That translation from the Latin was preserved when people translated the Bible into English not from the Latin but from the original Greek. The problem is that believe didn’t mean then, in the 15th, 16^th, and early 17^th centuries, what it means now. Theologians like Marcus Borg and Diana Butler Bass (who isn’t actually a theologian but who sometimes talks like one) are fond of saying that the original meaning of believe was the same as its linguistic cousin “belieben” in German. Belieben means to love or, as Borg and Bass say, “to belove.” We don’t use belove as a verb any more, but we see it in our word beloved, as in “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…,” the traditional opening of a wedding ceremony. Early on in the history of English translations, believe was a good translation into English of pistis and credo.

As we have seen, however, the meaning of believe has changed. That change came about over several centuries, beginning with the rationalism of the European Enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and the scientific revolution that was a big part of it. In the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution truth, which had been a much broader concept that included mythic and symbolic truth as well as factual truth, was reduced to fact. Science established facts, and religious people wanted their truth to be the same order of truth as scientific truth. Never mind that religious truth is unavoidably of a different order than scientific truth, that’s what they wanted. They wanted their truth to be factual truth. Over time factual truth came to be the only kind of truth people knew. For most Western people today it still is.[1] If only fact is truth, then the things we say we believe must be facts. Otherwise they are false. So believe came to mean to take as fact. The mind displaced the heart as the seat of belief. Intellectual assent to propositions about God as factually true replaced the whole person trusting in God, giving one’s heart to God, which was the original meaning of the word believe.

Consider what a difference this understanding of belief as trust, as loyalty, as giving one’s heart makes in how we understand the Gospel of John. Take our verse John 3:16 again. In the NRSV translation it reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (Emphasis added) In the modern understanding of believe this verse becomes an instruction to give intellectual assent to the idea that Jesus is who in John he says he is, namely, the Son of God Incarnate. The key to eternal life (see below for what that means) is thinking that Jesus is God. The key to eternal life becomes holding the opinion that Jesus is the Word (or the Son) of God become human.

Now consider John 3:16 with the original meaning of the word believe rather than the modern one. The verse then becomes a call to “belove” Jesus rather than to give intellectual assent to propositions about him. The key to eternal life (see below for what that means) becomes trusting in Jesus Christ, being loyal to Jesus Christ, giving one’s heart to Jesus Christ and to the God we know in and through him. Certainly the mind is involved in this believing, for the heart cannot love what the mind cannot accept. Yet belief becomes so much more than a mere action of the mind. It becomes commitment of the whole person—mind, heart, body, and soul—to being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. It becomes a commitment to relate to him as beloved and knowing, not with the mind only but with our whole being, that we are his beloved and God’s beloved.

In this understanding of believe we show our belief in Jesus Christ not only or even primarily by the words we say about him but by lives lived after his example, lives of peace, justice, compassion, forgiveness, and love for God, neighbor, and self. Returning to the original meaning of believe does nothing less than change what it means to be a Christian. Our faith will be very different, and very much more life giving, if we can just recapture the original meaning of the word believe. 

Eternal Life 

Eternal life is another key concept in the Gospel of John, and any adequate understanding of the Gospel of John requires an adequate understanding of the term eternal life.[2] As with the word believe, it turns out that eternal life doesn’t mean what the modern world generally takes it to mean. What do you think of when you hear the phrase eternal life? If you are like most people today you probably hear “life without end in heaven after we die.” There are indeed a couple of passages in John that at least suggest that understanding of the afterlife (if not exactly of eternal life). John’s Jesus does say “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places….I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2. Yet endless life in heaven actually isn’t what the Gospel of John means by eternal life.

John’s Jesus tells us at one point in the Gospel (and only at one point) what he means by eternal life. At the beginning of his long prayer in chapter 17, known as the Great Priestly Prayer, Jesus says: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people to give eternal life to all whom you gave him [i.e., all people]. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” John 17:1-3 (emphasis added) Notice that John’s Jesus doesn’t say “this is how you get eternal life.” I have often heard these verses interpreted that way, but that simply isn’t what they say. They don’t say this is the source of eternal life or the way to eternal life. They say this is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ.

Try thinking of it this way.[3] The original Greek phrase that is translated into English as “eternal life” is zoes aionis. Zoes (or simply zoe) is the ordinary Greek word for life. There are no issues there. The adjective aionis however is more problematic. Usually translated “eternal,” its root is the word aion. Aion means “age.” In the New Testament it is often used to refer to the world the way it is now when used with the adjective “this.” When Paul says do not be conformed to this world he says in the Greek do not be conformed to this aion. The word can also refer to the promised age to come, the age of God, the age of the Second Coming. In this meaning it refers to the world the way it will be at the end of time. It is an eschatological term, one that refers to God’s transformation of the world in the last days. In that age to come all people will know God intimately because God will be present on earth in a new way. The Book of Revelation, in one of its beautiful passages rather than one of its brutally ugly ones, puts it this way: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” Revelation 21:3[4]

Now please consider how John’s Jesus defines the term “eternal life,” zoes aionis, this way. “And this is life of the age to come, that all may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Eternal life becomes not something that we get after we die. It becomes a kind of life on earth, a life transformed by our knowledge of God in and through Jesus Christ.

Now take this understanding of eternal life and apply it and our revised understanding of believe to John 3:16. That famous verse now reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who gives their heart to him may not perish but live the life of the age to come, which is life in the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ.” Eternal life is life in the presence and knowledge of God the way Revelation envisions it for the age to come, only that life lived now, because giving our hearts to Jesus Christ gives us knowledge of the only true God now, in this life.

Think for a moment how different that way of understanding John 3:16 is from the conventional understanding. That famous verse today is almost universally understood to mean you have to take as true the proposition that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, your Lord and Savior, so that your soul can go to heaven when you die. That way of understanding the verse makes Christianity be all about giving intellectual assent to some words in order to secure some blessed thing after you die. As Marcus Borg says somewhere, it is strange to think that God cares that much about what we think; but today’s common understanding of John 3:16, and indeed of the whole Gospel of John and the entire Christian faith, makes the faith be about what we think, and about some longed-for future life after we die rather than this life. I think Jesus would be appalled. Our re-visioned way of hearing John 3:16 makes it, and the entire Christian faith, be about the whole orientation of our lives in this life, here and now. It makes the faith be about the whole person, not only the mind. It makes the faith be about how we live now, not only about how we may live hereafter. Don’t you think that way of seeing the Christian faith is a lot truer to what Jesus and God really want from us? I do.

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[1] For a discussion of a much broader meaning of truth see my Liberating Christianity, chapter 4.

[2] Perhaps surprisingly, the phrase appears mostly in the first half of the Gospel but only rarely in the second half. That difference in the Evangelist’s usage of the term seems to be related to a change in Jesus’ audience as the Gospel unfolds. In the first half of the Gospel Jesus speaks mostly to the people generally and to his opponents. In the second half of the Gospel he speaks mostly to his disciples, people who already believe in him (see above for what that means). The disciples then already have eternal life (whatever that means—stay tuned), so Jesus speaks to them more about love. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” John 13:34

[3] I have never seen this exegesis anywhere, and perhaps a real Greek scholar could show that there is some flaw in it, but it makes sense to me. I offer it to you so see if it makes sense to you too.

[4] I do not mean to suggest by citing Revelation here that John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, is also the author of the Gospel of John. He isn’t.

Introduction to a New Book

This is the draft introduction to a book I have begun writing with the working title "The Principles of Progressive Christianity. I'd appreciate any comments you might have.

Introduction

(c) Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2018. All rights reserved.

It may seem a strange way to begin a theology book, but let me tell you a little bit about myself. Why I want to start that way will, I trust, become clear shortly. I began life as a premature twin who wasn’t supposed to live through my first night. I’m seventy-one years old now, so I guess I beat that prediction by a good bit. Still, I grew up a skinny, uncoordinated, unathletic, quite mousy and meek boy. My story here sounds a bit trite I suppose, since I’m hardly the only one to have lived it, but it is true nonetheless. I was always the last kid chosen for the grade school sports teams. I was an easy mark for bullies. Once when I was in about the fourth grade some bullies stopped me as I was walking home from school, harassed me verbally, and wouldn’t let me keep walking. Once when I was in high school I came out of a neighborhood convenience store and some bullies blocked my way, berating me and not letting me go on my way home. I was never cool. I was never “in.” I was never very good at anything at least until I got to college, where all of a sudden I became a pretty good student. I never felt fully accepted anywhere but at home. I’m straight, but I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was well into my twenties. Even being a good college student made me a bit of an outsider with the small circle of friends and roommates I did develop there. I was the brainiac, not the party guy, not the fun guy, not the popular guy. I was a weakling, a nerd, a geek, and in my own mind at least always an outsider.

So why do I begin a book on the principles of progressive Christianity with that bit of biographical background? Because progressive Christianity is about, among other things, justice, and I have long had a passion for justice. I have long taught and preached that Christianity is about transforming the world from its typical worldly ways, the ways of violence, exploitation, hatred, and war, to the ways of God as taught by Jesus Christ, the ways of nonviolence, justice, love, and peace. My parishioners have known me as having a passion for justice. My clergy colleagues know me as having a passion for justice. And in my later years of life I have come to understand the connection between that passion and my perhaps not atypical but certainly unpleasant childhood and young adult years. I am passionate about justice because I have felt the injustice of the bullies who picked on me when I was young. I am passionate about justice because I have felt the isolation of being the outsider, of not being accepted or at least not feeling accepted. And I am passionate about justice because I am a Christian. 

I have just about every kind of privilege it is possible for an American to have. I’m male, white, straight, reasonably able-bodied, Christian, not wealthy but not poor either, very highly educated, respected by most who know me, looked to by some as a teacher and maybe even as a prophet. Yet I know at least a little of what it is to be none of those things for the reasons I just stated above. Even my twin brother, who was always bigger than I was, picked on me sometimes. I knew then and remember now what it is to be vulnerable, never to know when the tough guys were going to bully me. I know what it is to feel unaccepted and unacceptable. I don’t claim to know what it is to be Black in America, or gay, transgender, poor, female, or undocumented. I’ve never been any of those things, but I know at least something of what it is to be the outsider, to be unaccepted. So I stand for justice. I argue for justice. I get angry at all the injustice that is always afoot in the world, and I tie my Christian faith to Jesus’ demands for justice. To Jesus’ rejection of all prejudice. To Jesus’ inclusion of the excluded. How I see Christianity as entailing all of these things will, I trust, become apparent in the pages that follow. 

Here’s another relevant thing about me. At least since I began seminary at age fifty-one I have been accused of living way too much in my head. I readily admit that I do, although I know that there is an emotional and even a sentimental side of me that isn’t always as apparent to others as is the intellectual side. Why do I live so much in my head? Perhaps I’m just built that way, but I suspect that it is because academics was the first thing I was ever any good at. If academics is what you’re good at, you spend most of your time being academic. You approach subjects, issues, maybe even life itself as an academic exercise, and academics is head work. So what follows here is theology. It is head work. That’s what I write mostly. Head work. So be it. 

Yet the head work of theology matters. How we think about God, about Jesus Christ, and the Bible matters. Elizabeth Johnson, the great Catholic feminist theologian, says the God image functions. It works in the world. It determines a lot of things, including what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, what is normal and what is abnormal, what is beautiful and what is ugly. I write theology because I love theology, but I also write theology because theology matters. It really matters in the world whether we see Christianity as progressive or conservative; and, by the way, I am convinced that the phrase “conservative Christianity” is an oxymoron. So here I go again into another piece of head work. Yet what I say here really matters. If Christianity can’t free itself from the straitjacket in which conservative faith tries to constrain the faith it will die; and in that case, die it should. 

At the end of 2017 I retired from parish ministry. I resigned as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Maltby and entered into what in my local Conference of the United Church of Christ, in which I hold ordained ministerial standing, we call active retirement.[1] The Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, LMHC, the Jungian analyst and retired Episcopal priest whom I have seen regularly for the last twenty years as my therapist, told me once as I neared retirement that he wants me to be a voice of progressive Christianity in my retirement, a voice that he says isn’t heard at all or at least not nearly enough today.  (About the voice of progressive Christianity not being heard enough today at least he is right.) Kimbrough says he can’t think of anyone better able to be that voice than me. As flattering as that statement of his is, I don’t know that I will ever be such a voice. Yet shortly before I retired at a meeting of the West-side Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ on which I serve the Rev. Catherine Foote, doing our devotions, read something from a book that leaped out at me. I don’t recall the title or author of the book, and most of what she read didn’t mean much to me. There was however that one line that jumped out. Catherine read: “Make your limitations part of your story not an obstacle to your story.” At least, that’s how I recorded the line in my notes that day. My limitations are many, and they prominently include the utter inability to be a self-promoter. When I say I doubt that I will ever be the voice of progressive Christianity that my Jungian analyst wants me to be it’s not because I don’t think I have a voice that deserves to be heard. It’s because the voices that get heard are for the most part the voices of self promoters. I am not and never will be a self-promoter. I’m too introverted for that. I may be too insecure for that. I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I wanted to. Yet for all that I do have things to say. I am a lousy self-promoter, but I am a good theologian and a decent writer. I will make my limitations as a self-promoter part of my story not a limitation to my story. I won’t let my shortcomings in promotion stop me from using my gifts as a theologian and writer though the audience I reach may be small. One way or another as I retire from parish ministry I will be a voice for progressive Christianity in our current disturbing, even appalling, American context. 

Perhaps a few brief stories from my time as a parish pastor will illustrate why we must transform Christianity back into the progressive faith that it really is, why we must help Christianity rediscover its true self. Sadly, for most people both inside the church and outside it, Christianity isn’t progressive at all. In other words, they don’t get what Christianity really is. As a progressive Christian pastor in conservative communities I have accumulated several stories that at least show what we progressive Christians are up against. So here, for what they’re worth, are a few of those stories. 

At times during my career as a parish pastor it was my practice most every Friday or Saturday to send out an email to the members of the church I was serving telling them a little bit about what would be happening at the church on the coming Sunday. Once I said in such an email that I was going to disagree with some Gospel text or other because I think it reflects first century anti-Jewish prejudice rather than any kind of divine truth. Right before that service one of my congregants, a good man who served as the church’s treasurer, told me he would like a couple of minutes after my sermon to say a few words. I should perhaps have put him off, but I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t because I knew, though the congregation didn’t, that I had already decided to resign my position as pastor of that church. Whatever the reason, I said OK. After I finished my sermon I recognized him, and he stood to speak. He said that every word of the Bible was inspired and that therefore we had to find truth in every part of it. At least, that’s what I remember him saying. I didn’t argue with him though I strongly disagree with his statement. I did respond by telling the congregation that I was about to resign as their pastor.

In 2017 during Advent I was leading the worship service at the church I was serving at the time. During the time for the prayers of the people a woman who I always called (to myself, not publicly) my Fundamentalist offered a prayer that people remember what Christmas is really about and that it isn’t about shopping and gifts and all the cultural falderal that we surround it with. Up to that point I couldn’t have agreed with her more, but then she said what Christmas is all about for her. Indeed, I suspect that what she said sums up pretty well what the whole Christian faith is about for her. She said Christmas means that “he came down so we could go up.” Over the years I had gotten pretty good at finessing prayer concerns that included statements I didn’t want to affirm as I repeated them for the congregation, and I guess I handled this one well enough. Trust me, Christianity is not about “he came down so we could go up.” That widespread understanding is both hopelessly simplistic and totally misunderstands what the Gospels tell us about Jesus.

Once when I was leading a worship service I was disagreeing with a Gospel text that had Jesus saying somehow that belief in him is the only way to be in good with God. It was probably from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says lots of things that sound like that. A couple of people I didn’t know were visiting that Sunday. They were sitting in a back pew near the front door of the church. One of those folks, a woman, stood up, shouted “You’re wrong!” and walked out. Other visitors to that same church on a different Sunday when I was saying that Jesus isn’t the only way to God approached me after the service and asked me if I really thought Jesus hadn’t said that he was the only way to God. I said yes, I don’t think he ever said that. One of the visitors replied “that really troubles us.” I was relieved to see in the church’s guest book that they were from out of town and wouldn’t have been back in any event.

The first church I served as pastor became what we call Open and Affirming early in my time with them, and our being Open and Affirming, that is, our fully accepting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people as worthy and fully equal children of God, got splashed all over the front page of the weekly newspaper in the little town that church is in. A woman I knew in the town to be a Pentecostal minister called and said she wanted to come see me. I didn’t find that request surprising because I was serving on the board of a community organization she had organized. We held our board meetings at my church. I knew there was trouble, though, when she walked into my office with little bits of Post-it notes sticking out of the Bible she was carrying. She apparently thought that I must not have been aware of the places in the Bible where conservatives say, mistakenly, that God condemns homosexuality. I assured her that I was well aware of those passages and still believed that God loves and accepts LGBT folks on the same terms as God loves and accepts straight folks. Our relationship ended shortly thereafter when she asked the members of the board to suggest places we could meet other than at the church I was serving.

I knew another minister in town when our acceptance of gay people got splashed all over the local newspaper. He was a very conservative Spanish-speaking pastor of a Baptist church of some sort. He called and said he wanted to come see me. Of course he wanted to talk about our heretical position of not hating gay people. He kept asking: Do you really believe what the paper said you believe? I said that the paper had gotten a couple of minor details wrong but that on the whole yes, I believed what the paper said I believed. He couldn’t actually believe that I, a Christian pastor, could believe such a thing. I suggested that he read Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity, which was a fairly new book at the time, if he wanted to understand how I see the faith.[2] He said that he would and would get back to me; but as he left my office he said: “Until then I can have no more contact with you because I consider your position to be apostate.” I never heard from him again. I’d never been called apostate before. Apostate means abandoning some religious belief, principle, or tradition. It applies historically to people who were once Christian who renounced their Christian faith, often when threatened with persecution or martyrdom because of it. I certainly hadn’t been aware that to be Christian you have to hate gay people. I’m still not.

After that local news story came out the phone rang in my office one day. I made the mistake of answering it. The caller identified herself as a Christian who lived in a nearby town. She said: How can you call yourself a Christian pastor if you believe those things? To her, it seems, you couldn’t be a Christian if you didn’t hate gay people. She spouted Leviticus 18:22 at me, the verse that calls lying with a man as with a woman an abomination.[3] I asked her if she ever wore clothing made of mixed fibers, say a cotton wool blend. She allowed as how she did. I told her Leviticus prohibits that too. See Leviticus 19:19. She said “It does?” I assured her that it does, and I must give this woman her due. She said that if it does prohibit that, then probably we shouldn’t do it. 

Allow me just one more story about that church becoming Open and Affirming. I knew the pastor of a conservative church across the street from my UCC church. He is a good man. He has served as chaplain for the town’s police department for many years, and he was a wheel in the town’s pastors association to which I nominally belonged but had never had anything to do with. He told me that he and the pastor of the largest conservative evangelical church in town, who was also the head of the pastors association, wanted to see me. We met the Monday after Easter. I expected my church and me to be thrown out of that association, so I asked a lay member of my church to come with me to that meeting. I thought that if we were going to be thrown out of the only pastors association in town, I wanted my people to hear it from someone other than me or at least in addition to me. We weren’t thrown out of the association, but a couple of interesting things happened during that meeting. These two ministers wanted to know if I had preached Jesus’ resurrection the day before, on Easter. I assured them that I had, twice. I didn’t bother to tell them that I probably understand the resurrection much differently than they do. I didn’t think there was any point in doing that. During that meeting I explained that modern science understands human sexuality much differently than the ancient world did, that the worlds of the Bible had no understanding of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. The fellow who was the lead pastor of the big conservative evangelical church responded: “Yes, but the problem with applying your sociological understandings (sic) to the Bible is that then you don’t know what to take literally.” I allowed as how that was true. I didn’t explain that while he tries to solve the problem by taking it all literally, I solve it by taking none of it literally.[4] Again, I didn’t think there was any point in doing that. 

All of these stories illustrate a central truth about Christianity in our world today. In our context today most people are ignorant of true Christianity. They think that “evangelical Christianity” is true Christianity. It isn’t. They think that Christians vote for Donald Trump and other politicians of his ilk. Most of us Christians don’t. Even many people who attend Christian churches and have done so all their lives think Fundamentalism is the true old time religion. It isn’t.[5] A great many people would agree with that person I mentioned who summed up the meaning of Christianity as being “Jesus came down so we could go up.” That is most definitely not what Christianity is mostly about. It is however what most of the Christian church since the fourth century CE has succeeded in convincing people that Christianity is mostly about. The understanding of Christianity as being about what we have to do and believe and not do and not belief so that our eternal souls will go to a blissful eternity in heaven after we die is a gross distortion of biblical faith. Ancient Judaism, the original biblical faith and the originating faith of Christianity, did not believe in an afterlife that involved judgment and either eternal bliss or eternal agony at all. It hardly believed in a human soul at all, only that we all end up in some place of a sort of shadowy pseudo-existence called Sheol, often translated as “the Pit.” 

Christianity grew out of that ancient Judaism (as indeed did today’s rabbinical Jewish faith at essentially the same time). The earliest Christians believed in an afterlife that involved judgment, but it wasn’t an afterlife of an eternal soul. Rather, it entailed bodily resurrection at the end time here on earth. It is not clear whether Jesus shared that belief, though he may have. It is clear that it was not what his life and teaching were primarily about. It is not what today’s progressive Christianity is primarily about either. So just what is today’s progressive Christianity about? What are its principles? What follows is an attempt to state in relatively condensed form what those principles are. 

Progressive Christianity is true Christianity. Progressive Christianity is the old-time religion, though original Christianity wasn’t just progressive, it was revolutionary—nonviolently revolutionary. Jesus of Nazareth, the one most Christians confess to be God Incarnate and to be the world’s Lord and Savior, preached a radical overturning of the ways of his world—and ours. He called that overturning the kingdom of God. Today we don’t much like his use of the word “kingdom,” for it is too male exclusive and domination centered for our liking. Many progressive Christians today replace Jesus’ word kingdom with words like realm or, one I really don’t like, “kindom.” I don’t like “kindom” because it is entirely too cutesy for my taste, and it isn’t really a word; but I suppose it is preferable to kingdom in today’s world. In what follows I will use realm of God rather than kingdom of God. I think that phrase conveys Jesus’ meaning to people today without the negative connotations of kingdom.

The important point, however, is what Jesus meant when he said realm (literally kingdom) of God. He meant a world turned on its head. In the realm of God the last are first and the first are last. The poor are blessed and the rich are sent away empty. The meek shall inherit the earth, and the peacemakers are the children of God. Enemies are loved and prayed for, and all violence is rejected. The transformation of the world comes not through violence either human or divine but through the transformation of human hearts and minds one person at a time. In the realm of God the highest value is justice, and justice means not due process but real care about and care for the poor and the marginalized. All are equal, and no one is judged or rejected because of any aspect of her or his God-given humanity. The principles of progressive Christianity which follow are grounded primarily in Jesus’ teaching of the realm of God.

One criticism that is often leveled against progressive Christians both by conservative Christians and by progressive Christians themselves is that progressive Christians can easily state what they are against but have a hard time explaining what they are for. There is significant truth in this criticism. One purpose of the principles which follow is to state concisely and precisely what progressive Christians stand for. These are of course my principles of progressive Christianity. Progressive Christianity does not insist that everyone believe the same thing. Some, perhaps many, progressive Christians will disagree with the inclusion of some of these principles and will wish that others that are not included here had been. So be it. The acceptance of diversity of opinion as well as diversity of people is one of progressive Christianity’s primary virtues.

Finally, before I begin setting forth the principles of progressive Christianity it is, I suppose, incumbent on me at least to attempt to define progressive Christianity. Anything close to a full understanding of progressive Christianity will come from studying its principles, yet we should have some common understanding of what we’re talking about when we talk about progressive Christianity before we begin. There are, obviously, two words in the phrase progressive Christianity. They both deserve definition. Christianity is perhaps the easier of the two to define. Christianity is the conviction of the reality of a transcendent, spiritual dimension of being that we call God experienced through Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, that is, as God’s Anointed One, come to reveal to humanity as much of the nature of God as humans are capable of comprehending. It is a decision and commitment by a person to live her or his relationship with God through the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Christian tradition. It is a commitment of the entire person, body, mind, heart, and spirit. It is not an uncritical commitment precisely because it includes commitment of the mind with all of its God-given capacities, including the capacity to critique, analyze, and change.

The word “progressive” is harder to define in the context of progressive Christianity. One of the difficulties in defining progressive in this context is that one tends to start by saying what it is not, thereby running the risk of falling into the shortcoming of much progressive Christianity I mentioned above that I’m trying to avoid here. I’ll run that risk. Progressive Christianity is not conservative Christianity. It is not conservative evangelical Christianity. It is most definitely not Fundamentalist Christianity. To turn to what progressive Christianity is, it is a Christianity that emphasizes Jesus’ teaching of personal and social transformation rather than personal salvation understood in any other way. It is a Christianity that seeks to recover, build on, and live into Jesus’ teachings about the realm of God. It is a Christianity that takes the Bible and other ancient sources of the faith seriously but understands them as human documents that we must study carefully and in depth if we are properly to understand them. We are then free to accept or reject them as we see fit. It is a Christianity that looks toward a transformation of the earth away from the earth’s usual violent, oppressive, and materialistic ways to the nonviolent, liberating, and spiritual ways of God as found in Jesus’ teachings on the realm of God and in the way he lived it during his lifetime. It is, in short, a Christianity that dreams of and works toward the world transformed into that realm of God. It intends its word progressive as the opposite of conservative. It dreams of a world progressing toward the ways of peace and justice, indeed, to borrow from Borg and Crossan, a world progressing toward peace through justice. 

Yet progressive Christianity is one more thing. It is original Christianity. It is Christianity focused on Jesus’ teachings of peace and justice, that is, on the things Jesus cared about most. It is in some ways Christianity before Christianity. It is Christianity as it was before the Constantinian establishment that so changed the faith and distorted it away from the teachings of Jesus. It is Christianity that focuses on this life and is content to leave the next life up to God. It is Christianity that can save the world. It is Christianity that can save itself from the straitjackets of literalism and otherworldliness in which it is so confined today but from which it is at least beginning to free itself. If Christianity has a future, which by the way is something that isn’t at all obvious, it will a progressive one. The better we understand progressive Christianity the better we will be able to bring our great faith to that promising future.

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[1]          The First Congregational Church of Maltby is not a UCC church. It is a member of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. I served it under an arrangement with the Pacific Northwest Conference of the UCC that maintained my UCC standing while I served that non-UCC church.

^[2]              I would have suggested that he read my Liberating Christianity, but I hadn’t written it yet. See the list of my other works at the beginning of this one for the cite to this book.

^[3]              This verse does not actually condemn homosexuality. The world from which that verse comes knew nothing of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality, so it can’t have condemned that understanding.

[4]              For a discussion of the nature of the language of faith see Liberating Christianity, Chapter Three.

[5]              Fundamentalism dates from the early twentieth century, when some conservative Christians published a series of pamphlets titled “The Fundamentals.” In its inception Fundamentalism was, and remains, a reactionary movement resisting the work of the higher biblical criticism of the nineteenth century and the then relatively new science of evolutionary biology. It is not old time religion. It is modernist reactionary religion.

Living on the Outside

Living on the Outside

I live on the outside. I am a 5 on the Enneagram. That means, among other things, that I am the outsider. I know the Enneagram is right about that. For my entire life I’ve felt like the outsider in nearly every environment I’ve ever been in. My natural inclination is to stand on the outside of things and observe. I observe and analyze far more than I participate. Maybe that’s why I enjoy photography. The photographer is an observer of scenes not a participant in them. I don’t know why that’s how it is with me, it just is. It’s an important part of who I am and of who I’ve always been. I’ve always felt myself to be an outsider, but today in the land of my birth I feel more the outsider than ever. In recent days I’ve found myself wondering how I ever ended up living my life in a country with which I am so out of touch. To use Myers-Briggs terminology for my condition, I’m an INFP in an ESTJ culture. I’m pretty much the opposite of what most of American culture is. I guess that’s always been true, but today it feels more true than ever. Here are some of the ways that dominant American culture and I just don’t fit:

1. I value spiritual things over material things. I know that money can’t buy happiness. It can’t preserve youth. It can’t prevent death. The dominant American culture of which I am a part is all about making money. That old saying “the business of America is business” is true, and I am no kind of businessman. I don’t value commercial virtues. I can’t sell anything, and I don’t want to. Yet in my culture I cannot avoid being bombarded by SELL SELL SELL.  It drives me nuts. The mute button on my TV remote helps, but of course it can’t block out the selling altogether. In advertising I don’t typically see useful information, I see people trying to get my money to benefit them not me. The commercial world turns me off. I’ve always thought of business as what you do when you can’t do anything else, anything more worthwhile, like practice a profession (and contemporary usage to the contrary notwithstanding business is not a profession), like be a doctor, or a teacher, or a pastor. Spirituality has to do with relationships, and in true spirituality the other in your relationship, be it God, or a spouse, or a child, or frankly anyone else, is more important than you are. Spirituality is about losing yourself in relationship. American culture is about aggrandizing yourself at the expense of others. I suppose that’s a kind of relationship too, but it is relationship that doesn’t value relationship. It only values the self.

I left the practice of law, which was well on its way to killing me, to go to seminary and become a small church Christian pastor. To my culture that move makes no sense at all. Law is prestigious, ministry isn’t. You make a lot of money in law, or at least you can. Small church pastors barely make enough to live on. Lawyers make headlines, pastors don’t unless they’ve done something monumentally stupid like damning gay people or predicting the end of the world or are saints of the faith like Martin Luther King, Jr. Being a lawyer led me to burn out and depression. Being a pastor led to deep personal satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, and to my culture that’s just wrong. It should work the other way around. For me it didn’t.

2. I’m an intellectual in an anti-intellectual culture. I’m far from the most erudite person in the world. I’m not even the most erudite person I know. But I have always valued and to some extent pursued the life of the mind. I have more advanced degrees than I know what to do with—Ph.D., JD, M.Div. I know that ideas matter. I know that how we act is grounded in how we think. I know that cultures change from the top down. I’ve often said that in 1637 Rene Descartes said “Je pense, donc je suis,” I think, therefore I am, and the world hasn’t been the same since. That’s how culture operates. Some lone person sitting at a desk somewhere has some new insight, expresses it, and over the following centuries it changes the world.

My culture is anti-intellectual. It thinks generals are more important than philosophers. It doesn’t just not care about ideas, it is deeply suspicious of people who have ideas and who think ideas matter. At best it dismisses them because it doesn’t want to deal with them. At worst it attacks them and their ideas because those ideas are new and challenge the culture’s long-held beliefs and prejudices. Just look at who we made president in 2016. Donald Trump is the least intellectual president we have perhaps ever had. He doesn’t think, he reacts. He has no guiding ideas, no concepts that ground his actions and give them form and direction. He has no time for people who think. In his disdain for the workings of the mind he reflects the anti-intellectualism of the people who elected him. He is a symptom of the unthinking nature of mass American culture, and we are the worse off for having elected him to the highest office in our land. Yet I shouldn’t be surprised that we did that. Trump is symptom not cause. He is a symptom of a lot of things about America, its anti-intellectualism being prime among them.

3. I teach and practice Christian nonviolence in a violence mad culture. American culture is the most violence prone mass culture of any so-called advanced nation in the world today. We solve problems by shooting at them. When gun violence kills our school children we say put more guns in schools. We maintain an enormous military that devours an absurdly large amount of our national budget and keeps us from doing many far more constructive things. We say everyone in the military is a hero whether they have done anything heroic or not. We don’t call teachers, nurses, pastors, musicians, or artists heroes, though they contribute to life in far more constructive ways than the military does, or at least some of them do. Even our progressive Christians are loath to list nonviolence as one of their values or commitments. The Phoenix Affirmations, for example, don’t mention nonviolence as a central precept. Yet there simply is no doubt that Jesus, the one we Christians supposedly follow, taught and lived radical nonviolence. Not passivity but nonviolence, which isn’t the same thing. When I preach nonviolence I’m called unrealistic. I’m told nonviolence doesn’t work, never mind that in my lifetime it ended British rule in India and apartheid in South Africa. Our country is grounded in violence, violence against the British, Native Americans, Mexico, and Black Americans from slavery on among others. We are a frontier culture that worships the gun. Our popular entertainment consists almost entirely of different versions of the myth of redemptive violence.[1] So does our foreign policy. My commitment to nonviolence perhaps more than anything else about me puts me outside the American mainstream.

So I am an outsider in my own country. I don’t fit. Most of what I see of dominant American culture repulses me. I value the spiritual over the material, the intellectual over the unthinking, and nonviolence over violence. My culture’s values are the reverse of mine. Well, so be it. I’m not going to change American culture, and I sure can’t change the history that gave rise to that culture. I’m never going to fit in, so perhaps I need to stop letting that truth irritate me as much as it does and look at the matter a different way. See, there is a crucial role for the outsider in any culture. The outsider is the only one who can truly critique a culture. Every culture needs outsiders who are willing and able to call it on its failings. Who are willing and able to see through its defenses and its self-delusions to its true essence and to name that essence for what it really is. Who can identify its myths and see through them to its real identity. Who can and will identify those myths as the idolatry that they truly are. I think that’s actually what I’ve been doing for a long time. My audience is small, nearly nonexistent actually. Again, so be it. I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep posting essays on my blog. They will continue to be the essays of an outsider in American culture. Perhaps they will serve some useful purpose precisely because come from where I live, on the outside.

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[1] If you don’t know what the myth of redemptive violence is read The Powers That Be by the late Walter Wink.