Pieces of Faith

I have been having a strangely revelatory and peaceable internet dialogue about that old beast, Christianity. It is always nice to find your voice by contrasting it with another, and that is what this conversation has done. I just wanted to share a snippet. A lot of these things are old news for us Lee U vets, but it is interesting to see which of the old lessons have stuck, and how they've almost settled into a sensible and unified thought (omg, that is so process theology). Here is how I see my relationship to Jesus/Christianity/the Bible, one of many significant spiritual and ideological relationships in my life, today:

"As for my view of the Bible, it’s complicated, I’ll tell ya that. Well, actually it’s pretty simple. I believe the Bible was written by people who had real encounters with God* and real revelation from God. I don’t believe it is the infallible word of God himself, although I do see his fingerprints, his breath, all over it. and I don’t believe it has a single unified message. By no means. I think the Bible is a conversation between first-hand witnesses of God, and I think I get to be part of that conversation, to listen to every version of the story, and to contribute my own voice. I think this puts me very much in line with the religion of Jesus and his Jewish and Christian contemporaries.

"Except perhaps for one thing: that I do not feel bound by any tradition or any authority. If what I find to be good or true steps out of the bounds of a tradition or goes against what some authoritative entity tells me, then I step with it. This has led me to abandon essentially all of Christianity, except for Jesus. I don’t have it in me to sacrifice the way he did, and so I don’t claim to live up to him, but he inspires me so, and he changes me. For that, he is a good friend, and a mentor of sorts. something akin to my relationship with Nietzsche.

"Now, what do I mean when I say Jesus? I suppose I do mean the Jesus of the Gospels, although I find much truth and beauty in the epistles also. The Gospels are just as much framed by their authors as are the epistles, so I recognize they’re not just giving me pure Jesus. But they at least contain sayings and stories of him, and it is from these that I cobble together an image of the Christ. The extras, I often love and respect, but I take them to be words of the man’s followers, not words of the man himself. I find this distinction to be relatively obvious.

"And lastly, I do think Jesus came to set up a kingdom** on earth. I think that’s exactly what he did. And I think his death was the cornerstone of that kingdom. As for what I mean by that, maybe I will speak of it later. But I am not referring mainly to a ransom for sin, nor of substitutionary death. The cross means so much more than that to me."

*When I say 'God,' I just mean 'the divine.' not necessarily personal, not necessarily Christian.
**By kingdom, I mean anti-kingdom.