Saturday, December 01, 2012

New Language

I am slowly learning a new way of speaking about Jesus and the bible. I don't want to throw the baby (pun) out with the bath water. Marcus Borg, Bishop Spong, Bart Erman have helped me find the words to describe the reality of my faith. Thomas Sheehan has an interesting book, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986--electronic edition 2000) where he explains,
Catholic scholars now teach that the Gospels are not accurate "histories" of Jesus but religious testimonies produced by the second and third generations of Christians, whose faith that Jesus was their savior colored their memory of his days on earth. Thus, even though all Catholic biblical scholars believe that Jesus is God, they do not necessarily maintain that Jesus himself thought he was the divine Son of God, who had existed from all eternity as the Second Person of the Trinity.
I heard an interview with him on a Stanford University podcast and found his book online. I also found his 2006 audio course on iTunes on the Historical Jesus; I made a CD and listened to it several times during my commute. He is a little embarrassed that the host site, The Secular Web that is owned and operated by Internet Infidels Inc., who describe themselves as a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to promoting and defending a naturalistic worldview defined "the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system, which means that nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it."

The fact that I had to go to this kind of website demonstrates how hard it is to talk about our faith without being seen as one against belief in God. In my years in the Jesus movement (1969 to 73), I had a vague understanding that a theologian was someone who tried to destroy our faith in Jesus. LOL

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