I once saw a film, the title of which escapes me; in fact, everything about it escapes me with the exception of one scene. The scene is a most excellent commentary on cultural expectations. Somewhere in nineteenth century British imperial Africa a young woman in much distress and in skirts the size of a village hut comes running down the hill from the great plantation house to the fields below where the helots of the estate plod through their labours. She runs from one to another crying for help, but they, having been made obsequious clods, plod on. Finally she cries out “What is wrong with you people! We have been here twenty years and you still don’t speak the language”.
The woman is the church, the workers the world.
People in the church are so imbued with their own language of theological terms, idioms, and actions, that they do not realize they are an incomprehensible coterie, at best, to a world they ought to be addressing with palingenetic clarity and light.
The fossilized Hebraic religious terms, the antique Hellenic philosophical concepts, the argumentations of the medievals and reformers are all useless, meaningless absurdities when taken out of their time and cultural milieu. It does not matter that someone two thousand years ago found insight into what being a Christian means by comparing the work of Jesus to the work of the high priest in the greatest temple ritual. It does not matter that the Greco-Roman world found the parameters of its understanding of the Jesus-event in some philosophical terms and concepts of the great Hellenic schools. It does not matter that the scholars of the medieval period built wonderfully logical arguments about every minute detail one could possibly draw out of believing there is a god revealed in nature and Jesus’ work. All these things are of worlds past. They are surds. They have no meaning outside their time and place. No one today would seriously go out dressed in bustle and bonnet, or with codpiece and sword. But everyone in this coterie ecclesiastic is mindless enough to think the world should and does understand its antique interlarding about trinities, divine humans, propitiatory sacrifice, etc.
The church must shut up. It must reflect, and not for an aeon. It must learn the language of its world and speak it. If a pentecost, wherein everyone hears each in his own language, has a meaning, it is here. The time of gongoristic babbling is ended.
So what is it all about? What is the meaning of Christianity?
God: I have addressed this issue in many times and places and formats. But, at heart, belief here is about trust in being; trust that there is that which can be reverenced, trusted. It is hope and the ability to love, to project oneself and to extend oneself to others, a trusting that that flowering of being human, that graciousness of being, is rooted in and is opening out to all that was and to all that will be. Talk about the trinity or tri-unity of the divine is merely the attempt to speak of this founding Mystery of life as transcending all that is, as immersed in all that is, and as being not static but dynamic. God cannot be named (except ritually). God cannot be defined (except analogically).
Jesus: The divine is seen as being potent in him and his work. He is understood as being an avatar, an interface, an icon of the immanent and creative dynamic. The title of Messiah or Christ is a Jewish designation of this role, delegate of the divine. Before Jesus’ time the term was used of kings both Hebrew and gentile. By Jesus’ time the term was being reserved for one who would hold the title definitively as the initiator and pantocrator of history’s finality. The terms God-man, son of God, etc. were common enough in the ancient world, and basically, to the gentile mind carried the same connotation as Messiah/Christ did for the Jews.
This man looked up to the heavens and understood there could be no answers writ large and once and for all about the great questions of being that quiz us, that the beyond all of all that is is now and ever shall be Mystery. But (as the temptation narratives rehearse it) that is not a platform from which to plunge into despair or jump up into hubris. Somehow this Mystery is my Mystery. Out of it I am. In it, with it, now and evermore, I am. I am its child. I am not just some float-some of the spewing universe, some determined outcome, some pawn in a random sea of chances. I am tethered to a creativity in the very depths of me, a creativity that must flow “heart and soul” out of or within the indefinable Mystery. Jesus’ great spiritual vision was that he was not fundamentally, was not at heart, a son of Israel, but son of god. The connection to the eternal was not mediated through a race of people; it was something direct and essential. There were no bounds in this intimacy with the primal Mystery. It was parent, he was child. No ritual of temple, no code of laws, no thing in creation could or did here stand between god and man—except that a man might chose not to acknowledge that at the heart of him was not ego but deus, god awaiting to burst forth in uncontrollable creativity, in-spired life (as is rehearsed in the concluding temptation narrative).
Cross: This is the cynosure of Christianity. It is the sign of hope, of continuance, of transcendence regarding all things human. On it all faith, hope, and love, all shame and rejection hang. On it all is sacrificed and lost, but only from a mundane view, for it is also a proclamation that there is no finality in and to trust and hope, that life transcends itself, always.
New Life: Salvation, justification, grace, redemption, etc. are all terms trying to describe the effects of the self-comprehension of being a Christian. Jesus’ role as teacher, light, gateway, etc. in that ability to so understand oneself was anciently described in terms of the religious idioms of his early followers (Passover lamb, priestly sacrifice, propitiation of sin, etc.), and are all notions cult specific to their culture and time, bearing nothing of importance to today or any other time and place. Newness of life is that aspect of being one experiences when one opens up to the fullness beyond, above and within all — with hope, with faith, with love; it is the experience of the joyful yes to my life, my world. For the Christian that yes is concretized in the work of Jesus iconocized in the cross.
Church: The church is the body of followers of Jesus’ example. They intend to “put on Christ Jesus”, to act as delegates of foundational creativity, joy, love, healing in and to their times and places. It is the community of those who understand themselves to be not just creatures, but children of god charged to carry on life-giving creativity to and for all. In this they follow in the footsteps of Jesus, their great teacher, their iconic divine-possessive, divine-revelatory brother.
There follows from this the how to do that: ethics and religion.
Christianity is fundamentally a philosophical entity, as is Buddhism, as is Taoism. This is obvious in its adaptability to varied religious formats, although for most of its existence it has been dominated by one format. There was an early struggle between those who understood it as a Jewish entity and those who understood it as an entity that had to be passed on in Greco-Roman religious and philosophical terms. One philosophical school carried the day, and politics, at first of state and later of church, forced all other movements and attempts to the side or to the fire.
Ethics: There is a logical flow of ideas about how to act if one stands as the delegate of the creative force of life in the world for the sake of others, ideas about trust, hope, love. With all your heart, mind, body, soul honour the holy and yourself and your fellow beings; be reverent regarding all. There are no rules from on high the mind has not derived and exalted. The failure has been to carry them out.
Religion: Religion is a gymnasium for the soul, an exercise regime, a discipline of worship (obedience). How does one open up oneself to the boundless? How does one keep before oneself the ideals of ethical behaviour? A programme with a clear and consistent vision about the meaning of life is necessary. It is, however, as changeable as is necessary for the health and well-being of those engaged in the programme. Do its visions, rituals, teachings speak clearly and pass on logically the intent and thrust of the founding belief? Are they inter-consistent, integrated?
Religion functions by putting masks on the divine. The masks are necessary to talking about the divine and as acclimatizing shrouds before the fearsome power of the outpouring of sheer being. They are necessary tools for the spiritual (psychological, non-material) development of the church members, especially of those in the so-called purgative and illuminative stages of development. They must, however, be of such form that they make sense to them for whom they are devised. They must always be handled with caution, for there is always the danger here that they will become the stuff of priest-craft, superstition, and materialistic obnubilation of the divine. In the so-called unitive stages of spiritual life these masks dissolve and the individual experiences a powerful sense of unity with the divine.
The exercise of religion as a particular discipline of masks and rituals is always a funambulism, for its requisite institutionalization carries within itself the seed of self-idolization. The institution comes to perceive itself not merely as a vessel for the exercise of faith, but as the sole guarantor of authenticity and orthodoxy. This idolization creates an authoritarian conservatism that envisions any attempt at change as heresy, and so transforms a way of life into a system of pernicious intellectual sequacity and behavioral conformity.
Scripture: The scriptures are no more inspired by God than any other religious text and no less so. They bear weight in the church as an assembly of ancient witnesses to the divine, and especially so in so far as in part they were the formative texts of Jesus’ spirituality. They are the spiritual diaries of our ancestors. They ought to be reverenced, but they cannot and should not dictate from the grave of the past the content of the present or the future. They may be given only a sacramental, ritual use. The living dynamic spirit, not a book, is the heart of being Christian.
Sacraments: Ritual acts and ritual words and ritual persons are purely and simply that: rituals—stylized executions designed to give evidence of an underlying value of social cohesion. Passing on authority by laying hands on someone, sharing bread and wine as a sign of unity in the very fabric of being, lighting a candle as a reminder to keep the path before oneself open to the light, bowing to an icon in silent expression of submission to its meaning—all such things are acts of faith, and they have, by faith, the prodigious and profuse power of faith– vitality at once redeeming, reaffirming, and recreating.