Jesus as the New Adam

Michelangelo's Naked Christ

I offered this post on May 3, 2017.

Jesus as the new Adam is a trope familiar to Christianity since Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians. It has come to be reinterpreted by others, and perhaps what I present here has already been imagined, as anyone reading this blog knows my knowledge is limited. But I want to offer what meaning came to me as I grappled with the notion of Jesus “dying for my sins” during this recent Holy Week. 

I have flat out written on this blog that the God who is worthy of my devotion would never require the death of any kind of scapegoat as a stand-in for me taking responsibility for my own sins. 

But I have also written that the sacrificial love represented in the story of the cross mythologically conveys the absolute and eternal depths of God’s compassion. Many theologians have focused on the concept of God dying on the cross rather than “his only son,” taking the onus of a demanding, bloodthirsty God off the table. And anyone who has had a terrible sin to forgive of another knows the suffering such compassion entails. 

Longtime readers may remember that one of my Holy Week practices is to read one chapter each day of a short book, The Temple of God’s Wounds, in which the narrator visits a mythological monastery at a turning point in his life. I’ve written that I overlook his transactional understanding of atonement to contemplate other, deeper spiritual wisdom contained therein. 

This time I focused on how difficult it is for him (and  for me) to face that which is absolutely holy. I understand better the “mysterium tremendum,” the “terrible” face of God or, as the OED adds in its definition, of existence itself. 

During our last visit shortly before his death, an elderly dedicated churchman surprised me by his sudden tears and seemingly non-sequitur confession, saying something like, “I hope dear old Mother Church can forgive me for any embarrassment I’ve caused her.” I don’t think this was prompted solely by his having been a closeted gay man. 

Age may make us aware how far we have fallen short, not only of the glory of God, but of the glory of being a child of God, because I found during Holy Week that, along with the writer of The Temple of God’s Wounds, I felt such a need for forgiveness! Now, I know, as an introvert, that even the good I may do can embarrass me; but I’ve done plenty of things I’d prefer not to have in my eulogy! 

I have a depiction, acquired in Egypt, of a Pharaoh being weighed on scales opposite a feather. The tradition was that if the Pharaoh’s heart was heavier than a feather, he could not enter eternity.  Few if any of us could pass such a test! 

I have been reading The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol. A reader and contributor to my blog had asked me if there was a book I was eager to have in my library. Having just read a review of this book, that’s what I asked for. What’s remarkable to me is that the Qur’an, while not supporting Jesus’ divinity, reveres him as a prophet, like Moses and Muhammad. The writer suggests that this was the view of the Jerusalem church and its Jewish Christians led by James and represented in Christian scriptures by the epistle of James, which does not refer to the divinity of Jesus and famously includes, “Faith without works is dead.” This contrasts with other Christian emphases on mere belief, and specifically belief in Jesus’ divinity and substitutionary atonement. 

Thus I realized that progressive Christians have that in common with the early Jewish Christians, not to mention Muslims and Jews. We may or may not hold to Jesus’ divinity, and consider that doing justice and practicing charity and showing mercy are what the Lord (i.e. God) requires of us. 

For me as a progressive Christian, Jesus is the “new Adam”—not the innocent and perfect and beautiful (and initially sexless) Ken and Barbie doll of Adam and Eve; rather the tried and tested, unappealing and vulnerable and wounded one, acquainted with sorrows and grief, the bearer of the sins and injustices of the world—political, religious, and personal. Treasonous and blasphemous, betrayable and deniable, because compassion was all he held dear. 

Thus he knows the trouble I’ve seen, the trouble I’ve gotten into, and the trouble I’ve caused, not just personally but throughout the world. He is the real human being that Adam and Eve could not even imagine in their innocence and privilege. They were rough drafts, prototypes, not as fully human. 

So when Jesus prays, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” it seems genuine, true, and possible. 

 

Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

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The Body Still Loves to Dance

Dancing Jesus

One of my spiritual practices during Lent turned out to be sorting through boxes of my papers for my archive, a process that continues. I warned readers that this might lead to nostalgic posts! The excerpts here come from a commentary I wrote for Frontiers Newsmagazine, published July 17, 1992.

Exodus International President Joe Dallas gave the opening address at a conference of “ex-gay” ministry leaders and members held at Point Loma Nazarene College in San Diego June 21-27.

This was an assignment I did not want. I approached the gathering of 500 registrants, to use a biblical phrase, “in fear and trembling.” Maybe it was the uncomfortable memory of my straight and narrow fundamentalist past. Maybe it was the expected conformity of participants, from a dress code (“no tank tops, tight-fitting clothes, immodest bathing suits or skimpy shorts”) to thought code (“Exodus International reserves the right to deny conference participation to anyone whose views are not in agreement with our doctrinal and policy statements”). Maybe it was the workshops on avoiding “impure thoughts” or masturbation as “the ‘M’ word.” Or maybe I just thought they’d all be loony.

But they weren’t, and I discovered that though gay sex may be verboten, some things never change. Camp humor abounded. People were caring and sensitive and carefully huggy. Haircuts and clothing, though not overly provocative, were still stylish and colorful; in a workshop on masculinity, I heard rumblings of discontent at a suggestion that they rid themselves of their wardrobes and patronize barbers rather than hair stylists. En route to a session, two ex-lesbians were kvetching about one’s lack of punctuality and the other’s lack of patience. And two ex-gay boys next to me in the opening worship were thrilled to find someone with a car: “We need to go to a mall really bad!” one emoted while in the next breath telling his friend, “I really want to be here; I’m longing to be closer to God.”

Ultimately, I’m not sure what I expected, but I did not anticipate everybody would be so “nice” and “normal.” But then, they thought that I thought like they did—that homosexual behavior is sin, an affront to God. Yet in none of the presentations or workshops that I attended—even those designed for the newcomer—did I hear why they thought so: no scripture, no theology. It just was.

…

Fundamentalists of whatever faith need God to be in control, and on God’s behalf, they are controlling: stressing uniformity over unity, obedience over independence, authority over reason. As do many other Christians, they also believe in spirituality controlling the body’s feelings and needs. These were recurring themes throughout the day, not only in word, but in deed: the design of the presentations and the “workshops” made no provision for questions or interaction among the participants—though individual counseling and laying on of hands were available, and special interest groups, such as one on AIDS, were encouraged.

…

Faces brightened over those who “left the lifestyle,” and hushed tones described others who “had fallen.” Cheers greeted the introduction or mention of a wife or husband, and nods of agreement met veiled references to Satan. Disparaging references were made to “pro-gay” churches, “sympathetic” media, and a psychoanalytic profession which had caved into “political pressure” from gays. One man drew vigorous applause when, noting that gays were better than their group at “building solidarity,” he suggested that they hold their own “Ex-Gay Pride March.”

The day ended as it began: with a worship of emotionally stirring group singing, led by a church musician who declared that Jesus “took my homosexuality on himself in the cross, and took it to the grave.” In the morning I had felt sad, witnessing these young people giving themselves over to a God whom they thought didn’t like gay sex. I knew that this would be, for most of them, a way station on their way out of the closet and possibly out of the church.

Now I felt sad leaving them, as a camper feels sad leaving a spiritual retreat. We belonged to each other sexually and spiritually, but they did not nor could not know that. Years from now I might meet one in a bar, and he will tell me he was forced to choose his sexuality over his spirituality. The fortunate ones will be those who find their way to a congregation which welcomes them as self-affirming gays and lesbians.

But in the meantime, the music tapped into the erotic energy of the crowd, which stood to sing. Jesus, put your arms around me and hold me; it’s true I love you. Hands began lifting in a charismatic gesture, as if to touch God, as if opening to God’s embrace. I will come, while you sing over me: How I love you, child, I love you.

The beat led to clapping hands and discreet movements of the bodies surrounding me. I noticed that hips loosened in gay dance bars by the pulsing music of Donna Summer or Madonna now swung easily in praise of their Lord.

The Shakers, a Christian cult, got their name from their ritual dances. They, too, did not believe in practicing their sexuality, and perhaps their shaking dances emanated from some deep erotic wish. For no matter how our spirituality might deny it, the body still loves to dance.

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Squandering Eternity

If you are looking for devotional material for Advent, may I recommend my own Reformation of the Heart, which leads the reader through each day of Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, and Holy Week. It includes a handy scripture index.

A thought crossed my mind today that I can’t let go of.

It took a virtual eternity to get to me, to you, to our present lives.

We think of eternity as a thing of the future. “Where will you spend eternity?” billboards and bellicose Bible-thumpers ask. Much religion is based on this premise. “Squandering eternity” has come to mean giving up heaven, an everlasting future with God.

But the only eternity we “know” is in the past, the billions of years it took to form the universe, solar systems, planets, inhabitable planets, life, and the forms of life those planets host today.

Eternity has brought us to this moment, the breath I take as I write this, the breath you take as you read this. Squandering eternity is not living up to this moment, not being fully mindful of it, not reverencing all that has come into balance, into play, to make this moment “work,” to create this eco-sphere in which we live and move and have our being, to evolve my/your consciousness to reflect its magnificence.

Much of our lives is denial and distraction. We fill our moments rather than letting them fill us. We’re occupied with our pasts and preoccupied with our futures.

The founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius, believed that, in the Final Judgment, God will not ask what we didn’t do, but rather, “How much of my creation did you not enjoy?”

Given our current displays of xenophobia and environmental arrogance, we could ask ourselves, how many of God’s creatures do we not enjoy? And, given various inequalities, how much enjoyment is being denied others?

Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And it was the Jesuit-educated priest and physicist George Lemaître who gave us the wondrous concept behind the Big Bang. Talk about a singular moment!

I lost my muse in July, our beloved dog Hobbes. Though now she joins me only in spirit for my morning prayers on the deck, I am not bereft of “wildlife,” so to speak. Identical twin cats sometimes watch me from a neighbor’s window.  A hummingbird occasionally flies inquisitively before my face. Almost every morning, a bee gathers nectar from the flowers in our hanging baskets.

I once said the Lord’s Prayer as my eyes followed the bee move from tiny blossom to blossom, as if the bee were praying it. How differently God’s kingdom and power and glory seemed then!

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough,” Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote.

Ignatius defined sin as anything that blocks the love that God is trying to share with you, or blocks your love for God. And for Ignatian spirituality, God is part of everything.

To Ignatius, what bothers God is not our being fully human, but our trying to be God.

Let God be eternal.

Take this moment to wonder that you have come to be after all this time.

Cultural anthropologist Rene Girard died earlier this month. As many of you know, I used his understandings of mimesis, mimetic rivalry, violence, and the scapegoat mechanism in my book, Coming Out as Sacrament. For an excellent analysis of his life’s work, please click here.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Something Divinely Providential about Our Deaths

I think we got off on the wrong foot, believing that death came into the world because of sin. If there is something divinely providential about our lives, there must be something divinely providential about our deaths. In the language of the previous post, “The Universe in Your Soul,” the cosmos that begat life must have also begat death.

This insight, this revelation, came to me as clear as day while reading Julian of Norwich’s Revelations one morning. And it gave me great peace, and dare I say, bliss. I felt as I imagine C. S. Lewis’s wife did when she was “surprised by joy.”

Was it something Julian said? Probably, but not directly. The idea welled up in me as she described our yearning to see the face of God, though I don’t assume as she does that death provides that experience. Neither do I reject that hope. After all, if we can imagine an infinite multiverse, who knows what death may bring?

I believe that whatever death means, it is intended as providentially as our lives.  It is part of the natural order of things or the divine order of things, however one chooses to view it.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” in death as in life. “In life and in death we belong to God.”

Because we resist death, and our deaths in particular, as part of life, we view death as a kind of failure rather than an accomplishment or completion. It is not only the medical profession that suffers this. Because long ago death was associated with sin, even those who don’t think much about sin may search obituaries for self-inflicted causes, even if it’s simply to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I wrote a sonnet to a friend in college that rather romantically compared our life cycle with that of alpine wildflowers, ending with the couplet:

And then someday we’ll lose compose

While out of us, another grows.

Even then I wanted to be buried straight into the ground, recycled, as it were, into the earth, and into other forms of life.

But recycling has other expressions. 

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” Jesus said.

Having sold only two paintings in his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “Life is only a kind of sowing time; the harvest is not here.”

Echoing this, Henri Nouwen spoke of the “fruitfulness of our lives” that may only be realized after our brief lifespans.

In one of her letters of spiritual direction, Evelyn Underhill wrote, “No one, not even the greatest saint, is irreplaceable. It is a greater act of trust and love to give your work into fresh hands…”

Finally, it takes an artist like Van Gogh seeing death as if for the first time to observe: 

It certainly is a strange phenomenon that all the artists, poets, musicians, painters, are unfortunate in material things…  That brings up again the eternal question: is the whole of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side [of] death we see one hemisphere only? 

Painters—to take them only—dead and buried, speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations through their work.

Is that all, or is there more besides? In a painter’s life death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is.

For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this, that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train. 

So it seems to me possible that cholera, gravel, phthisis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. 

My preference would be to go there on foot, but regardless of how I get there, I hope to trust the benevolent providence of God and the universe. They’ve been doing life and death much, much longer and better than I have.

Readers are this blog’s only means of support. To donate, please click here or mail to Metropolitan Community Churches, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order.

Thank you!

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Universe in Your Soul

With a title like “The Universe in Your Soul” you might think I’ve gone New Age or motivational, but this idea came to me while reading the medieval Christian recluse Julian of Norwich, whose “Showings” or “Revelations” (the first book written in English by a woman) I’ve been contemplating for several months during my morning prayers. She writes: 

And then our Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the midst of my inner self. I saw my soul as large as if it were an endless world… 

Translator Father John-Julian, OJN offers other versions and translations of her Middle English as possibilities for “endless world,” but concludes that “Julian is trying to convey the idea of limitless space within her soul.” Julian views the soul as both body and spirit, much as the ancient Hebrews and first Christians did, and that God is “the means by which our sensuality and our essence are held together.”

When she speaks of her soul, she means our souls as well. That captures my imagination. It occurs to me that our souls are the progeny of a universe expanding not only beyond itself, but also within ourselves—not only outwardly, but inwardly.

Being, life itself, is how the universe is reaching beyond matter and gasses, energy and dark matter, to comprehend itself, to communicate, and to contemplate the wonder of it all. (Scientific contemplation is helping us also understand how “lively” matter is, even before life emerges.)

For Julian, this is not just humanity, but all living things. And, she observes, it’s in this “being” that God is to be found, making me think of Paul Tillich’s notion of God as “the Ground of Being.”

She has a high view of human beings, in sharp contrast to “the typical medieval stance (or the Puritan and Calvinist attitudes),” to quote her translator. She observes: 

For I saw in the same showing that if the blessed Trinity could have made [humanity’s] soul any better, any more beautiful, any nobler than it was made, [God] would not have been wholly pleased with the creation of [the human] soul. 

And that’s why God chooses to dwell in our souls. I flash on Etty Hillesum’s understanding of God as her “deepest and richest” self—in the words of 12-Step, our “higher power.”

For Julian, “the Fall” is a human stumbling into a hole, requiring compassion and help getting out. As I’ve written in a previous post, she doesn’t believe that God blames us for sin, but feels empathy for the trouble and suffering it causes us. Sin is “nothing” and “unnatural” for us, making me think of Karl Barth’s notion of sin as “the impossible possibility.”

And she embraces the “felix culpa,” the “fortunate sin” that makes possible the Incarnation as well as our individual realizations of vulnerability, though I prefer Hildegard of Bingen’s notion that the Incarnation was intended from the beginning; indeed, I would say the Incarnation is a teaching moment to reveal God’s incarnation in all life.

And our “dearworthy Mother” Jesus, “if we fall, quickly…raises us by [a] loving embracing and merciful touching.”

God knows we could all use more “merciful touching”! Julian writes: 

As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother. 

And what [God] showed in all the showings… particularly in those sweet words where [God] says: … 

“I am the supreme goodness of all manner of things.

I am what causes thee to love.

I am what cause thee to yearn.

It is I: the endless fulfilling of all true desires.”

We do not invite so much as observe the presence of God, Jesus, and the Spirit in our souls, central to our interior “endless world and…blessed kingdom.”

And, as if all of this were not enough, Julian asserts: 

It is God’s will that I see myself just as much bound to [God] in love as if [God] had done all that [God] has done just for me. 

And thus should every soul think in regard to [God’s] Love: that is to say, the love of God creates in us such a unity that when it is truly understood, no [one] can separate [oneself] from any other. 

As I contemplate this insight of an “endless world,” this universe inside me, I am struck with awe and a sense of tremendous responsibility. A recent study indicates that awe is directly related to an ability to care for others. A current book, The Spiritual Child by Lisa Miller, argues “that spiritual awareness is innate and that it is an important component in human development,” in the words of columnist David Brooks.

This further insight from Julian I find transforming the more I consider it: 

And thus I understand truly that our soul can never have rest in things that are beneath itself. 

Reminiscent, as John-Julian observes, of Augustine’s famous saying that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, O God.” It makes me consider all the things with which I occupy my life that are “beneath” my soul. 

And the soul that thus contemplates [this delightful sight] makes itself to be like [God] who is contemplated, and ones itself in rest and peace by [God’s] grace. 

Even for those who may not believe in God, contemplating the universe within that is the culmination of a billions-year-old universe may inspire awe and make us sensible to the value of our lives and the lives of others. 

Click here for other posts about Julian of Norwich.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Readers are this blog’s only means of support. To donate, please click here or mail to Metropolitan Community Churches, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. 

Thank you!

Thank God for Atheists!

I believe we need to imagine a world without God.

We then might take greater responsibility for our own lives and the circumstances of others, as well as life on this planet.  Our consciences would not be alleviated by the notion that suffering or poverty is God’s will.  There would be no “acts of God” that can toss a baby through a window, drown a family, suffocate the elderly, or destroy a coastline. There would just be tornadoes, tsunamis, heat waves, and hurricanes.

We wouldn’t wait for God to fix things, or save us, or take care of the world. We wouldn’t exclude anyone from basic human rights because God demands purity or orthodoxy or a particular form of religion or worship. We wouldn’t have those who do violence to themselves or others for the reward of various versions of an afterlife. We wouldn’t have American politicians who insist on saying “God bless America” rather than “God bless the world.”

Diseases, disabilities, and infirmities would not be blamed on God but on their true causes ascertained by science. Global warming and evolution would not be things of “belief” but challenges to human arrogance and pride. Sin would be viewed not as an offense against God but as an offense against ourselves, others, and the earth. Redemption would not be considered a supernatural event but a coming together of forgiveness, responsibility, mentoring, and community. Death would remind us of the unpostponable value of life.

Rather than prefer and await an invisible world, we might better value bodies, earth, the cosmos, and the moment.

So I am grateful for atheists and agnostics who remind me of my own “cloud of unknowing” when it comes to God’s definitions, actions, and desires.

Yet I still believe in God.

Letting go of the concepts above prompts me to believe still more that all we say and do and all we fail to say or do matters.

+++

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution. Perhaps your congregation might include it in your mission budget. Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

"What's Playing Down at the Presbyterian?"

The king in the comic strip Wizard of Id once passed a church sign with the sermon title, “The Wages of Sin.” Consternated, hoping for an alternative, he bewildered his faithful knight by asking, “I wonder what’s playing down at the Presbyterian?”

In progressive circles, sin is not center stage.  Kathleen Norris, in her book Amazing Grace, notes, “Pastors can be so reluctant to use the word ‘sin’ that in church we end up confessing nothing except our highly developed capacity for denial. One week, for example, the confession began, ‘Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives You want us to have,’ which,” she writes, “seems less a prayer than a memo from one professional to another.”

A seminary classmate resisted corporate prayers of confession because they often confessed abuses of power, when she felt her sin as a woman was her inability to claim her power, to assert herself. Celtic Christian scholar J. Philip Newell objects to beginning worship with prayers of confession, rightly asking, “How would it be if I began every encounter with my wife telling her what a piece of garbage I am?”

Progressive Christian theologian Marcus Borg thinks that the priestly story of “sin, guilt, sacrifice, and forgiveness” in Sunday worship can lead to a passive spirituality. In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, he writes, “Rather than seeing [religious] life as a process of spiritual transformation, it stresses believing that God has already done what needs to be done.” He explains: 

This story is very hard to believe. The notion that God’s only son came to this planet to offer his life as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, and that God could not forgive us without that having happened, and that we are saved by believing this story, is simply incredible. Taken metaphorically, this story can be very powerful. But taken literally, it is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message. To many people, it simply makes no sense, and I think we need to be straightforward about that. 

(Btw, Hildegard of Bingen believed the Incarnation was planned from the beginning, not as the result of human sin.)

Borg believes that the stories of the Exodus and the Babylonian exile speak more to the oppression and alienation people experience and/or witness in this world. Though receiving the Law at Mt. Sinai is a part of the Exodus story, the concept of spiritual journey better captures our spiritual imaginations.

And indeed, the first Christians considered themselves “people of the way.” “Disciple” means follower, and the disciples were Jesus followers, as many Christians choose to be designated today.  

To me this is preferable to accepting an identity as “sinners,” which is why I embrace the Celtic Christian understanding that sin is not an inborn characteristic, and its effects can be expunged by encounters with either Creation or Christ.

Confession thus becomes a way of acknowledging we are better than sin as beloved children of God. The New Testament word for sin ’amartia derives from ’amartano, which means “to miss the mark,” confirming a more positive understanding of our nature.

President Calvin Coolidge was a progressive Republican who voted for women’s suffrage. He was also a taciturn Congregationalist, which means he didn’t have much to say, known as “Silent Cal,” unconsciously practicing Benedictine “restraint of speech” (taciturnitas). You probably have heard the possibly apocryphal story of him returning from church one Sunday, his wife asking what the preacher’s sermon was about. “Sin,” he declared. “Well, what did he say about it?” she prodded. “He was agin’ it,” he replied.

We too can oppose sin. Sin doesn’t have to come “naturally.”

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. To donate, please click here. Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

What about Sin?

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. 

Some of you may have gritted your teeth a little at this post’s title, “What about sin?” That may be because we hear the question filtered through the doctrine of original sin or hear it as a prelude to finger-pointing and judgment.  

In his book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, contemporary guru Eckhart Tolle advises that if we turn off when we hear the term “sin,” we might substitute other terms, such as “unconsciousness” or “insanity,” because sin is all about losing awareness of our deeper selves, our deeper connection to all that is. Tolle defines the word “sin” as “the suffering you unconsciously inflict on yourself and others as long as [an] illusory sense of self governs what you think, say, and do.” 

This illusory sense of self that Tolle asserts we feel called to defend reminds me of what Trappist monk Thomas Merton called the false or inauthentic self, that self that thinks of itself as autonomous, self-sufficient, unrelated to other human beings, unrelated to other creatures, and unrelated to the Creator. In his book, Contemplative Prayer, Merton calls true sin-awareness “a sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one’s own inmost truth” and claims that “society itself, institutional life, organization, the ‘approved way,’ may in fact be encouraging us in falsity and illusion.” 

In the fourth century, Pelagius and other Celtic Christians taught that sin was real, awaiting to tempt us from birth onward, but that it is not inborn and may easily be removed by an experience of grace, either in nature, by love, or through Christ. A contemporary of Pelagius, Augustine, got him declared a heretic in part because he opposed the doctrine of original sin which Augustine (and much later, Calvin) embraced. As Pelagius wrote, “You will realize that doctrines are inventions of the human mind, as it tries to penetrate the mystery of God.” 

In his book Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, contemporary writer Philip Newell explains that another Celtic Christian teacher, Eriugena, uses leprosy as a metaphor for sin. Just as leprosy can transform a human face into something scary, so sin can change the human soul into something monstrous. And just as leprosy causes numbness, so sin makes us insensitive “to what is deepest within us, and more and more we treat one another as if we were not made in the image of God.” 

Celtic Christianity recognized the image of God in everything, including ourselves, so following Christ was not about becoming something other than we are but rather embracing who we are, beloved children of God. And everyone was a beloved child of God, Christian or not.  

Imagine what a difference this attitude would make in how we reach out to others, whether among our neighbors or among the nations and religions of the world!