Thats my opinion
Thats my opinion's JournalChristian leaders weigh in on policies which would seriouly impact the poor.
100 Christian leaders have called on government officials to protect the poor and fragile as they seek to find a way to avoid devastating cuts implicit in the “sequester.” For some time these officials representing denominational and religious agencies and calling themselves. “ A Circle of Protection” (for the poor), have been advocating national policies and programs which take seriously the vast number of Americans who would be injured by the implementation of draconian national policies.
Here is a summary of their statement.
We urge our leaders to protect and improve poverty-focused development and humanitarian assistance to promote a better, safer world.
1. National leaders must review and consider tax revenues, military spending, and entitlements in the search for ways to share sacrifice and cut deficits.
2. A fundamental task is to create jobs and spur economic growth. Decent jobs at decent wages are the best path out of poverty, and restoring growth is a powerful way to reduce deficits.
3. The budget debate has a central moral dimension. Christians are asking how we protect "the least of these." "What would Jesus cut?" "How do we share sacrifice?"
4. As believers, we turn to God with prayer and fasting, to ask for guidance as our nation makes decisions about our priorities as a people.
5. God continues to shower our nation and the world with blessings. As Christians, we are rooted in the love of God in Jesus Christ. Our task is to share these blessings with love and justice and with a special priority for those who are poor.
Budgets are moral documents, and how we reduce future deficits are historic and defining moral choices. As Christian leaders, we urge Congress and the administration to give moral priority to programs that protect the life and dignity of poor and vulnerable people in these difficult times, our broken economy, and our wounded world. It is the vocation and obligation of the church to speak and act on behalf of those Jesus called "the least of these." This is our calling, and we will strive to be faithful in carrying out this mission.
The God Problem 3 (and finally)
If God is the driving force, the energy, the substance, the Tao, the wisdom, that which is within and under everything, what do we do with this overwhelming notion? How do we relate to it and honor it? The traditional answer lies in the generation of social structures by which we seek to articulate and identify what we find at the depth of being. By our human institutions we affirm that life and the universe make sense. They are our testimony that life is not just “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? The opposite of religion is nihilism, which asserts that there is no meaning or purpose in the universe.
If God can be defined as the energy at the heart of the cosmos, the creation of social structures is the way we celebrate and affirm that reality. Some of those structures and institutions are religious, but many are not. But like all institutions they tend to be faulty, prone to be more part of the problem than part of the answer. That is why they must continually be rethought and renewed
Religious history is a record of the ways in which people over the centuries have sought to make real in society what they sensed about reality—that is about God. The problem with the Biblical witness is not that its creators were wrong, but that they had a cosmology—a theory of how the universe was put together—which assumed that God was a person up there somewhere. If we have indeed lost that image, are we now called to make sense of life using a very different notion of reality? What if we image God not as above, but in “all things,” (ta panta) within the depth of meaning and purpose at the core of the universe.
If there is love, beauty, purpose, meaning, hope, they lie at the heart of reality. When these break through and we see them, we build vessels to incarnate them. Some of these vessels are churches, creeds, doctrines, liturgies, cathedrals. But some are governments, universities, hospitals, symphonies, oratorios, paintings. And some are evidenced in compassion, hospitality, peace, equity, justice. Many of these have been generated by religious people and their institutions. But many have other roots.
It is my personal conviction that no one better articulated this notion of God than Jesus, who knew that love lay at the heart of reality. If God is not a person up there somewhere, perhaps Jesus is all of God we can see in human form—or as the early church saw him—fully God and fully human. Yet like all religious people and religious structures, he only pointed to that deeper reality by what he did and what he taught—even by how he died.
If a long time ago the notion of a two story universe disappeared, along with its personal God up here somewhere, the day may be dawning, now centuries later, that the institutions and religions which grew out of that notion, are also beginning to disappear. The result, at its best, may be the dawning of a very different notion of God. God may be the power with a purpose at the heart of the cosmos, the source of life which affirms the meaning of all that is—(ta panta). Whatever institutions are being created to give witness to that reality, they must be free from any sectarian impulse, and will recognize that the God in all things is not the sole possession of any one religion or social form.
The God problem (part 2)
If you have not read THE GOD PROBLEM (part1), it would be helpful to do so before getting to this post.
Two generations ago, the world’s leading theological mind, Paul Tillich, who was also a distinguished student of science, struggled with how to define God in a post-Copernican age. The pre- Copernican world, including the era which produced the Bible, traditionally referred to God as a being who existed in a supernatural realm. Tillich suggested that a better way to understand God was as ”the ground of being.” Tillich, then at Harvard before moving to the University of Chicago, has since become the core theologian for modern religious studies including seminary trained persons.
To understand God as “the ground of being”—the energy in, through and underneath all that is—suggest a very different notion of revelation. If traditionally we have thought of revelation as coming down from God in one form or another, in a post-Copernican world we may see revelation coming up from the depth of human experience, a natural not a supernatural phenomenon. God is not a person, but the energy which is both under and within everything. God is not identical with nature, ala Spinoza, but the energy within everything—animate objects, history, human experience—indeed the cosmos.
We can still understand the Bible as crucial to faith if we realize that revelation does not come down from some supernatural world, but up from human experience. That is the way God speaks to us—through nature, culture and ordinary events. The Bible is the record of the human struggle to understand the meaning and purpose of life, beginning with the dynamics of culture. Pre-Copernican Biblical history is the story of a people who sought to discover this authenticity—God—from above. A post-Copernican religious people must seek to discover God within both history and nature, not as a person but as the energy which gives meaning to everything. This is the God who is not only in us, but in all things.
No one comes closer to this meaning than the author of the great poem in the second chapter of Colossians when he uses a little Greek phrase “ta panta” which means ‘all things.’ His image is the God recognized in Christ whom he describes this way. “…for in him all things, (ta panta) in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, or rulers or powers…. He himself is before all things (ta panta), and in him all things (ta panta) hold together.” That image is also pointed to in the prelude to the fourth gospel. “In the beginning was the word (Greek “logos”), and the word was with God, and the word was God.” In Greek philosophy, from which the gospel writer got the word, “logos” identifies the “underlying principle governing the cosmos, the source of all human reasoning. “
When we translate this Biblical text for Asians, particularly Chinese, we use the word “Tao”. “In the beginning was the Tao.” It is the same grand idea. The Tao, or Word, is not a created thing or being, but that which is underneath and within all things (ta panta), the energy which gives life.
So what is this energy which is at the heart of the universe, and which we call God? We must have ordinary understandable ways to both access it and express it. So we call it love, justice, peace, equity, purpose, meaning. While Asians call it the Tao, Greeks called is Sophia—wisdom. Every religion has buried within it this sense of wonder about what is beyond and underneath all creation. The thrust of this energy was best philosophically depicted by Teihard de Chardin’s omega point, and Bergson’s élan vital. It is what makes the universe alive! The God of this notion is the heart and substance of all things. (ta panta)
A third post will discuss the development of religious institutions from this concept of God.
The God problem (part 1)
For a long time a variety of posters have asked for some better definition of God than much religion has traditionally offered. Here is the first of my posts offering some fresh thinking on this subject.
First, we must consider the outdated notion that the Bible is the Word of God. Traditionally most Christians have seen the Bible as revealing all we need to know about God. It is the Bible that traditionally comes out as the fundamental source of revelation. But if we take seriously what we now know about the structure of the cosmos, we have a problem in seeing the Bible as literally true and divinely revealed.
The Bible throughout assumes a two level Aristotelean universe, with the world down here and God up there. The Bible is stuck with the notion that God is a supernatural uncreated reality and the world a natural created reality. The Biblical cosmology posits this two-tiered universe. If we today don’t believe that any more, most religious people don’t know how to abandon it. We are like the Australian child who got a new boomerang for his birthday, but couldn’t throw the old one away? That idea may have gone out when Copernicus came in, but like the tar baby, we are unable to turn it loose.
The Biblical record, therefore, is based on what we now believe to a mythical cosmological system that does not now and never has existed. This pre-scientific religious fallacy posits not only a spatial division between the world and God, but also a hierarchical relationship. God is above us, up there somewhere—omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Revelation comes as God chooses to reveal “himself” from his supernatural realm. The Bible contains the record of the way our religious ancestors saw that revelation.
This brings us to the heart of our problem. It allows, indeed it mandates, the notion of God as a person, an entity who exists apart from our human sphere in some supernatural realm. Persons must be somewhere, and they must have attributes or they are not persons in any way we have defined the word. So God is a personal character who lives in a supernatural reality.
In this posting I have only laid out the religious problem in believing that the Bible is divine revelation in which God is a person existing in some non-worldly supernatural realm. In my next posting I will talk about an alternative way to understand God, based on a post Copernican understanding of how the universe is put together.
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