The Bible is a collection of ancient texts that are of inestimable worth to the three monotheistic religions and more. I read that Ghandi spent 45 minutes daily meditating on the sermon on the mount. As he said, “I love Jesus. It’s Christians I have a problem with.” I value hearing from anyone living the loving relationship with the Great Spirit that Jesus invited us to. I am sure that many biblical authors fall into this category. Their words have value when they are right on and even on another level (as a lesson in reverse) if they fail the Love test sometimes. In any case, it is always worth hearing the observations, cultural values, and resulting beliefs of those sincerely seeking a relationship with their abstractum of the unknowable God. However, we must free ourselves to read their writing critically, looking through a lens other than a literal one.

Inspired?

Marcus Borg observed,

“When reading the Bible, I am reading the opinions and observations of the writer, not the opinion of God.”

I completely agree. Confusion on this point has led readers to some very harmful conclusions about the nature of our Father. I do not accept the assertion of Christian fundamentalism that every word in the bible is of god or that every word is historical and is to be taken literally. As Pete Enns has often said, “The purpose of the Bible is wisdom, not history.” There is much wisdom to be gleaned even from the biblical stories that were obviously not breathed by the Spirit.

These stories, preserved over the millennia, have served for our good. And, a lesson in how not to be is as valuable as a lesson in how to be. The Bible contains both and is a collection of documents written by men who were doing their best to understand their god in the context of their culture. The wisdom literature was written by men with relationship experience with Her, but the Bible is not a collection of documents written by men who were inspired or told by God what to write. The Bible was written by men, for men. To again quote Marcus Borg, I am comfortable with “taking the bible seriously, but not literally.” Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible again, for the first time

All domination systems, whether political, economic, or religious, are contrary to the purposes and will of the Great Creator Spirit. Acceptance and participation in such systems place us outside and in opposition to Her perfect will for Her good creation. In particular, when the ‘holy scriptures’ of any religion endorse violence in any form or the subjugation of women, they are clearly not inspired but are serving the self-interest of the writer and the culture that produced them. As it has been said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton

• • •

“God is Christlike, and in [Her], there is no unChristlikeness at all”

—Archbishop Michael Ramsey

Passerby asks, “You say, the world’s wisdom literature contains both the will and words of the Great Spirit, to our benefit, and also, at the same time, the nature of humans as we have created the Spirit to be, often in our own image, and to our great detriment, then how am I to discern the difference? What is of men that I should question the value of, and what is of the Spirit?”

Helder replies, “As you well know, while I hesitate to call myself a Christian, as I once did, I self-identify as a ‘Follower of Jesus’ and a ‘Lover of the Father of Jesus’. It is no reflection on the person or on the teaching of Jesus that I cannot identify as Christian, but in my experience and by my observation, the religion and its adherents, while they may, rightfully so, claim to practice the Christian religion, many can no longer claim to be followers of Jesus since so few Christians follow the teaching of Jesus.

I hold that there is one standard by which I discern what is of men—and I mean to say, men, as opposed to women—and what is of the Creator Spirit is just this,

‘If it doesn’t look and sound like Jesus,
it cannot be the Father of Jesus.’

While there have been, over the centuries, other human beings who have been incarnations of the Spirit, Jesus was unique in the quality of his person, the first fully human being to have walked the earth, meaning that the quality of the relationship that he modeled with the Spirit, his Father, was what the Spirit had created humans for. Also, in the obvious power of the Spirit in which he was anointed for setting the feet of humanity on the path toward unity with the Spirit, with one another, and with the universe, and in the depth of his teaching, by which humans should have enjoyed a much more fulfilling and satisfying history as “the Kingdom of God” on earth, rather than the one that they chose.

If we want to know what the Spirit thinks, feels, and acts like,
we look no further than at Jesus.

Jesus said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” If we want to know what the Spirit thinks, feels, and acts like, we look no further than at Jesus. As the good Archbishop said, “In God, there is no unchristlikeness at all.” In the amount that the ancient documents, whatever the tradition from which they come to us, are consistent with the person and teaching of Jesus, we may trust that they are the excellent words of the Spirit for our benefit. But, everyone is worshiping a god of their own understanding and making, so whenever the god they offer is contrary to the person and teaching of Jesus, we may assume that they are merely a reflection of the man that wrote them.”

• • •

Passerby says, “You say, if we want to know Her, we must look at Jesus, but all that we know of Jesus is what has been written of him in the Christian bible. Can we trust that everything those writers wrote is what Jesus did and said?”

“No, and there are a few things to say about that. First, none of the deeds and words of Jesus stand on their own merit. There is an older wisdom to which they all defer. Fr Rohr likes to use the example of a finger pointed at a beautiful full moon; the lesson is not in the finger, but in the moon, the finger is pointing at (The Buddha told a similar story). Jesus directs our attention not to himself but to Love, who created all things. It is Love that is the older wisdom to whom Jesus pointed. So…in the same way that we learn to know the difference between the wisdom of the Spirit and the words of men by looking at Jesus, so we discern the words and deeds of Jesus by—as opposed to what men said about him—looking to what he pointed us to…Love. If it isn’t Love, then it is not Jesus nor the Holy Spirit whom Jesus referred to as Father.”

• • •

“The soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love. Therefore, it can never find rest nor happiness in other things. It must lose itself in love. By its very nature it must seek God, who is love.”

—Mechthild de Magdeburg

​​“Through my love for you, I want to express my love for the whole cosmos, the whole of humanity, and all beings. By living with you, I want to learn to love everyone and all species. If I succeed in loving you, I will be able to love everyone and all species on Earth. . . . This is the real message of love.”

—Thich Nhat Hahn

“Can we truly know what Love is and is not?”

“I believe we can, absolutely. Most humans can, for all humans have been created in the image of Herself, which is Love. To demonstrate, still yourself, turn your seeing and hearing inward in the same way that you have learned from me, to seek the Holy, and what do you find there? Is it Love, or is it something else? I expect that you, and almost everyone else, will find Love. Never have I met someone who finds hate at their center when conducting this simple exercise. Although it is theoretically possible for hate to be stronger than Love, as Karl Barth said about hell, “it is the impossible possibility.”

We all seem to know, don’t we, when we love well and when we are not, and we all possess the language of Love. It is not by evolutionary accident or intuition that we know these things; Love is what it means to be created in Her image. Love is the ultimate destiny to which Jesus pointed.

So then, we know when we read that the words and deeds ascribed to Jesus are truly his, and by inference then, the heart and mind of the Creator, since they are always true to the character of the person of God, Love. Trust yourself to Love.

• • •

There is more to be said about the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels, which deserves our careful attention.

Jesus himself left no personal record of his teachings…he wrote nothing. All stories of Jesus are about him written by men who presumably—not to dismiss motive—were well-intentioned, record events as they remember them. And some of them are writing considerably after the events, which, as we well know, can have a deleterious effect on history. This explains the differing accounts present in the Gospels, and accepting this is true is not a significant problem, in my view.

Also, I have found it helpful to acknowledge that history does not take very long to become myth. This is particularly true in the lives of notable human beings (i.e., St Francis, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, and yes, Jesus). Neither do I find this particularly disturbing. If we understand that the value of good mythology is that it gives us a deeper look at reality than historical literalism can ever provide, we know that we have been given a wonderful gift. The rule of Love still applies.

• • •

Another very helpful understanding of the story of Jesus in the gospels I first read in the work of Marcus Borg. While obvious, it seems to me that it mostly goes unnoticed. All the writing that makes up the New Testament is “post-resurrection” and is, therefore, a reflection of, or a mirror, of the community that produced them. So…much that we read in the Gospels is the understanding that the blessed community came to after they had time to process the events together and had agreed on what they experienced. This is the excellent work of the Holy Spirit, a gift, and needs a myth to be received. If the question is, “Is what I read true, or is it a myth? ” The answer, as the good Rabbi said, is, ‘Yes!’

Passerby, Stand by Love.”