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Time for Luther to sit down

Time for Luther to sit down

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Scene from the movie "Luther"
Scene from the 2003 film “Luther”

Today is Halloween for most people. In church history, October 31 is considered the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Tradition has it (the history is a little murky) that on that day, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, nailed a list of 95 propositions for debate on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, in the German state of Saxony. Soon, thanks to printers looking for excuses to use their new presses, copies of the 95 Theses (as they became known) were spreading across Europe, igniting a firestorm.

Luther’s list was the culmination of a running argument he had been having with church officials over the sale of indulgences. It had been sparked by the arrival in Luther’s neighborhood of perhaps the supreme indulgence seller, one John Tetzel. Let me stop here and say that if you have any interest in this affair, I highly recommend watching Luther, the 2003 biopic staring Joseph Fiennes (Ralph’s brother) in the title role. (Be aware that, by a weird coincidence, there is another 2003 movie called Luther which about a British detective.) The film also features Alfed Molina as a wonderfully twisted Tetzel, and Peter Ustinov, in his last film, as Luther’s protector, Prince Frederick the Wise.

The sale of indulgences was probably the epitome of the corruption and superstition of the medieval Catholic church. While the Renaissance and its new thinking was expanding, it was still very limited. Luther makes clear that 1517 Germany, and by implication much of Europe, was still mired in the Middle Ages.

Indulgences were essentially heavenly get-out-of-jail free cards. They were certificates authorized by the pope releasing the person for whom they were bought from a certain number of years in purgatory (more money = more years canceled). That purgatory was a thing, and that the pope could get your deceased relatives out of it, was part of the medieval world view which, like spinning plates in a circus act, was destined to soon crash to the floor.

In a touching scene in the movie, a young woman of obviously limited intellect, comes Luther to proudly show him the indulgence certificate she has just bought from Tetzel. We watch her smile drop as a crestfallen Luther tells her to save her money because the certificates are worthless. The message is clear. The church is taking advantage of people’s gullibility and anxiety to finance its various projects, which included the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

In truth, the church’s spin hasn’t changed much. Protestant propaganda is that the Reformation set people free from the crass legalism of the Catholic church. “We are saved by grace and not by works of the laws” is the classic formulation of this new/old gospel. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple.

For Luther, especially, salvation was something still dispensed by the church. The gospel was the church’s “true treasure”, so one had to be part of the church to receive this gift. So just show up and you’ve got it? Not quite. You have to be baptized, receive communion, and live a moral life.

Oh, and one more thing: you have to have faith. The full Protestant gospel formula is actually “we are saved by grace through faith.” And those two words have tied Protestant (and other) church leaders and theologians in knots ever since. What is “saving” faith? Basically, there have been two interpretations. One essentially equates faith with belief, an intellectual assent or conviction, which often meant having the right “beliefs”, as determined by church authorities. The other view saw faith as an experience, as a spiritual or interior “knowing”, not of doctrines but of a saving relationship with God.

In the first case, the question is: How do you know what the right beliefs are? The church will tell you. How does the church know? God revealed them in the Bible and to the early church leaders. But there are lots of churches and they don’t agree which beliefs are right. How do you know? We’ve got them right. Just trust us.

In the second instance, the question is: How do you know if your faith is real? Again, the church is the decider but not so clearly. Genuine faith wil “bear fruit” in tangible ways. You will “want” to go to church, read your Bible, do works of charity, etc. But again, whether those fruits were real or enough was open for debate. Here too churches differed in their understanding. More troublesome were the doubts in people’s minds: Do I really believe? What about my doubts? My sins? How do I know for sure that I am saved?

The history of Protestantism is essentially the story of the endless debates about these never resolved questions, and the repeated denominational divisions over them. In the meantime, Catholicism cleaned up the worst of its organizational abuses, and got involved in these debates to a degree, but essentially rested on its ancient history and tradition.

The church where I worshiped last Sunday observed Reformation Sunday, as Lutheran churches typically still do. The usual hymns and readings associated with the day were used to stir Lutheran blood, and even the Nicene Creed was dragged out (not typical for this congregation) in all its incomprehensible babble.

In her sermon, the preacher focused on a recent translation change whereby faith in Jesus Christ is now rendered the faith of Jesus Christ. It’s happened in a few places in Paul’s letters but in this case, it was Romans 3:22, “the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” The Greek can be translated either way, but this version takes the emphasis off our having faith in Jesus and replaces it with Jesus’ faithful service.

The preacher (and presumably the sermon helps she was using) seemed to think this was a big deal. In the case of this passage, however, (or Romans generally) it doesn’t really help in understanding the theological word salad Paul has produced here. And there are other places where the meaning obviously is faith in Christ or God.

“Faith” is used in lots of different ways in the Pauline epistles. And it’s used differently again in the gospels—and not at all in John! Today it’s popular to say the faith should be rendered or understood as “trust,” which may be helpful. But that’s obviously not how it is always meant in the New Testament, nor in the teachings of the Reformation.

Yet none of this gets at the church’s core problem today, which is the meaninglessness of salvation itself. People just don’t care. They aren’t joining the synoptic gospels’ “rich young ruler” in asking, “What must I do to be saved?” Progressive preachers think its wonderful to declare that “salvation is a free gift!” But like a free subscription offer, most people are saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Free, discounted, or full price, salvation is a nonstarter for more and more people.

In short, the church needs to get out of the salvation business. Salvation was finished as soon as heaven and hell lost any tangible meaning. But even apart from that, biblical scholars and theologians have been saying for centuries that salvation is not the only lens through which to interpret the Bible, or the most important. Individual salvation gets almost no mention in the Old Testament. Nor is it obviously Jesus’ central concern in the gospels. The church’s salvation obsession is mostly based on its reading of Paul, and even that interpretation is now recognized as simplistic.

What “business” should the church be in? For an answer, the church needs to eat some humble pie and turn to another tradition, from about the time of the prophets but several thousand miles apart: Buddhism. For the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is the concern of all people: the reality of suffering. More fully: What is suffering? Why do we suffer? Can we keep from suffering? If so, how?

I agree with those who say, especially from a Western perspective, that Buddhism is more philosophy than religion, though that isn’t quite right. In any case, many modern Christians have found Buddhism to be a very compatible spiritual partner and ally. And that for the simple reason that suffering is a major theme of both testaments of the Bible, as well.

In the Old Testament, this is especially true of the wisdom books and the prophets. In the New Testament, it is a theme of Paul (believe it or not) but it especially jumps out in Jesus’ endless concern for people’s ailments and disabilities. Jesus heals everyone who seeks it, often adding enigmatically that it was “your faith” that healed them.

But perhaps it is in John where the alleviating of suffering is most clearly Jesus’ mission. Here Jesus repeatedly offers “eternal life” as the answer to the human predicament, not as something experienced someday in a great beyond but here and now. He promises peace to his troubled disciples, and in John 16 says,

“I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation [suffering]; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

For the Bible, and especially for the centuries-long Christian mystical tradition, the end of suffering is not a promise in the by-and-by, not a theological doctrine to be believed, nor a social or political project. Rather, it is an experience of awakening and rebirth, the discovery of our true nature, and being set free from the endless turmoil of our egoic obsessions.

If we want to still use the word, “salvation” then is not from sin, the devil, or the wrath of God. Rather, the gospel is the we are “saved” by being set free from the delusions and suffering of our false self. We awaken to our oneness with God, to as Jesus says the kingdom of God within us, to our essential nature as Spirit.

In other words, Christianity has the seeds for its own rebirth. But as Jesus says in John, it has to let the old plants die for the new seeds to fall to the ground and sprout anew. Luther said he had to take a stand to reform the church. Today, it’s past time for him to take a seat.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Finding Rabbi Jesus

Finding Rabbi Jesus

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Modern mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene
A contemporary mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene at the Magdalena Institute in Magdala, Israel, on the Sea of Galilee.

I’ve been writing about the near impossibility of knowing who Jesus really was: what he did, what he taught, and what his ultimate intention was, if he had one. Our earliest writings about Jesus are by someone who never knew him, the apostle Paul. The gospels are written decades after Jesus’ death, again by people who never knew him. What the sources were that the gospel writers used are unknown and we can only speculate about.

Reading the gospels, it’s obvious that their authors, like Paul, each had their own agenda, i.e. a particular understanding of Jesus they wished to promote. Complicating things even more, we have no original manuscripts for anything in the New Testament and it’s now accepted that many of its texts were later edited by unknown scribes, and not just for spelling and grammar.

In short, immediately after his death, Jesus’ followers struggled to define who Jesus was and what his message was. Why was this so? Likely because Jesus himself had laid out no clear agenda, or at least not one that fit with the expectations of the people of Judea. Personally, I think Jesus himself had a clear understanding of what he was about, but he did not have a programmatic agenda and his message was not easily understandable for many of his listeners. Jesus was thinking and behaving far outside the conventional Jewish box.

As a result, Jesus made use of symbolic stories called parables, symbolic acts of inclusion, especially meals, and healings—parables in action, if you will—to get his “message” across. And that strategy worked, at least in touching and changing many people. Jesus’ gracious welcome, and the sense that in doing so Jesus was acting on God’s behalf, seems to be the one thing universally remembered about him. In simplest terms, Jesus communicated that God loved everyone and people just needed faith to experience that love.

Unfortunately for his followers, Jesus left no organizational plan. And that was likely intentional: he just wasn’t interested. So no, Jesus’ goal was not to found a new religion. Not surprisingly then, the story of early Christianity is as disorganized and dysfunctional as can be imagined.

It’s unlikely, for example that “the twelve” was ever as solid an inner core as the gospels want us to believe—they can’t even agree on their names! Peter was supposedly the primo disciple, yet scholars now agree that it was Jesus’ brother James who was head of the Jerusalem church, and he seems to not have been an original follower.

After Jesus’ death, his disciples remained faithful Jews. But then Paul sailed in out of the blue, announcing that Jesus revealed himself to him and told him that gentiles were to be included in this new Christian community. The church’s split over this issue was not resolved until the center of Jewish Christianity was decimated by the first Jewish Roman war and the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70.

After that, Gentile Christianity became the norm but it existed in countless different flavors. Non-canonical gospels and other writings from the first centuries testify to the diversity of beliefs and practices of the early church. A centuries-long power struggle ensued leading to infighting, persecutions, and excommunications. This was mostly ended in the 4th century with establishment of Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman empire and the adoption of creedal decrees about the content of true Christian belief. Anyone who disagreed was now officially a heretic and beyond the pale.

As this process ensued, the historical Jesus of Nazareth became an ever-smaller dot in the church’s rear-view mirror. Today, thanks to archaeology and the techniques of critical scholarship, we know more about the historical Jesus than any of those gathered to thrash out the Nicene Creed in 325. It’s not surprising that the creed says almost nothing about Jesus’ life besides his birth and death.

We know more but, as I’ve said, we don’t know enough to construct a convincing, definitive picture of the historical Jesus. And our problem isn’t so much lack of information as it is having too much. It’s as if the pieces from multiple jigsaw puzzles have been (partially) poured into the same box. The question isn’t which picture is “right” but which picture do you want to (partially) put together from all those pieces?

The question of who Jesus really was will never definitively be answered. But we can answer the question of who we want or need Jesus to be. This doesn’t mean that Jesus is a blank slate. The early Christian writings establish discernible boundaries. And reestablishing those boundaries would help knock down the more outrageous caricatures of him that keep popping up: “We don’t know for sure who Jesus was but he certainly wasn’t that” (thinking of the Rambo Jesus recently on posters and t-shirts).

Besides the questions of history and the record of the first Christians is the question of our context today. For centuries the church was able to create the context. Life orbited around the church and was called Christendom. That time is long gone, though many in the church haven’t figured that out, or nostalgically long for its return. But it’s not coming back, no matter how many copies of the Ten Commandments get hung up.

In fact, religion itself is rapidly fading away. All the so-called “world” religions are well past their sell-by date. Rituals continue to be performed, texts continue to be studied, and people return to congregations in times of crisis. But religion can’t shake its pre-modern origins. That’s the world it was created for but that’s not the world we live in now. Today that’s obvious in Westernized societies for most people under 50, at least.

Even in its heyday, though, religion was not without its critics. The fluidity of Hinduism always allowed people to live outside its traditional boundaries, including its most famous wayward son, the Buddha. The most well-known and influential ancient Chinese writing, the Tao te Ching, has little to say about religion. The prophets railed again Israel’s corruption and denounced the hypocrisy of temple worship. And the embarrassing irony now highlighted by many scholars is that Jesus himself showed little interest in formal Judaism or in founding another religion.

Thus, the growing number of the “spiritual but not religious” can find ample support in the tradition of Jesus, as well as in the many other religious renegades that have appeared over the centuries. There is still much we can learn from voices of the past, so long as we realize it doesn’t require us to return to the past.

In a nutshell, Jesus the mystic and wisdom teacher has much to offer our distressed world today. Jesus the Messiah and savior from sin and hell does not. 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 who are part of what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.” And the teachers and followers of nondual or unitive spirituality today follow in their footsteps. It is in recognition of this transcendent tradition that Meister Eckhart said, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world all speak the same language.”

Robert Funk was the brilliant founder of the Jesus Seminar, the multi-year effort to gain a clearer picture of the historical Jesus. In his book summarizing its work, Honest to Jesus, Funk says with typical humor and irony:

We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion. He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him no less.

Funk believed Jesus has much to offer us today but we can’t see it because he has been swallowed up by centuries of religious titles and symbols. He needs to be set free. He needs a demotion, but only in the eyes of the church. In John’s account of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene initially mistakes Jesus for a gardener. But when he calls her by name, she recognizes him and says in Aramaic, “’Rabbouni!’ (which means teacher).” If rabbi/teacher was an adequate title for the one who was probably Jesus’ most devoted follower, it should be good enough for us today.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.