As I said in the conclusion to my last post, in Gallup’s decades-long practice of polling Americans on religions topics, for the first time less than half of respondents said religion was an important factor in their lives. After peaking during the post-World War 2 baby boom, worship attendance has been steadily declining. Mainline denominations, along with the Catholic Church, have been shrinking and closing congregations by the thousands. More recently, evangelical denominations have also been losing members, as have many of the most well-known nondenominational megachurches.

In Europe, this change began much sooner. The disruptions and violence of the Reformation, followed by the Enlightenment push for intellectual and political freedom, combined to put the value and authority of establishment religion in serious doubt. Westernization and urbanization have had similar effects on the great Asian religions. There, too, participation in traditional rites and ritual have declined, and many temples and shrines have been abandoned and become tourist sites.

Yet among the “big three” traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, there remains a spiritual and intellectual vibrancy that has responded to modernism and even spread internationally. Many non-Asians identify with Buddhism, especially Zen, while not affiliating with a Buddhist congregation. Similarly, Advaita Vedanta Hinduism is the foundation of many secular Western spiritual teachings today, while new translations into English of Daoism’s primary text, the Tao Te Ching, have appeared regularly.

Christianity, however, has viewed itself as a black-or-white, you’re in or you’re out, movement. Christian teaching was subordinated to evangelism, spiritual renewal to baptism and worship attendance. Until only recently, the goal was that the whole world would someday become Christian, and some still hold that view. And this points to the single biggest change that Christianity needs to undergo: it has to change its view of itself.

There is a historical gap between Jesus of Nazareth and the emergence of the church that scholars will likely never bridge, simply because we have no evidence. The period is a void. Yet for some reason, a group of people came to the belief that the most important thing about Jesus was not his life but his death, which they said was for the forgiveness of the sins of all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. The most prominent of these was Paul, who never actually knew Jesus.

This is the form of Christianity that came to prevail. In its first centuries, Christianity set itself against both Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. After becoming the official Roman imperial religion in the 4^th century, it championed itself over every other form of religion it encountered. Christianity’s superiority was simply assumed, though rarely argued.

What was nearly lost in this process, however, was a clear sense of what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus here and now. The “don’ts” of Christian morality were hammered home from the pulpit, mostly to ensure people made regular use of the confessional. The love and compassion that are central to Jesus’ life and teaching in the gospels, as well as important to Paul, were encouraged but mostly left to religious orders to actually implement.

The Reformation resulted in few changes in practice to this emphasis, though it did rearrange church power dynamics. But this isn’t surprising because it was barking up the wrong tree. What was needed then is what is desperately needed now: not a reorganization or renewal of the church, but a refreshing and rethinking of the meaning of Christianity itself.

To do that, this truth needs to be hammered home: Jesus did not start the church. And despite the teachings of the early church fathers and the creeds, neither did the church fall from heaven, born on the wings of the Holy Spirit. As church historians have clearly shown, the Catholic Church which arose in the 4^th century was very much a human product, born of highly debatable theology and intense political power struggles. And as was evident to many at the time, its connection to the man Jesus of Nazareth was tenuous, at best.

If Christianity is to have any future, it will only come from rebuilding  itself on a new foundation, the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, and by getting over its hangup with the dramatic titles and identities the later church gave him. In a post last year, I highlighted an emotional scene from John’s Easter story. Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Jesus but initially mistakes him for a gardener. When Jesus addresses her my name, Mary recognizes him and says simply, “Rabbi.” Jesus is called rabbi repeatedly in the gospels and it is Jesus the teacher that needs to be returned to the center of the Christian movement.

Now, I won’t pretend that it is easy to identify what Jesus taught with historical accuracy. It’s not. Impossible, really. But with the texts we have (none from Jesus himself, of course), including texts outside the official New Testament canon, an important, moving, and compelling message can be heard. Much of that message, such as the Beatitudes, is already well known and long appreciated. Likewise, the parables.

But what is most important about Jesus’ message is hard to discern because it runs counter to the church’s centuries-long message. And that is, that our full life and existence are here and now, not in some heavenly dimension in the future. Once one knows to look for it, it seems incredible that it was missed. Why heal the sick, feed the hungry, and welcome the outcast if some apocalyptic establishment of God’s rule was around the corner? Jesus wasn’t making a prophetic or theological point; he genuinely cared. He really meant his probably most important teaching, that loving God and loving our neighbor were really the same thing.

The metaphor that was central Jesus’ parables and teaching was the kingdom of God. Contrary to many New Testament scholars, I do not believe Jesus was talking about its arrival in some apocalyptic future event. Rather, the kingdom of God was a reality already present here and now but which most are unable to recognize. There are many passages in the canonical gospels that point to this, but perhaps the clearest is in the gospel of Thomas, where Jesus says:

“[The kingdom] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

In Luke 17, Jesus says something very similar but with an important twist.

“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, ²¹ nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”

It’s been obvious for a long time that the church’s traditional message of supposed “good news” that Jesus died for our sins so that by faith we can go to heaven is a dead letter, going nowhere in today’s culture. A renewed Christianity will be done with the sin/salvation dynamic, including humanity’s need for forgiveness and rescuing from God’s wrath. How can any modern person today talk about these things with a straight face?

Instead, a renewed Christianity will teach the essential goodness of creation, including and especially human beings. It will focus on the biblical tradition that humans are “earthlings” (adamah) enlivened with the breath and Spirit of God. As the 20^th century Catholic priest, mystic and scientist, Teilhard de Chardin said,

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Jesus the teacher, prophet and mystic has much to offer our distressed world. Jesus the messiah and savior from sin and hell does not. Further, the Jesus who says that God’s kingdom is within and all around you, and that you must lose your life in order to find it, speaks in harmony with countless other voices down through the centuries. Thus, other religions are not competitors of Christianity but fellow travelers in the age-long spiritual quest for life and truth. It was in recognition of this transcendent tradition that Meister Eckhart said, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world all speak the same language.”

If religion is the quest to find and understand God, spirituality says that God doesn’t need to be found but is already here, within and around us. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” In Galatians he says, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” In the gospel of John, Jesus’ last prayer for his followers is that they would all be one, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you.”

Jesus, then, is not the unique Son of God but the one who reveals that we are all children of God, in the language of the Bible. Jesus reveals to us our true selves, our inherent divine nature. The human dilemma is not “bondage to sin” but our ignorance of and our blindness to this truth. Salvation, then, is our awakening to our true identity and liberation from the false self of our mind-based ego.

A rebuilt and renewed Christianity would not be a gate keeper but a gate opener, showing the way to a life of freedom, abundance, and joy. It would point, not just to Jesus’ death, but to Jesus’ whole life as a revelation of the path to salvation, a path to wholeness and liberating truth.

For many, this is already who Jesus is for them. And for many of them, their life of following this Jesus takes place apart from the church because they find there little, if any, support for that life. I don’t believe it has to be that way. Next time, and the last part of this series, I’ll talk about how the institutional church could adapt to this renewed Christianity and the life of following the rabbi Jesus. That goal, however, will be at the top of a steep road, indeed.

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