Monday, April 19, 2010
This blog has moved
9:21 AM by Christi Bowman
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Friday, April 9, 2010
Atheist God
4:54 PM by Christi Bowman
I went to see
Peter Rollins last night. Incredible! Peter is a theologian from Belfast. He made some fabulous points...my personal favorite: Christianity has the only God who becomes an atheist. On the cross God doubts God. Jesus' famous last words "My God, my God why have you forsaken me."
I woke up this morning conceptualizing the Christian God as an atheist and the irony brought a smile to my face. though now, with the freedom this insight brings, I am wondering if there is a way we can begin to speak of this God outside the confines of religion.
If Jesus did indeed come to show us how to live and he died in doubt of God then: "what's good for the goose is good for the gander"
It is with great humility and the acknowledgement that I "see through a glass dimly" that I say the following:
This God does not belong to Christianity, this God belongs to the world. This God doesn't care if you can't believe in God, this God understands...because he experienced it too. Not because Jesus is God, if you can't bring yourself to believe that, but because God experiences life through each and every one of us and he experienced the doubting of God through Jesus as God also does through Richard Dawkins. God loves people...all people...beyond any concept we have of love...and God isn't mad at a single human being. I no longer like to quote the Bible to prove a point, but this is a profoundly Christan concept: "Our fight is not against flesh and blood."
Sure there may be consequences of disbelief in this life...but don't we all have areas where we live out disbelief (even if we can't admit it) and don't we all suffer the consequences in those areas of our lives...no matter who we are or what we profess?
Our disbelief and our belief have eternal consequences, but it does not effect where we will spend eternity. What does the term "eternal consequences" even mean? Christianity has made "eternal consequences" sound so horrible, when in fact the fact that I have decided to have kids has eternal consequences and if I had decided not to, that also would have "eternal consequences"...neither bad nor good...eternal consequences are what they are.
If there is an afterlife, and I tend to think there is, then we all end up in God. For me, that does not mean we all end up in whatever God was to us in this life...there is not enough unity to that...I think we all end up together in the same God. That is not to say that I believe that God to be the Christian God. I believe the God, of which I speak, is far beyond any religious construct of God.
To say this God belongs to Christianity does this God a great diservice. To say this God belongs to any religion does this God a great diservice. If we give this God to Christianity, or to any religion, than we let that one lense define this God...
Religions carry baggage...religions are hurtful. They exclude and they divide. They are not living breathing organisms in the very fact that they stop growing...they stop searching for truth. As Peter Rollins so eloquently put it last night..."religion believes for us." We stop searching when we ascribe to only one set of ideologies or limit our search for truth to a particular set of boundries.
I've recently been reading Buddhist philosophers, not because I want to leave Christianity behind...quite the opposite...I want to keep the thing that makes me profoundly Christian (belief in the Jesus way of living life) while seeking to understand the others' engagement with God.
The way people string words together has been bothering me as of late...even if those words are not being spoken directly to me. They make me uncomfortable because I tend to see people as speaking with authority on whatever they happen to be pontificating on.
One such person said something close to: atheists who are interested in spirituality are Buddhists, Taoists, or Confucians. I felt the sting of those words (even though of course he did not intend for me to) because I heard: As a theist I am not allowed to consider their thoughts as a form of engagement with God.
If this is true, than in this regard Buddhism is exclusive. There are beautiful things about Buddhism, but the very fact that it wants to exclude me based on an experience that I neither asked for nor can help, tends to build in me some resentment. Even though Buddhism cannot tell me that I cannot learn from it, on a deep level it tells me "you will never be accepted here." That breeds contempt. It is what is wrong with religion. If what I heard this man to be saying is true, then, Buddhism will not meet me where I am and walk with me. It stops me at the door and says I cannot accept you as you are.
Christianity claims to be radically different...it claims that its Christ accepts you where you are. The real Christ may accept you wherever you may be, but Christianity's Christ does not. You do not have to look far on my blog posts in the comments section to see where Christianity excludes. My last post, comment two, tells me I must believe in the literal bodily resurrection of Christ as God or my eternity is of the damnable sort. Whether I believe in a literal bodily resurrection, or not, is not the point. The fact that there is criteria is the point. What I heard someone imply regarding Buddhism, was for me exactly what Christianity is for others...and that is not Christianity...or is it? (I can run around in circles on that one point alone...but that is because I am to steeped in Christendom (whether I like it or not) and at times think in terms of God favoring one religion.) Perhaps Christianity is not so radically different after all.
I cannot help that I have experienced the sacred and therefore believe. The atheist cannot help not experiencing the sacred and not being able to believe. And everybody in between cannot help having the experience they are having and coming to conclusions based on those experiences. I cannot snap my finger for the atheist and cause the atheist to have my experience...in the same vein the atheist cannot snap their finger and cause me to experience the very things that have caused them to come to the conclusions they have come to.
None of us are deceitful in what we truly believe in our heart of hearts. If we respect each other as we walk along side each other then our beliefs can be our starting point. And the sky can be the limit as to where we end up If there is safety and warm invitation to explore.
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Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Can We Raise the Love of Jesus from the Dead In Our Churches...Literally
6:42 PM by Christi Bowman
I have been reading a few liberal theologians as of late, and to be quite honest I have found them to be a breath of fresh air. They do not treat the questioning of tradition as though it were heresy. Maybe it is the lack of belief in a literal and/or eternal hell that gives them such patience, but whatever the reason they do not see any need to give the "right Christian response" to the questions people of other faiths or the people of no faith have been asking for centuries; nor do they need to instill fear or belittle their readers with shameful rhetoric should their readers be asking these questions while wrestling with their Christian heritage.
I have not been comfortable with identifying as a Christian for a while now. I am fine with follower of the way of Jesus or something similar...but, for me, Christianity has become such a loaded term.
The weekend before Easter Kevin flew to North Carolina to work and I flew out with him in order to visit with
Hugh Hollowell and his wife Renee (together the two of them head up a fabulous ministry doing incredible things:
Love Wins.) We happened to be hanging out with them on Sunday and decided to join them for services with a Mennonite congregation. We loved it. We reminisced for a short while about the few weeks we went to Living Water, a Mennonite congregation in the city of Chicago, but our reminiscing quickly turned to lament as we discussed the impossibility of being a part of their community life while we were still residing in the burbs. It was then that we remembered seeing a small Mennonite building in our little town and we decided that our first Sunday back, which just happened to be Easter, we would pay them a visit.
I poke fun at culture and at times find myself longing to throw off its constraints, but their was a certain excitement, perhaps in the cultural familiarity, about being in a church building with people who identify as Christians on Easter morning. I felt the morning pregnant with so much possibility...as if, for the first time, I was in sync, emotionally, with what I had grown up being told this whole day was about. If there was to be anything left in Christendom for me to hold on to...I was pretty sure I was going to find it that morning, amongst that group of people.
We found our seats upstairs; while our kids, excited to meet new people, were safely in their respective classes downstairs. There was a resurrection slide on the power point and while looking at it I decided to lean over and ask my husband about the importance of believing in a literal interpretation of the resurrection. My husband was trying to answer, but I found it hard to pay attention; the preacher had begun his sermon abruptly with proof texted verse saying very harsh things regarding disbelief in the literal resurrection. After making belief in the resurrection a "where you will spend eternity" issue, he then went on to say: if you do not believe in a literal interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus than you are not a Christian...but he didn't stop there...he went on to say: if anyone was not in agreement with his interpretation they could just go visit the Unitarians down the street (If I was brave I would have raised my hand and asked him for directions) ...or better yet just go home.
I am not here to debate literal vs. metaphorical interpretations of the resurrection, what I want to know is when did Christendom get so mean? How dare somebody stand in the pulpit and play on people's fear by preaching a Hellenistic construct of eternal damnation with little relation to any Jewish vision of Sheol and the after life (Dante's Inferno.) Also, there is a whole sect of people who are serious about the Jesus way, much more serious than some literalists I know, who passionately call themselves Christians while believing in a metaphorical view of the resurrection...who did that guy think he was to strip them of that label? Judge not lest ye be judged says to me: if anyone thinks being called a Christian is what gets you through those pearly gates then it would be wise to not go stripping others of the label because of how their beliefs differ...they will find themselves in that same position...only, according to their beliefs, it will really matter. As for kicking people out of the assembly who are having trouble swallowing what others so readily do, what happened to walking with someone? Jesus walked and taught his disciples for three years. I'm not even going to get into, with much detail, how hurtful a comment like that might have been to someone who affiliates closely or knows someone who does affiliate with the Unitarian church. What about building bridges with each other to better serve the community we find ourselves in?
I don't know, it doesn't look promising from where I sit. This conformity before community, to a set of ideologies, has got to stop...and quickly. Fear and hate don't draw people to you...not today. People want to be accepted where they are at...it is not about a refusal change, it is about a deep seeded need to be loved. Love people and then everybody changes...including yourself.
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