“No-one, said Jesus, tries to put new wine into old wine-skins. To put this into modern terms: our minds must be elastic enough to receive and contain new ideas. The history of progress is the history of overcoming the prejudices of the shut mind. Every new idea has had to fight for its existence against the instinctive opposition of the human mind. The motor car, the railway train, the aeroplane were in the beginning regarded with suspicion. Simpson had to fight to introduce chloroform, and Lister had to struggle to introduce antiseptics into the work of the doctor and surgeon. Copernicus was compelled to retract his statement that the earth went round the sun, and not the sun round the earth. Even Jonas Hanway who brought the umbrella to this country had to suffer a barrage of missiles and insults when he first walked down the street with an umbrella.
“Within the church this resentment of the new is chronic, and the attempt to pour new things into old moulds is almost universal. We attempt to pour the activities of a modern congregation into an ancient church building that was never meant for them. We attempt to pour the truth of new discoveries into creeds which are based on Greek metaphysics. We attempt to pour modern instruction into outworn language which cannot express it. It may be that we would do well to remember that when any living thing stops growing, it starts dying. It may be that we need to pray that God would deliver us from the shut mind and give us the open mind.
“Viscount Samuel was born in 1870 and he begins his autobiography with a description of the London of his childhood. ‘We had no cars or buses or tube trains; there were no bicycles – except the high penny-farthings; there were no electric light or telephones; no cinemas or broadcasts.’ We are living in a changing and an expanding and a growing world. These verses are Jesus’ warning that the church dare not be the only institution which still lives in the past.”
Footnote
William Barclay wrote this commentary in 1956, over 50 years ago. Just think how much society, our awareness of the world around us, our use of technology and our knowledge of the vastness and complexity of the universe have all changed in the five decades since then - and how little the church has changed. In the early days of the car, a law was passed in 1865 that a man had to walk 55 metres in front of a car with a red flag and the speed restriction in towns was 2 mph. What’s the equivalent of the Red Flag Act within the church? Philip Sudworth
We have recently been working on a new forum for Progressive Christians to meet and discuss. It’s now gone live but we need members!
The forum is designed to be easy to read and navigate, there is even a mobile version to catch up on the go! We hope it will become a vibrant place for people to get resources, discuss and socialise.
Hope to see you there!
Matt
]]>In this Review 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.
Much more can be said, but to me this way of looking at the basis of Christain faith is truly liberating. It frees us from the literal, to experience afresh the power of story, of universal myth, and the life changing realisation that we are blessed as a spark of God’s light, called to live in enlightenment, now and beyond our earthly lives.
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.]
The 2nd paragraph of Kairos Palestine reads:
“In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity, and that any theology that legitimizes the occupation is far from Christian teachings, because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed, a call to justice and equality among peoples.”
The document is on the website of the World Council of churches and the address is:
http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/other-ecumenical-bodies/kairos-palestine-document.html
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.”
Continues.....
]]>He has come to the conclusion that the Bible is all about ideology and not at all to do with religion. Moreover, he sees the Bible as a revolutionary critique of civilisation using a marginal perspective rather than as a blueprint for a correct way of living, as is usually supposed. He has begun to create a cartoon form of the Bible, not as a jokey thing, but in an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible. So far, his cartoons have not got terribly far through the Bible but there’s plenty more on his site for anyone who is interested in looking at another way of defining God.
]]>Israel controls all access to water in the occupied territories? This means that settlers in the illegal settlements have all the water they need, incl. having sprinklers on their lawns, while Palestinians have to import water from a distance with considerable expenditure and trouble.
Or, did you know that a French company called Veolia operates internationally and was involved in setting up a light railway to link East (i.e. Palestinian) Jerusalem with Israel and with settlements? However, considerable pressure on the company in other countries has led to their withdrawal from this scheme. But Veolia is still involved in providing public transport to some settlements and for operating a landfill site in the Jordan valley, on Palestinian land, but used to dispose of the rubbish from settlements - not from Palestinian villages.
Veolia operates in quite a number of boroughs in the UK. For instance, they deal with street cleaning in the City of Westminster. This gives us the opportunity to pressurise Veolia still more.
If you want to get more information about this, about the campaign re access to water and a whole host of other topics, go to http://www.jfjfp.org.uk
]]>For those of you who came into PCN in its relatively early days, like me, you will be aware of the significance of the 8 points - which stared life with our sister organisation in the US, TCPC. The 8 points were a cry of the heart for an open, welcoming, non-exclusive Christianity, accepting of difference. Check out this link: http://www.tcpc.org/about/8points.cfm to be reminded of them.
I was excited by this openness which I steadily came to expect from “church”, as I travelled from evangelical (from University CU experience) to eventual ministerial training as an NSM, in the mid 80s. Once in ministry I steadily moved to embrace justice issues, including the movements to support women’s roles, gay rights and wider acceptance of those in more unorthodox relationships.
The journey from the late 90s become more deeply theological, wrestling with the science and religion debate, becoming more reflective in terms of those new spiritualities emerging from a post modern context, but often connected back to the mystical tradition in early Christianity and indeed other faiths. Indeed my most recent interest has been exploring how to see God in all faiths and spiritual paths. But this of course stretches the more rationalist “liberal” to the limit, and can be a source of tension for we all journey at different paces.
So my instinct is to see that Progressive Christians are at a threshold, where new definitions of what it means to be progressive might need to be openly discussed in PCN Britain and much more widely. I have published a booklet beginning some of this thinking through PCNs sister organisation Free to Believe: check this link - http://freetobelieve.org.uk/booklets2.html and of course I have covered my further developing thoughts in the article in the Newsletter. So whether you comment here, or in my new Blog - I’d be very pleased to hear from you.
John Hetherington
Email john dot hetherington at pcnbritain dot org dot uk