The One with God and the Ones with God
Christ
The New Testament portrays Jesus as making many statements along the lines of "I and the Father are one." By such statements, the church – including those members of the first century church who wrote the NT – has for the most part understood Jesus to have asserted a special identity with God that no one else has. Jesus’ statements were understood in view of the church’s belief that he was resurrected, an event which it took to reveal his special and specific identity with God.
Traditions of contemplative prayer and meditation where people experience a sense of profound unity with what they usually describe as God, the universe, or nature, are found all over the world. They existed at Jesus’ time. Surely spontaneous versions of such experience preceded these traditions, led to them, and are as old as humankind.
During the Middle Ages, Christian contemplatives were sometimes put to death for talking about their experiences of a sense of unity with God, which was considered heresy. The church hierarchy considered that to speak in such terms was to claim the special sort of identity with God that they believed belonged to Jesus Christ alone.
Jesus
The NT refers to Jesus spending forty days and nights in the desert. People have often sought contemplative and meditative experiences in solitude with nature – think, for example, of Native American traditions of this kind. Buddha's enlightenment experience is said to have taken place in similar circumstances.
Of course we know next to nothing about the historical Jesus: the facts about his life, how he grew up, what he himself may or may not have thought of himself in possible distinction from those who would write about him decades after his execution. The NT is a faith document written by the first century Christian church and compiled by the church in the Middle Ages; its narrative about Jesus is interpretive and not a work of contemporaneous journalism or historiography.
Many NT passages suggest to me the possibility that Jesus, whatever we do or do not believe about him, may sometimes have been speaking from out of his own powerful experiences of the kind of religious unity that other people have also experienced. It isn’t such an easy thing to talk about; he would not necessarily have been well understood on this point. This would especially be the case if his followers and those who came after them later in the century to write the books of the New Testament themselves lacked first-hand experiences of this kind. They would not, so to speak, have had ears to hear.
The New Testament portrays Jesus as making many statements along the lines of "I and the Father are one." By such statements, the church – including those members of the first century church who wrote the NT – has for the most part understood Jesus to have asserted a special identity with God that no one else has. Jesus’ statements were understood in view of the church’s belief that he was resurrected, an event which it took to reveal his special and specific identity with God.
Traditions of contemplative prayer and meditation where people experience a sense of profound unity with what they usually describe as God, the universe, or nature, are found all over the world. They existed at Jesus’ time. Surely spontaneous versions of such experience preceded these traditions, led to them, and are as old as humankind.
During the Middle Ages, Christian contemplatives were sometimes put to death for talking about their experiences of a sense of unity with God, which was considered heresy. The church hierarchy considered that to speak in such terms was to claim the special sort of identity with God that they believed belonged to Jesus Christ alone.
Jesus
The NT refers to Jesus spending forty days and nights in the desert. People have often sought contemplative and meditative experiences in solitude with nature – think, for example, of Native American traditions of this kind. Buddha's enlightenment experience is said to have taken place in similar circumstances.
Of course we know next to nothing about the historical Jesus: the facts about his life, how he grew up, what he himself may or may not have thought of himself in possible distinction from those who would write about him decades after his execution. The NT is a faith document written by the first century Christian church and compiled by the church in the Middle Ages; its narrative about Jesus is interpretive and not a work of contemporaneous journalism or historiography.
Many NT passages suggest to me the possibility that Jesus, whatever we do or do not believe about him, may sometimes have been speaking from out of his own powerful experiences of the kind of religious unity that other people have also experienced. It isn’t such an easy thing to talk about; he would not necessarily have been well understood on this point. This would especially be the case if his followers and those who came after them later in the century to write the books of the New Testament themselves lacked first-hand experiences of this kind. They would not, so to speak, have had ears to hear.
Posted by Paul at 11:24 AM Permalink
17 Comments:
I try to stick with the former and avoid the latter . . .
The former-- a mystic, a shaman, a spirit warrior-- worthy of emulation . . .
The latter-- a crusty mass of fear, ego, and soul sickness-- scary . . .
The former lives; the latter never did . . .
I find the former refreshing . . .
See ya . . .
But people usually cut out what they dislike and leave in what they like based on personal preference (like the Jefderson Bible, where he cut out all the miracles and expressions of Jesus as God becuse he saw him as merely a philosopher).
To say that Jesus is just a guy not unlike the Buddha who was simply good at contemplative prayer, you have to do what Jefderson did. I haven't read all the scholarly stuff, just some, but I don't think Jefferson's thesis can be historically proven any more than mine, which is the opposite.
oceanshamans former scenario and your assessment of the universal god experience are where im at, although crystal makes a great point...i guess you have to decide where you stand with the NT writers
I am comfortable leaving it up to the Biblical scholars to sort through it and give us their view which I think is probably going to be as unbiased as they come. Or I could be wrong, but I am willing to live with that.
Paul, I have always felt that we are supposed to become one with God like Jesus and do what we see the father do. That is, act in accordance with the divine will. That is, in a kind, compassionate way using all the wisdom we can muster to determine what is truly kind and compassionate. Or I could be wrong.
You may not be suggesting this at all, but just because it could be taken that way, I'd want to add that most believers I've met aren't "crusty, soul sick" etc. Of course, some are. It might be interesting to consider what makes for that difference - why religious belief plays a constructive role in some lives and a misguided or even destructive role in others.
CRYSTAL: I think that's exactly right. Not only is there little genuinely historical information about Jesus; on top of that, the material in the NT is so wide ranging that you can favor, say, a Jesus who condemns to hell everyone who doesn't believe he's the Christ, or a Jesus who intercedes on behalf of a woman about to be stoned and says the greatest commandments are to love others and love God.
I'd add that there's a difference between reworking the bible to cut out the passages that one doesn't find compelling, and pointing to existing passages that suggest Jesus may have sometimes been speaking from out of contemplative experience.
SHE: I think so too, as per my reply to Crystal above. Just as you say, you end up having to interpret for yourself or accept the interpretations of others that you believe are authoritative.
SUE: Have to lie down and your comment just came in! Catch up asap...
solitude leads to self realisation...and knowing your self is important to understand the world....all of us have a part of thedivine in us...and when alone we start conversing...this is realisation....god is us and we are god....
and thought it was going to be historically laid out from other perspectives of that time.
I was wrong, thugh it was an interesting read. It dwelt upon where he got his teaching, the general upbringing process of jewish males at the time, and a brief description of some of the things that were written years (sometimes centuries) before his tim that he spoke of during his lifetime.
(the only one I can recall right now is the sermon on the mount, which supposedly started with the beatitudes, was written near a century before he lived.)
It was quite unfortunate that the early churches felt so "put upon" at the time that they changed the already time seperated writtings from Mark and later, Luke. Threatened by jewish hard-liners and Romans alike, I guess they felt the need to lie their way into our hearts, not trusting the SPIRIT at all, but rather, tipping the balance to their way of thinking. Even at the risk of pulling down a great movement.
Actually, few folks know that there was a second contemplative soul. One who would help others in need, give freely of himself, demand nothing in return, and still, the powers that be at his lifetime felt threatened by him, and in the course of homogenizing the public, had him put to death.
Socrates.
Even without looking at the scholarship, there’s such a variety of material in the Bible that people invariably bring their own takes to it, whether it’s preconceived notions or passages and types of material that resonate more with some individuals/groups than others.
Doing our best to act in our own persons like the Jesus we find portrayed in what sounds like may be favorite passages for both of us, is central to my view too.
VISHESH: Solitude is something I tend to think people often get too little of. We need “high quality time with ourselves,” so to speak.
BONEMAN: Socrates made a huge impression on me too. It’s strange, as an adult I’ve never read him – I’m talking maybe when I was ten or eleven I read something about him. He sounded like someone of tremendous wisdom and integrity.
One of the best things I ever saw on the historical Jesus was a PBS documentary several years ago. What that concentrated on, because so little is known about the historical Jesus, was the historical context. Things like what the celebration of the Passover was like at that time and what the social and political environment would have been like when Jesus went to Jerusalem and got arrested.
I was like, "WHAT?"
At some point in my childhood, a Sunday School teacher LIED to me and told me they were "just perfume." And I always wondered why kings would give the Christ child perfume.
To know that they were used to deepen meditation puts a totally different light on the Christmas story, meditation in Christianity, and the "gift of the Magi," doesn't it?
And I would like to believe that Jesus meditated. I like the idea of Jesus using contemplative prayer in the desert. But I also accept that it may just be my own attempts to justify contemplative prayer!
EMERGING FROM THE FIRE: Historically, contemplative prayer has been practiced within Christianity and before Christianity and is practiced all over the world today within Christianity, especially in monasteries, so no justifcation's needed! Also certain denominations, like the Quakers, emphasize it even with the laity.
It's really much harder for me to imagine that Jesus did not practice contemplative prayer than that he did. Certainly he was "the religious type!" And from what I've read and experienced, powerful "one with the universe" or one with God experiences, depending on how they're interpreted, are as profound as it gets when it comes to human religious experience.
When Jesus is regarded as the Christ, he's still understood as being fully human as well as fully God. The New Testament portrays him praying aloud in human ways at least a few times that I can think of off the top of my head (Let this cup pass from my lips, the Our Father, why have you forsaken me) and has him advising people to "go to your room and close your door when you pray" rather than make a big show of it.
If he knew about and practiced petitionary prayer, then I just can't see how contemplative prayer would have escaped someone with strong spiritual inclinations - and it's something people most often do in private.
He was written about by (and this is a guess) Plato.
But, just as Jesus, there are some minute markers of his existence laid out by other historians and census takers.
and, i'm inclined agree with this post. in the religious paradigm of my growing-up years, it seemed important for the powers that be to convince the 'flock' of the realism of the NT and stories of Jesus. that's just it, tho, i saw them more as life lessons embedded within a story ... not as a historical record.
still, what of the 'real' jesus? i sort of see where cs lewis is coming from in when he writes about this ~ we either believe he's divine, or we don't, in which case we believe he's lying. i haven't got the quote exact, but that's the jist of it, i think.
i think often about this, and how people sort of treat spirituality, g-d, jesus and all this stuff like they're items on some sort of cafeteria line. does belief conform to us, or do we, to it ... ? or perhaps i'm way off.
i like to see the biblical characters in terms of how their actions can guide me in my life and not fixate on the historical accuracy of the records.
if i'm thinking of jesus as the christ, i think of him as the incarnate, and not as g-d, himself. perhaps that a silly semantical thing, but in my mind there's a difference.
RED M: There are no serious biblical scholars - at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, anywhere - who see the NT as a factual record. And the faculty of the leading div schools are mainly Christian clergy that represent probably every denomination.
Enough is known, for example, just about the composition of the NT, to indicate that the gospels were written several decades following Jesus' death by anonymous members of the first century church that was founded in his name. These authors set into writing oral traditions about Jesus that had developed during that time frame.
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