|
First, you might wish to go to the bottom of this article and read the “Closing Aspiration.” The Aspiration provides the prayerful spirit and intent in which this paper is sent to you.
What if you could bring all the events of the written Gospel into this very moment, into this week, into every day and night, alone and in worship with others? What if you could feel the events lived out inside your body? What if you could allow the Conception, Birth, Life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ (i.e., the Christ Event) to be an adventure you would never, thankfully, get over, and which would change your life, forever? What if, through celebrating the Christ Event, you would feel more joyful, at peace, and free? What if, among others worshipping the Christ, the sense of temporal sequence could dissolve into the bliss of the Eternal, the One? Well, to all the “what if,” such is possible. That is the Kergmatic Thrust, the Proclamation of the Gospel as continuing Event, not just historical, past happening.
The Christ Story itself is transforming, not because it is magical, but because it is inspired to speak to the Truth already longing to be lived inside each of us. That is, the Christ Story is about what is already possible, the eternally existing pattern of Life. The Christ Story actualizes in time and continues to bring into lived realization what is the original intent and design for human life and Creation. This Story, essentially, says, “Life and history are meant to take a Christo-Form.” Likewise, your life and my life are whole to the extent that they are in the universal Christo-Form, or Christ-Likeness.
We cannot, in the present age, speak of such matters apart from the concept “energy.” And, we cannot overlook that such a focus is true to the truth of God as “Spirit” and the human as a spiritual, thus, energetic, expression of Spirit. Therefore, I turn to Bruno Barnhart, a Camaldolese monk, who does a wonderful work, in Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity, on seeking to demonstrate how the Christ Event continues to shape a Christo-Form world, having, he contends, being unleashed through the events of Jesus’ life. This does not mean this movement was not, however, operative before Jesus’ earthly life.
The incarnation of Christ, indeed, is a decisive transitional moment in that unfolding that was prior to Jesus of Nazareth. This is why we can better speak of the Preexistence of Christ, or the Word, but not the Preexistence of Jesus. Many Christians, indeed most, seem not to notice this important and historical theological distinction. One leads to a Christology, which is historically orthodox, the other to a Jesusology, which is not true to the historical Christian faith. Christ manifested as Jesus of Nazareth; that is the Incarnation. The Incarnation manifested the essential union between what is perceived as “spirit” and “flesh,” “human” and “God.” The causative relation, however, must be kept in place: temporally, causatively, spirit precedes flesh, God precedes human; likewise, Christ precedes Jesus. After the union, we can speak of inspirited matter, a deified human, and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. That is, Incarnation is both a manifestation and a unitive-uniting event.
Therefore, likewise, we ask, “In what sense is the Christ Event energetic, incarnational, causative, and unitive for us, now?” We, as creatures in time, trust that the sacred celebrations of the Church have a sacramental causation. If we rightly engage them and are engaged by them, we will be transformed in the process. All speech of Eternity does not annul that Eternity is manifesting in and as time for us on this human journey. Sacred Story is one means that Eternity effects causatively in time and through the images of time and historical happening. Likewise, the Gospel does not end with the Revelation in the New Testament; rather, the Gospel continues in lived experience within the Church, the world, and Creation.
Barnhart, in agreement with the early Church and most theologians since, contends for the importance and centrality of historical events, which actually happened, as essential to Spirit working through the Christ Event. He observes, “The divine energy is present successively in several ways: ‘objectively’ in a given historical event, then as if contained within the gospel narrative, and finally in the listener’s or the reader’s experience.” Therefore, a whole approach to the Christian life, as well as the events of the written Gospel, will take seriously those three aspects: historical event, Gospel narrative, personally experienced significance. For a Christian not to take seriously that a real, historical event, very close to the recorded Christ Event, would be as odd as asking a Buddhist not to believe that the Buddha underwent something historically commensurate with the story of his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree or telling a Hindu that Krishna did not receive instructions from Arjuna, as recorded in the Bhagavad Gita.
But, the Christ Event will not be Christo-Formative for those who reduce the mystery of the Gospel and Christ to a celebration of what happened back then. Nor, is it likely to happen for those who, entrapped in an opposite, naturalistic, and reductionistic rationalism assume that the events of the Gospel are too “unbelievable” to believe. Hopefully, we can find a middle way between the literalistic-regressive or spiritualistic-demythologistic mentalities.
I am not prepared to relinquish the word “myth,” though I often imply it by using other words, like Event or Story. “Myth” is jettisoned by modern fundamentalism, and many others will not use it due to its widespread corruption as “fictitious story.” So, let me define my understanding of Christ Myth up front, which I call Christ Event in this paper:
The Christ Event, both inside and outside spatiality and temporality, arises to us, by Divine Energy, in personal and collective immediacy, and through, among other means, the collection of stories in the written Gospels and personal and collective engagement with them in worship, as they reveal to us the inner, abiding, and evocative significance of historical events related to Jesus Christ and the early Church for us today.
For some, the primary focus is the events that happened in Jesus’ life. For others, the primary focus is the experience of Jesus as the living Christ after the Resurrection. However, this latter group does not simply ascribe “fiction” to everything written in the Gospels. The two groups, nevertheless, will, generally, disagree on the importance or essentiality of the literal historicity of events in Jesus’ life or the degree to which the historicity applies. Here, I am not contending for the rightness of either approach. In fact, I find both groups often to represent a rationalistic mentality that keeps in primacy the intellectualization that blocks surrendering to the Christo-Form intent of the Christ Story.
|
|
The degree to which particular biblical events are or are not historical, strictly speaking, is a point of healthy difference in the Christian faith. And, as Christians, we have a bias in this regard. For example, many Christians, it seems to me, can live quite well with a spiritualized understanding of God writing Ten Commandments on tablets and giving them to Moses. This can be read as an etiology: a story intending to explain an origin, along with the “significance” of a social reality, be it legal, familial, religious, ... Thus, the experience of the Torah (Divine Law), over time, could have led toward formulating the story, to point not to a fiction, but the truth that the Torah derived from Divine inspiration. In such cases, the experience leads to the story, while the story does not precede the experience. The community is not writing fiction, in the sense of fancy; it is seeking to embody truth within a format to pass along the faith. This is logical, for humans are imaging creatures.
However, such interpretive freedom to see a story or event as meaningful narrative and not historical, is narrowed, often, when looking at the Gospels. There are logical reasons for this, among them the perception that matters surrounding Jesus Christ are central to Christian faith. Many Christians can live quite well without God having written the Ten Commandments on stone; they would have great difficulty relinquishing matters like the virgin birth or literal-bodily Resurrection.
Of course, much of these matters rest on prior assumptions about the nature of Scripture. If one is literalistic in Scripture reading and assuming an infallible agreement among all parts of Scripture, she is prone to find other passages to verify her understanding of a first passage. This is called proof texting and is a form of circular reasoning. For example, one might argue for interpreting the Resurrection narratives in one manner by appealing to a passage from St. Paul that would contend that the literal-bodily Resurrection happened and must have done so. The person, then, says, “See, it had to have happened.” But, if one does not assume that one necessarily knows what St. Paul meant by “body” or “bodily,” or any such words, or does not approach St. Paul as always right, or infallible, in what he wrote, that throws a monkey wrench in the proof text modality.
I offer a sane, intellectually mature resolution to the dualistic divisions between those who contend for a literal Resurrection, for example, and the ones who contend for a spiritualized understanding. The literal Resurrection goes like this: Jesus, in the flesh, got up out of the tomb, or was raised from the tomb by God. The spiritualized has been presented like this: The story of the Resurrection arose out of the experience of the early disciples after the crucifixion, while the presentation of it as a bodily Resurrection is the way persons, generally, embodied spiritual significance in story form. Both agree on the essentiality of the continuance of Jesus after the Resurrection and His continuing relationship with the disciples. In other words, Jesus is alive!
But, how about us today? I believe we can arrive at the same point regarding Jesus Christ: the continuing Presence among us. In that sense, the Resurrection is true each moment. Myth takes the event out of linear time, into what we can call the Eternal Moment, or Kairos Time. However, I find believing in a historical Resurrection of a bodily nature, in line with the contention of Barnhart, part of the Christian understanding. Yet, I would not contend that the events around Holy Week and Easter have not been shaped by later experience. Such remembrance or recasting seems clear, even by a cursory reading of the Gospels. However, the Gospels and early Christians give a consistent witness to an actual Resurrection of a bodily nature, but a body that could manifest on different planes of existence. So, the body was a glorified, or transformed body, that seems to have been able to manifest at differing levels between gross and subtle.
And, I, personally, have found no logical reason to assume the Gospels are not remembering an actual, historical event, though I once did not believe in a bodily Resurrection. I have, through honest prayer and study, had my mind changed on that matter. Again, referring to a Buddhist comparison: I do not know what respect I would have for a Buddhist’s faith, if he could not believe an actual historical event was behind the sutras, or scriptures, on the Buddha’s enlightenment.
Fortunately, while differences of opinion on the events of the Gospel will remain a part of the over-all Christian faith, it is at this point of Myth, Event, or Story that all Christians need to find meaning, as we encounter, or are encountered by, the written Gospel, and are addressed by it in personal experience within Lived Gospel.
We are seeking this answer in the Gospel: “What does the Christ Event mean now?” Or, “Beyond the material, historical details from two thousand years ago, how is the Gospel and Christ an ongoing reality of my life?” “… our life, together?” And, “How can I, right now, experience the Gospel as part of an a-temporal event available to transform my life?” Likewise, “How can I integrate the meaning of the Christ into the fabric of daily existence, along with all the events of the Gospel?” That is to say, “How can my life take on a Christo-Form?" And, Christology is not complete, until completed in you and me.
I ask all of you, who likely represent different assumptions about the events narrated in Gospel, as regards what did or did not happen, or had to or did not have to happen, this question:
How will you participate in the Gospel and Christ as something integral to the ongoing life of participating in the drama of being fully human, realizing your divine potential within this earth plane and, thus, furthering the transformative emergence of all beings to become all we are being created to be?
Thank you for sharing this time with me. I opened up some cans and did not re-gather all the worms, so to speak. I have tried to insert my opinions, as best I can, while seeking to do what OneLife is meant to do: provide a place for persons of varied opinion and faith to gather around the Christ Event, our common spiritual quest, our honest doubts and questions, our humble openness to learn, and discover healing, meaning, and transforming Grace, as One People together.
Closing Aspiration
The Gospel of Christ, I pray, will be a place for realizing our oneness, across peoples, race, politics, and faiths. May all persons and peoples realize more deeply our common human heritage and shared longing for love, joy, and peace, and further open our lives to be shaped into the Likeness of Christ, even among us who might use different religious words and images for that divine calling.
OneLife Ministries is a pastoral outreach and nurture ministry of the First United Methodist Church, Fort Meade, FL. For Spiritual Direction, Pastoral Counseling, spiritual formation workshops, Christian meditation retreats, or more information about OneLife, write Rev. Dr. Brian K. Wilcox at briankwilcox@comcast.net.
|
