LtQ2 is a popular video and small group exploration of progressive Christianity featuring premier religion voices of our day. It is an open-minded alternative to studies that attempt to give participants all the answers and instead strives to create an environment where participants can interact with one another in exploring what's next for Christianity. Living the Questions is not the product of a denominational workgroup or other institutional effort aimed at simply dressing up the theological status quo. Instead, it is the response to the search for a practical tool to bring together, equip, and re-educate thinking Christians.
"Perhaps we are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Chrysler Corporation, or the Mafia as having a spirituality, but they do," writes Walter Wink. In The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, Wink returns to the ancient view of a world filled with angels and demons, powers and principalities, and reinterprets these notions for contemporary people. Wink's book is a challenge for Christians to wake up and become dangerously different, by objecting to the Darwinian games of domination that prevail in many of our governments, corporations, and churches. The book also offers stunningly gracious comfort, by showing that we are all caught up in this game, that the game is even a part of our gift, and that as long as we live in the world, not a single one of us can be pure, but we're called, all of us, to be holy. ~ Michael Joseph Gross
[From The New Yorker] Straddling popular science, ancient history, and theology, this ambitious work sets out to resolve not only the clash of civilizations between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim world but also the clash between science and religion. Tracking the continual transformation of faith from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Wright postulates that religious world views are becoming more open, compassionate, and synthesized. Occasionally, his prescriptions can seem obvious —- for instance, that members of the different Abrahamic faiths should think of their religions as “having been involved, all along, in the same undertaking.” But his core argument, that religion is getting “better” with each passing aeon, is enthralling.
Belief in God — understood as a supernatural spiritual being who created the universe and continues to sustain it — has long been assumed to be the irreplaceable foundation of the three monotheistic religions. But just as the bible ceased, in the nineteenth century, to be convincing as the repository of divinely revealed knowledge, so the twentieth century witnessed the death of the conventional image of God. Lloyd Geering asks whether this "death of God" spells the imminent death of the whole Christian tradition or simply means the end of conventional Christian doctrine.
In this small book Walter Wink offers a summary of his whole thinking about this issue, including the relation of Jesus and his message to politics and nonviolence, the history of nonviolent efforts, and how nonviolence can win the day when others don't hesitate to resort to violence or terror to achieve their aims. The Christian tradition of nonviolence is needed as an alternative.
There is not one Jesus, Chopra writes, but three. First, there is the historical Jesus, the man who lived more than two thousand years ago and whose teachings are the foundation of Christian theology and thought. Next there is Jesus the Son of God, who has come to embody an institutional religion with specific dogma, a priesthood, and devout believers. And finally, there is the third Jesus, the cosmic Christ, the spiritual guide whose teaching embraces all humanity, not just the church built in his name. He speaks to the individual who wants to find God as a personal experience, to attain what some might call grace, or God-consciousness, or enlightenment.
Don Cupitt believes that a new and truly global religious consciousness has been quietly easing itself in around the world. It does not need any visible organization and does not make any non-rational doctrinal claims. It is the religion of life—a secular, purely this-worldly, and radically-democratic affirmation of ordinary life. Where prescientific ages saw Heaven, he says, we see only sky. We have given up belief in a supernatural world, and we have felt compelled to break with the received ecclesiastical form of Christianity. But the Christian spirit of critical thinking, of systematic self-criticism and perpetual reform, has spread around the whole world in modern science, technology, critical history, and liberal democracy.
What happens to faith when the creeds and confessions can no longer be squared with historical and empirical evidence? Most critical scholars have wrestled with this question. Some have found ways to reconcile their personal religious belief with the scholarship they practice. Others have chosen to reconstruct their view of religious meaning in light of what they have learned. But most have tended not to share those views in a public forum. And that brings up a second question: at what point does the discrepancy between what I know, or think I know, and what I am willing to say publicly become so acute that my personal integrity is at stake? In the pages of When Faith Meets Reason, thirteen scholars take up the challenge to speak candidly about how they negotiate the conflicting claims of faith and reason, in hopes that their journeys will inspire others to engage in their own search for meaning.
Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning? Why do we "dress up" for church? Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week? Why do we have pews, steeples, choirs, and seminaries? This volume reveals the startling truth: most of what Christians do in present-day churches is not rooted in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles. Coauthors Frank Viola and George Barna support their thesis with compelling historical evidence in the first-ever book to document the full story of modern Christian church practices. NOTE: While some in the group found the concept of a "house church" a good alternative, most strongly disagreed with the authors' concervative theology.
Many people remain unaware of how the New Testament was written and transmitted. This course draws on modern biblical scholarship, recent archaeological discoveries, and careful literary analysis to trace the history of the New Testament and of the early Christian faith community. Professor Ehrman has crafted this course as a historical introduction to the books of the New Testament, addressing such significant questions as:
* Who wrote these books, under what circumstances, and for what audience?
* What do the books of the New Testament say, what do they mean, and how historically accurate are they?
* How can we can come to more fully appreciate and understand them?
[From Publishers Weekly] Crossan and Reed make a compelling case for the idea that culture, politics and quest for empire played as large a part in the formation of the Apostle Paul as did theology and religious training. The authors dig deeply into the history and archeology of Paul's world, searching for an understanding of the enigmatic apostle. Paul emerges as a fervent advocate for both the uniqueness of the Christian faith and the marginalization of others, the triumph of the City of God over the pagan and anti-God Roman empire. And this Paul is willing to reach out to both Jew and Gentile to accomplish his aims. In the end, Paul the man of faith is subsumed in Paul the agenda-driven revolutionary. The authors' masterful use of history, geography and theology combine to offer a strong case for their thesis.
Spong, the iconoclastic former Episcopal bishop of Newark, details in this impassioned work both his "deep commitment to Jesus of Nazareth" and his "deep alienation from the traditional symbols" that surround Jesus. For Spong, scholarship on the Bible and a modern scientific worldview demonstrate that traditional teachings like the Trinity and prayer for divine intervention must be debunked as the mythological trappings of a primitive worldview. What's left? The power of the "Christ experience," in which Jesus transcends tribal notions of the deity and reaches out to all people. Spong says Jesus had such great "energy" and "integrity" about him that his followers inflated it to the point of describing him as a deity masquerading in human form; however, we can still get at the historical origin of these myths by returning to Jesus' humanity, especially his Jewishness.
Karen Armstrong observes that it sometimes seems that we are developing exactly the kind of religion that people such as the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Jesus and Muhammad wanted to get rid of. How, she asks, did the preoccupation with orthodoxy become so important in the Western Christian tradition? Confucian, Daoist, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Greek and monotheistic traditions were not much interested in metaphysics or theology, and each one of these faiths began in recoil from the violence of their time. They developed an ethic based on compassion and the Golden Rule, which they declared to be the essence of the spiritual quest. In a series of four, one and one half hour classes, she looks in detail at the implications of this conviction to see what it has to say to us in our conflicted world.
Taking Mark -- the earliest Gospel -- as their guide, Borg and Crossan "re-tell a story everyone thinks they know too well and most do not seem to know at all." In so doing, they offer an alternative Passion of the Christ, the primary feature of which is not suffering, but passion understood as "consuming interest, dedicated enthusiasm, or concentrated commitment." Jesus' passion was the Kingdom of God declared in terms of God's justice, and that this was seen as a threat to the system of domination by Rome and Jewish temple rule. Borg and Crossan explain that despite Jesus' non-violence, his insistence on justice and equitable distribution of necessities ultimately led to his suffering.
A new kind of Christianity is emerging at the grass roots. Full of heart-felt expression, artistic creativity, and liberal social values, progressive churches and small Christian communities have established themselves across the denominational spectrum. Reporting on a national research study that undercuts the impression that right-wing Christianity is the only new development on the contemporary American religious landscape, Hal Taussig identifies thousands of progressive churches and para-churches and describes five characteristics of this new movement. He then proceeds to analyze its blind spots, project its future, and suggest how to start a progressive church.
Including nearly four hours of video content and a discussion guide, this DVD-based study featuring John Dominic Crossan
explores the juxtaposition of Roman Imperial Theology and the Kingdom of God. Contents include:
* Justice & The World: What is the Character of Your God?
* History & Jesus: What is the Content of Your Faith?
* Worship & Violence: What is the Purpose of Your Prayer?
* Resurrection & Community: What is the Function of Your Church?
Publishers Weekly: Spong focuses this book on "terrible texts" which have been used to justify such "sins" as overbreeding, degradation of the environment, sexism, child abuse and anti-Semitism. These biblical texts, according to Spong, are not the incontrovertible Word of God, but flawed human responses to perceived threats. An incendiary example of this is Spong's assertion that Paul was a closeted gay man whose anti-gay statements were motivated by little more than his own self-loathing. Spong does not stop there; in the course of the book he suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married; that none of the supernatural events described in the Bible took place (including the resurrection); and that theism itself is a misunderstanding of God. Interestingly, readers who do not endorse Spong's radical reinterpretation of Christianity will still find much in this book they can affirm. His explanation of the roots of Christian anti-Semitism is fascinating and much less challenging to orthodoxy than many of his other claims. You may also listen to Spong's November 2004 lecture on this subject by downloading this MP3 file.
The popular perception of the Bible as a divinely perfect book receives scant support from Ehrman, who sees in Holy Writ ample evidence of human fallibility and ecclesiastical politics. Though himself schooled in evangelical literalism, Ehrman has come to regard his earlier faith in the inerrant inspiration of the Bible as misguided, given that the original texts have disappeared and that the extant texts available do not agree with one another. Most of the textual discrepancies, Ehrman acknowledges, matter little, but some do profoundly affect religious doctrine. To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results. He further explains why textual criticism has frequently sparked intense controversy, especially among scripture-alone Protestants.
The scholars of the Seminar analyzed the likely authenticity of the more than 1,500 sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels. The text of the sayings is color-coded red, pink, gray or black, according to the consensus of the scholars: red (Jesus undoubtedly said this or something like it), pink (Jesus probably said something like this), gray (Jesus did not say this, but the ideas are close to his own), black (Jesus did not say this; it represents the content of a later or different tradition). See also this article by Lane C. McGaughy, The Sayings of the Historical Jesus.
[From the Publisher] Since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich, and pro-Republican? And since when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity mean you had to put faith in God aside? God's Politics offers a call to make both our religious communities and our government more accountable to key values of the prophetic religious tradition -- that is, make them pro-justice, pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-equality, pro-consistent ethic of life (beyond single-issue voting), and pro-family (without making scapegoats of single mothers or gays and lesbians). Biblical faith and religious traditions simply do not allow us as a nation to continue to ignore the poor and marginalized, deny racial justice, tolerate the ravages of war, or turn away from the human rights of those made in the image of God. These are the values of love and justice, reconciliation, and community that Jesus taught and that are at the core of what many of us believe, Christian or not. (See also sojo.net)
What difference does scholarship on the historical Jesus make for the way we think about the meaning of Christian faith in the twenty-first century? In The Historical Jesus Goes To Church, biblical scholars -- Fellows of the Jesus Seminar -- speak directly to the ways in which new knowledge of the Jesus of history requires and enable us to think differently about the significance of Jesus and about the reliability and authority of the Bible. They also imagine what these new understandings imply for public worship, preaching, prayer and practice, and life in community. These articles evoke the spirit of Paul, Christianity's first theologian, who like us found himself standing at the intersection of two eras and knew that he had to let go of his past if he hoped to have a future.
Lost for more than fifteen hundred years, the Gospel of Mary is the only existing early Christian gospel written in the name of a woman. Karen King tells the story of the recovery of this remarkable text and offers a new translation. This brief gospel rejects Jesus' suffering and death as a path to eternal life and exposes the view that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute for what it is -- a piece of theological fiction. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala offers a fascinating glimpse into the conflicts and controversies that shaped earliest Christianity. (see also MaryofMagdala.com)
This book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including a textual battle between The Gospel of Thomas (rediscovered in Egypt in 1945) and The Gospel of John. While John declares Jesus to be equivalent to God the Father, Thomas portrays Jesus as a teacher who seeks to uncover the divine light in all human beings. Pagels shows how the Gospel of John was later used by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon and others to define orthodoxy during the Second and Third Centuries -- a time when church leaders constructed the canon, creed, and hierarchy -- and in the process suppressed many of its spiritual resources by banning texts such as Thomas; a process Pagels argues "impoverished the churches that remained."
This book concentrates on the time after 324 AD when Christianity became the official religion under Emperor Constantine. Accepted by Rome, Christians turned to fighting each other, specifically over the precise degree of Christ's divinity. On one side was Arius, a Greek ecclesiastic maintaining that Christ was the holiest of mortals but not the Eternal God of Israel. On the other was Bishop Athanasius and his followers arguing that Christ was precisely God on earth and equal to God. Intrigues and deaths ensued over the attempt to form a unified Church, a conflict lasting 60 years and 20 ecumenical councils. Rubenstein describes the controversy, discusses the origins of the Nicene Creed, the nature of morality and sin, the consequences of fundamentalism, and the intertwining of religion and government.
For the millions of people who have turned away from many traditional beliefs about God, Jesus, and the Bible, but still long for a relevant, nourishing faith, Borg shows why the Christian life can remain a transforming relationship with God. Borg reclaims terms and ideas once thought to be the sole province of evangelicals and fundamentalists: he shows that terms such as "born again" have real meaning for all Christians; that the "Kingdom of God" is not a bulwark against secularism but is a means of transforming society into a world that values justice and love; and that the Christian life is essentially about opening one's heart to God and to others.
Best-selling inspirational writer Walsch has another "conversation with God," this time focusing on the aggression and dogma that plague the world. Walsch guides individuals to take an active role in changing the world by changing their beliefs. He does not advocate replacing beliefs, such as those rooted in the Bible, Qu'ran, or Bhagavad-Gita, but instead suggests that we become aware of how those beliefs have led to dysfunctional behaviors. Besides his "Nine New Revelations", Walsch also lists "Five Fallacies" about God and Life, and proposes "Five Steps to Peace", (full lists avaliable at the CwG.org web site).
Amazon's Editorial Review (Best of 2001): Christianity will not be a viable belief system for honest people in the contemporary world, writes John Shelby Spong, until it drops a few outmoded ideas -- for instance, belief in a supernatural God who reveals Himself from outside creation. A New Christianity for a New World continues the work begun in Spong's bestselling Why Christianity Must Change or Die, in which the former Episcopalian bishop diagnosed Christianity's major problems. Here, he offers a vision of what authentic Christian belief might look like today, stripped of theism and all its corollaries (doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Atonement). -- Michael Joseph Gross
Biblical scholar and Southern Baptist minister Clayton Sullivan brings together the latest work on the historical Jesus and offers four new strategies to help Christians find a faith that is consistent with the best scholarship available. Sullivan looks at some major questions -- what was Jesus' main message, what was his attitude toward non-Jews, and more -- and uses these to propose ways to rescue Jesus from the creedal prison that orthodox Christianity has put him in.
The quest of the historical Jesus -- who he was, what he said, what he did -- has been one of the most exciting and controversial developments in contemporary religion. Thanks to decades of renewed interest and research, the way we think and talk about Jesus will never be the same. The Once and Future Jesus Conference took that quest to a new level. At this unprecedented gathering, leading thinkers turned their attention from the past to the future and asked: What do new understandings of Jesus mean for the church, the faith, and the world of tomorrow? More info...
Not since Martin Luther has a leader risen from within the church to call for a more powerful reformation. Here Spong integrates his compelling stands on the Bible, Jesus, sin, and morality into an intelligible creed that today's thinking Christians can embrace. While Bishop Spong has for many years called upon Christians to confront issues ranging from the role of women in the church and the unfair treatment of homosexuals to the perils of fundamentalism, this important book marks the first time he has offered a unified vision of authentic Christian belief that can live in the third millennium. Exploring the future of ethics and prayer, Bishop Spong proposes a Christianity based on a whole new way of thinking, premised upon justice and love rather than judgment and literal-minded readings of the Bible.