Tuesday, January 27, 2015

A Brief Ethic (Revisited)


  1. Embrace life in hope.
  2. Accept death with realism.
  3. Resist death's delusions.
    1. The power delusion.
    2. The escape delusion.
    3. The covenant delusion.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

The Best Case for Jesus (Response to Peter Kirby)


The Best Case for Jesus
Response to Peter Kirby

(Right click on link above to open Peter's article in a new window)


Your argument, as always, evidences that you've put a great deal of time and thought into this.

My seat-of-the-pants Historicaljesology* :-) follows, to the best of my recollection, the Jesus Seminar scholars I've read and Burton Mack's work on the Gospel of Mark (whose title escapes me).

Mack's construction of Mark is that "Mark" took either stories or inherited tradition (depending on how much weight one wishes to assign them as historical sources) of an itinerant preacher, healer and exorcist and mashed them with a cosmic Christ mythology in one peanut butter cup of a new genre: gospel.

For my part, I find the "if the evidence for Jesus is insufficient for us to have confidence in his historicity then we should be similarly skeptical regarding Socrates and any number of other ancients whose existence we more or less accept on faith without researching them ourselves" convincing.

I mean, when you come down to it, to believe that some poor Jew in occupied Palestine who had a reputation as a preacher, exorcist and healer (similar to a number of others with similar reputations) got himself executed by the Romans as a potential threat to public order during a major, tense religious holiday in Jerusalem does not seem to require a high threshold of credulity.

All of these are historical assertions subject to the evidence and arguments of historians.

Moving from history to theology, the question comes down to the big, "So what?"

What difference would it make if Jesus DIDN'T live?

What difference would it make if he did?"

I do not believe it makes any difference at all. 

(Heck, got turned down for ordination three times, I at least owe them a good reason. :-) )

Without getting into a lot of theology that I already have on the Inclusive Christian blog and web site, I'll just say that I believe God is fully present in all of history, public and private, and that the focus of that incarnation is in the reality of the historical Jesus as witnessed, in faith, by the authoritative witnesses of Bible, the broad center of the Christian tradition, and an equally broadly construed reason.

The critical event of the incarnation is that the central myth was and is instantiated in history - again, world history and our own private histories - and finds its focus in a real event.

If that event ISN'T this itinerant preacher, teacher, and healer, then I believe it resides in the historical existence of the Pauline and Marcan communities who encountered this mythic reality of death transcended in their own lives and work and sufferings and deaths.

I'm going to simulpost this to my blog so I can at least remember that for which I'm being burned at the stake. :-)


* Historicaljesology: need to translate this into German so I can sound uber-theological. :-)

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

A Brief Ethic


  1. Engage and exhaust your life in hope and anticipate its renewal.
  2. Accept that all things die and that life is a free and temporary gift.
  3. Reject death's delusions: conquest, evasion, negotiation.

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