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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.

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Yes, but who are you?

Yes, but who are you?

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Sunrise in Santa Fe, New Mexico
New Mexico sunrise

The traditional meaning of Good Friday and Easter is that Jesus died for our sins and by his resurrection people are given eternal life. For centuries, this has been the church’s carrot and stick. Believe in Jesus and you will have eternal life in heaven. Don’t believe in Jesus and you will die in your sins and go to hell, or at least not go to heaven.

I think the stick part of this message has almost completely lost its credibility. Even very few religious people believe in a God who punishes human beings for their wrongdoing, especially for eternity in some place of torture. As one of my seminary professors wryly said, “I may believe in hell, but I don’t have to believe anyone is in it.”

But what about the carrot of life after death? My sense is that isn’t much of a carrot anymore because people either believe in it or not regardless of their religious beliefs. I have a friend who grew up in a Muslim household but has no religious practice now, and he told me emphatically that there is life after death.

For most people today, life after death is real or not regardless of one’s beliefs about God or religion. Some say, “when you’re dead, you’re dead”, while others, like my friend, insist our lives go on “beyond the grave.” What form that life takes is up for debate, of course. In any case, few believe anymore that life after death is something awarded to us, by God or the church.

The church’s reward-and-punishment message was always a self-serving distortion of Jesus’ teaching and what the Bible in general says. It was adopted because it got people in the pews and kept them there. The church got away with it because there is no clear and consistent biblical understanding of life after death. So, the church’s theologians could pick and choose the verses and traditions which supported the message of salvation which the church wanted to promote.

Biblical scholars agree that the notion of life after death was a late developing belief in ancient Judaism. There is little discussion of it in the Old Testament. God’s rewards and punishments are almost entirely this worldly, and more related to the behavior of Israel as a people than of individuals. The dead went to Sheol, the underworld place of darkness. Later, the idea of a personal afterlife was likely picked up from Israel’s neighbors but was never universally taught or accepted. It remains a minority belief among Jews today.

Early Christians apparently were among those who did believe in life after death. In the gospels, Jesus clearly takes this position in a debate with some Sadducees. Yet Paul has to defend the idea of the dead being raised in 1 Corinthians in order to justify a belief in Jesus’ resurrection, so apparently it was not universally accepted among the first Christians.

In that same letter, Paul gives his most detailed discussion of resurrection and what he says would startle many Christians. Paul says flat out that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Likening death to the planting of seeds, he says, “It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Thus, Paul would have scoffed at the later gospel stories of the resurrected Jesus’ with a body that could be touched and felt and even eat!

Paul never defines what he means by his seemingly contradictory phrase “spiritual body.” But another statement he makes does point in a helpful direction. Using the idea of Jesus as the “second Adam” (i.e. God’s restart of humanity), he says, “Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam [Jesus] became a life-giving spirit.”

The divine spirit, often imagined as breath or wind (the words are the same in Hebrew and Greek), is one of the most important but underappreciated ideas in the Bible. The creation story in Genesis 1 begins with “a wind from God” blowing over the watery chaos from which the universe is made. In the creation story of Genesis 2, God creates the first human out of dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Spirit, God’s own breath, is what makes us alive and is the energy of all creation. Death is the departure of that spirit from the body. All four gospels describe Jesus’ death in those terms. Mark, Matthew, and Luke each say Jesus’ death was when he “breathed his last.” Before this moment, Luke has Jesus say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And in John, Jesus’ death comes when he “gave up his spirit.”

But in talking about life after death, we rarely ask who or what it is that might continue to live after death. Who is the “I” that we think will go on? This is the source of our confusion because we fail to ask the most fundamental question: Who am I? Ignorance of our true identity is the primary cause of our misery according to many of history’s great religious and spiritual traditions.

This has become a crisis in modern Western culture. Society emphasizes the individual personality and its free development, i.e. “finding” or developing ourselves. Yet we know that all our qualities, abilities, talents, and accomplishments are ephemeral—they won’t last. Am I more than these qualities? If so, who is the “I” that has them? Who am I besides the roles I play, my ever-changing physical qualities, or my mental and physical abilities?

While much religious language has become antique, the word “spirit” has remained meaningful and powerful. I believe this is because it points to what is unchanging and eternal, deeply felt and intuited, yet otherwise unnameable. It is spirit, according to ancient wisdom, that is our true nature and identity. And being spirit, we are then one with God.

In modern times, this was perhaps most clearly summarized by the 20th century French anthropologist, priest, and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin. In describing our true nature, he said,

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

Is there a way to understand spirit in modern, even scientific, terms? Increasingly, spiritual teachers and scientists are finding common ground in the idea of consciousness. The study of fields as diverse as quantum physics and near-death experiences (NDEs) are causing scientists to recognize that consciousness needs to be seen from a new perspective. Many are beginning to speak of it in ways that echo the teachings of Eastern religion and Western mystics.

Earlier this month, The Guardian published an in-depth story titled, “The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’.” Among other topics, the article shows how our confusion about consciousness is impeding our understanding of both living and dying. The author quotes the bold prediction of Sam Parnia, an acknowledged expert in the fields of resuscitation and NDEs:

“I think in 50- or 100-years’ time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

Other scientists are going even further, asserting that consciousness is not how we perceive reality but where, in fact, reality starts. In his book The Case Against Reality, UC-Irvine cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman says of this new perspective, “Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality.”

How do we experience consciousness itself? For centuries mystics around the world have said this is the purpose of meditation. Through the practice of sitting in silence we develop the ability to become aware of awareness itself. This is our true self, such teaching holds, before any particular experience or thought. It is the self which knows such experiences and thoughts, is aware of them, but is not the experiences or thoughts themselves.

Not only is consciousness our true self, spiritual traditions have said, but it also Consciousness, or Awareness, our experience of our oneness with God, the one Self of all reality. This is why so many religions teach that knowing God requires a dying, a giving up of our ego, our false self, because it obscures our experience of our True Self. As Jesus says, we must lose our life in order to find it.

Alan Watts was a British-American clergyman who helped modern Westerners discover the Eastern religious traditions. Appreciating both the Bible and Eastern spirituality, he wrote:

You don’t really exist. That is, as an ego, a soul, a separate will. When you realize this, you’re liberated…. Ego is an abstraction…. So is one’s self. There’s a happening, but it’s not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don’t exist, you’re reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

This was the essence of Paul’s experience of the crucified and risen Jesus. In this letter to the Galatians he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

In his video, “What Happens After Death? A Nondual Explanation”, retired Baptist pastor and author Marshall Davis comes to this conclusion.

What happens after we die? The individual human consciousness comes to an end. No more me. But the universal eternal consciousness that is expressed as me, in me, through me, that consciousness that we call God, continues…. [W]e are one with this divine consciousness. This consciousness is the universe, is the nature of the universe, and this consciousness is always, and it continues. In that sense we continue after death because this is who we really are. The good news is that this divine consciousness can be known now. When I die, I expect that this divine consciousness that I know now will continue, although my individual personal consciousness will end.

A phrase I have not used until now is “eternal life.” It is so often misunderstood. Eternal life is not just life after death. The word “eternal” means “without beginning or end; lasting forever; always existing.” In John, which uses the phrase more often than any other  book of the Bible, Jesus teaches that “eternal life” is not something given later but known now. How could it be otherwise if it is eternal? In other words, our true self has no beginning or ending. Not only will we not die, but we were also not born, because our true self is the eternal Spirit of God.

One of the mystical metaphors that is especially helpful is that of waves on the ocean. Each of us is such a wave. It exists only in union with the ocean. The wave’s substance is entirely that of the ocean. When it reaches the shore, it comes to an end, even while other waves are following behind. Nothing “dies” when the wave ends. Only its form has changed while its true identity as ocean continues on unchanged.

Discovering this truth is the experience of salvation. In John, it is what Jesus means, in his conversation with Nicodemus, by being born from above or born again. In many religious traditions it is called awakening. It is seeing clearly, for the first time, who we are, and what life and reality truly are.

It is to be set free to live in the “eternal now”, without regrets about the past or fear of the future because neither actually exist. It is to be able to love life and our own existence, and to realize how literally Jesus meant it when he said we should love our neighbor as ourselves. It is to recognize our eternal oneness with God, or whatever word we want to use for the One that is the ground of existence, as Meister Eckhardt says. It is to recognize our oneness with everyone and all things. It is to know that our truest and most important identity is expressed in simply saying, “I am,” and to know that we always will be.