It’s Time for Upgrades – Trading In for Some New Beliefs
Part Six: Moving from Toxic Beliefs to Transforming Ones
Jesus saying he was never a Christian may sound shocking, but it’s true. Jesus was a Hebrew mystical reformer. His religion was Judaism, not Christianity. His followers were not called Christians until much later (Acts 11:26). What today we call “Christianity” did not exist for the first three hundred years after Pentecost. It took a hundred years to separate from Judaism, another hundred to become an institution, and another hundred to define its central doctrines. And today, an increasing number of Jesus’ followers would say Christianity looks less and less like him. I can, in certain contexts, no longer just say, “I’m a Christian” because, as I have shared in this series, conventional Christianity departs so much from being Christ-like. I often say, ”I’m a follower of Jesus.”
Through the centuries, traditional Christianity has seen selfless saints and self-centered sinners as part of its persona. The saints range from the famous ones like St. Frances to the multitude of unnamed, simple saints who have blessed all those around them. However, the more today’s world moves into modern and postmodern stages, the less persuasive traditional Christian belief systems and practices are. People are leaving Christianity in droves in the Global North, the center of modern and postmodern stages.
Some believe that Christianity has so departed from Jesus’ life and teaching that they do not call themselves Christians because they take Jesus more seriously than conventional Christianity seems to.
Boring versions of Christianity turn some away from Christianity, but toxic Christianity turns away more, even if they do not label it as such. They say things like, “It isn’t meaningful to me.” “It doesn’t make any sense.” “Look at all the scandals in churches today,” meaning things like the child predators among Catholic priests and the cover-up of the sex scandals among Southern Baptist pastors. “Look at all my strongly held religious beliefs and the religious groups I belong to.” These are versions of Christianity and church systems that do not produce transformed people but rather people who use religion as a way to hide from God.
Ken Wilber once said, “We don’t need a new religion—just a more evolved version of our old one.” To evolve in our own faith tradition we will need to trade in some of the old, broken-down beliefs that are boring, toxic, or just simply no longer useful. It’s time for an upgrade!
Here are three beliefs I have traded in for something better.
1. I have Traded in Original Sin for Original Blessing
The idea of “original sin” isn’t biblical, isn’t part of Judaism, wasn’t known by Jesus, and wasn’t known by any Christians for the first three hundred years of the early Church. It was invented by Augustine (354–430) and latched onto by a Christianity that was increasingly preoccupied with sin.
This traditional doctrine holds that we are sinful from birth simply because we are human and Adam and Eve passed down their “original sin.” Therefore, we all are “totally depraved.” Even newborn babies must be quickly be baptized so their sin will not send them to hell should they die tomorrow.
Jesus did not teach that we are separated from God. Instead, Jesus taught ORIGINAL LOVE. We are all precious children of a God who never acts with violence, wrath, retribution, punishment, or threats of eternal separation.
Roger Wolsey, progressive Methodist pastor and author writes, “In Jesus’ day, sin had become reduced to legalistic notions about being ritually impure and “dirty” and unworthy of participating in Temple practices. Jesus subverted that notion. Instead of treating sin through the lens of some sort of retributive law books, ‘if you commit x transgression, you deserve y punishment,’ etc., Jesus embraced restorative justice and saw that when sin is committed, it harms both the sinner as well as persons his/her actions may have harmed. Jesus emphasized restoration and reconciliation of relationships – not the doling out of appropriate punishments that only further alienate people from one another.”
Original Blessing
The idea of Original Sin is rejected in progressive Christianity in favor of Original Blessing. Progressive Christians don’t typically deny that sin exists or that it is a bad thing. But we deny the idea that we have some sort of a sinful nature that was passed down to us from Adam and Eve. Instead, progressive Christians often teach that sin isn’t what separates us from God, but our own self-imposed shame. In the progressive integral view, we simply need to realize that we were never separated in the first place.
Original blessing knows we are steadfastly held in God’s love just as we are. Original blessing reminds us that God calls us good and beloved before we are anything else. Sin is not the heart of our nature — blessing is. Therefore, our task is to cooperate with our innate nature, not work against it.
2. I have traded in the toxic “Fall” of humankind for the glory of our evolution.
Viewing the Bible as a record of what people believed about God in the times and places in which they lived, means it does not always give us a literal account of the way things were and are. Rather, sometimes the Bible uses dramatic, mythical stories to say something true. The story of Adam and Eve is just such a story. Is the account literal historically true? I don’t believe the first two people of the human race, named Adam and Eve, suddenly appeared in human bodies like we have today and could have such an evolved conversation about life. That makes the story unusable to a modern reader.
Understood metaphorically and symbolically, while needing deconstruction, it may not be quite the story we remember. It just needs some rescuing from the way church history has understood it.
The story itself never uses the words “sin” or ‘The Fall.” Those are things classical Christianity put in there.
Humans haven’t “fallen” from some idealized status or state of being. However, progressive Christians tend to suggest that from the very beginning, we have had both propensities to seek union with God and tendencies to attempt to do things our way.
Dawn Hutchings, writing on Progressive Christianity, says,
“Humanity is not inherently evil, or sinful, or broken. I am not saying that humanity is not capable of evil, or that we are not capable of sin, or that there are parts of us that are not broken. I’m not saying we are perfect. I am saying that we are incomplete and out of our incompleteness evil, sin and brokenness can emerge.
But we are fearfully and wonderfully made, capable of great goodness, and innately wired with a pull toward cooperation. Competition, violence, and the survival of the fittest are not the keys to our evolution. Cooperation and compassion are the keys to our evolution into a more complete species. We have a role to play in determining how and what we evolve into. All that potential is entrusted to us.”
I view the traditional Christian version of the Garden of Eden story not as a Fall for humanity, but rather as a step up, making it an evolutionary tale. I believe God wanted humans out of the Garden just as parents might want their adult children to eventually move out of their house to start their own lives.
3. I have exchanged the nebulous “Spirit, third person of the Trinity” for the luminous “force” of divine-human awakened-spirit-breath-consciousness.
In Part Three of this series, I addressed the Apostles’ Creed concerning “Father” and “Son.” Let’s now finish opening up the classical Trinity with the part that states, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”
First, a word about my strange spelling of s(S)pirit. It is to make a point. The Greek word for s(S)pirit is pneuma (πνεῦμα) which means breath, wind, spirit, and in today’s terminology, awakened consciousness. In the Bible, it is used for both human and divine spirit — often without distinction. However, there are no lowercase and uppercase letters in biblical Greek. So, translators arbitrarily decided they needed to indicate by “spirit” or “Spirit” their guess as to whether it refers to human or divine spirit. I do not see that need since the biblical writers didn’t either. To point out that this word represents both humanity and divinity, I spell it s(S)pirit. My apologies to the Chicago Manuel of Style, which just fainted.
The traditional understanding is that the Trinity is “God in three persons.” This does not mean they are human beings but that the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” each have personhood or personality. They each have intellect, emotion, will, and relationality.
“Father” and Jesus as “Son” have a second-person perspective of this intellect, emotion, and will that I have expanded to call the Intimate Face of God Beside Us. This is God as a loving parent, among many other manifestations, who cares for us personally. The Intimate Face of God Beside Us is easy to see with Jesus as our friend since he lived as a physical human, spending his time loving his friends.
But s(S)pirit does not seem to me to be a “person,” although it, too, can be personified. There are centuries of torturous debate and many opinions about the mystery of s(S)pirit, so I offer mine in that awareness.
Star Wars theology
When I went to see the first Star Wars movie in 1977, I remember thinking, “The Force sounds like what Christians call the Holy Spirit.” In Star Wars IV, A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi gives a beautiful definition of the Force: “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s a mysterious energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
Later, I discovered that George Lucas researched the world’s spiritual traditions for common themes about spirit and spiritual realities. Mary Henderson’s book, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, focuses on the mythical and religious aspects of the Star Wars Universe, drawing on Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. She says, “In many ways, the Force combines the basic principles of several different major religions, yet it embodies what all of them have in common: an unerring faith in a spiritual power.”
In Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda, speaking of the Force, says, “Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we.... not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you... me... the tree... the rock... everywhere! Yes, even between this land and [Luke’s] ship!”
Yoda also teaches Luke about the extra-cognitive abilities one can gain from the Force, “Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. The future... the past. Old friends long gone.”
The Star Wars Four Aspects of the Force are the Living Force, the Unifying Force, the Cosmic Force, and the Physical Force. Heroes like the Jedi seek to “become one with the Force.” Once again, it sounds to me, even more so today, close to my understanding of s(S)spirit.
We experience all of the above in our WeSpace groups in ICN. If you want to skip the complicated, often tedious debates to understand s(S)pirit, including mine, just know that the Force is everywhere — beyond you, beside you, and being you. Paul writes, “May . . .the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all (2 Cor. 13:14). Sounds to me like, “May the Force be with you!”