I have just published a Note on Facebook on my recent pondering about why we squabble so much about religion, spirit and scientific materialism. Views welcome.
My views are, should it come up:
That this universe is deeply connected - and that the connection will be scientifically demonstrated at some point.
That what we call 'God' or 'Life' or 'Love' is a 'Reality' in the sense that we are part of "All" that IS (the I AM of the old testament and John's Gospel).
That human beings can have (inner) awareness of the "Presence" (in life and love and being) of a divine light - a Reality perhaps coexistent with (pantheism) the Universe or perhaps both in and beyond (more than) our known Universe (panentheism).
That there have been many human beings who have been so open to the "presence" or the "Spirit" of the divine - known as much in our inner depth as in the world of form (life and beauty in nature and other human beings) - that they have made a deep mark in history. as religion founders, shamans, wise men and women etc (Abraham, the prophets, the Buddha, Lao Tse, Jesus, Muhammud, and other religion founders (actually it was their followers) and philosophers like Aristotle - even Isaac Newton)!
But that they are not of a different "substance" from us - just more deeply infused with the light of the divine thatn most if us - who are not truly "awake" to see.
That awakening is a goal for all intelligent beings, but a hard path - because in some ways it makes those who seek the Way different, and thus called to risk and challenge - and thus open themselves to ridicule or presecution or hate.
I am also aware that this is not the way Christianity is increasingly interpreted. It seems to me that what has happened is that after the Western enlightenment science and experience of the divine were divided - with experience of the divine being split as "life as religion" (orthodoxy of ancient words and practices) or "life as experience" (exploring paths to personal awakening to the inner light and presence). All 3 are warring somewhat and are scornful of the other paths. But all are ways to "gnosis" - God, the divine, is neutral surely about what little beliefs / doctrines we humans invent. God, the divine, is neutral surely about the practices we adopt to help us touch "presence" - neutral about hymns and words and chants and meditations. God, the divine, is not interested in what our science is beginning to tell us because s/he knows. BUt s/he honours all three ways that we search.
What we need to do is grasp the big picture that embraces the hsitory of all human culture and will see us one day among the stars within the physical reality of the universe and deep within as our religions and sporitualities take us there too, so that more and more we are both aware of the God within and the God without.
If we all on this small planet took this view then there would be an end to injstice and war, and the planet would be sustained and managed well. Anyway - that is my dream.
Friday 19 March 2010
Thursday 11 March 2010
Christian Antecedents - The Pagan Christ
This Blog is excited tonight. I have nearly finished reading Tom Harpur's "The Pagan Christ - Is blind faith Killing Christianity". Its subtitle is "Recovering the Lost Light". Its that I want to review tonight.
However, at our Progressive Christianity Network Britain session tonight we were looking at the Jesus Seminar's work in 'de-mythologising' the Gospels - basically how they concluded that very little of the New Testament is presenting the actual words of an historical 'Jesus'. To learn more about the Seminar's approach check out, "The Five Gospels" - link here: http://www.westarinstitute.org/Polebridge/5gospels.html.
I was a bit of a pain to my colleagues, because I had been excitedly reading "The Pagan Christ" and was trying to point out the differences and points of converegence of the two approaches.
As I see it, the Jesus Seminar was primarily composed of scholars who bought in to the view that the gospels carry much that, to the modern mind, would be regarded as 'myth'. So, to make sense of them we need a thoroughgoing process of de-mythologising. Hence the search to draw out from the "myth" a core of sayings that reflect the words of a 'Jesus of history'. Unsurprisingly the scholars found very few sayings to be authentic and ranked as definite "red letter" words of Jesus.
By contrast Tom Harpur is one of a growing number of scholars who would, rather, want Christians to be into a process of re-mythologising the Gospels. Tom Harpur argues that, "to take the Gospels literally as history or biography is to utterly miss their inner spiritual meaning." He calls for a return to an "inclusive religion" capable of helping us, "regain a true understanding of who we are, and are intended to be." The Jesus Seminar, in seeking to de-mythologise, and thus downplay the hope of finding clear evidence in the gospels of the words of Jesus as a historical figure, are potentially missing the point. The Gospels are not a history, but a carrier of "story" and "myth" - which needs to be set free to work on our souls.
I love Tom's quote from Dominic Crossan (one of the Jesus Seminar Scholars) in the introduction to Chapter 1, "My point .. is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally." The book's thesis is that, "The Christian Church made a fateful error ... in a competitive bid to win over the greatest number of the unlettered masses", when it took a literalist, popularised, historical approach to sublime truth." "The transcendent meaning of glorious myths and symbols was reduced to a farrago of miraculous or irrelevant, or quite 'unbelievable' events."
Tom Harpur relies heavily for his thesis on earlier books by Gerald Massey and Alvin Khun, which have unearthed amazing parallels between the New Testament and the foreshadowing of almost all the gospel stories in "pagan" sources, often pre-dating the gospel versions by millenia. He sets out how an allegorical, spiritual and mythical approach to the Bible and Christian faith solves the enigmas of scripture and the Christ story, which makes the, "Bible stories come alive".
The heart of his argument is that the ancient world had deep insight, recognising, "our own potential for Christhood, and for experiencing the indwelling spirit of God here and now." The mythos has the power to frame a "cosmic" faith that resonates with the natural world and our humanity. What Harpur has uncovered is that deep similarities exist between Christian beliefs and the earlier Pagan religions. He argues that, "the Bible in general, and the New Testament in particular, actually copy or repeat motifs laid down centuries or millenia before.
He points out that a "true myth" is, "more eternal than its meaning in history". Moses was an Egyptian name and Jesus figures in Egyptian lore as Iusu / Iusa, meaning the "divine Son who heals and saves". There was an Egyptian Christ named "Horus", who had a mother called Isis - forerunners of the Madonna and Child. Other names and place names from Egyptian religion are used in the Bible. Beyond the names and their links is a common theology from across the "pagan" world - based on the Osyris myth - that, "the incarnation of spirit in human flesh" is, "in fact the oldest, most universal mythos known to religion."
We are encouraged to recognise that "myths aren't fairy tales" and that, "myth was the favorite and universal method of teaching in archaic times." Myth, like a Shakespear tragedy or comedy, is capable of carrying universal truth - acted out in ritual, made flesh in story - with no-one in the ancient world blind to the power of myth and story to change people. "The myth itself is fictional (or only loosly tied to history), but the timeless truth it expresses is not."
In this Blog I will conclude by retelling the central "Christ Myth" - the ancient story behind the New Testament themes - all of which are borrowings of the ancient myths previously played out by the "Sun Gods" Osiris and Horus in Egypt or Hercules in Greece. These myths were there to symbolise the point that, "the prime datum is man (humanity) himself, a spark of the divine fire ... and buried in the flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy." The ideal person - Adonis, Mithras, Khrishna, Christ, symbolised the divine spark in every human being. Similar myths were universal across other cultures.
The conclusion is that the "myth" of God incarnate is an (almost) human universal - but for the west after Constantine, Christianity forgot its origins and imposed credal belief on the masses, who then burned all the ancient books of wisdom, and set back civiliation by hundreds of years. What Paul and the early Christians knew was a very different faith - in which:
John Hetherington - 11th March 2010
[This summary and reflection fully acknowledges the copyright subsisting in, "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur- Walker and Company New York, 2004.]
However, at our Progressive Christianity Network Britain session tonight we were looking at the Jesus Seminar's work in 'de-mythologising' the Gospels - basically how they concluded that very little of the New Testament is presenting the actual words of an historical 'Jesus'. To learn more about the Seminar's approach check out, "The Five Gospels" - link here: http://www.westarinstitute.org/Polebridge/5gospels.html.
I was a bit of a pain to my colleagues, because I had been excitedly reading "The Pagan Christ" and was trying to point out the differences and points of converegence of the two approaches.
As I see it, the Jesus Seminar was primarily composed of scholars who bought in to the view that the gospels carry much that, to the modern mind, would be regarded as 'myth'. So, to make sense of them we need a thoroughgoing process of de-mythologising. Hence the search to draw out from the "myth" a core of sayings that reflect the words of a 'Jesus of history'. Unsurprisingly the scholars found very few sayings to be authentic and ranked as definite "red letter" words of Jesus.
By contrast Tom Harpur is one of a growing number of scholars who would, rather, want Christians to be into a process of re-mythologising the Gospels. Tom Harpur argues that, "to take the Gospels literally as history or biography is to utterly miss their inner spiritual meaning." He calls for a return to an "inclusive religion" capable of helping us, "regain a true understanding of who we are, and are intended to be." The Jesus Seminar, in seeking to de-mythologise, and thus downplay the hope of finding clear evidence in the gospels of the words of Jesus as a historical figure, are potentially missing the point. The Gospels are not a history, but a carrier of "story" and "myth" - which needs to be set free to work on our souls.
I love Tom's quote from Dominic Crossan (one of the Jesus Seminar Scholars) in the introduction to Chapter 1, "My point .. is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally." The book's thesis is that, "The Christian Church made a fateful error ... in a competitive bid to win over the greatest number of the unlettered masses", when it took a literalist, popularised, historical approach to sublime truth." "The transcendent meaning of glorious myths and symbols was reduced to a farrago of miraculous or irrelevant, or quite 'unbelievable' events."
Tom Harpur relies heavily for his thesis on earlier books by Gerald Massey and Alvin Khun, which have unearthed amazing parallels between the New Testament and the foreshadowing of almost all the gospel stories in "pagan" sources, often pre-dating the gospel versions by millenia. He sets out how an allegorical, spiritual and mythical approach to the Bible and Christian faith solves the enigmas of scripture and the Christ story, which makes the, "Bible stories come alive".
The heart of his argument is that the ancient world had deep insight, recognising, "our own potential for Christhood, and for experiencing the indwelling spirit of God here and now." The mythos has the power to frame a "cosmic" faith that resonates with the natural world and our humanity. What Harpur has uncovered is that deep similarities exist between Christian beliefs and the earlier Pagan religions. He argues that, "the Bible in general, and the New Testament in particular, actually copy or repeat motifs laid down centuries or millenia before.
He points out that a "true myth" is, "more eternal than its meaning in history". Moses was an Egyptian name and Jesus figures in Egyptian lore as Iusu / Iusa, meaning the "divine Son who heals and saves". There was an Egyptian Christ named "Horus", who had a mother called Isis - forerunners of the Madonna and Child. Other names and place names from Egyptian religion are used in the Bible. Beyond the names and their links is a common theology from across the "pagan" world - based on the Osyris myth - that, "the incarnation of spirit in human flesh" is, "in fact the oldest, most universal mythos known to religion."
We are encouraged to recognise that "myths aren't fairy tales" and that, "myth was the favorite and universal method of teaching in archaic times." Myth, like a Shakespear tragedy or comedy, is capable of carrying universal truth - acted out in ritual, made flesh in story - with no-one in the ancient world blind to the power of myth and story to change people. "The myth itself is fictional (or only loosly tied to history), but the timeless truth it expresses is not."
In this Blog I will conclude by retelling the central "Christ Myth" - the ancient story behind the New Testament themes - all of which are borrowings of the ancient myths previously played out by the "Sun Gods" Osiris and Horus in Egypt or Hercules in Greece. These myths were there to symbolise the point that, "the prime datum is man (humanity) himself, a spark of the divine fire ... and buried in the flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy." The ideal person - Adonis, Mithras, Khrishna, Christ, symbolised the divine spark in every human being. Similar myths were universal across other cultures.
The conclusion is that the "myth" of God incarnate is an (almost) human universal - but for the west after Constantine, Christianity forgot its origins and imposed credal belief on the masses, who then burned all the ancient books of wisdom, and set back civiliation by hundreds of years. What Paul and the early Christians knew was a very different faith - in which:
- Christ is the name given to the presence of God within - "Christ in you, the hope of glory"
- The Christos is known by many names, present in all humanity
- Everyone will come to realise his or her spiritual power (as did Jesus at his baptism and Paul on the Damascus road)
- Doctrines, creeds, dogma and institutional religion has masked the inner light
- The gospels are a drama about the Christos - with Jesus a symbolic personification
- Jesus' birth, death and resurrection are events happening within us
- We must release the divine within to spiritualise our nature - as fragments of God with divine potential
- Religions and spiritual paths free us to commit to the eternal Christ experience.
John Hetherington - 11th March 2010
[This summary and reflection fully acknowledges the copyright subsisting in, "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur- Walker and Company New York, 2004.]
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