My newest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, just released in paperback, is written for those people who are committed to the Jesus experience, but because they are citizens of the 21st Century cannot twist their minds into First Century pretzels in order to say “I believe” to the traditional explanations offered by the biblical writers. Rather I seek the reality of the Jesus experience that made these explanations seem appropriate.
I do not believe, for example, that Jesus was born of a virgin in any biological sense, but I do believe that people found in Jesus a God presence that caused them to assert that human life could never have produced what they believed they met in him.
I do not believe that Jesus expanded the food supply, so that with a finite number of loaves he could feed more than 5,000 people in the wilderness, but I do believe that people found in him that which satisfied their deepest hunger and so they referred to him as the “Bread of Life” that is never exhausted.
I do not believe that the deceased body of Jesus was resuscitated physically on the third day and was restored to the life of this world as, at least, the later gospels assert, but I do believe that in him and through him people found a way into that which is eternal and so they portrayed him as breaking through and transcending the limits of death.
I do not believe that Jesus defied gravity to ascend into the heavens of a three-tiered universe to be reunited with the God who lives above the sky, but I do believe that Jesus opened the door to that realm in which life can become so whole and so fully human that we enter God’s divinity and God’s presence in a new way.
I do not believe that 50 days after the Easter experience the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples as a might rushing wind, accompanied by tongues of fire, as the Pentecost story in the Book of Acts relates, but I do believe that when we are open to God’s eternal presence we are also open to see another so deeply that tribal identities fall and we can communicate with one another in the universal language of love and discover that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, but a new humanity.
As Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once observed, I do not believe that Christianity can today be contained inside the traditional formulations of Christianity and must, therefore, transcend these boundaries, if it is to live in this generation. Bonhoeffer coined the phrase “Religionless Christianity” to describe what he meant. I seek in a similar way to look at Jesus outside the boundaries of religion. The result for me has been the recovery of a Jesus who commands my allegiance anew, a Jesus who calls me beyond my limits into a new humanity, beyond my prejudices into a new wholeness, beyond my religion into a new courage to live for others and to be all that I can be. It is this Jesus to whom my life is committed.
The Easter Jesus is, I believe, the limitless Jesus, the one in whom full divinity flows, not destroying but affirming his humanity, the Jesus who can command the attention of a world that is not only weary of war, but weary of religion also, especially when it seems to be a cause of war.
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