Jesus - Christ Enlight

The Incarnation

The Incarnation is one of the two pivotal events for followers of Jesus (the other is the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension - but that is for another day), and it is important to clarify the meaning of the Incarnation. This is especially true for Christ Enlight, since we have freed ourselves from a mythological view of the paternity of Jesus.

The Incarnation holds that God became man in Jesus. In so doing, the created order was shown to be good - completely good - because God became part of creation. Christ Enlight holds this not only to be true, but also to be very important. We would hasten to add that God has never seen the created order to be bad. This was a distortion that occurred when the story of the Garden of Eden was taken to be an historical account and theology was developed around it - most notably original sin. Most likely in order to induce guilt, we were taught that although we were created in the image and likeness of God, we lost either the likeness or the image of God in the Fall of Adam and Eve. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The story of creation tells us that when God created all that is God saw it all to be good. We believe that God is all seeing and all knowing - that has historically been part of the definition of God - and that God exists outside of time. That is to say that all moments are the present moment to God. This truth about the timelessness of God has been held throughout of Christianity. What this means is that, to God, the moment of creation and the moment of the Fall are the same moment. If God sees all and knows all, how can creation possibly be both all good and also bad/fallen/evil at the same time? It is logically contradictory for both of these things to be true at the same time.

So what? The Incarnation is what - the Incarnation is God's definite statement that the created order is wholly and totally good. That truth is re-affirmed every time a child is born, because all children are born totally and wholly good - without stain of any kind.

You may say that this is all great, but if it is just a theological position that one holds why should I be interested? The answer is that how you view humanity and the created order has a lot to do with how you make ethical decisions. If the created order is good, then environmental concerns are not only appropriate but essential. The Earth cannot possibly exist to be plundered and destroyed. If all human beings are good, then none of us can stand by and watch human beings starve or have substandard health care - anywhere in the world. Equally important, we cannot allow human beings to be exploited in any way - not by the sex slave trade, not by substandard wages or working conditions, not by the evils of racism and tribalism, not in any way.

As we approach the Feast of the Nativity and, in that Nativity we celebrate the truth of the Incarnation, may we all be reminded of the goodness of all that is and may we also be led to act in accord with that goodness to protect all of creation: humanity, the animal kingdom, and the environment - both on the Earth and beyond it. It's not only practical, it's imperative.

Merry Christmas!

Jesus and Karma

Jesus taught Karma. For those of you who don't know what karma is, it is essentially the law of cause and effect. In its simplest form, it states that if you do good things, good things will happen to you and if you do negative things, then negative things will happen to you. Karma is most definitely not the prosperity gospel, and our actions both good and bad cause us to accumulate or lose merit. So, if I cheat someone out of five dollars this morning, it doesn't mean that someone is going to cheat me out of five dollars this afternoon, but it does mean that there will be negative consequences down the road.

If you are wondering where Jesus taught the Law of Karma, I would refer you first to the Beatitudes. Found in their fullest form in Matthew chapter five verses one through twelve, they are also found in Luke chapter six verses twenty through twenty-six. Since I am going to delve deeply into the Beatitudes in a future blog, I will not explore them very deeply now except to refer you to them. If you will read them I believe their karmic implications are clear.

I would also like to refer you to Luke six beginning at verse thirty-seven where Jesus says, "Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you." Clearly, this is a teaching about the Law of Karma.

Continuing now at verse forty-one, Jesus continues, "And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye." And perhaps the crowning moment of this teaching, "For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit."

This is far from an exhaustive list of Jesus' teachings about karma, but I believe it is enough to illustrate my point. The institutional church has been reluctant to admit to these karmic teachings because it has been lost in the perspective of a wrathful, vengeful God - a perspective that is replete in the Hebrew scriptures but a perspective, interestingly and significantly, that Jesus did not share. The institution needs you to believe that you need the institution to improve your lot, and so they have historically distorted this and many other teachings of Jesus so that they might retain their power.

The truth is that you do need spirituality and you do need community - these are basic human needs. You do not, however, need to subject yourself to the power and control games of institutional religion. The Law of Karma pretty much spells out what you need to do to improve your lot in life: Start treating other people better than you do now, act with compassion and mercy, and love without exception.

And the choir sang, AMEN!

Jesus, the Son of God?

First, let me apologize for not having posted for a while. If you haven't checked it out yet, allow me to invite you to the Christ Enlight podcast. You can find it on ITunes by searching for Christ Enlight, and you can also listen to it on our podcast hosting site - http://cbergland.libsyn.com. I try very hard not to duplicate what is written here with the material on the podcast and vice verse, although sometimes the podcast format allows us to explore topics more deeply. Now to the topic at hand!

How do we understand the historic claims that Jesus is the Son of God? As we have established in earlier blogs, Christ Enlight does not believe that either God or the Holy Spirit are the biological father of Jesus Christ. We acknowledge that stories of divine parentage and virgin birth were very common two thousand years ago. Even the Roman Emperor was seen as divine, as a son of God. Various other spiritual leaders - priests, prophets, and kings - were seen as the offspring of a union between the divine and a virgin mother. It was an archetype, or a motif, if you will, that indicated that someone was very special. We are very aware that there are people who say that all those other stories were false, but when the story was told about Jesus it was true. We find that to be so logically inconsistent that it is almost laughable. Some will say it is true in the case of Jesus because the story of Jesus' parentage is in the Bible, and the Bible is the infallible, inerrant Word of God. To that we have two responses. The first is to refer people to the blog posted on The Bible. The second is to say that Jesus is the Word of God (cf. John 1:1), not a book.

Christ Enlight, then, rejects as non-historical fact the mythological notion that Jesus is the biological Son of God. How else might Jesus be the Son of God?

The first and most obvious way that Jesus might be called the Son of God is in the same way that all of us are children of God. Since we see God as the Source of all Being, the Source of Love and Life, we all are Sons and Daughters of God - including Jesus. Yet not all of us have had a religion spring forth from our teachings, and so there has to be something more. Clearly, Jesus was very special. In fact, if you look to the number of people throughout history from whom a new, lasting religious tradition has sprung (Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Krishna...) the list is less than ten. There must be something more than being a child of God in this sense that is involved.

We believe that what is involved in each of these cases is that the individuals in question - for the purpose of this blog, Jesus, but the others as well - had the capacity and the willingness to so radically open themselves to life and truth and love and everything else that we understand to be God active and present in the world. Let's not misunderstand the importance of the radical nature of this kind of openness.

This kind of openness involves the complete, voluntary abandonment and destruction of ego. It involves everything we know of as leading to enlightenment and even more that we do not completely understand. It is everything understood by the Orthodox Christian notion of Divinization of humankind and still more that we do not completely understand. There is incorporated in these individuals the fullness of the Boshisattva vow, and still more that we do not completely understand. Are Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna, and other pivotal foundational religious leaders exactly the same? Of course not - they are individuals functioning in their distinct cultural and historical contexts. However, they do share similarities and so to rank them in some sort of hierarchy is offensive and inappropriate. Such games of spiritual competition are offensive and the result of inappropriate, ego driven motivations.

In the way explained above, Jesus is indeed uniquely the Son of God. Interestingly, so are Muhammad, the Buddha, Krishna, and other foundational religious leaders. If that threatens you, what is really being threatened is something within your ego. If you doubt that, ask yourself seriously whether the biblical record or anything else in the history of Christianity reveals a Jesus who is jealous. Then ask yourself why it is you feel a need to be jealous on Jesus' behalf.

The days of spiritual and religious tribalism need to end immediately. No authentic foundational spiritual leader ever saw themselves as in competition with any other spiritual system. This is found in the truth that none of them were trying to form a new religion - the most they were trying to do is reform their own tradition. Our need to defend these people comes from a deep, dark corner of ourselves that needs examination and healing - not from any need of the foundational spiritual leader or of the tradition that developed around them.

It is the hope of Christ Enlight that this understanding of Jesus as Son of God can bring us at long last to the place where we can engage in both interspiritual practice and discussion. No longer can we argue about whose foundational leader is bigger or better. We can devote our energy to learning more about the Divine, which is, after all, the goal of all spirituality. To those who are not yet ready for this understanding of the nature of Divinity we can extend patience, not an argument. We can truly be loving and compassionate and feel no need to convert them or argue with them for any reason. When they are ready, we will be here to respond compassionately and lovingly.

Now that is a healthy spirituality!