The Politics of Religion Drives Me Nuts

Some thoughts …

The reality of the Bible is that there is little left that is real. Written in a time of crisis when the Romans decapitated Israel and destroyed its Temple, the Jewish Christians or Ebonites had finally realized that Jesus wasn’t their earthly savior and a more spiritual interpretation was required.

Before this could be completed, the male-dominated institutional church of the 4th and 5th centuries edited the gospels and letters to render them unintelligible to the first century Christian. The Roman emperors also added that the scriptures must be consistent with their ancient beliefs – and the rest is pseudo-history.

So, who is this Jesus that Christians worship? Surely the Jesus of the scriptures that has come down to us is a mere adaptation or accommodation of the Jesus of history of the first century. Therefore, it makes no sense to be a literalist with regard to the New Testament. Too much has changed. To say that Jesus is “God” is also to misappropriate the scriptures. When the concept of the Trinity was formulated in the 3rd-5th centuries CE, the Catholics tried to wipe out the Holy Spirit as the feminine side of God (Sophia). The emperors tried to keep Mary as a part of the Trinity. Finally, Sophia was changed to the neuter form of the word “spirit.”

Perhaps Coptic Christianity and its Gnostic or docetic counterpart is closer to the ancient interpretation of Jesus that what was handed to us in the West. It scared the per-gi-bers out of the Western Church and so they had their books burned. Luckily some were buried and some survived. Just maybe the interpretation of the God-Christ-Messiah who was implanted in the earthly Jesus resolves a lot of the difficulties with the Apostles’ Creed and the like – you know the “begotten but not begotten” passages or “Homousia (man stuff created by God) and ousia (God stuff which is uncreated).” So close we are to the ancient myths and mystery religions that the Jesus of scripture is more metaphor than fact, a metaphor in need of interpretation by each Christian generation.

I find it difficult, as one who has studied such stuff in college, seminary, and university to take fundamentalism seriously as a "faith." I see it more like the ancient Roman group: a political power movement with relgious symbolism. We don't teach this in the church. Divinity schools and seminaries must also heed to appropriate non-intellectual path or be closed down. There is scholarship out there and much of it has uncovered the real story behind the myths, lies, and legends. The problem is that most preachers who know want say, but there are more who don't know and condemn those who do.

Therefore, we keep laypeople in the church in blissful ignorance because we really don't believe their faith is strong enough for the truth. Political correctness has infiltrated the church and so Biblical and historical scholarship falls on deaf ears. Just think, if the church is anti-education, then our schools are also in that schools of education are recipients of such shallow scholarship and historical facts and conceptual ideas.

What then is the purpose of religion? That's another blog.